B2B marketing plan: Strategies to grow your revenue

Everyone will tell you planning matters. But how seriously do most departments take it? If B2B marketing planning were a silent movie, it would go like this:

Most marketing departments do a little cursory planning, then rush into producing deliverables. If you rush, you doom your department to random acts of marketing because that plan won’t be solid enough to follow. There are many reasons marketing teams rush, which we’ll discuss throughout. But if your planners can’t push back against the business, results rarely follow. It’s a “go slow now to go fast later” situation.

Planning is also just as much about what you say “No” to as what you say “Yes” to. When you have finite budget and resources, there is only so much you can actually do—you must remain focused. Planning provides that focus. It leaves everyone with a solid rubric of what the business wants to accomplish that year, such that they can ask, “Is what I’m doing contributing, yes or no?” —and change before it’s too late.

In this complete guide to strategic B2B marketing planning, we walk you through most of what you need to know to run this process on your own. It offers two case studies, four templates, and a step-by-step walkthrough. Plus, a deck you can borrow to get your team’s buy-in on going slow first.

We wrote this guide based on our work helping small startup marketing teams on up to big teams at Meta, Thomson Reuters, and Salesforce plan. We hope it distills that wisdom into something that gives you a competitive planning edge this year or quarter.

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What is a B2B marketing plan? 

A B2B marketing plan is typically a slide deck that explains what everyone on your revenue team should be doing and when. Now, getting it down to one slide is never easy. If all you had to do was write it, every company would plan. It’s not the slide that matters, but the thinking, coordination, and negotiations that go into producing it. 

A small, clear plan is the result of dozens or hundreds of company meetings and conversations. To paraphrase the mathematician Blaise Pascal, “If I had had more time, I would have gotten this plan down to one page.” Alas, for lack of time, many marketing teams create big plans that have little to no impact.

You have to think about your marketing plan’s user experience. After you have written it, it makes sense to you. But what about to other teams? Will it remind your team what’s important throughout the year, and what isn’t? Will it serve as a useful guide to how to react to each new fire drill? Or a big shift, like the chief revenue officer changing the sales compensation model mid-quarter? 

Later in this guide, we discuss all the ways plans go wrong. But for now, it’s important to understand that the B2B marketing plan is not just about the slide itself. It is about the thinking, negotiations, and work it takes to create the slides. Because your VP of sales, director of customer success, product manager, and integrated partners must all be able to look at it and say, “Ah yes, I see my role and what’s needed from me by when.” 

So what is a B2B marketing plan, specifically? 

It’s usually a deck. Or really, several deck slides that, together, document your strategy in a dynamic, living way such that people on your team can execute, track their progress, and adapt. A plan is best measured on the impact it has on your business: Everyone stays coordinated, and the metrics you’ve chosen tick up.

B2B marketing plans are essential if you hope to be a “day one” vendor

Today, 86% of buyers enter an evaluation knowing who they’ll buy. The evaluation is sometimes a formality. As such, marketing owns more of the “funnel” (if we’re still calling it that) than before and it takes a serious amount of effort to stand out, be known. Very few vendors make that “day one shortlist,” says Kerry Cunningham, Head of Research at 6Sense, by which he means the list of companies your buying committee will recall off the top of their head. 

“To earn the budget you need for this year, you have to explain how you’re using it … which usually means not spending it on the 95% of accounts that are not in market,” says Kerry. That requires a plan simple enough you can present to executives, which you trust enough to put all your resources behind, even down to perhaps saying “No” to some inbound interest. 

Again, that requires planning. Plans hold everyone together to achieve something specific.

Use your B2B strategic marketing planning to transform the company

Planning time is also a chance for you to call time-out. You get to reset everyone else’s expectations and make a case for updating your go-to-model and assumptions. Companies we talk to are increasingly using it to:

• Switch from measuring MQLs to MQAs.
• Expand 1:few ABM pilot to also target 1:1.
• Shift SDR culture from hunters to concierges. 
• Double down on the campaigns that are working.
• Pick a new market to launch in. 
• Revisit ideal buyer profile (ICP).

