If you’re like many of our customers, you are somewhere in your planning cycle, working with your partners in Sales, Finance, Product, and IT as you crystallize your marketing plan. Here’s a bit of advice: Our experience has proven that a collaborative marketing planning session is an essential step in this process.

Focus on 5 Best Practices for Your Planning Session

Our experience facilitating meetings like this has provided us with a number of best practices that we stick to when developing the planning session agenda and structure. Here are our suggestions for five areas to focus on as you build your own.

Guidelines for your Marketing Planning session

Make it about more than just the plan. Design your market planning session agenda with a focus on improving your ability to measure its contribution to the organization and manage performance. Enabling the team to make more strategic market, customer, program, and investment decisions will show your team and the C-Suite that this work is connected to the bigger picture.
Hone performance metrics from the start. As we’ve stated many times, it’s critical to align Marketing to business outcomes and to establish clearly how Marketing is expected to support these outcomes. Research in the area of Marketing Performance Management (MPM) consistently confirms that alignment and accountability are what set apart best-in-class organizations. Make sure you have a well-constructed performance management dashboard based on performance targets, metrics, and data chains built from specific information on what the business wants to achieve (e.g., a market share target in a specific segment/category), how Marketing will contribute (e.g. X qualified opportunities from Y customers in the specific segment), and the strategy Marketing will deploy (such as influencers and customer referrals). Find out the degree of your MPM maturity.
Keep the customer in mind. It’s easy to quickly get mired down with tactics and activities in these planning sessions, but all activities should be matched to programs. In addition, programs need to support a strategy – ideally, a customer-centric strategy. That means you will need to understand the personas and their content, touchpoints, and channel preferences. Consider what has worked for you in the past, what hasn’t, and what insights into the customer experience you’ve gathered along the way. Capture the most frequent issues/challenges/pain points of customers – this data can even be disseminated in advance of the meeting to give attendees some time in advance for contemplation.
Don’t forget the competition. Most of us share the market with competitors. You need to understand each competitor and how to position your company and its products accordingly. Do you know where there is opportunity, and where there is risk? If your market is undergoing change, what changes are happening? What is the potential impact of these changes?
Avoid turf wars. Design your planning session to focus on what Marketing needs to do to move the needle. The objectives in the market plan are what Marketing needs to own. Likewise, the other functions within the company will craft their own objectives. Business outcomes are shared across organizations, and each part of the company plays a part in achieving the outcome. Ideally, all the plans and associated objectives will work together to support the company’s outcomes.

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A Professional Can Help With Planning

Sometimes knowing what to do is easier than knowing the best way to do it. Maybe your Marketing team is lean, or there is no one on the team with best-practice expertise. Or perhaps you just need a catalyst for change or an objective point of view. A third party can help develop/re-engineer your market planning processes, ultimately speeding the achievement of revenue-oriented benefits. Consider these five capabilities when evaluating potential partners:

Market planning expertise
Quality of pre-developed tools/templates/frameworks
Experience working with other companies in your industry
Utilization of knowledge transfer methods so that your team can implement best practices for process development, change management, and communication going forward
Relevant positive references

For more about why a best-in-class approach is critical, and how VisionEdge Marketing can help, see this informative video.

FAQ:

(written by Penn of Sintra.ai)

Q1: Why is a collaborative Marketing planning session an essential step in the planning cycle?
A: Because Marketing planning is inherently cross-functional. Working collaboratively with Sales, Finance, Product, and IT improves alignment, reduces downstream friction, and increases the likelihood the plan is both executable and measurable. In practice, a well-run planning session also strengthens performance management by clarifying what outcomes matter and how Marketing will contribute.

Q2: What are the five best-practice focus areas for designing an effective planning session?
A:

Make it about more than just the plan. Structure the session to improve your ability to measure contribution and manage performance—not merely to produce a document. The goal is better market, customer, program, and investment decisions that demonstrate strategic relevance to the C-Suite.
Hone performance metrics from the start. Align Marketing to business outcomes and define how Marketing is expected to support those outcomes. Build (or refine) a performance dashboard grounded in performance targets, metrics, and data chains—starting with what the business wants to achieve, what Marketing will contribute, and the strategy Marketing will deploy.
Keep the customer in mind. Prevent the session from devolving into tactics by ensuring activities map to programs and programs support a customer-centric strategy. Bring persona insights, content/touchpoint/channel preferences, and customer experience learnings. Consider distributing key customer pain points and insights in advance to improve meeting quality.
Don’t forget the competition. Incorporate competitive understanding into planning: where opportunity and risk exist, how competitors are positioned, what market changes are occurring, and the likely impact of those changes on your plan and positioning.
Avoid turf wars. Design the session around needle-moving ownership. Marketing owns the objectives in the market plan; other functions own their functional objectives. Business outcomes are shared, and the plans should work together—so alignment replaces internal competition.

Q3: What does “hone performance metrics from the start” look like in practice?
A: It means beginning with outcome clarity (e.g., market share growth in a defined segment), translating that into Marketing’s measurable contribution (e.g., X qualified opportunities from Y target customers), and then selecting the strategies and levers (e.g., influencers, referrals) that will produce those outcomes. This is also the point at which you assess your MPM maturity and ensure the dashboard is built on metrics chains, not activity reporting.

Q4: When should a third party support the planning process—and what should you look for?
A: Consider outside support when the team is lean, lacks best-practice expertise, needs a catalyst for change, or benefits from an objective point of view. Evaluate partners based on: