As you prepare for Q4, you are likely drafting your business goals for next year. Knowing your goals is the first step in planning a successful year. Defining how you will meet your goals is the second. Below are some commonly overlooked questions that, when addressed, can set you up to successfully design an effective business strategy for your company in 2025 and beyond:
What are we trying to achieve for our customers?
Identifying a good strategy begins with clarity on goals that address a clearly defined challenge. Ground your goals in what you are trying to achieve for your customers in the coming year. Doing so keeps the conversation practical and focused on impact-driving behaviors that ladder up to more traditional revenue or market goals. This will also give your team a greater sense of agency and accountability.
To ground your goals on a clear challenge, it is critical to align your leadership team across three areas: market landscape, time horizon, and business purpose. These are common derailers in the process of defining a strategy. There are some things you can do to make it easier for your team:
Reflect on the market landscape and note changes in the last year. Create a point of view you can share with your team, or facilitate a conversation where your leaders bring their perspectives on what has changed and how it impacts your company. Engage your team in articulating both what has changed and how you think things will change in the year ahead.
Define the time horizon you want the leadership team to think about. It is common for individual leaders to approach this exercise thinking about everything from what they need to ship in the next month to the value the company needs to deliver over the next 3 years. Tell the team if you want quarterly, annual, or multi-year goals - or some combination of the above.
Determine if you need to share more about the company’s purpose in order to create necessary alignment across the leadership team. As you discuss possible goals with the leadership team, listen for alignment and gaps. What are common phrases and mindsets you hear across the team? Where are the “outliers”? Do these perspectives need to be integrated or influenced in order to establish a unified strategy?
How will we achieve these goals for our customers in the coming year?
One key element of successful planning that is often overlooked is establishing clear measures of success (which you’ve done, above) tied to tactical changes we will need to make in how we run the business in order to be successful. The what connected to the how. This is your strategy: how will your company achieve its goals?
What specifically needs to be done or changed in order to achieve our goal? Long before we reach the goal, how will we know we are directionally correct? We can then begin to create function or role-specific goals and actions that get us closer to our destination.
Let’s imagine your goal is to expand access to your product in an emerging market, with success defined as x% increase in product availability in that market resulting in y% total revenue increase for your company by the end of next year. Depending on the strategy you choose, you might look at the following levers (these are just a few examples):
We might find that we have no experts in that market on our staff or in high enough leadership positions
We may need to change the composition of decision makers in meetings, or modify our current process for making decisions
We may need to ask our head of Product to deprioritize another project
What resources do we have available to us to be successful?
It can be helpful to get very specific about what you will need to accomplish the strategy in terms of time, talent, and money. Ask yourself:
Are people spending their time on the highest priority projects?
Do we know and understand the key people needed to accomplish our strategy?
As we look at our financial forecast, do we need to shift any allocations?
Does our strategy enable us to clearly say “no” when appropriate?
You can also make the strategy planning process more engaging for your leadership team by encouraging different approaches based on the resources you have available. For example, you could ask: what might we do to meet this goal if we couldn’t hire more people?
What obstacles might we face in the year ahead?
Take time to reflect on why and how the team might fail. Some teams like to do this through a pre-mortem exercise. Whatever framework you choose, ask yourself:
Do any of our processes (e.g., meetings, how we make decisions) need to shift to support next year’s strategy?
On a scale of 1-5, how aligned do I think each lead is to the strategy as we’ve defined it?
Does everyone in the company understand the strategy and their role in making the company successful?
Once you’ve put in the work to define an inspiring, tangible strategy for the year ahead, make sure your strategy is visible, documented, and communicated across the company. Talk about it in all of your meetings and ensure people feel aligned and empowered to take action.
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