Begin Planning With The End In Mind

By Perry Rearick, Chief Editor, Follow Your Buyer

This week we’ll close out the last full month of summer. That’s right, it’s best to accept the truth, order yourself a pumpkin spice latte during your next Starbucks stop, and start thinking about your marketing and sales plans for 2025.

Few of us start planning early enough to develop an adequate plan to reach challenging, realistic goals and now is a good time to start thinking about what you will accomplish next year and how you will do it. Even if you don’t operate on a calendar year fiscal cycle, most of your prospects and customers do.

Over the next month or so, I’ll be sharing thoughts on the best practices related to planning. Two experts, Christine Slocumb and Heather Sugrue will be my guests on the Trailblazers. They both have extensive knowledge and experience in planning, resourcing and executing B2B marketing and sales operations for companies that offer complex solutions in the life sciences space, and they’ll be sharing their insights and advice with us.   

Planning is one of the most underestimated, and underappreciated, functions of business and especially marketing and sales. It is valuable to get into the right mindset before you begin.

First, my recommendation is to read Plan Like There Are No Rules. It was written several years ago but remains relevant today.

My next recommended step is more difficult, not often done, and when it is, it tends to be hollow and quickly discarded. Transport yourself to the future, all the way to the end of 2025. Imagine you’re standing before all of your business’ stakeholders: employees, board members, steering committee, investors. And you’re summarizing the year, kind of like a year in review.

Begin by describing where you were at the end of 2024 and where you are now.

We grew by X amount in revenue and why. We offered these new products & services and briefly summarize why. State new markets that were entered and why. We have X new customers and our existing customers spent X more with us.

Then walk those numbers back to how that business occurred. State how many potential buyers you engaged with marketing communications, where, and how. State how many buyers you needed to engage to attract X number of sales. Identify the media partners who delivered the most target audience engagement. Go beyond clicks and opens and speak to the quality of the engaged audience in terms of fit for your solutions.  

Define, in detail, the disposition of this engaged audience, where they are in their buyers’ journeys, what their biggest challenges are, and how you can help them.

Go through this process in your mind each day, refining it each time until you begin planning.