The 5 Elements of an Effective Annual Planning Fact Base

Effective annual planning often makes the difference between achieving your growth goals and falling behind the competition. However, for CEOs and growth leaders to make the right decisions today that may affect results in 2024 and beyond, they need to first establish a fact base to help them identify the key growth levers that are vital to their success.

From our discussions with market-leading executive teams, we discovered that the best CEOs often leverage Revenue Operations (RevOps) to lead the collection of data to establish the company’s fact base. This process builds the foundation for them to begin the annual planning process that gets their desired results. However, RevOps' efforts extend beyond identifying where the company is on the value creation path: they help CEOs understand how they are performing against their KPIs and decide where they should execute to succeed.

In this blog post, we dive into the five essential elements of an effective fact base and how you can use identified success metrics to help you make your number in 2024 and beyond.

Establishing a Look-Back Fact Base with RevOps

By letting RevOps take the lead, growth executives can leverage dedicated resources to parse through their past year’s performance and uncover actionable insights for the annual planning process. There are five elements that organizations should look out for in their fact base:

1. Sales and Marketing Productivity

Assess how productive your sales reps were by analyzing the number of new bookings and revenue streams, the number of new deals, and how much revenue was generated from existing accounts and bookings. Use that data to understand whether your sales and marketing spend was efficiently utilized and compare them with initial projections.

2. Sales and Marketing Plan

Along with assessing the efficiency of your spending, it is also the time to take a thorough look at how you have organized your sales and marketing organization. Carefully break down the organizational structure, quotas, compensation plans, and talent. This also ties into how effectively your organization can execute on the established revenue plan—whether you were successful in driving renewals, upsells, cross-sells, and lead generation.

3. Market Positioning

Once you have conducted assessments of internal capabilities, now growth leaders must look outwards and understand where they stand in relation to their industry. Review resources from market analysts and get a bearing on the overall economic outlook in your sector: understand what the market growth rate is and how you compare it.

Then, perform competitor analyses to assess how your organization has fared against other companies. Look at average client size, deal size, deal profiles, and whether you had more single or multi-product penetration successes. The result of these initiatives is a clear view of the general trajectory of your market and how you compare against the competition, helping you plan for the road ahead.

4. Revenue Goals

With data helping you to set an objective understanding of your past year’s performance, now the executive leadership teams must consider if their revenue goals were met and what contributed to their success or failure. We found that leaders often begin this stage of establishing the fact base by asking questions: Which product line was the most profitable? Where did our offerings perform the best?

By performing a strategic retrospection, CEOs and growth executives are provided with a clear and objective overview of what works and what doesn’t. More crucially, they get the opportunity to understand if their revenue goals are realistic and aligned with the organization’s value creation plan.

5. Customers and Prospects

Equipped with insights into how their organization has performed and whether their revenue goals were achieved, growth leaders should now understand their previous market opportunities: identify if markets with promised high returns have paid off. Moreover, it also highlights the successes or failures in penetrating new markets, providing leaders with new insights into what markets they should prioritize next.

The result of all these initiatives is a comprehensive outlook on the leading and lagging indicators of the organization, helping CEOs evaluate which metrics are key to their organizational goals. Tabulate the data uncovered from the five elements into a form that highlights potential areas for value creation:

It is a similar story for lagging indicators, which provide actionable insights to help your organization cover gaps in the execution:

For CEOs and growth leaders to make the right decisions in their annual planning process, they need insights that can only be found in a comprehensive and objective fact base. Discover more insights to help your organization get a head start in your annual planning for growth in 2024 and beyond: Annual Planning Playbook.