Janis Zech: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab podcast. Today, we are here with Laura Cross from Forrester. Hey, Laura.

Laura Cross: Hi there.

Janis Zech: Great to have you. We had a fantastic prep talk. We're gonna talk about annual versus continuous planning today and try to make this a masterclass as we know that many of you are actually kicking off this process. So high expectations. But before we dive in, who are you? What do you do?

Laura Cross: So very nice. Thank you so much for having me today. I'm Laura Cross. I'm a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, and I help revenue operations, sales operations, marketing operations, global planning leaders, and chief of staffs basically help in three major priorities, organizational design, process, and then the one that we're talking about today, all planning processes across go to market functions for marketing, sales, and product.

Janis Zech: Well, awesome. We are excited. It's a very important topic, and I think everybody, you know, looks at the planning process with a, I would say, love and hate relationship. So, I mean, we chatted about annual versus continuous planning, and you see a lot of customer setups. So I'm curious, like, what are some trends in planning you're observing?

Laura Cross: So interestingly enough, the trends in planning that we're observing is kind of the trends that are going on inside of the organizations in general. There's a lot of dynamism and a lot of just things that are in flux. And because the business has things in flux from, I mean, if we want to go to macroeconomic or microeconomic things, you know, tariffs or changes in environments, but we've always seen that. It's just different ways of going to market and the need for being able to say, I need to do something differently. We've had these static plans. We have lots of organizations that plan in PowerPoint and plan in Excel spreadsheets, and there's always probably been a need to move to more agile practice, adaptive practice, but planning has now been pushed, I would say. So the trend is now experimentation inside of planning. The trend is now what can I do to make this more of a motion that is constantly on versus a one and done annual and we put it on the shelf and then come back to it next year?

Janis Zech: And what are the common challenges you observe with annual planning? I mean this comes obviously not for no reason.

Laura Cross: I think some of the biggest challenges is that we have a timeline that is typically set up from executive leaders and the board of finance needing, for large, large companies, finance needing to be able to say what, where are we going to invest? Where are we going to put the dollars for this year? And then no matter what size of company, you have to be paying for ongoing programs. So there's this weird timeline that almost assumes everything's from scratch every year, but we've got deals happening on the sales side, we've got marketing programs in flux, we have events that we've signed up one to two years ahead. So we have these difficult timeline challenges. And then we have people challenges related to the executives having their own ideas of what their plan looks like. Sales has a plan, marketing has a plan, product has a plan, customer has a plan, I could go on. And while everyone jumps in a meeting and we all say yes and high five and we're aligned, we're aligned for that moment and then we all go back to our own jobs and our own teams and the misalignment happens almost immediately based on that agreement because the agreement didn't get downstream. The agreement happened in a boardroom, in a meeting room, in a conference room, but it wasn't actually the vision carried down to execution in downstream planning steps. And so then execution, while it may seem that execution was against plan, whose plan was it against? And did it actually go back to what the business needed? And then there's lots of finger pointing. So there's massive challenges in sort of that one and done motion versus the ongoing kind of thought process.

Janis Zech: Oh, yeah. Sorry. That's — no, all good. I mean, first of all, I love that you called out the leadership in the beginning with unrealistic expectations also here. I mean, like, as someone who also experienced, you know, annual planning cycles in a larger stock listed company, one of the things that always struck me was that I always felt I never understood why it was always so late because, like, what it ultimately did is it massively reduced the confidence in the leadership team. And it created, like, this moment where you feel confused and not really, like, you don't really have a clear vision because you feel like, okay, the company says they wanna go in that direction, but they're not putting the dollars behind it. Can I actually believe it? And how am I and my team actually supposed to act on it if I don't have the financial backing, so to speak. Right? So it's like this — I think all of these crazy ripple effects, like the finance team cannot really properly plan, you cannot allocate any proper resources, you lose trust in the leadership team. It's like this whole bunch of side effects that I sometimes wonder, are they even clear to the leadership team? And I think what you just said was quite interesting is so you have this alignment in the boardroom or in some leadership team meeting, but then that alignment immediately, you lose it, if it doesn't stream down. So I wonder what's the fix?

