Planning for 2025: Strategic & Tactical Goals
By Kristen Hayer
It is that time of year again – planning for 2025. Many companies don’t plan far enough in advance for the coming year. If yours is one of them, that’s OK, I have some ideas for you later in this article. Either way, whether your company is actively planning or not if you’re a leader now is the time to be getting your plans for 2025 in place. After all, the first plan is the best plan and the best plan, often, wins.
I’ll be writing a series of articles to help you get ready for 2025 over the next six weeks. This week I want to start with the thing you should consider first: Goals. What does your company, your department, and your team need to achieve in 2025 in order to be successful? In order to be competitive? In order to keep customers? In order to bring in revenue? I believe that the first step in planning should always be to determine what your North Star is. From your vision of your goals, everything will flow down through the tactics you’ll need to put in place to deliver on those goals.
Here's how I like to approach Goal-Setting for the new year:
1. Understand Top-Down Objectives
Before you start working on this for your specific department or team, make sure you understand the objectives of the overall organization. While you might be concerned about your getting your 5% churn rate to 2%, your company’s bigger concern might be the fact that no new customers are coming in. Talk to your C-level leaders to understand their thinking going into the new year. There may be concerns related to a still stabilizing economy, gaining investment or debt at a reasonable rate, or staying competitive in an increasingly tough business environment. The US election may be on customers’ minds. Knowing how your executive team is considering these challenges will help you with the next step.
2. Build Team or Department Strategic Goals
It may seem like I don’t think your team or department goals don’t matter: On the contrary. It is crucial that you have specific strategic goals for your group. You just need to make sure they align with your company’s strategic objectives. For example, if you learn that your company is primarily concerned with driving new sales (assuming churn is under control and customers are largely happy) you might want to focus your goals on driving referrals, references and leads. In contrast, if your company is concerned about staying competitive, you might want to set some goals around collecting and providing comprehensive product feedback for your leadership team.
3. Develop Functional Tactical Goals
Once you’ve clarified your group’s strategic goals, you can start to break those down into goals for each function on your team. Let’s say that the company’s goal is to drive more new business, and the department’s goal is to create more referrals, references, and leads. You might look at your team and decide that the best way to get referrals is by having CSMs run a proactive campaign to satisfied customers to ask for them, to have Implementation Specialists ask for references when happy new customers finish onboarding, and to have Support Reps highlight customer needs that align with existing services. By breaking down the broader company goals into role-related tactics, you can ensure that your team’s goals align with company goals.
And, of course, this all happens in the perfect world of your company having already started plans for 2025. In my experience in September, many of your companies have not yet started planning for the new year. Here are some ideas for handling the situation if things aren’t perfect:
What if…
· There is no Top-Down plan?
It’s OK. Start by talking to your C-level or senior leaders to understand their concerns about 2025. If I had to choose 3 leaders to talk with it would be your CEO, your CFO, and your CMO. These forward-looking leaders should be able to provide you with enough insight to give you a direction to go in for planning. You might need to adjust later, but I’ve never seen an annual plan make it through a whole year anyway!
· You’re worried about creating a metrics-based plan?
If you have never developed a metrics-based plan, I understand your concerns. I was always a bit afraid to put a stake in the ground and say something like, “I’m going to hit $1 Million this year.” But when I did, it happened. And when I didn’t, it didn’t. Make sure you have data behind your plan (where the numbers will come from, how you plan to achieve it) but don’t be afraid to stake your claim. Executives know that big goals don’t always get hit, but no goals never do.
· You don’t know how to convert a strategic plan into a tactical plan?
Once you know what your leadership team is focused on, and you create a metrics-based plan for your team or department, break it down into the activities it will take to achieve that goal. Going back to my earlier example, if your goal is to drive more references, set a goal for your CSM team to ask at least X number of customers each month if they would be willing to be a reference. X should be a number you can explain, and is relevant for your business, but hold firm. You could also set a tactical goal of maintaining at least Y% of referenceable customer at any given time. This is also a practical, tactical goal. By considering the activities that support a strategic goal, you convert the tactical into strategic.
Step One in 2025 planning is to set goals for your team. If you are setting them in September or October, when you’re (hopefully) reading this, you might have to adjust them. However, first goals in will get the attention of your leadership team, which will help when you move on to some of the more budget-focused goals we’ll discuss in future weeks. Good luck with setting challenging, but achievable, goals for 2025!
Are you a CS leader that could use a little support? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that also offers a wide range of CS training for leaders. Our popular CS Leadership Certification program or our new Leading as a Director series might be fore you! For more information visit TheSuccessLeague.io
Kristen Hayer - Kristen founded The Success League in 2015 and currently serves as the company's CEO. Over the past 25 years Kristen has been a success, sales, and marketing executive, primarily working with scaling tech companies, and leading several award-winning customer success teams. She has written over 100 articles on customer success, and is the host of 3 podcasts about the field. Kristen has served as a judge for the Customer Success Excellence awards, and is on the board of several early-stage tech companies. She received her MBA from the University of Washington in Seattle, and now lives in San Francisco.
