Does your annual marketing plan feel more like a guessing game than a strategy? You are not alone. For many marketing teams, planning is a dreaded exercise of updating last year’s plan with bigger numbers, only to watch it become irrelevant by the first quarter.

The result? Marketers become a "promotional factory," launching random acts of marketing and hoping something works, all while feeling disconnected from the real drivers of the business.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. In the latest episode of The RevRoom, Inverta's planning practice lead, Danielle Contreras, explains how to transform planning from a painful reporting exercise into a dynamic leadership process that creates clarity, collaboration, and commitment.

Move from guessing to leading

The number one frustration marketers face during planning is the feeling that they’re guessing. Most teams are handed a top-line revenue goal and a funnel model and told to "go plan." But as Danielle notes, "a funnel is just math. It doesn't tell you where growth will come from or what's realistic by segments."

This lack of context is what drives the frustration. To stop guessing and start leading, marketers must drive discovery and ask better questions before building the plan. This means reaching across the aisle to understand the business from every angle.

Ask these questions to get the inputs you need:

• To Sales: What accounts or segments are moving the fastest, and where do deals get stuck? Where do you not need help from marketing?
• To Finance: Where do we have the strongest average contract value (ACV) and lifetime value (LTV) profiles? What assumptions are already baked into the financial forecast?
• To Leadership: Beyond the revenue number, what strategic bets are non-negotiable this year?
• To Product: Are there white space opportunities or new product iterations coming that we need to support?

Asking these questions opens the door to better inputs and better plans. It shows you understand how the business makes money and gives you the credibility to shape how the team goes after its goals.

[Pull quote, unattributed: "A funnel is just math. It doesn't tell you where growth will come from or what's realistic by segments."]

Connect your plan to reality with a revenue map

Once you have the right inputs, you need a framework to translate them into an actionable plan. We use a three-part system designed to move from big goals to specific campaigns:

1. The Plan on a Page: This is the what. It captures the high-level initiatives marketing will own and connects them directly to business objectives and revenue goals.
2. The Revenue Map: This is the where. Danielle calls this the "missing piece" that connects business goals to execution. The map uses account and pipeline data to outline distinct, data-backed paths to revenue. It helps you segment your ideal customer profile into meaningful motions, such as pipeline acceleration for fast-closing deals, high-touch plays for "whale" accounts, and specific retention or expansion programs.
3. The Campaign Timeline: This is the when and the who. It takes the paths identified in the revenue map and sequences them into a clear timeline of campaigns.

This framework provides a clear snapshot of how marketing will accelerate revenue and close gaps, giving marketing and sales a shared playbook to execute against.

Make your plan dynamic, not static

The word "annual" is misleading. A plan shouldn't be a static document you create once and then abandon. We call our process dynamic planning because it's designed to evolve with the business and the market.

Instead of a single, massive review, adopt a "rolling three-month look" at what's coming. This cadence allows you to reflect on what's working, adjust your approach based on real-time data, and keep the entire organization aligned. Because the three components—plan, map, and timeline—are distinct, you can refine your revenue map or timeline without having to rewrite the entire annual plan.

The value isn't in having flawless numbers on day one; it's in creating a process that keeps you aligned over time.

Listen to the full RevRoom episode with Danielle Contreras to get more tools and insights for building a marketing plan that stops the random acts of marketing and starts driving real business impact.