Laura Cross: Yeah. And I think, you know what, I will say because I do talk to a lot of leaders that actually recognize this in themselves, recognize this in what they're doing. It's not for want of alignment. It's a lot of times — and it's, I cover planning, I cover process and I cover team and org design — planning almost always goes into a people discussion, almost always. It's not just a process or just the documents or the templates or the deliverables, there's that human element. And whether we want to say COVID, remote work, everybody reporting to different people, there's lots of reasons for the lack of collaboration. But if you said to me, like you did, what's the fix? The one thing that people forget is if we put the customer in the middle and we talk about the customer experience, the way we plan shifts, the mindset shifts, and it's not about what I need to do to get done, it's what we need to do for the customer. And I think that's the quickest fix for you. You said, where do I put the dollars? Am I doing the right thing? We should be having that ongoing motion and having the conversation about customer experience and are the buyers and customers behaving the way that we want them to? Are deals closing? Are programs working? And if not, where do we need to shift the dollars? Unfortunately, shifting the dollars means shifting the control, and then we have the people issue again. So it's a lot of it, actually, of a mindset shift, but there is recognition. So people understand there's a problem. People want to change it. What the fix is, is a really strong process with amazing governance. Having the leaders actually focus on the customer and then make the best decision for the business, maybe not the best decision for their team, and they have to give up some control. But then also, you said it, we have to make sure that people get the vision all the way downstream and leaders can help with that. A lot of times leaders talk about it from their perspective only and they don't talk about it broadly. That's where revenue operations comes into play, where we can actually help with that. And we're not necessarily just having the conversation from a marketing perspective, from a product or from a sales or customer success, but having it more broadly and allowing us to bring those perspectives forward, as long as the leaders are willing to listen to that revenue operations function of where we're seeing the challenges and the problems, then there's another fix as well.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah, just wanna add one thing here. So obviously the finance organization has an annual plan. There's a board that needs to approve the annual plan. That is a compliance topic, and that is often driving the annual planning process. Many times, the annual planning process starts too late. We had John Mayhem here on the show, talked about ramp times. If you start in September to plan for next year, you're already behind in hiring. So you're basically already riding behind it. So I think in general, the go to market planning needs to be continuous because we are changing things all the time. And the budgets are changing, marketing programs are changing, pipeline generation is changing, conversions are changing, ramp times, people work out, don't work out. So I think things are changing so drastically and so quickly and you need to be able to react to it. But then you have this annual cycle and the board perspective. And I think often the alignment between finance and go to market planning, that is a huge challenge. And it's something that is not so easy to overcome. I mean, you mentioned that there's a big trend towards continuous planning. Let's assume annual planning, right? Like, okay, we got the budget, the CFO is happy. All this is in order, right? Like first, maybe how do you get to that? Like how do you make sure that the CFO and the board is happy with the annual plan? Like what are your — very specifically, right — what are the different streams? Who needs to be involved? What are the cycles? When should you start? And then maybe we can talk a bit more about how does the annual planning look like? But maybe let's start with making the CFO and the COO compliant first.

Laura Cross: I think you said it, the way that we see it and how we even structure our aligned revenue planning process, which is a Forrester model, we have it in kind of three separate chunks. There is that strategic input concept and that's that go to market planning that finance and all the leaders downstream would be reliant on, and that's ever changing. So some things should probably be put in motion, but the three to five years, we don't see the three to five years anymore. We really see one to three maybe, but that's like the growth strategy, how the company is gonna grow. Are they growing in new markets? Are they going through an M&A and acquisition? Are they going through productivity because they already have a ton of market share and now it's a lot of productivity? Are they going through new customers and net new logos? Based on that go to market motion, there's significant differences in how much will change and then what we actually need to do from a plan. Then there's obviously the macro and microeconomic things that we've already talked about, but then we go into customer needs and go to market needs and marrying that up to the routes that we're taking — is this direct, indirect, e-commerce? Where are we going to get these things? All of those strategic inputs, finance, if there's a commercial operations team, if obviously the board, definitely a lot of the go to market C level leaders would be having those conversations. And if those strategic inputs change, then all of the cascading downstream has to change. If we can lock those in for H1, H2 planning or lock those in quarterly, then we've done a better job. But to your point about forecasting for the aligned revenue that is gonna continue to cascade from a continuous motion, we have to get those strategic inputs right. We say we get those late. Fair, but we also realize that the downstream plans year over year, quarter over quarter, there's a lot of the same that we carry to the next part. Is it seventy percent? Is it ninety percent? Is it somewhere between there? We don't typically throw the whole plan out. Now we do have customers that throw the whole plan out based on new product or new something, but typically the plan is seventy, ninety percent there. We're changing some things, we know it. So if we have a static mindset of you didn't give me what I need, I can't start until — yes, we're going to have challenges and problems, but we have to shift that, we have to change that, we have to say what can I do with seventy to ninety percent of the knowledge that then I'm waiting to input some of these things? So if that mindset of those strategic inputs then cascades into my plan and I know that my plan is gonna be this always on scenario and it's going to be refined, what are then the timeframes I put in to refine my plan? And that may vary from marketing and sales based on their own unique needs. Sales has headcount numbers to deal with, typically in forecasts and territory planning. Marketing deals with programs and definitely personnel as well, but marketing is having to make some reliances on those programs. And then the execution piece of what we're doing should constantly change to then inform the plan of moving some money around and then potentially inform some of the strategic inputs. This new market we've — you guys have said we're supposed to go into — we're not seeing the traction, what are we now doing? So there's this infinity loop between all of the three sections. So if we change the mindset in the three sections, we're not always waiting on finance. We're waiting on finance to give us the final numbers, and for some clients that starts in the year that they've already, you know, they're getting it very, very late. But for some clients and for the expectations, they get enough of what they need to be able to then make those downstream plans. And again, that's where revenue operations, very, very, very key in this, being able to actually say, go to the teams downstream, we have enough, you all can go. Don't sign contracts and things, but you have enough to go to be able to do your plan. That's where revenue operations can facilitate the syncing and the sequencing based on the dates.

