Here is the test for whether you have a marketing plan.
Can you name the thing it refuses to pay for?
If the answer is no, what you have is a list of everything that sounded good in a room in November, with a budget divided twelve ways. That document has no way to tell you it is wrong, which is why it gets quietly abandoned around week six and nobody holds a meeting about it.
A plan that holds has five parts and none of them is a channel list. Three outcomes rather than twelve activities. One named person per outcome. A review date fixed before the year starts. A written list of what you are not funding. And, the part nobody does, a record of what you believed when you picked the numbers.
That last one is the whole difference between a plan you can learn from and a plan you can only abandon.
The number people will quote at you for the next six weeks
Budget season is starting, so you are about to be told what percentage of revenue to spend. Let me save you the argument.
The figure in circulation comes from Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey, which puts marketing at 7.8% of company revenue, barely moved from 7.7% the year before. It gets repeated as a benchmark for everybody.
Read the method. Gartner surveyed 401 senior marketers in the US and Europe, at companies with more than $1 billion in revenue. That is a number describing what enormous companies spend to maintain demand they already have. The CMO Survey out of Duke puts it nearer 9.0%, and the gap is mostly that their sample includes far smaller firms.
Neither number is a budget for a business trying to create demand it does not have yet.
Percentage-of-revenue works as maintenance arithmetic. If your revenue is small because nobody has heard of you, a percentage of it funds a proportionally small attempt to fix the thing causing it.
One more finding from that survey, and it is the one I would pin to the wall. 56% of those CMOs said they lacked the budget to deliver their own 2026 strategy. More than half, at billion-dollar companies, with planning departments.
So the gap between plan and budget is not a small business failing. It is the normal condition. Which means the skill worth having is not better forecasting, it is deciding in advance what gets dropped.
Three outcomes, not twelve activities
An activity is something you do. An outcome is something that changes. Most plans are entirely the first kind, which is why they cannot fail, only stop.
“Launch a newsletter” is an activity. “Thirty percent of new inquiries come from people who have heard of us before they call” is an outcome. The second one tells you what the newsletter was for, and lets you kill the newsletter without abandoning the goal.
Three is the number because you have to be able to hold them in your head on a Tuesday in March. I have never seen a small company execute more than three.
Pick them from where the business actually leaks. Not enough inquiries, wrong inquiries, inquiries that go quiet, customers who do not come back. Those are four different years of work and each one has a different plan.
Then put a name against each. Not a department, a person, and preferably not the same person three times, because a plan where one name appears everywhere is a plan that depends on that person having a quiet year.
The refusal list
This is the shortest part of the document and it does more work than the rest combined.
Write down what you are not doing in the coming year, and why. TikTok because our buyers are not there. A rebrand because the problem is not recognition. Trade shows because we tried two and could not trace a deal. Four or five lines.
Two things happen when it is written down.
The first is that you stop relitigating. When somebody forwards a competitor’s Instagram in April, the answer already exists in a document everybody agreed to, and the conversation takes a minute instead of two weeks.
The second is more useful. A refusal is a prediction. If you said no to paid search because the terms are too expensive, and in August you find out a competitor is making it work, you have learned something specific, because you wrote down what you expected. Without the list, you just drift into it in August and never notice you changed your mind.
Write down what you believed
Here is the move that separates a plan you can learn from, and almost nobody does it.
Next to every number in the plan, write the sentence that has to be true for that number to happen.
“Forty qualified inquiries a quarter from organic search” rests on something. Maybe: we believe our top ten pages will keep the traffic they have, and that a buyer who reads one still calls us. Write that down.
“Twelve referrals” rests on a belief that your existing customers talk to people like themselves. Is that actually true, or do they all work in isolation?
Why bother? Because of what happens in month five when the number is half of what you projected.
Without the written belief, you cannot tell whether the belief was wrong or the execution was, and those need opposite responses. If the belief was wrong, working harder is the worst available option. If the execution was poor, changing strategy destroys a year of work for no reason. Most companies cannot distinguish them, so they do whichever one is more emotionally available, which is usually to change the plan.
The organic search one is the live example for this planning cycle. A forecast built on last year’s traffic assumes the results page behaves the way it did last year, and it does not: a page can hold its position and lose a chunk of its clicks to an answer printed above it. That is not a reason to skip the forecast. It is a reason to write “we are assuming our click share holds” next to it, so that when it does not, you know exactly which brick moved.
A number without its assumption is a guess wearing a spreadsheet.
The review date, set now
Pick the four dates before the year starts and put them in the calendar as a recurring meeting with the owners on the invite.
If you set them in January you will set them generously, which means the first honest conversation about the plan happens in May, by which point two quarters of budget are committed.
The agenda is three questions per outcome, and it fits on one page. What was the number, what is the number, and which of our written beliefs turned out to be wrong. That third question is the only one that produces a decision.
And give yourself permission, in writing, to stop funding anything whose belief has been falsified twice. Otherwise the plan accumulates zombies: line items nobody defends and nobody cancels.
Before lunch
Ninety minutes with last year’s plan open, if one exists.
Read it and mark every line that is an activity rather than an outcome. That ratio is your honest starting point.
Then write the refusal list. Five lines, what you are not funding next year and why. It is the fastest part and the part you will use most.
Then take the three biggest numbers you are about to put in next year’s version and write one sentence under each: the thing that has to be true. If you cannot write the sentence, the number was decided by working backwards from a budget, and it is worth knowing that now rather than in May.
If you’d like to think through which three outcomes are the right ones for your own year, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on getting marketing and sales pointed the same way cover what happens when the plan meets the pipeline. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.