Planning season again, and most of the effort will go into a spreadsheet arguing about channel allocation. That argument matters less than it feels like it does. Before touching the budget, I'd spend an hour on three questions — in my experience they change more about the following year than any allocation decision made afterwards.
Question one: where did the revenue actually come from?
Not where your dashboard says. Pull the last twenty or thirty closed-won deals and reconstruct the origin of each one properly — talk to the rep, read the notes, check the self-reported source. It takes half a day and it's routinely surprising. The most common finding is that a channel receiving a large share of budget produced very few actual customers, while something nobody funds deliberately produced a meaningful number.
Question two: what will we stop doing?
Every plan adds. Very few subtract, which is why marketing teams accumulate programmes that continue for years past their usefulness — the webinar series, the sponsorship, the newsletter nobody edits properly. Name at least two things you're ending, and write down the reasoning so the decision doesn't get relitigated in March. If you can't name anything, the plan isn't a plan; it's last year plus additions.
- Two named programmes ending, with the reasoning written down
- One clearly stated bet with an explicit budget attached
- The trigger that would tell you the bet has failed, agreed in advance
- Who decides, so it doesn't become a committee argument under pressure
Question three: what has to be true for this to work?
Every plan rests on assumptions that go unstated — that the sales team stays fully staffed, that the product ships the integration in Q2, that the current conversion rate holds at higher volume. Write the three biggest ones down explicitly. Then check them quarterly. When one turns out false, you'll be adjusting a plan rather than discovering in June that you've been executing against a fiction since February.
Then do the budget
With those three answered, the allocation argument gets considerably shorter, because you know where revenue comes from, what you've stopped, and what you're betting on. Most of the heat in budget meetings comes from people arguing about channels when they actually disagree about strategy. Resolve the strategy and the spreadsheet takes an afternoon.
The spreadsheet is the easy part and it's where all the time goes. Spend the hour on the three questions first and the rest of planning gets much less painful.
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