Setting up 2022 for Success, 4 critical steps CMOs must facilitate now | Part 1: Vision Setting & Understanding your Market

Q4 is that time of year when marketers often get laser-focused on finishing strong while the business begins planning for the next fiscal year. (Or hopefully is starting to plan, I'm still amazed at how many organizations do this in late December/early January and start the year on their heels and a quarter behind)

Over the years, I've had the opportunity to be a part of, consult on, or drive strategic planning at varying-sized businesses. Here are the critical items and lessons learned that I recommend any CMO follow from enterprise to startups. Each of these could be its own in-depth post, but I wanted to provide a framework and some basics to get started. What am I missing?

Step 1: Revisit and Refine your Corporate Strategy and Objectives

It is always important to take stock of how far your organization and team have come over the past year. A healthy, functioning leadership team will be able to have candid conversations on what went well, what didn't, what strategies and objectives need to carry forward, which should be killed (often, there is always one or two), and which new ones should be added. Too few objectives and you won't move the needle enough while having too many and you won't move the needle at all. It is important that leaders are not given a rose-colored view of the reality at hand within the business, but it is equally important for them to create a culture where that isn't necessary. That's a whole article for another time.

I am a fan of utilizing what is called the VSEM Framework for strategy conversations. VSEM stands for Vision, Strategy, Execution, and Measurement.

• Vision: Where do you want to end up? What is the time horizon? This is the banner to drive motivation and alignment across the business. It should inspire and set the tone from the top down. Typically, visions are multi-year in length, but they do need to be adapted and changed from time to time.
• Strategy: These are the key and critical items that must happen or be accomplished for the vision to become a reality. Often, these are crucial initiatives you are activating for the following year(s) and an outline for allocating resources. These are often things like breaking into a new market, launching a new product, increasing your overall win rate, impacting customer retention, etc.?
• Execution: Against each strategy, you now clearly state how you will deploy to achieve the desired results. This includes identifying and describing critical programs, hiring, actions, budget, etc. needed to be successful. Often this also includes naming the executive sponsor and the leaders on the hook for getting it done.

Callout/Gotcha here:?It is great to do this exercise, but if the business does not treat this as a real priority and carve out time or resources appropriately, it simply becomes an annoyance that the team has to report out on and scrambles a week before each report to show 'progress,' you're doing it wrong. These will take time, creative thinking, and capacity away from other things, but given they are critical to your strategy, that should be the right call; if not, then maybe it isn't significant enough to the business and is lip service.

• Measurement: This is the last and most obvious step of the VSEM framework, which is measurement. How will you show and measure progress against this strategy? It is essential to set your metrics and a plan for HOW you will measure those. Often picking metrics is the easier part of this. HOW you will pull the data or show progress can be the tricky side that I've seen teams spin on for months. Account for that now in your planning cycle and make that a critical success factor.

The VSEM framework is an excellent tool for getting leadership aligned. The strategies and execution levels can then be taken into the different teams and functional areas to ensure they align and support those initiatives.??

Callout here: Teams should question activities, events, campaigns, etc. that they are doing if they do not align to these objectives and why they are doing them. This will help reduce and prevent random acts of marketing.

After setting your initial VSEM draft, take some time to circulate it with your teams and stew on it a bit. Ask the hard questions if there are any active fires you need to put out and address in Q4 or Q1 to ensure success in 2022 against this plan.??Eg:

• If your goal is to grow by 70%, but you're losing customers, what can you do now to address that issue as it will be a crucial blocker in your success in 2022.?
• If you will need new marketing or sales technology deployed to accomplish the goals, start sourcing now, so you aren't waiting until Q1 to get started.
• To accomplish your VSEM, you know you will be hiring. Create the JD's and start recruiting in Q4 vs. waiting till Q1. Ideally, you would even hire in Q4 for the roles you want in 2022, so they are onboarded and starting to be effective by the time the new year rolls around.

Before you fully lock on your VSEM for the next year, it is time to ensure your understanding of your market and any critical trends, competitors, or other things that may impact your strategy and need to be accounted for.

Step 2: Renew and/or Refresh your Market Understanding

It is always good to take a deep look at your market, customers, competitors, analyst, etc., and take an honest assessment of your market dynamics.??

This process typically starts by reading as much analyst content as you can get your hands on that aligns with your VSEM. Does the research reinforce your perspective and priorities or say you should focus elsewhere??

It is also good to distill down the conversations from leadership around win/loss analysis, competitors impacting you, new regulations, or cultural trends you may need to be aware of, key industries or geographies to go after or avoid, etc. This research will serve as a sanity check when you set targets later in the strategy and planning process. I like to break my marketscapes down into the following parts:

Executive summary: Make it easy for the board and c-suite to quickly understand the trends and information you want to draw their attention to (you mean like an executive summary? Ya, sorry for being redundant there)

Megatrend/Item that reinforces your vision: Why is that your vision? What is the data or market dynamics that support why that should be your vision?

Market Size/Growth: You will want to do this for each product, business unit, etc. that you have and need to look at. If you're going to set a sales target against it, you will want to understand the dynamics that will impact achieving those targets. You will want to ensure to have things like:

• What is your Total Addressable Market (Both in $ and account numbers)?
• Is the market growing? How fast? In what categories? For example, when I was in the BPO world, there were a lot of outsourcing services, from technical support to customer retention to the obvious ones of customer service and sales service. We wanted to understand each of them and if that needed to impact our strategy, both on the product side as well as the M&A side.
• What is the Annual Addressable Market? This is important because if your industry typically has multi-year contracts, you need to understand how much of that market comes up for renewal each year vs. net-new created demand.?
• Who are the buyers and demand units for each product/service? What are their key considerations and trends that you may need to account for in your product, sales, or marketing?
• What are the adoption trends for your product/solution across geographies, industries, and functional areas???

Competitive Landscape and new solution trends

• Overall competitive trends for each of your products/solutions/geographies.
• Deep dive on each of your core competitors and things you want to be aware of or monitor for them. This is often greatly enhanced with win/loss data if you have been fortunate to gather that over the year.?
• Any new solutions and potential disruptors to your business or industry that you need to account for.?

A good marketscape can take a few weeks to put together through all the research, discussion, aggregation of data, and distillation into key insights. Give it the time it deserves and start it now. In my experience, this document is something we referenced back to many times throughout every year as we executed against our strategy and was well worth the time investment. Typically, I've seen this led by the marketing leadership and product marketing teams.

Roadmap Review: Once you've completed your marketscape and VSEM drafts, you should review your current roadmap with both assets in mind. Are there any changes you need to make to account for the VSEM, changing market conditions, competitors? Do any of your timelines need to shift to ensure your ability to deliver against the VSEM?

Once you've finished finalizing your VSEM, marketscape, and roadmap, it is then time to get an outside perspective for a sanity check. Depending on your relationship with your analyst, it can be good to share your plans and seek their feedback and thoughts. I've always found that analysts greatly appreciate the chance to give their perspective and want to be helpful with their guidance. I know not everyone feels this way about analysts, and one CMO group I'm a member of even has a meme any time one firm ticks us off (hint: it starts with a G).

Part 2: Steps 3 & 4 will come next week!

Once all of this is accomplished, it is time to set targets and dive into defining the job to be done. But I'll cover that next week!

Was this helpful or simply a repeat of what you are doing today? What am I missing that you would add leading up to this point in strategic planning?