Annual Planning Meetings (APMs) are a great way to get everyone on the same page, set goals, and celebrate successes. They help your entire team focus on upcoming goals while also reinforcing your company culture. But as beneficial as these meetings are, organizing them can definitely be a challenge.
Using a built-in meeting agenda, like the one in Ninety, can help your teams stay on task. It allows more room for interpersonal connection and less room for misalignment and redundancy.
The Strategic Advantage of Annual Planning Meetings
When you bring together talented, hardworking team members who are all working toward the same goals, it gives your business the chance to focus on what truly matters. This collaborative approach has proven benefits: The Journal of Management Studies reports that companies with documented business plans grow 30% faster, and founders with a business plan are 129% more likely to push forward with their business beyond the initial startup phase and scale it. Here are some of the strategic advantages of Annual Planning Meetings:
Realign on Your Vision
Your Annual Planning Meeting is the perfect time to ensure that the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) remains fully aligned with the Focus Filters that are core to your vision. These include your Core Values, Compelling Why, goals, Ideal Customer, Compelling Value Proposition, and industry and niche.
If necessary, your SLT can make adjustments to reflect shifting market conditions or strategic changes. Any updates should be recorded in Ninety’s Vision tool, so your entire team can review them throughout the year.
Set Goals
Setting 3–7 organizational goals for the year helps your business focus on the big picture and work collaboratively. These goals should be ambitious and large-scale, requiring contributions from many different departments.
For example, setting a goal of increasing subscriptions by 20% requires separate efforts from Sales, Marketing, Onboarding, and Customer Service teams. These collaborative goals help teams focus on actions that will truly make an impact, including hiring, training, technological investments, and streamlining existing processes.
Ninety’s Scorecard can provide visual cues for your team about the status of your goals. The Scorecard Improves team alignment by enabling customization and more intuitive visual cues like those found in spreadsheets. Teams can tailor the Scorecard to their specific needs, grouping KPIs and adding clear descriptions, ensuring everyone works toward shared objectives.
Discuss Key Issues
Every organization faces challenges. What sets great companies apart is their ability to recognize these challenges and actively work on finding solutions.
When people hear the term "issues," they often think of problems or difficulties, but issues can also refer to ideas, opportunities, or topics worth exploring. High-trust companies encourage open, honest conversations among Internal Stakeholders, tackling both challenges and opportunities directly as a team. This approach leads to smoother operations.
At Ninety, we use the Issues tool to Raise, Discuss, and Resolve both obstacles and opportunities, and the Annual Planning Meeting presents the biggest opportunity for alignment throughout the entire year. The Ninety Issues tool helps any team member create an issue for discussion — just right-click and select “Make it an Issue.” This creates a highly visible format that ensures issues will be resolved (or at least discussed) in a timely manner.
Reflect on Wins and Learnings
Discussing wins during your Annual Planning Meeting is a vital way to celebrate progress and reinforce a positive company culture. Acknowledging accomplishments boosts morale and provides an opportunity to reflect on what has been working well. These discussions also offer valuable insights into the strengths and strategies that have driven success, helping to guide decision-making as the organization looks ahead to the next year.
But an undervalued part of your Annual Planning Meeting is reflecting on anything that hasn’t gone to plan. Understanding threats and weaknesses is just as important as acknowledging strengths and opportunities. In the same vein, discussing strategies that didn’t work can help your team avoid future pitfalls.
Improve Team Health
Team health is a critical focus during Annual Planning Meetings. Just as individuals need attention to maintain their physical health, teams require intentional effort to ensure strong communication, trust, and collaboration. During the APM, taking time to assess and nurture team health can lead to improved relationships, better problem-solving, and a more unified approach to achieving company goals. Engaging in team-building exercises, addressing any underlying tensions, and fostering open dialogue help create an environment where everyone feels supported and aligned, setting the stage for a more productive year.
Build Your Annual Planning Meeting Agenda in Ninety
Once your SLT identifies these focal points, it’s time to create the overall agenda for your Annual Planning Meeting. Ninety makes this simple with our customizable, pre-built agenda. In the Meetings tool, you can customize our recommended agenda based on your unique needs. Running the meeting off of this agenda is extremely streamlined, with built-in timers to keep you on track. Once you finish one section, you can easily hit the “skip forward” button and advance to the next item on the agenda.
Running your meeting out of the Ninety app also enables your team to follow along and minimize distractions. Everyone can see the schedule and find the appropriate place to raise their pressing questions and comments. Having the schedule on-screen also eliminates the need for a physical copy of the agenda while still encouraging transparency and alignment.