Janis Zech: Okay. I mean, yeah, that's a lot to really wrap your head around, I think. Right? So, like, one of the things that I always find so challenging — the bigger the organization, the more naturally I think it moves towards siloed planning and siloed data and all of the silos that you can possibly think about, like cultures, for example, as well. Because simply it's so hard to synchronize all of this, and it's just simpler if you think inside your box. So, I mean, maybe just to recap what you just said. Right? So basically I think three main things. Like, key one is, like, what are the actual inputs? What are we measuring continuously? What are we constantly looking at? And that needs to be very well agreed upon. Basically the key KPIs and metrics. Then a clear set of responsibilities that you share across the different departments and functions. Everybody knows, okay, this is my job as part of this continuous planning process. This is what I need to constantly update and have a feedback loop on. And then sort of the third part is all of the sequencing of these steps into this cross department function plan, and that is something where you would say RevOps can play a very critical role in order to facilitate that. Is that a fair summary?

Laura Cross: That is definitely a fair summary. RevOps is not gonna be the subject matter expert in every single input and won't be the subject matter expert in every single plan. They would rely on the individual sub functions underneath marketing, sales, and product to get some of these things done. But their main role — and they may be the subject matter expert on some things — but their main role is that facilitation and the movement of these pieces back and forth between the teams that need that, to stop that siloed planning.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Got it. Okay. I mean, one thing that, you know, all of this makes a lot of sense. Right? And I think everyone would dream of working in such an organization. The one concern that would pop up for me for sure would be overhead, right, still. Like, it feels like a lot of overhead, the continuous alignment, not just from a resource capacity, but also from a purely mental capacity. Like, you have to constantly realign and adjust and be open and willing to also accept these changes. So for me this also feels like something where you actually need to get to a certain culture within your organization to even achieve that. Because if you have those people who just push back against the constant change, I don't think you will get very far with this. Is there any suggestions or a proven concept that you can share in order to help with this?

Laura Cross: I mean, of course, it's my job as an analyst to talk about ideal state and then marry up where a client is currently to then their ideal state, right? So we have ideal and everything best practice. It's not what I see living with the clients that are living this day in and day out. Where we challenge clients is to choose an area that they feel the organization has the biggest appetite for change, the biggest pain point. Get value in there and then expand from there. You're not going — it is highly people intensive, planning. You're not going to have to drag people over the goal line to get this done. It either is a mandate and a mindset shift or it's not. And some organizations have an easier time of this. But I would say every global planning leader that works inside of an operations function has this challenge, but they rely on also — you said headcount — they rely on experts in every team to help get their job done. So they're highly cross functional in nature. Overhead, we don't see a lot of planning teams that have, you know, tens and hundreds of people inside of their organizations. It's generally they rely on all of the team members in other groups. But you said something earlier that there's this agreed upon assumptions of these strategic inputs and how they are then pushed downstream. That's the biggest area that I think people can jump in with a mindset shift. I think most people agree, they understand the vision, they don't know how to operationalize that vision, and then they don't know what to do a lot of times. It's not that they're unwilling, they're not saying I don't want to do that. They don't even know what to do or what templates to use. So we're not seeing global planning leaders hand something and get nothing back — they generally get it filled back out. They generally get a response and that response is positive. It's just a lot of people don't know what they're supposed to do in their role inside of planning.