If you have fundamental changes you want to make, planning is the time for it.

Next up, we explain each of those components in detail, and then how to get your entire organization involved in producing plans that guide you to more sustainable revenue. 

The key components of a successful B2B marketing plan

A good B2B marketing strategy requires insight and intuition in equal measure. You need data to back up your decisions and feel confident. But in B2B, the sample sizes are small and rarely statistically significant. So you also need qualitative insights and your intuition about why people are buying, what goes unseen (usually 12 of 16 buying committee members remain silent), and what makes a great experience.

That means when going in, you’ll need four things:

1. Your go-to-market team to understand dynamic planning

Everyone on your team is likely entering the planning process with their own personal ideal of what “planning” means. We advocate for a type of planning we call “dynamic,” where everyone’s trained to understand that: 

• The point of marketing plans is to support top business objectives. Period.
• The point of the planning isn’t the plan—it’s the agreements that go into it.
• Everyone on the revenue team must agree to “disagree but commit.”
• Plans are only as useful as they are implemented.
• You should never let the plan stop you from doing the right thing.

“Dynamic” planners set their plans knowing they will change. They measure and watch to see what must change to hit their goal—and implement as they go, rather than restarting. Dynamic planning is having one top-level view of how things should go and making many micro decisions in pursuit of that overall goal.

Get certified in dynamic marketing planning → 

2. Revisit your ideal buyer persona (ICP)

A plan is essentially you saying, “These are the actions we’re all going to take to hit this or that goal.” And if you’re practicing ABM, add on “...by closing these accounts.” Which means you had better be very confident that you are targeting the right people. A good plan applied to the wrong audience cannot help. 

“You need a common understanding of what it looks like when your buyer is buying—how many people, which roles, which questions/objections, how long, is there an RFP, what are the steps, etc.,” says Kerry Cunningham. This is first and fundamental.

3. Topline business goals

If your C-suite has not determined goals for the overall company, you can’t credibly plan. Plans stem from those goals. You must know what the business wants to achieve in terms of revenue, entering new markets, sales velocity, and so on. If marketing’s plans don’t point to the overall business goal, or people don’t believe in the plan, they’ll revert to what’s familiar—which will lead to random acts of marketing. 

Learn how to get these goals from the business → 

4. Budget

You must know how much money you have to invest. Because that can change everything. Of course, in reality, you won’t get your budget from the CFO in time for a year-end annual plan—but don’t let that stop you. As Kathy Macchi, Inverta Co-Founder, encourages, that budget is actually your job! The CFO doesn’t know what’s needed. You do. Present your budget to the CFO and say, “This is what I need to hit the goals the company has set up for us.”

The 3 components to a B2B marketing plan

With that, here are the actual components of a plan. Complete these three templates in order, and they build toward greater and greater specificity. The plan on a page sets the strategic direction for the year. The revenue map defines the targets and GTM strategies you’ll use. And the campaign plan helps you create a sequenced calendar of all the activities that should lead you to your revenue goals.

1. Annual plan

The annual plan is a top-down exercise that results in a single plan on a page, pictured. This is when the CMO takes the business’ topline objectives and the budget and allocates it to the various initiatives they want the team to execute. It’s not enough detail to actually execute—you’ll figure that out later.

More than other parts of a B2B marketing plan, the annual plan is a total revenue team exercise. We really can’t stress that enough. Planning is not something marketing “does” to the sales team, but a conversation where heads of all the teams gather to jointly decide how they are going to hit the business’ goals. This plan outlines each team’s contributions, and it’s a pact that the CMO can then hold them all to. 

