Before You Begin Planning For Next Year, Look At How Things Went This Year?

By Perry Rearick, Chief Editor, Follow Your Buyer

This is the time of year when most businesses, and their marketing and sales teams, begin planning for next year. Before jumping into your planning process, it’s a good idea to assess what you’ve accomplished this year.

First, did you follow the plan you developed last year? You likely did not because the conditions that drove last year’s plan changed. Think back to just a few years ago when the COVID pandemic hit, and everyone was scrambling to redirect tradeshow budgets. There are good reasons to revise plans.  

But there are bad reasons too. Like when your head of sales was upsold into a larger booth a month before his favorite tradeshow, and marketing resources were frantically diverted from your content creation plan to supporting a larger booth footprint, and then never used again.

So, take a close look at your original plan that you were so excited about a year ago, determine if it was followed, and if not, why. Did you have good reasons for revising the plan?

Here are two operational areas that often make the “needs improvement” list.

One, did you create enough content to engage potential buyers? Marketing content is vital! Good content oriented on the early buyer’s journey is what keeps sales funnels full. Marketing plans often have us signing up to produce more content than we can because we don’t have enough dedicated content creators. We burden our creators with “busy work” that has no ties to our marketing and business outcomes, and we’re surprised why business isn’t as good as we thought.

Two, are you able to attribute where all your leads came from? Measuring results remains elusive for many marketing and sales teams. If you are tracing every lead back to the first engagement, good for you! It is a gold mine of value as you determine what worked and what didn’t.

If aren’t doing this tracing, and this is going to sound harsh, “get with it!”  Without it, you have no idea what initially attracted a buyer to your solutions before they revealed themselves to you. Remember, the buyer’s journey begins long before the sales process! It is important to gain visibility of the entire buyer’s journey because it will help you build a better plan that concentrates resources on what works.