“Scaffolding” is a support structure that aids both the CEO and leadership team to optimize your annual planning offsite — from clarifying your market vision, to aligning on your ideal customer profile (ICP), and bringing your sales plays to life. When it comes to high-stakes planning exercises, investing in an unbiased business strategist and coach dramatically reduces the risk of wasting precious time. Here are five tips that provide scaffolding to ensure a successful annual business planning offsite.

1. Make it a Priority

Not all companies invest the time and resources to build or update their strategic business plan annually. The excuses are common: “planning is overrated, we just need to execute”. “We’re working with reduced staff and I don’t have someone to lead the planning effort.” “Now is not a good time.” For many first-time CEOs, they may have never guided a cross-functional strategic business planning process before. They don’t know what the process or the final deliverable looks like. This creates a serious blind spot.

There are simple ways to alleviate these concerns. It starts by making a commitment to a formal cross-functional business plan created by the leadership team. This priority must be driven by the CEO. Without a formalized business plan to align all corners of your business, your company will experience unnecessary headwinds and slower growth.

The leadership team was out of sync for a while. With the arrival of our new CEO, we had opportunity to stop the chaos and get aligned on our strategic priorities. We just didn’t know how to instigate a cross-functional planning process ourselves. –  Jack G, CRO

Read: 4 Tips for Driving Executive Alignment

2. Partner with business planning facilitator to be your coach, guide, and referee

Business planning can become highly emotional. When people feel that their turf is being challenged, they become territorial and defensive. This can quickly escalate and derail the process, damage moral, and lead to ineffective decision making. This is why using an internal facilitator is far less effective: they are already biased.

I am so frustrated being in meetings where the CMO and VP of Sales go head-to-head. I just zone out. – Amit V, VP of Product

To avoid this problem, CEOs benefit from hiring a business planning facilitator to provide scaffolding for your annual business planning offsite. They:

• Bring experience and expertise in the complete B2B business planning cycle.
• Know how to structure a series of high-stakes exercises that will engage your team to constructively identify issues and drive alignment around business priorities.
• Are unbiased as the leader of the planning exercises, thereby allowing all team members to engage equally.
• Ensure the process remains constructive and professional.
• Reduce risk of ineffective business planning, guaranteeing that the process concludes with a meaningful document that includes action items, owners, and timelines.
• Deliver the business outcome you and your team requires.

3. Give the planning process time

Business planning is a journey, not a destination. You need more than one meeting; and the annual business planning offsite is the perfect place to start. The process requires specific milestones and deliverables along the way. It can easily take between three to four months. Rushing the planning process creates risk. Scaffolding provides your team time to think strategically about the four cornerstones of your strategic business plan:

• Clarify (and ensure everyone can articulate) the company vision and mission statements.
• Set clear corporate strategy guidelines so the leadership team is aligned on the criteria that will be used when making investment decisions.
• Build a short-term and long-term product portfolio strategy that supports your company’s vision and mission.
• Architect clever go-to-market strategies and marketing blueprints that map to the target persona, buyer’s journey, and take advantage of latest campaign best practices. Read: Marketing Campaign Development; The Marketing High Ground.

Mike was great to work with! Through his leadership and facilitation, our teams were finally on the same page. We won several big deals, and the entire marketing plan was executed.  – Jamie B, CMO

When we guide executive teams in the planning process, we schedule a workshop for each of these cornerstones.  An overview of the four workshops is included in this article: Business Planning: How one CEO aligned his team and achieved a winning exit strategy

4. Embrace business planning as a team sport

Business planning requires collaboration. It is not about dictating an outcome. It’s about identifying opportunities, discussing possibilities, and acting as company leaders (not department managers). And this may surprise you: it should also be fun! We’re talking about the future. If we can collectively imagine it, we can achieve it.

One fun exercise we use as part of the vision/mission workshop is called, “Envisioning Success”. Imagine what the company looks like three years from now. Your company has achieved noteworthy success and it is on the cover of your choice. . . (magazine, newspaper, online news outlet).

Each team then sketches on a flipchart the cover of this article:

• What is the headline?
• Accompanying graphic?
• What is the story about?

I divide the leadership team into small groups. I give them 20 minutes to sketch the cover. Always, the first response I get is, “Mike, I’m not an artist. I can’t do this.” To which I reply: “You now have 19 minutes and 50 seconds.”

This is such a great ice breaker exercise. Immediately, there is a buzz in the room as creative interpretations of the future unfold. At the end of the exercise, each team shares their vision. What is most interesting to me as the facilitator is that every group but one will land on a vision that is somewhat aligned.  But, one vision will be unexpected. This is when things get interesting!

These flipcharts are posted throughout the entire planning process. In fact, many teams keep them visible long after the process has concluded.

Be a team. Be supportive, curious, and open to ideas. And, have fun along the way.

We hung our vision posters in our executive hallway and left them up all year. They are a good reminder of where we want to go. And employees always ask about them. — Sharon H, CMO

5. Hold people accountable

Your strategic business plan means nothing if your team does not own it. It is imperative that careful notes are taken. Most importantly, action items with owners and timetables are required. This is the only way to ensure your business plan comes to life. Once your strategic business plan is complete, you’ll need to identify proper KPIs (key performance indicators) to track. And, you’ll need to assign specific OKR (objectives and key results) to every employee. Everything is connected!

As executive facilitators, we never let a workshop conclude without clearly documenting and assigning next steps. The designated action owner verbally repeats the action item and the next steps they have agreed to take. This keeps everyone honest. It dramatically reduces the risk that someone will say “yes” in the meeting, but then take no action (or go in an opposite direction after).

At the next meeting, the action item owners update the team on their progress. (Peer pressure is a natural driving force.)

What impressed me most is that we ended with an aligned action plan. Our annual planning process was an excellent use of time! John D, CEO

Scaffolding is the key to ensuring success of your annual business planning offsite

It costs a lot of money to pull your executive team out of the field to build a business plan. You can’t afford a misfire. Scaffolding is a technique that removes the risk of having a less-than-stellar annual planning offsite.  Take advantage of partnering with an expert skilled in designing and facilitating business planning exercises.

The outcome will be a plan that provides direction and clarity. It will greatly accelerate your team’s ability to develop customer-ready messaging, a differentiable product strategy, and a set of sales plays that will accelerate growth. Your path to doubling your annual recurring revenue (ARR) starts here!

About the author

Mike Gospe is a skilled go-to-market strategist and business planning expert. He facilitates a variety of executive-level planning meetings, include Customer Advisory Boards and Partner Advisory Boards.  Through his collaborative and in-the-trenches approach, he guides executive leadership teams to discover and align on pragmatic answers to the question asked most often by CEOs, “What do we need to do to accelerate revenue growth?”

For more information and best practices for working with your CMO and marketing team, please contact Mike Gospe.