The key to your AOP is the voice of the customer

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It’s one thing to have a plan – and, by now, your startup probably has its annual operating plan (AOP) for 2025 pretty well set. But putting that plan into action is a discipline all its own.

If there’s a secret to making your AOP a reality, it’s the same as in so many other aspects of your business, says Marcus Holm , Chief Revenue Officer of LaunchDarkly : You have to make sure you’re making the time to talk to your customers.

“The most impactful founders I've met are the ones that are just super curious and they do a lot of speed dating,” Marcus says. ”They're constantly trying to pressure test their strategy to then build out their initial near-term, mid-term, long-term roadmaps that closely align to that.”

Marcus recently gave his advice for activating on the AOP and aligning your go-to-market with your master plan in a special session for Vertex portfolio company founders and business leaders. As with our last session on making the most of the AOP process, however, I wanted to share the single biggest takeaway from his talk.

The thing about the AOP is that, by necessity, it reflects the vision and perspective of the company’s leadership, driven largely by the CEO. In short, it codifies the overall strategy, defining what kind of company you want to be and what you want it to look like over the next year or more.

But you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men. Even the best and most ambitious AOP will fail if following it means you wind up trying to sell something people don’t need to customers who don’t want to talk to you. That’s why it’s so crucial, Marcus says, to find ways to constantly talk to customers and find out if your roadmap matches theirs.

At the beginning stages of a startup, that might mean a focus on gathering product feedback and feature requests from early adopters. As you grow, you might spend more time talking to CIOs, CISOs, or whoever your ideal customer is. In fact, talking to all of those business leaders might help you refine your ideal customer profile (ICP) in the first place. You’ll refine your messaging strategy, too, and come up with sales collateral (industry-specific and general-purpose) that helps to move the needle. And if you’re moving upmarket – starting to sell to banks, for example – you’ll quickly find out the kinds of workshops, integrations, and other enablement work that you’ll need to offer customers in order to overcome their organizational inertia and close the deal.

With all of those insights in your toolbelt, you’ll be able to fine-tune sales forecasting, hiring, pricing, and all the other devilish details that go into the business of setting KPIs and selling software. That, in turn, makes it so much more likely that you’ll have the kind of year you hoped you would when you set your AOP.

“You're really trying to get to a level where you can figure out your strategy, pricing and packaging and customer adoption sequencing, and that's where you place your bets,” Marcus says.

For more on mastering the AOP process, here’s our recap of the advice that Cyberhaven’s Rickie Goyal gave founders on how to turn it into a dynamic leadership tool from late last year.

The latest news from the VVUS network:

• Noah Carr of VVUS was joined by investor colleagues from across the international Vertex network for a deep dive into what a successful startup exit actually looks like. Watch the full video on LinkedIn here.
• Vertex’s Simon Tiu provided a breakdown on how to get your board and investors to love your usage-based pricing model — with a special focus on how investors value each different type of revenue.
• Vertex Ventures US participated in RAD Security 's $14 million round of new funding, led by Cheyenne Ventures. You can read more about the funding and RAD’s vision for AI-powered threat detection for the cloud-native era in SiliconAngle.

Vertex portfolio job of the week: People Operations Manager at Gitpod

Gitpod is scaling up its People team as it pursues its mission ?of standardizing and automating development environments so developers are always ready to code. In this role, you’ll be a champion of Gitpod’s operating principles, helping to scale benefits, compliance, and employment practices as the company matures.

Apply Now

Find more jobs at Gitpod here. For more startup jobs from across the Vertex Ventures US portfolio, check out our jobs portal.