Plus, Ninety generates an email recap at the end of your day 2 session, which outlines the Rocks and To-Dos created, issues solved, meeting notes, and meeting ratings. You can even schedule annual and quarterly meetings to recur throughout the year (though you can obviously adjust the dates and times to align with your team’s schedules).
Align Your Senior Leadership Team
Aligning your SLT to a single source of truth is an essential step of your Annual Planning Meeting, and Ninety simplifies this process. Having one software that provides a single source of truth allows your teams to work continuously toward your vision.
Compile Rocks for Each Department
Your SLT is able to quickly access their teams’ Rocks and milestones from the previous year. Since these Rocks and issues tie into the overall goals of each department, the SLT can quickly reflect on the biggest wins from each quarter. Select 3–5 accomplishments per team to share during the Annual Planning Meeting. Aim to showcase the most significant lifts for each department and build a compelling narrative of how the company has grown.
Vision and Focus Filters
The Annual Planning Meeting is an ideal time to reflect on your current vision and align it to any changing market conditions and the current stage of your company’s growth, with any potential changes documented in Ninety’s Vision tool.
The facilitator leads the conversation by asking important questions to ensure alignment. These include whether your organization still fully embraces your Core Values, and whether you are hiring, reviewing, rewarding, and even letting people go based on those values. The facilitator also asks if you’re incorporating the Core Values into our Quarterly Discussions and Weekly 1-on-1 Meetings. Another key area of focus is whether our Compelling Why still drives the company forward and if your current industry and niche continue to represent where you deliver the most value.
The team is also prompted to assess if the company’s Compelling and Audacious Goals are still inspiring and motivating everyone in the organization. Additionally, evaluate if your Ideal Customer has been clearly defined, and whether you’re satisfied with how you’ve outlined their demographic, geographic, and psychographic characteristics. Lastly, the facilitator asks whether our Compelling Value Proposition still clearly defines why prospects choose us over our competitors.
If any of these questions raise concerns, the facilitator either works to resolve them quickly or adds the issue to the long-term issues list for further discussion.
Focus on Team Health
With all of your SLT in the same room, your Annual Planning Meeting is also the ideal time to focus on your team health. At Ninety, we firmly believe that our success stems from one key factor: our people. Since individuals rarely work in isolation, the health of our teams is just as important. Just like physical health, team health doesn’t maintain or improve independently — it requires attention, effort, and commitment. During our Annual Planning Meeting, we dedicate time to engaging our teams in a few team health exercises. This is an important conversation worthy of its own deep dive, so please check out our blog “Is Team Health at the Forefront in Your Annual Planning Meeting?”
Revisit the 9 Core Competencies
The 9 Core Competencies are the essential skills and disciplines an organization must master to progress through the Stages of Development. The 9 Core Competencies are Vision, Customer, Goals, People, Structure, Data, Meetings, Process, and Exit. We recommend reviewing these competencies on a quarterly basis, and then opening a broader discussion with your SLT during your Annual Planning Meeting.
If you’ve never thought through your 9 Core Competencies, a great place to start is by taking our Org Fitness Review. These questions will help you gauge your current performance and then provide you with a comprehensive PDF report.
When your SLT has gathered for your Annual Planning Meeting, ask the following questions to open the conversation and reach alignment:
- What results represent the most consensus? Why?
- What results vary most significantly from person to person?
- According to the assessment, what are our organization’s greatest areas of opportunity?
Understanding these time-tested fundamentals will help you grow and scale.
SWOT Analysis
One key objective of the Annual Planning Meeting is identifying any major strategic challenges. We do this by conducting a SWOT analysis, which examines the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
The main goal of a SWOT analysis is to gain a deep understanding of the critical factors that either support or could potentially hinder our ability to build a successful company. It helps us pinpoint internal factors, like strengths and weaknesses, and external ones, like opportunities and threats. This process highlights both favorable (strengths and opportunities) and unfavorable (weaknesses and threats) aspects related to achieving the company’s goals and bringing its vision to life.
In the first Annual Planning Meeting, the team creates a SWOT analysis from the ground up. In subsequent meetings, they revisit their previous findings and ask if anything has changed. This helps to gauge the trajectory of your organization and spot potential threats before they impact your business.
Once the SWOT analysis has been completed, the facilitator walks the team through each of the four lists (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) and determines if any of them should be added to the Long-Term Issues list within Ninety.
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Review 3-Year Goals
Every year, your facilitator should direct the team to revise and update your
3-year goals. To do so, you can move the date of existing goals forward by one year, decide if any 3-year goals need to be adjusted or revised, and update your numerical goals based on your updated projections.