Philipp Stelzer: So I have a few thoughts here I just wanna mention. So we had a bunch of podcast episodes on operating cadences. Obviously a concept that's super crucial. Let's assume we have the strategy, basically the company strategy clear, which I really like when you outlined your three different layers. You started actually with strategy. You didn't start with planning or budgeting. You started with strategy. Let's assume the strategy is clear. How do you operationalize a strategy? And I think RevOps can really play a strategic role here. And I think it's really like, what are the operating cadences? So the meetings that happen in marketing, the meetings that happen in sales, success, product, right? The meetings that happen between the different groups across the different hierarchy levels so that you run a continuous cadence that is weekly, monthly, quarterly, where you then pull up and reference back to the numbers and strategic initiatives you've agreed upon. And you track against those. If that doesn't exist, it's very, very hard to actually — right? Like you need that kind of operationalization. So I think RevOps is actually perfectly positioned to play that role. And that is a very strategic role. We had a podcast episode with Christina, ex Glebsom, very not massively large companies. Think, Philipp, you mentioned this, the larger the company, the harder this is. No question about it. But I think she outlined this concept really nicely and very tactical. So if you're interested in that, listen to that episode. I think it's like four or five episodes before this one. And I'm curious, is that something you see when people adopt this mindset, right? Like that they invest in those operating cadences or is there other things they are doing?

Laura Cross: The operating cadences — and we talk about it as syncing and sequencing. So there has to be a sync, but then there's a sequence and my sequence in marketing is not your sequence in sales, but we have to sync up at a specific point. You know, we did a summit session in March in Arizona, and it was a panel of our marketing executive analyst, a sales executive analyst, a product analyst, a customer analyst, and myself as the RevOps analyst. And to your point, every time they answered a question about strategic planning, going from strategy to planning to execution, they would then say, and what does RevOps do for us in this role? So every single time the leader pointed back and I got to answer every single question about, then what is RevOps' role in what we just said here? And the biggest role is that knowing when they have to sync, knowing when they don't, and then sequencing that. For example, if we get it right, we understand the business alignment. We understand our target market, everyone agrees. We understand our go to market, everyone agrees. We understand these are the target accounts and opportunities that are really, really critical for us all to get. Based on that, what's my marketing plan against that? Budgeting, we can take as a separate discussion because then the budget to achieve that, but sales, what is my plan against that, and product, what is my plan against that? Those are three different deliverables. Marketing doesn't own the sales plan and they may have some inputs into it, but marketing's plan is about programs, marketing's plan is about tech, marketing's plan is about process, sales is about headcount and coverage design and territory, and product is about roadmap and packaging and pricing. Now, if we're out of sync, product prices a product very, very differently than how sales is gonna get compensated, we have a problem. We have a product that we say is gonna launch, a campaign is being executed or talking about being executed in marketing, we've got a problem. Well, do we know all of that during the annual plan? No. If we don't have the concept of ongoing, we're gonna be out of sync the moment we say go. It's why we call plays in a football game or a cricket game or whatever, it's why we call plays. We have to have the concept of calling plays inside of planning because the moment things change, we see a hole, the quarterback throws it to the hole, that's where we have to change our mindset instead of just, this is the plan we all agreed to in the locker room. We had that whole concept of that analogy in that summit session that we kind of brought together — planning is a team sport. We have to stop thinking about it as this static concept. We have to constantly call plays throughout the entire always on kind of process.

Janis Zech: Yeah. No. I typically don't like sports analogies, but this one — I'm big into sports, but that was our team that did that, you know? No, no, no. That's not what I wanted to say. I like this one, right, with the plays. Because I think that makes sense because, basically, right, so you go back to the locker room, right, where you basically call a break in order to strategically realign yourself, exactly like a team. Right? So the situation on the playing field has changed. So, okay, you call a break, you basically say, okay, how are we doing this now? I mean, I guess, typically, how are we competing against the competitors, or how are we just targeting our key and core customers in a better way? Right? So this play didn't work. Okay. Now here's the feedback loop. The numbers don't look good. Okay. Let's try this play and then let's try this play and so on until you succeed. Right? Because that's what it is. It's just like trial.

Laura Cross: But the issue is though — can you imagine — this is where the finger pointing. If you're a team, finger pointing is not there. We don't go into the locker room and say, seventy seven, you didn't do your job. We go into the locker room and say, the situation has changed. We're not performing. What are we going to do differently? But if we don't have leaders that have the mindset of thinking about it as a team and it's finger pointing, or it's I'm gonna lose my budget because we think we should put more budget here — and sometimes the answer is hire more salespeople or sometimes the answer is do more branding or sometimes the answer is hire more developers to get us that product quicker. Those are different decisions where the business has to do some different things, but then they have to realize they're on a team and it's not about them. We're not doing a relay race for my gold medal as a swimmer. We are on a team that actually has to go back in. That's just a different mindset and I don't see that from a lot of organizations. I don't see a team mindset. I only see their team mindset. And that's, I would say, one of the biggest challenges with planning is that we don't have that team mindset.

