Strategic planning

What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is setting long-term priorities and deciding how to allocate resources to them. It produces a plan that ties long-term goals to budgets and people, reviewed on an annual or quarterly cycle. Roger Martin warned in Harvard Business Review in 2014 that a detailed plan can feel like strategy without making the hard choices strategy requires.

Why it matters to a revenue leader

The strategic plan sets the revenue leader's resources before the sales plan is written, including seller headcount and new service lines. A revenue leader who joins the process early can shape those choices with pipeline and capacity data. One who joins late can inherit a target with no path to it. In a PE-backed company the plan should line up with the value creation plan, so the commercial assumptions in it become promises to the sponsor.

A testing and inspection company plans to grow revenue from $45M to $70M over three years. The revenue leader shows that the current 15 sellers can carry about $55M, so the plan adds six sellers in year one and moves $600K from trade shows into hiring and ramp. The board approves the plan with the capacity math attached.