Steps for effective annual planning

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As we have seen before, the annual plan is a roadmap for the entire organization. It brings everyone together around common goals. Creating such a plan requires a comprehensive approach, as we describe below.

1. Review of last year
Before making plans, take a good look at last year's results. Consider the following.

Goals you had set for yourself and to what extent you have achieved them
Budgets and actual spending
The activities you had planned and the review of each of them
Return on investment in each of the activities/expense titles
Performance of each person on the team
Collect quantitative and qualitative data. Collect numbers, but also opinions on why and how.

For example, don't just ask what the team's sales were last year. Also ask why the sales australia accountant email list target was met or not, what worked, how the hardest workers met their quotas, etc.

Use this information as a baseline for the coming year. If the conversions from the in-person event channel were better than those from webinars, you would do well to allocate more budget to the former. Or if the content channel didn’t produce any results, you may want to reconsider the goals you had set and whether they were really appropriate.

A review of this type will also serve to bring the previous year to a clear close and start the new one from scratch.