Philipp Stelzer: I think this is such an important point, especially for RevOps because, right, like, I think we're very factual, very quantitative driven. And I think there's always the politics dynamics in every team and the power dynamics. Right? So there's people who've been there, want to be there, want to grow their team, want to grow their territory footprint in the organization, and they don't wanna give up, and they don't wanna change. Right? And so you have the situation, right, like demand gen versus content versus brand. Right? They all fight for budget, and it means something because it's essentially their career. And so then you come in and say, well, let's shift the brand to demand gen performance, and suddenly that's not well perceived, although it would make sense to do. And so how you get into a situation where people understand this? Because if you don't understand this — like in Berlin, we just shipped the most expensive autobahn in all of Germany. And it's a really bad autobahn. It doesn't make sense. It was only shipped because Berlin got a lot of money from Germany to build it. And if that is the mindset in the organization, it's like cancer. It really destroys the performance. So first and foremost, you shouldn't have those leaders, but those leaders always exist. Right? And so I think it's something to recognize for RevOps because, obviously, this is a slippery slope. And yeah, you can fall into a lot of areas where you have to navigate those politics. So I think starting from what you said, Laura, like having the right mindset and understanding that this is constantly changing and it's a good thing to change, and then designing the compensation for those executives or VPs accordingly so that they are motivated to change it, is so crucial.

Laura Cross: It's so crucial. Our data — it's somewhere around twenty eight, twenty nine percent, I'd have to get the exact number — of people that say their success metrics in their role in RevOps is related to the annual planning process and getting it right. Yet fifty percent of them say it's part of their job. So just what you said, if incentives drive behavior, there's a significant gap between the people that are responsible for it, but it's nothing to do with driving their incentives for it. So I have a responsibility, but I don't care if it works or not — there's something wrong with that incentive. If we get the sales plan right, there's massive incentives, meaning we're actually achieving our coverage plan and our compensation plan, there's commission involved. So I do think there's massive responsibility for RevOps, but you said it, we have quantitative data, we have performance data. We walk into the room with the answer based on data driven reasons. We also walk into the room ideally with the process that should be followed and we can see where it's not being followed and then say, do we need to fix the process? Do we need to fix the people? Do we need to get more technology for automation? Do we need to have a different budget line item? Like there are things that we can illuminate to say this is what's not happening, but internally that's not always the best place to be. As RevOps leaders, we have to be willing to have those hard decisions, willing to argue, and a lot of times we may report up to one of those C level leaders, not all of them. So this is also where the dynamic of who we report to matters. But if we can start proving that out with data — and I should say, if we can prove that with data and then always bring it back to the customer experience — we also have to make sure that we're bringing in how the buyers and customers are behaving because we can't argue with data and we can't argue with our buyer and customer experience. We can argue all day with, I want more political clout, I want more budget, I want that. But we really cannot argue when the data shows us something that we have to make a change with. And when our customers and buyers are saying something to us through their actions of something working or not working, we can't argue with that. So if RevOps stays in that lane, we win every time. And then of course, we have to be able to have a strong, strong process and be willing to change our process if something's wrong or broken.

Janis Zech: Perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much, Laura. I think this was like a very passionate, you know, sort of end of the podcast speech to really rally the troops. I fully agree, and I think it's definitely worth diving deeper into that topic, to read up on it, how you can achieve that, and how to think about how can you, as a RevOps person, initiate that effort on getting to continuous planning in your organization. Because, again, this is a common theme in this show — this puts you in a position where you can become more strategic. And I would say this is a great, on your path to VP of RevOps, kind of topic to own. So, Laura, always one final question for our guests. What kind of book or just reading material would you recommend to our listeners?

Laura Cross: Because this is such a cross functional thing in nature, and it's RevOps, and then it's all of the marketing, sales, and product, and customer success teams as well, I would say broadly, our Forrester blog has a lot of content on planning, especially right now because this is the season of planning. Lots of content. So I would say follow the Forrester blog and follow the analysts that you like the way that they're writing those blogs inside of other channels because we do push out content and we do always take the perspective of the persona. But I am just one of the RevOps analysts on our team that cover this topic. So there's a lot of me that you can get other points of view from as well.

Janis Zech: Perfect. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Laura Cross: Awesome. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you for having me.