How to Master Annual Planning Rollout for 2025

With the right information and strategic bets in place, leaders prime their organizations for revenue excellence in 2025 and beyond. But even the best revenue plans can fall short of delivering their projected results if the execution and rollout aren’t up to par. In our discussions with market leaders, we often see the best organizations go beyond fixed multiyear project plans; they are agile, constantly adapting to the market and achieving higher returns faster.

In the final part of our 2025 annual planning blog series, we take a deep dive into the secrets behind effective annual planning execution and discover how you can start adopting winning strategies and get the results you want.

Set a Cadence to Align Teams and Drive Results

The top growth leaders we have spoken to share a similar characteristic in their annual planning: they have a clear short- and long-term view of what needs to be done. Hence, their executive and go-to-market teams are always aligned on their current priorities, helping them build progress towards making their bets pay off.

For leadership teams wanting to make this a reality, start by mapping the details of each strategic objective ranging from a long-term to a short-term view:

Once you have established which bets are critical to your success, break down the objectives into quarterly and weekly milestones. By providing actionable steps for your team, they have the clarity on how to execute the strategic goal in the mid and short-term, contributing towards your desired results with every milestone they achieve.

A key benefit to establishing short and midterm milestones is the agility you get in deciding what needs to be done. As markets shift and changes occur, leadership teams have the opportunity to reassess and pivot on the actions as frequently as they need to. Since the cadence and strategic goals have already been established, it only requires a change in the methodology—not the strategy—to ensure that the revenue plan is still on track.

Mapping your strategic bets as actionable bullet points also helps with overall organizational alignment. It gives your executive and go-to-market teams insights into your vision for the organization and how you plan to get there, providing them with a tangible outcome that can be contextualized and felt by every member. Crucially, it establishes the purpose of the objectives, aligning team members on a unified path that contributes towards the success of your organization.

Best Practices for Acceleration Summit (SKO) Planning

As the revenue plan moves into the last stretch before the SKO, growth leaders must now determine if they need to adjust any of their go-to-market levers to execute their bets successfully. Market leaders often take a programmatic approach to how they plan for an Acceleration Summit, focusing on several key workstreams:

3 – 4 months prior to Acceleration Summit

Assess the relevance and projected effectiveness of your account segmentation based on high-opportunity customers and prospects. Then, use the output to determine the optimal route to market and the headcount needed to ensure an effective coverage plan.

1 – 2 months prior to Acceleration Summit

With a fundamental understanding of where revenue will be generated, validate that you still have the right organizational design model and talent to support your execution plan. Once the foundations are primed, ensure that every sales rep is equipped with the right territory, quota, and compensation plan so they hit the ground running.

Our Annual Revenue Planning guide goes into more detail about the market-leading methodologies that help leaders succeed. Discover how you can get a head start in your 2025 annual planning by reading the guide here and get the results you want.