There’s a pattern I’ve observed play out more times than I can count. A new initiative gets the green light. Energy is high, the team is motivated, and everyone gets to work. Weeks pass. Sometimes months. And at some point, someone asks the question that should have been asked at the very beginning: what does success actually look like?

The answers, when they come, are almost always the same. We want to raise awareness. We want to drive engagement. We want to grow our audience. All fine ambitions, but none of them are a destination. They’re a direction, and there’s a world of difference between the two.

Knowing your direction is not the same as knowing where you’re going.

I’ve always believed that the most important question in marketing isn’t what should we do? It’s what are we trying to achieve? Not roughly. Not directionally. Specifically. Because until we’ve answered that question with precision, everything else that follows is, at best, educated guesswork.

This is what Stephen Covey meant when he wrote about beginning with the end in mind. It sounds straightforward. In practice, in my experience, most organisations don’t do it, and the consequences are significant.

Research suggests that fewer than a third of strategy executions are ever considered successful, and that the gap between how aligned leaders believe their teams are and how aligned they actually are is nearly three times wider than most would guess. That gap starts here, in the planning phase, when nobody pins down what winning actually means.

So, what does beginning with the end in mind actually look like in practice?

It starts with a financial goal. Not a marketing goal: a financial goal. A revenue figure. A profit contribution. A customer acquisition target. Something the CFO would recognise as meaningful. From that number, you work backwards. If the goal is to generate £1m in new revenue, and your average new business win is £5,000, you need 200 new customers. If your Opportunity Win rate is 25%, you need 800 qualified Leads. If your Lead to Opportunity conversion rate is 20%, you need 4,000 qualified Leads. And so on, back through the funnel, until you arrive at the marketing activity that needs to happen, and the cost you can afford to pay to make it happen.

That’s not a complicated model. But it’s a discipline that most marketing planning simply skips.

The reason it gets skipped is usually one of two things. Either the financial goal hasn’t been clearly set by the business (in which case, the marketing team is flying blind through no fault of their own), or it has been set, but nobody has done the work of translating it into the customer and conversion model that tells you whether your plan is actually viable. Both are problems. The second one is the one us as marketers can fix ourselves.

Because here’s the thing: working backwards from the goal doesn’t just produce a better plan. It produces an honest one. It forces us to confront, before we’ve spent a penny, whether the resources available are proportionate to the outcome expected. It surfaces unrealistic assumptions early, when they’re cheaper to correct, rather than late, when they’re expensive to explain.

It also changes the conversation with leadership entirely. When you walk into a planning meeting with a model that says “to hit this revenue target, we need this many customers, which requires this conversion rate, which means this level of investment” At that point, you are no longer asking for a budget. You are presenting an investment case. That’s a very different position to be in.

The four questions I now insist on answering before any initiative gets underway:

• What is the specific financial outcome this initiative is designed to deliver?
• How many customers does that require, and what is the expected Average Deal Value?
• What conversion rates are we assuming at each stage of the funnel, and are those assumptions evidence-based?
• What is the maximum cost per acquisition we can afford and still hit the goal?
• And finally: if this initiative delivers half of what we expect, does it still justify the investment?

If we can’t answer all five, we don’t have a plan yet. We have an idea. Ideas are easy. Plans are what move businesses forward.

So, if you’re looking to win, decide what winning looks like before you decide how you’re going to win. Everything else follows from that.

Citations

• McKinsey: fewer than one third of strategy executions are viewed as successful. ScienceDirect / Journal of Business Research (citing McKinsey & Company, 2021) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0148296325000542
• HBR: executives report 82% strategic alignment; actual alignment is 23%. Harvard Business Review, “Is Your Company as Strategically Aligned as You Think It Is?” (May 2023) https://hbr.org/2023/05/is-your-company-as-strategically-aligned-as-you-think-it-is