An annual plan aligns with go-to-market:

• Priorities
• Goals
• Budget

Use our workbook → 

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2. Marketing revenue map

The next step is a marketing revenue map where you pick various segments and say, “I want 50% of our revenue from these enterprise customers, 25% from that mid-market segment,” and so on, and then write bullet points about how you plan to do that.

The revenue map translates your high-level initiatives into a specific list of go-to-market resources and motions that less senior teams need to understand the work to be done. Each row translates into campaign types sequenced on the timeline. It also helps you reveal gaps, overlaps, and sequencing issues.

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3. Campaign plans

The third step is campaign planning, where you plan out the details of specific campaigns you’ll need to run to satisfy the revenue map. This aligns your various initiatives and lets everyone see what everyone else is doing. It creates the final bridge between your revenue goals and the actual actions your writers, marketing operations managers, field marketers, and others will take. 

Next up, we share how to do that step-by-step.

The step-by-step guide to building your B2B marketing plan

As we’ve covered, you’ll need four things going into all planning, whether annual or campaign. You need everyone to know the process, a detailed agreement on who your customer is, top-level goals from the business, and to know your budget. With that, you can use this general plan to achieve any type of B2B marketing strategy—short-term or long-term.

To unlock the secrets of annual planning, watch these webinars → 

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1. Define all your resources

Make a table with your people, tech, and workflows that you can use in running your campaigns. 

2. Pick the team

The longer term the plan, the more important it is that the CMO is involved. That’s because it means other teams are involved, and you need that C-suite engagement to parlay with other teams, like sales. For campaign planning, that’s fine to occur at the manager level. 

No matter the size of the planning, every marketing plan should have one singular owner. Not two, one. That person is ultimately responsible and can involve others to be accountable, but if you let it be a committee effort, it will take longer and be worse off.

Consider having representatives from:

• Demand
• Marketing operations
• Creative and content
• Sales and account management
• Customer success
• Product marketing

3. Take a first pass on your own

Planning works best when you give others a structured assignment and something to react to. Based on your present knowledge, take a pass at the plan by filling in the appropriate template. Make note of anything you want to clarify with the group:

• Assumptions about the buyer
• Assumptions about internal capacity
• Assumptions about your agency’s capacity
• Content and creative support you’ll need
• Marketing operations support you’ll need
• Whose budget this is coming from

4. Schedule a structured planning meeting

Have everyone commit to doing a pre-read so you needn’t waste the first half hour recapping. Use this hour to present the goal for everyone’s agreement. Discuss. Then the plan to reach that goal. Discuss. Make note of action items for people to research after, so as not to slow anything down. 

5. Delegate every responsibility

Once approved, delegate the various responsibilities and have a project manager keep everyone on target. Stress that if people fall behind on their duties, you want to know early, so you can plan and adjust. If you set weekly or twice-monthly check-ins, stress that people should not wait until the minutes before the meeting to do their work. You’re looking for quick action. 

If you haven’t yet involved the creative and content team, pause. They can’t be helpful if they’re only involved at the end. If involved at the start, they can use their creativity to help you achieve a lot more with less—as with repurposing old content or writing higher-converting headlines. 

6. Launch and adapt

The launch isn’t the end—it’s the beginning. Monitor according to the metrics you selected, and know that few campaigns ever go according to plan. It’s all about how you duck, weave, and improvise as the data starts flowing in. 

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Common mistakes to avoid in B2B marketing planning

There are many ways planning goes wrong. Here are a few: 

Rushing and not being thorough enough

Planning is about sorting through all the ideas and mapping things out visually so you can see, do our activities really level up to our goals? Do these campaigns conflict because they use the same channels at the same time? And are our assumptions wishful or based on data? If you succumb to pressure from the sales team or business to rush, you don’t have time to think all these intricacies through. The result is constant fire drills as your plans crash into reality. 

A useful way to frame it to the business: Do you want to make all our mistakes throughout the year or get them all out of the way in this one month? That’s what planning does.

