Making Your FY26 Plans Happen: Tools and Tips to Turn Your Plans into Growth
We’ve hit the start of FY26, and many of us have been finalising plans and budgets for the year.
But, as we all know - having a plan is just the beginning. To be effective it needs to be a living and breathing guide for the whole organisation, not something that lives on a shelf.
We’ve all had times when we’ve set targets and agreed plans for our businesses (or life!), but have struggled throughout the year to deliver.
Some of this is about changing realities, external challenges or opportunities, of which some (not all) are outside our control.
What I also observe in many businesses is that we take a leap - from setting the plans, objectives or goals - right into the busy day-to-day doing, without necessarily tying them together through:
Clarity of what activities we need to focus on and why
What steps we need to take - quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily
If you don’t believe how important these steps are, there’s a great article summarising why Amundsen beat Scott on the race to the South Pole.
It’s all about remembering to eat the elephant in bite-sized chunks!
I am a bit of a planning freak, so thought I’d bring together some of my favourite tools for this time of year. All in one place just for you!
I hope they help. If you have any questions or suggestions - I’d love to chat.
Step 1: Clear Objectives and Direction
You’ve got a business plan.
Now you need to be really clear on what role marketing & sales is going to play in helping you succeed this year.
Sometimes you need to prioritise - I’ve found putting a weighting or percentage around the effort is helpful in getting everyone aligned around what is important.
Step 2: How’s It Going to Happen?
Most people think about marketing tactics. What events, or blog posts, or t-shirts, or brochures do we need.
Before you jump into this with your team, think about what you have in place to ‘make it all happen’. Do you have a smooth running marketing machine, or should some of the effort this year go into building that?
For example, could spending some effort getting your CRM system doing some basic automations be a good way to build your business for growth?
To get a clear picture of where your marketing is today, I recommend starting with a Marketing Audit. This will help you establish a baseline and identify key areas for focus in helping you build a marketing machine to support your business goals, as well as looking at the tactics you need.
Start your Marketing Audit here.
Step 3: What’s My Budget
I recently wrote a blog post to help B2B businesses plan their marketing budgets.
TLDR businesses like yours spend between 5-12% of revenue on marketing. Where you sit on that % will depend on your plans and priorities.
You can read the blog here Setting Your Marketing Budget for 2025-5
You can download this checklist Marketing Budget Planning Checklist
Step 4: Bitesized Chunks
Now you need to break this down into chunks.
Don’t think about the year as a whole and hope it’s going to happen. You probably don’t do that for your sales targets, so don’t do it for marketing activity either!
Annual, quarterly and monthly plan templates here
These templates can be super useful in helping you focus on what is important now and park other things until later in the year. This can be really helpful in stopping you being distracted by things that are on your mind to do, that might not be the priority, but you don’t have to hold them in your mind.
For example: you want to refresh your website this year. You might put that in Q3 as you have some other priorities right now.
In Q2 the focus may be on writing the brief and finding a partner.
It’s also super useful as a tool for the team to use to hold each other accountable and to stop being reactive when the latest idea pops up.
“Yes - but not now”
You can still keep adapting as needed, moving things around as the year progresses.
Step 5: Getting a Plan
Now it’s time to get into the tactics - getting your marketing plan together in one place on your Marketing Calendar.
For those that don’t do anything much right now, this can be really helpful to make a start.
For those who are super-busy, but might not be as effective as they could be, this is a great tool to help you think about how to re-use messages and tactics across your channels.
Or to get visibility of what is coming up, so you make the most of things like events or sponsorships.
As a starting point:
Add all the things you already know eg events, conferences
Add in the activity you are doing around this, e.g.
We’ll do an e-book before the conference, plus an email to attendees and some social media ads
Add in your baseline activity that you have agreed to, e.g.
1 x blog a month, 1 x newsletter a month, 2 social posts a week, 1 x case study every month….
Add in what sales activities you need e.g.
Bob’s doing a presentation to the health sector and needs collateral and a pitch deck, plus we need some marketing around this event that talks about our expertise
Be realistic. Balance what is achievable with what you have set your objectives to be.
You might need to loop back to your planning and priorities if there is a mis-match.
Step 6: Keeping on Track
Now you have kick-started the year, keep it on track.
Whether it is you as the CEO, who is doing all the marketing (amongst all your other hats), or you have a specialist marketing person to it, I suggest you schedule regular marketing meetings to check-in on progress and hold yourselves to account.
These agenda templates are great for giving you structure for what each of the meetings should be about;
Weekly Standups: short, focused meetings to keep on track with this week’s priorities, identify blockers, and ensure everyone has the support they need
Monthly Marketing Planning: these meetings are for looking at the month ahead to ensure upcoming activities are on track
Quarterly Planning & Review: this is more of an in-depth look at metrics, reflecting on learnings, and making strategic adjustments for the next quarter.
Weekly, Monthly and Quarterly Agenda templates here
There’s loads of tools and tips on my website which you can check out.
As a fractional CMO, I have the privilege of helping many businesses like yours navigate these challenges and achieve their growth goals. If you'd like to chat about how I can support your plans this year, please get in touch.
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I provide leadership, support and direction for growing Kiwi tech and innovation companies as your 'fractional' (part-time) Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) - an affordable way to get senior thinking and direction for businesses.
If you could do with some help to grow your business, get in touch
Helen Shorthouse
Fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)