Hi Friends,
A question keeps coming up with my clients: how should we plan for 2027?
Here's my answer, in 9 steps. Your 2027 plan is already in your last 12 months. You'll finish with a number your leaders believe, 3 channels, a target list and a plan every leader has signed.
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Look backwards
1. Find your A+ customers. Pick the customers you'd clone if you could. Go deep on who bought, what they bought and why, and whether they kept getting value. Then find the 6 things they share (below).
Next, check your messaging against them. Pull the words they use on calls and in reviews for their problem and why they chose you. Put those next to your homepage, first-call pitch and sales deck. Where they don't match, have your team rewrite them before step 6.
2. Plan expansion & churn. Mark every current customer green (growing), amber (at risk) or red (likely to leave), and be honest. Talk to your ambers and reds now, while you can still turn them around.
Then put a 2027 number on what current customers will add: expansion from your greens, minus what you expect to lose from the ambers and reds you can't save. It's your cheapest growth, and the margin shows it.
If your best customers aren't buying again or expanding, the gap is in delivery, and new messaging won't close it.
3. Trace every deal. Pull 12 months of won and late-stage lost deals and find each one's lead source. If it's missing, stop and have your team fill it in. It's the most important field in your CRM.
For every loss, also note why you lost (price, timing, a competitor or no decision) and who won instead.
Then check you have 12 months of:
Number of won deals and late-stage losses, with pricing on each
Number of discovery calls, demos and proposals
Total sales and marketing spend
Gross margin by customer
Have your team fix any data gap now, and mark every guess as a guess until it's fixed.
You should end with 3 things:
Which lead sources produced your wins
Your conversion rate at each stage
Your top loss reasons
Those are the first problems your 2027 plan has to solve.
Set the plan
4. Set a 2027 number. Agree on the unit first. Bookings, revenue and ARR are 3 different numbers, and leadership teams mix them up all the time. Pick 1, define it in writing, and make every leader use it.
Before anyone talks numbers, write your own read of this year and next year's number, and keep it to yourself. Have each leader write theirs at the same time, alone. Nobody sees another's until all are in, so nobody anchors on yours.
Once every write up is in, compare them and draft the number.
Subtract what current customers will add (step 2).
The rest has to come from new customers. Divide it by your average deal size to get the deals you need to win.
Use step 3's conversion rates to work back to the proposals, demos and discovery calls that takes.
If your last 12 months say you can't book that many discovery calls, have a healthy debate. An ambitious number nobody believes is worse than no number.
5. Test your Four Fits. Check your go-to-market strategy against Brian Balfour's Four Fits. All 4 parts have to fit each other. If you change one, like a new market or a price increase, recheck all 4.
Every business runs on 4 connected parts: who you sell to (market), what you sell (product), how buyers find you (channel) and how you charge (model). If one doesn't fit the others, growth stalls no matter how hard you push.
The biggest miss I see is product-channel fit. As Balfour puts it: "Products are built to fit with channels. Channels do not mold to products."
Run Balfour's own tests:
Market and product. If you turned off all your marketing today, would you keep growing?
Product and channel. Does how you sell match how your buyers find and buy?
Channel, model and market. Does a customer's first-year gross profit cover the cost of winning them? And is your price, times the customers you can reach, big enough for your number?
The test you fail is your first fix. Solve it before you pick channels. His full Four Fits series is required reading.
6. Commit to 3 channels. Every channel falls into 1 of 4 groups: outbound, partnerships (including referrals and introductions), inbound and ads. Start with the lead sources behind your won deals in step 3, and keep the ones that match how your buyers find and buy.
Commit to the 3 with the strongest record, and make them feed each other:
Turn every event into content
Use that content to start outbound conversations
Ask partners to co-host the next event
Give each channel a monthly discovery-call target, owned by 1 leader.
In Kyle Poyar and Maja Voje's 2026 State of B2B GTM report, the average team runs 5.5 core channels. I'd rather see 3 that work together.
Make it stick
7. Build your target list. List the accounts that match your A+ customers on the 6 things from step 1. Put the ones showing a buying signal now at the top: a new leader, a funding round, hiring for the team you serve or a past champion who changed jobs. Aim all 3 channels there.
8. Align your leadership team. Put the step 4 reads next to your draft plan: the number, the 3 channels and the target list. Show each leader where the number landed against their read, and why.
Collect objections before the meeting, and settle them in it. Every leader leaves bought in to the whole plan, and each revenue leader owns 1 number.
Last, check comp. If it pays for anything other than those numbers and your 3 channels, fix it now, or the plan won't hold.
9. CEO delivers plan.
Commit: sign the plan, and have each leader sign for their number.
Communicate: within 1 week, tell the whole company the number and the overall plan to get there.
Lead: every month, review only the owned numbers.
Start Monday, and you can announce the plan before the holidays. If any of you want help shaping yours, put time on my calendar to chat.
Til next time,
--Ali
P.S. Next Saturday: Dear Next Year, the 10 questions every leader should answer before you set the number.
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About Me: I'm Ali Mamujee. I run Allenix, where we build AI revenue systems for B2B companies between $5M and $25M with complex sales cycles. If you need any help with your 2027 growth planning, don’t hesitate to reach out.
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