The No Smoke & Mirrors ; Strategic Planning Series Part 2: Strategy Should Follow the Data, Not the Other Way Around
We shared a post about strategic planning and how you may have a smart strategic plan that fails to deliver because your sales team lacks the skills to execute it. As we enter strategic planning season, we started a series of posts, with Part 1 focused on Assess before you write Strategy. I’ve attended numerous strategic planning sessions. I can count them all. They began with the same exercise: brainstorm goals for the next three years. Let’s establish our BHAG.
The whiteboard fills up fast. Grow revenue, enter new markets, and increase margin. Add customers, launch new products, expand geographically, and improve retention. All good ideas. None of them are a strategy yet, and strategy shouldn’t start with brainstorming. It should start with evidence.
The No Smoke and Mirrors Strategic Planning Starts With What’s Actually True Today, Then We Discuss Future Goals
The No Smoke & Mirrors™ approach starts with gathering data before deciding what the company should do next. From the customer’s perspective, that means returning to Voice of Customer research: why customers buy from us, why they leave, what they genuinely value, and what problem they are really trying to solve.
From the transaction side, assess what is purchased, which products grow, which decline, average transaction size, and where margins leak.
On the economics side, it means understanding net profit by customer, by salesperson, by product, and by market — because revenue alone hides an enormous amount of trouble.
On the market side, it means facing what’s genuinely changing around you: emerging competitors, shifting technology, new regulation, tariffs, labor conditions, or economic pressure that could reshape the opportunity no matter what you decide internally. On the people side, it means going back to the sales effectiveness assessment from Part 1:what can your team actually execute today?
No Smoke and Mirrors Truth: Your data holds dollars if you know where to look.
Know Your Numbers: Data Changes the Conversation Entirely
Say your leadership team believes the biggest opportunity sitting in front of the company is new customer acquisition. But the data shows your best existing customers are far more profitable than new ones, and your sales team is much better at expanding relationships than prospecting cold.
That should change your strategy in the near future and help you identify key thrusts to hit your 3-5 year BHAG. Don’t let this insight get filed away as an interesting side note. Or the data could show the opposite: stagnant existing accounts, customer consolidation driving revenue down, a strong hunting team, and a market full of profitable prospects nobody’s called yet. Same result: the data moves the strategy for the next year, then may identify key thrusts for the future.
The data is where the real opportunity actually lives, not wherever the loudest voice in the planning session assumed it was.
Feel free to use our no-smoke-and-mirrors pre-strategic planning checklist to prepare to write a strategic plan that moves the revenue needle.
Don’t Confuse Revenue With Profitable Growth
One of the more dangerous numbers in strategic planning is plain revenue. Revenue can climb while profitability quietly declines underneath it. A rep producing $5 million can genuinely destroy more value than one producing $2 million once you account for margin, service cost, discounting habits, and how profitable their specific customers actually are. That’s why the question I keep coming back to isn’t “where are we selling.” It’s “where are we actually making money.” Understanding net profit by customer and by rep can completely reorder a company’s strategic priorities the moment leadership actually looks at it honestly.
As we share with each team we help: Know your numbers!
Strategy Is a Set of Real Choices
Real strategy requires actual choices, not just aspirations. Decide which customers to pursue, and which you won’t. Certain markets merit entry. Which accounts deserve a different service model? Which products deserve real investment? Where will you compete, and how will you actually win there? What will you deliberately stop doing? And, tying directly back to Part 1: what capabilities have to be built for those choices to actually succeed once they leave the boardroom?
Before approving your next strategic plan, put five questions to your leadership team directly:
Which evidence supports this strategy?
What have customers actually told us?
What does the transaction and profitability data say?
What industry shifts are we responding to?
And does the organization have the capability to execute this?
If those five questions can’t be answered with real evidence, you don’t have a strategy yet.
You have a good-sounding list of ideas, and there’s a meaningful difference between the two.
No Smoke and Mirrors Truth: Strategy was never supposed to sound best in the boardroom.
Real strategic planning is what holds up against the reality of your customers, market, economics, and people.
Is your team getting ready for strategic planning?
What does your team prepare before the strategic planning session?
Does your team have a history of executing your strategy successfully, or do they fall short?
In the next part of this series, we will introduce Part 3 — The strategy is finished. Now the hard part begins: execution.