Executive Summary: Business leaders can shape their own futures by taking a proactive approach to their strategic growth planning. For organizations to stay focused on their overall goal they must embrace a fundamental mindset shift as well as be people-focused and well aligned around the plan to get there. Along the way they will also need to carefully measure the results of their efforts, strive to ask good questions, and resist the temptation to hasten the process through oversimplification.

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A European study published in the Harvard Business Review on the future of work compiled extensive research from news articles and experts to make predictions around what progress and growth may look like over the next 50 years. As part of the research, the Belgian authors of the study sought input from tech entrepreneurs, economists, and authors/journalists. They discovered that these experts theorizing about what’s to come next fell into three buckets – optimists, skeptics, and pessimists. It’s no surprise that each of these groups had vastly different perspectives on what the future may hold, and yet amid their contrasting perspectives, the key takeaway from the article was this:

"The future will be whatever we make it. In our view, the scenarios pushed by optimists, skeptics, and pessimists are all theoretically possible. Questions like ‘will AI destroy a lot of jobs’ are thus misguided — whether AI destroys a lot of jobs or not will depend on the decisions made by people in the coming years. The question is thus not, ‘What will the future of work be like?’ but rather, ‘What do we want the future to be like?’"

It became clear that regardless of what people think may happen in the future, there is a strong element of personal agency that will shape the future far more than our speculations alone ever could. Our thoughts may not be self-fulfilling prophecies, but our actions do create outcomes. And the same principle is true on a smaller scale as well!

At the individual organization level, companies poised with a strategic plan will be able to shape their own future. So, the question your organization should be asking isn’t "What will the future hold for us?" but "What do we want the future to hold for us?"

Have you done your annual planning yet? If not, don’t worry. There’s still time!

Typically, in companies where their fiscal year aligns with the calendar year, annual planning will begin in October for the year ahead. However, it’s certainly not unheard of to still be planning for the year ahead into Q1, or even later. Sure, if you get to the end of Q3 and don’t have a plan put together yet, it’s probably best to just move on and start planning for the following year! But otherwise, planning will still offer significant benefits even if you start it late. Going through the steps involved in the planning process is valuable in and of itself, independent of the actual plan you put together. All the different types of data you need to gather to create a plan will give insight into how well your company is performing and what the industry is looking like overall. This broader perspective is extremely valuable to have regardless of when you get the plan put together because it will equip you to make the ongoing tweaks and shifts needed now to be set up for success later. For these reasons, planning helps organizations run more smoothly and improves their ability to grow over time.

But how should leadership navigate the nuances of B2B business planning?

In times of planning, we ask questions like, “How do we continue this momentum?” and “How can we improve results?” We want to understand the keys to success – the path we should follow to get where we want to go. And yet, we sometimes forget that the path to success is simply moving forward.

Letting go of the old is a precursor to ushering in growth.

There are many times personally and professionally when you will need to let things go and move on to grow. How do we stop doing what we’ve always done and start doing something new?

There is plenty of advice available for business owners and CEOs of struggling companies to help them right the ship. But what if your “problem” is simply just that you are doing well and need to figure out how to take the next steps to grow revenue?

Every day I work with organizations that are succeeding, but they are stuck where they are. Their current revenue figures have plateaued, and they are unable to get to that next level. The issue they need to tackle is not staying afloat, it is figuring out how to increase their speed to win the race.

How do companies that have their business model figured out and are on sure footing propel themselves forward to that next leap in revenue growth? This revenue growth guide will give you the tactical advice you need to build a growth strategy to take your company to the next level!

Strategic business planning has always been an organization’s key to finding success. However, when the pandemic hit, strategic plans went out the window. Changing consumption patterns and buyer expectations rendered sales forecasts obsolete and supply chain challenges turned “business as usual” on its head. Businesses pivoted, shifted, and rode the wave eagerly anticipating a “return to normal” that never came.

In the wake of this massive disruption, it has become abundantly clear that the business landscape as we knew it has been permanently changed. How we do business has changed, who we do business with has changed, and the kind of business we do has changed. The long-term planning that companies once relied on to guide their strategic moves was largely put on hold, and continuous re-forecasting served as a tenuous foundation that companies came to rely on for their short-term planning.

If you are asking this question, you are already doing something right. Taking the time to analyze whether your Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy needs to be either refreshed or overhauled is a critical component of keeping up with both the market and your industry.

Determining whether you need a new B2B GTM strategy this year will depend largely on how old your existing plan is. If your GTM strategy was developed before COVID and has not been updated since, it definitely needs attention. If it was written or updated over the last two years, it likely still needs work but may not have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Globalization has given B2B companies access to a seemingly endless list of suppliers and buyers, lowering prices and shortening delivery times. That is, until a disruption is introduced into the global network that ripples through the system.

Some disruptions have a more limited scope (only affecting certain industries or regions), while others have a more widespread effect. The pandemic has been the widest reaching business disruption of our time, and it is not going to be resolved anytime soon.

In fact, over the last few months “supply chain” has quickly become the new trending topic that everyone is talking about. However, most B2B companies have been dealing with supply chain woes for almost two years now. And with no end in sight, they are feeling the pressure to get even more strategic with how they approach supply chain disruptions.

So, how should you handle today’s ongoing supply chain disruptions… and tomorrow’s?

“The ability to withstand unpredictable threat or change and then to emerge stronger.”

This is how the team at McKinsey & Company defines resilience in their recently published an article on what they call The Resilience Imperative. They elaborate further that resilience is going to be more important in the coming decade than ever before when they explain, “Catastrophic events will grow more frequent but less predictable. They will unfold faster but in more varied ways. Disruption is becoming more frequent and more severe.”

Resilience can be financial, operational, technological, organizational, or reputational in nature but the greatest resiliency comes when an organization can anticipate and respond to threats across all categories to dynamically adapt as needed. Obviously, this kind of resiliency does not just fall into place – it is the result of careful planning to develop a revenue resiliency toolkit.