Delegating annual planning to someone other than the CMO

Annual plans are a top-down exercise and must come from the highest ranking marketer. That’s because someone has to sell that plan to the CEO and CFO and reflect back the topline business goals to them with a dose of reality: “You’re looking to add $25M in revenue, but you’re only allocating $100k in spend. How do you square those two? Do you want to invest more, or reduce expectations?” 

Not getting buy-in from other teams

Planning is not something marketing “does” to other teams. It has to be a joint exercise where everyone’s invested because sales knows it’s how they’ll hit plan, customer success knows how they’ll hit their net-retained revenue goal, and product knows there’s enough people on the platform to launch the next wave of features. 

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Case studies and real-world examples

Here are two great case studies of going slow to go fast to remarkable success:

Sysdig increases its average contract value 36%

The analytics software Sysdig wanted to go after more enterprise customers. But through a joint planning project with Inverta and AlignICP, they realized that the real opportunity was to stop chasing net new business and focus on customers. Looking at their net-retained revenue (NRR), they realized there was a lot more opportunity in upsell and cross-sell. This approach increased their average contract value by more than a third.

Procore drove 75% of its outbound pipeline with ABM

The construction software Procore had a marketing qualified lead (MQL) culture that caused the sales and marketing teams to mistrust each other. Scott, the marketing leader, knew they needed to shift to account-based to re-win that trust, and because it’d drive more revenue. He used their annual planning as an opportunity to co-plan an ABM pilot with Inverta and Demandbase.

More real stories → 

Tools and resources to support your B2B marketing plan

Just to summarize, here are the tools we’ve shared throughout this guide to help you with your B2B digital marketing strategy: 

The 4 planning templates → 

The annual planning guide → 

Webinars on the planning process → 

The dynamic planning certification → 

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Plan early, plan often, plan dynamically

Hopefully we’ve made a complete case for planning in your B2B marketing org. It isn’t easy. But as our Co-Founder Kathy Macchi jokes, have you ever tried not planning? That’s a lot harder. Because falling back into random acts of marketing stresses and burns your team out. It puts them in a position where they can’t possibly be creative and can’t get out of that cycle. 

Annual planning is your opportunity for a reset. You get to ask, what are the business’ top goals, and how can we best reach them given our customer and budget? Revenue planning helps you get more specific with that and say, okay, which groups of customers can that revenue come from? And campaign planning takes it the rest of the way and creates the step-by-step roadmap your team can actually follow.

If you have any questions about planning or want help getting your startup or enterprise’ annual plan ready for next year, give us a call.

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Frequently asked planning questions (FAQ)

What is a B2B marketing plan?

A B2B marketing plan is a deck—usually just a few slides—that tell people a goal and how to achieve it. Some plans are intentionally vague because they’re meant to guide the entire business, such as an annual plan on a page. Whereas others are highly specific, and basically a work order, like a campaign plan. Planning is essential in B2B, and the surest way to cut marketing waste.

Why is a B2B marketing plan important for my business?

When companies don’t plan or don’t take planning seriously, they fall into random acts of marketing. The ads don’t match the landing pages, don’t match the event series, don’t match the sales pitches, and in the end, the marketing doesn’t work. Buyers don’t realize all those messages are coming from the same group, and you won’t make it into their ‘day one’ consideration set.

How do I create an effective B2B marketing strategy?

Every good B2B marketing strategy starts with knowing the business’ goals. Is it growing or trying to grow more efficient? Is there a revenue target? All strategies are a hypothesis and answer to the question. They are essentially saying, “We think this mixture of budget, targets, and activities are the best way to get to $25 million,” or whatever that next level is.

Which marketing channels work best for B2B companies?

It always depends but right now for most B2B buyers it’s executive events, email, conferences, LinkedIn, syndication, B2B ads, and search engine marketing. Though every business is different. When in doubt, conduct a study. Analyze a cohort of accounts that recently closed and look at all the signals they gave off while buying.