Quarterly planning

Quarterly planning is where your growth strategy becomes a set of numbers that people can actually work towards. Without it, you have vague ambitions. With it, you have targets that cascade down to every team and every metric.

The process I use works backwards from revenue. You start with the number the business needs to hit, then calculate what that requires from each stage of the funnel, then assign those targets to the people responsible for hitting them. By the end, everyone knows their number and understands how it connects to the company's goals.

This isn't a top-down exercise where leadership hands down targets and hopes for the best. It's collaborative. Each team contributes their assumptions about what's realistic. Each person owns the metric they're accountable for. The model becomes a shared tool for making decisions, not a spreadsheet that lives in a folder nobody opens.

The first time you do this, you'll get it wrong. That's fine. The point isn't to predict the future perfectly. It's to have a baseline you can calibrate against, so each quarter you get closer to understanding how your business actually works.

Every quarterly plan starts with one number: the revenue target. This comes from the business - what does the company need to generate this quarter to hit its annual goals, fund its operations, satisfy its investors, or whatever constraint applies.

From there, you work backwards through the funnel. The maths is simple but the clarity it creates is powerful.

Revenue divided by average order value gives you the number of new clients you need. If you're targeting €500,000 in new revenue this quarter and your average deal is €10,000, you need 50 new clients.

Now you move up the funnel. If your sales pipeline converts at 30%, you need roughly 167 qualified opportunities to close 50 deals. If your marketing funnel converts 20% of leads into qualified opportunities, you need about 835 leads. If your landing pages convert at 3%, you need around 28,000 sessions. If your ads get a 0.5% click-through rate, you need 5.6 million impressions.

Each step reveals the inputs required to produce the outputs. And each step has a conversion rate that becomes a target for whoever owns that part of the funnel.

The structure varies depending on the business. A product-led company with self-service signups has different funnel stages than a sales-led company with demos and proposals. Some companies have both motions running in parallel, each with their own model. The principle is the same: start with revenue, work backwards through every conversion step, and end up with the activities and inputs that need to happen.

The conversion rates in your model are assumptions. They're your best guess at how the funnel will perform this quarter based on historical data, planned initiatives, and honest assessment of your team's capabilities.

For an established business with good data, you pull the assumptions from last quarter's actuals and adjust based on what's changing. If you're launching a new ad channel, maybe you assume lower performance until you've optimised it. If you've just hired a senior salesperson, maybe you assume a slight improvement in close rates.

For a new business or a new funnel without historical data, you have to start somewhere. I typically ask the client what they think is realistic, knowing we'll be wrong. The goal in the first quarter isn't accuracy - it's establishing a baseline we can calibrate against.

What matters is that assumptions are explicit. Write them down. When you review the quarter, you can see exactly where your predictions were off and update accordingly. If you assumed a 10% trial-to-paid conversion and you hit 7%, that's useful information. If you never wrote down your assumption, you have nothing to learn from.

Some assumptions you'll set once and rarely change - average order value, for instance, tends to be stable. Others you'll adjust every quarter as the team improves. A sales team that's been trained and coached should convert better over time. A marketing team that's been testing and optimising should generate leads more efficiently. Build that expectation into your assumptions.

The model often reveals uncomfortable truths. This is a feature, not a bug.

You might build out the numbers and discover that hitting your revenue target requires 100,000 website sessions, but you're currently getting 15,000. That's a gap that won't close through incremental improvement. You either need to invest heavily in demand generation, lower your revenue target, or find a fundamentally different approach.

Or you might find that your sales team needs to convert at 35% to make the numbers work, but they're currently at 10%. That's not a target - that's a fantasy. Something needs to change: more training, better qualification criteria, additional headcount, or a revised revenue goal.

When the model shows impossible gaps, you have a conversation. What would it take to actually hit these numbers? Does the sales team need resources or training to triple their conversion rate? Does marketing need to hire a specialist for a channel they don't know how to run? Does the business need to accept a lower revenue target while the team builds capability?

This is where quarterly planning becomes strategic. You're not just setting targets - you're identifying constraints and deciding how to address them. Sometimes the answer is investment. Sometimes it's accepting that this quarter is about building foundations for next quarter. Sometimes it's realising that the business model itself has a problem.

Better to discover this in a planning session than to set impossible targets and watch people fail.

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I don't set targets for people. I set up the model, then work with each team to fill in their piece.

The process typically works like this. First, I build the model structure and discuss it with the CEO or whoever owns the overall revenue target. We agree on the target and the funnel stages that make sense for this business.

Then I meet with each functional leader. With the head of sales, I discuss the sales pipeline metrics: qualification rate, proposal rate, win rate. With the marketing leader, I discuss the marketing funnel metrics: lead capture rate, activation rate, booking rate. We look at last quarter's data, discuss what's realistic, and agree on assumptions.

Finally, I go to the individual people who will own each metric. The person responsible for lead activation rate sets their baseline and commits to their target. The person running ads commits to their cost-per-lead assumption. Everyone has input on the number they'll be held accountable for.

This takes longer than just handing down targets, but it produces something more valuable: ownership. When someone has participated in setting their target, they can't claim it was unrealistic. They understood the model, they saw how their metric connects to revenue, and they agreed to the number.

It also surfaces problems early. The marketing person might say they have no idea how to run LinkedIn ads effectively. Good - now we know we need to find a freelancer or agency rather than assuming a skill that doesn't exist. The salesperson might say the qualification criteria are too loose and they're wasting time on bad leads. Good - now we know to fix that before committing to conversion targets that assume good lead quality.

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The quarterly planning spreadsheet is a working document, not a deliverable. What matters is that the targets end up somewhere the teams will actually see them.

For companies using HubSpot, I set up goals for each team based on the model. The sales team sees their opportunity and deal targets. The marketing team sees their lead and MQL targets. Each metric from the model becomes a goal that people can track progress against.

This creates visibility and accountability. You don't have to wait until the end of the quarter to know if you're on track. The goals update as data comes in, so you can see mid-quarter whether you're ahead, behind, or on pace.

The connection between the spreadsheet model and the live goals matters. If you change an assumption in the model, update the corresponding goal. If you add a new initiative that should affect a metric, make sure the goal reflects that. The model and the goals should always tell the same story.

Some companies prefer to track goals in Notion, or a dashboard tool, or even a shared spreadsheet. The specific tool doesn't matter as much as the principle: quarterly targets should be visible to the people responsible for hitting them, updated with real data, and connected to the overall revenue model so everyone understands how their piece fits.

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Quarterly planning turns ambition into arithmetic. You start with the revenue the business needs, work backwards through every conversion step, and end up with targets that each team and each person can own.

The first quarter you do this, your assumptions will be wrong. That's expected. The value isn't in predicting perfectly - it's in having explicit assumptions you can calibrate against. Each quarter, you learn more about how your funnel actually behaves, and your model gets closer to reality.

The output is a set of goals that cascade from revenue down to activities. Everyone knows their number. Everyone understands how it connects to the company's success. And when something's off track, you can see it in time to do something about it.