Quarterly planning

Annual goals are often little more than corporate wishful thinking. They are too large to be actionable and too distant to create urgency. Quarterly planning is where we strip away the fluff and turn vague ambition into arithmetic.

This process is not about predicting the future with perfect accuracy; it is about establishing a mathematical baseline. Without a model, your team is merely busy. With a model, your team is effective. By the end of this chapter, you will have a system that works backwards from revenue to calculate exactly what inputs are required to hit your targets.

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Most teams start with their current activity and hope it leads to revenue. We do the opposite. We start with the revenue the business needs and work backwards through the funnel stages to find the required inputs.

Consider a B2B SaaS company that needs to generate £500,000 in new business this quarter. If the average contract value is £10,000, the arithmetic dictates you need 50 new clients.

Working further up the funnel reveals the scale of the challenge:

• The sales gap: If your win rate from proposal to close is 25%, you need to send 200 proposals.
• The qualification gap: If only 50% of discovery calls result in a proposal, you need 400 discovery calls.
• The marketing gap: If 10% of your leads book a discovery call, you need 4,000 leads.
• The reach gap: If your website converts at 2%, you need 200,000 sessions.

By laying it out like this, you move from "we need to grow" to "we need 400 discovery calls." The latter is a problem you can solve with specific tactics.

Every number in your model—from click-through rates to lead-to-opportunity conversion—is an assumption. In an established business, these are informed by historical data. In a new venture, they are educated guesses.

The danger is not in being wrong; the danger is in being vague. You must write your assumptions down. If you assume a 10% conversion rate and achieve 7%, you have gained data. If you never stated the assumption, you have only gained a sense of disappointment.

Example: The "optimistic" vs "realistic" assumption

Imagine you are launching a new LinkedIn ad campaign. An optimistic assumption is a 2% click-through rate based on industry blogs. A realistic assumption is 0.8% based on your previous performance in similar channels. Using the realistic number in your model ensures you don't under-budget for the traffic you need.

The primary value of this model is that it reveals uncomfortable truths before the quarter begins. It acts as a filter for fantasy.

You may find that to hit your revenue goal, your sales team needs to hold 20 meetings a week, but they only have the capacity for 10. This is a structural bottleneck. You now have a choice: hire more staff, automate the qualification process to save time, or accept that the revenue goal is impossible with current resources.

A common pressure-test failure:You calculate that you need 5,000 leads, but your current cost per lead is £50. This requires a £250,000 budget. If your actual budget is £50,000, your model is telling you that your current strategy will only deliver 20% of your goal. You must either pivot your strategy to a lower-cost channel or lower your targets.

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I do not hand targets down to teams. I build the framework, then work with functional leaders to fill in the blanks. Ownership is the byproduct of participation.

The process follows a specific sequence:

1. The revenue anchor: Agree on the total revenue target with leadership.
2. The funnel architecture: Define the stages that represent the actual customer journey (e.g., Lead > MQL > SQL > Discovery > Proposal > Win).
3. The collaborative calibration: Meet with functional leads to agree on the conversion assumptions for their sections.
4. The final sign-off: Ensure the individuals responsible for the work agree that the numbers are realistic.

If a marketing manager agrees to a lead target, they are also agreeing to the logic that produced it. If they believe a target is impossible because a specific channel is saturated, that conversation happens now. This eliminates the excuse of "unrealistic expectations" later in the quarter.

A model that lives only in a spreadsheet is a failed model. Once the arithmetic is agreed upon, these numbers must be migrated into your daily visibility tools.

If you use a CRM like HubSpot, these assumptions become formal goals. If you use Notion or a custom dashboard, they become the benchmarks for your weekly reports. The connection between the quarterly model and your live data must be absolute.

When you update an assumption in the spreadsheet because of a market shift, the corresponding goal in your tracking software must move in tandem. This ensures that every Monday morning, the team is looking at the most accurate version of reality.

Quarterly planning turns your growth engine into a series of solvable problems. By working backwards from revenue, you identify exactly where the pressure points are. You move away from "doing more" and toward "doing what is required."

The model is your map. It will not tell you how to drive, but it will tell you if you are headed toward a cliff. Once the arithmetic is set, we move to the monthly rhythm to decide which levers to pull first.