One question to answer is whether your vision’s KPIs still represent your most important non-financial KPIs. If they do not, you should make the appropriate adjustments and update the KPIs for both 1-year and 90-day goals.
The facilitator then walks your team through the process of updating, adding, or redoing the list of the 5–15 things your organization wants to accomplish by the end of three years. The main question you should focus on is: “What will our company look like, feel like, and be like in three short years?"
Establish 1-Year Goals
During each Annual Planning Meeting, your Senior Leadership Team should agree on your new numerical goals for the coming year. The facilitator starts this exercise by asking each team member to write down what they think the 1-year goals should be, including financial goals (such as gross profit, net profit, or cash flow), KPI-based goals (such as percentage of Ideal Customers, prospects in the funnel, new clients, or lost clients), and company and departmental goals for each unique team.
At Ninety, we first compile goal candidates as a team, then go through a systematic, facilitated process to narrow the list down to our top 3–7 goals. To keep our teams focused, we keep our goal sets smaller (closer to 3 than 7) to prevent distraction.
Break Down 90-day Goals
Once the team agrees on 1-year goals, you can use them as the foundation for setting Rocks for the next 90 days. Here, it’s essential to identify what you need to accomplish in the next 90 days to ensure advancement toward your 1-year goals (while ideally making progress toward your 3-year goals). Since it involves establishing goals for the new quarter, this segment is often one of the most energizing parts of the APM. It’s exciting to think aspirationally and set new targets. The facilitator leads the team through two goal categories: numerical goals and Rocks. We typically start with the former, as new Rocks sometimes emerge from numerical goals.
Pull KPIs from Your Ninety Scorecard
As we like to say at Ninety, data is a superpower. Your Annual Planning Meeting presents the perfect opportunity to align on both targets and actuals, all supported by clean, simple data points.
Gathering KPIs for the Annual Planning Meeting can be overwhelming for many companies, but Ninety users already have these metrics at their fingertips. During your Weekly Team Meetings, you can revisit your Scorecard and ensure that everything is on track with a single glance. KPIs that are on track will show up as green, those that have been off track at least once within the last three weeks will appear yellow, and those that have been off track for more than three weeks will display as red. Remember that off-track KPIs are as important as on-track KPIs… you should also discuss setbacks and lessons from these disappointments. 
Once you’ve selected your KPIs, add 1–3 years' worth of previous data to provide a comprehensive view. This helps provide context for your organization's overall growth. You can also use the forecasting tool within the Scorecard to forecast your goals by quarter for the upcoming year.
Seamlessly Move Into a Quarterly Cadence
Reviewing your goals and achievements on a quarterly cadence helps keep your team on track, and Ninety streamlines the process of pulling together all of your Rocks, milestones, and KPIs throughout the year.
One thing to keep in mind as you establish KPIs is that you’re setting an agreement, not an expectation. When an agreement is in place and it's not lived up to, there’s more flexibility to discuss what happened and implement plans for change and improvement.
The KPIs that are most beneficial to you will depend on your company’s stage, industry, and vision. But if you’re not sure where to start, here are ten key KPIs to help you get started. These KPIs are automatically populated into your Scorecard when you sign up with Ninety, though you are always able to add or remove KPIs based on your unique needs:
- EBITDA: Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization — a measure of a company's overall financial performance.
- Enterprise Value: The total valuation of a company, including its market capitalization, short- and long-term debt, and any cash on the company's balance sheet.
- Net Income Annual: The net income generated by the company in a specific year.
- Net Income TTM: The net income of the company over the trailing twelve months.
- Achieved Budget (1-10): A score from 1 to 10 rating the company's performance for the year.
- On Track to Hit Budget (1-10): A score from 1 to 10 indicating how likely the company is to meet its budgetary targets.
- Rock Performance (1-10): A score from 1 to 10 rating the performance of the company's key initiatives or Rocks.
- Revenue Annual: Total revenue generated by the company in a specific year.
- Revenue TTM: Total revenue of the company over the trailing twelve months.
- Revenue per FTE: Revenue generated per full-time equivalent team member.
- Total Workforce: The total number of team members in the workforce.
We also provide secondary KPIs based on the 9 Core Competencies (Vision, Customer, Goals, Structure, People, Data, Meetings, Process, and Exit). If your business has more unique needs, you can customize KPIs or build your own based on what you want to track. This simple setup within Ninety helps you stay on track and better prepare for all future Annual Planning Meetings.
Key Takeaway
Annual Planning Meetings help ensure your entire organization remains aligned around who you are, where you are, and where you’re going! Ninety helps support these initiatives by gathering data, creating meeting agendas, and motivating your team throughout the entire year.
