Your 2026 marketing plan probably isn’t the problem. The fact nobody looks at it is.
Remember that marketing and BD plan everyone spent weeks creating at the end of last year? The one with the objectives, target markets, campaigns, events, BD priorities, actions and KPIs?
When did you last look at it?
More importantly, when did anyone outside marketing and BD last look at it?
By September, there’s a reasonable chance that some of the plans created with great enthusiasm in January haven’t been opened for months. And yet, when planning season comes round again, you’ll be asked to start work on the 2027 version.
Perhaps the problem isn’t the plan. Perhaps it’s what happens after you create it.
How a good plan goes quiet
Marketing and BD teams put a serious amount of effort into planning. You analyse last year, look at markets and competitors. Run workshops and speak to partners, sector leaders and anyone else with a view. You agree objectives, priorities and activities, then pull it all into a document, spreadsheet or deck.
Everyone agrees it’s a good plan.
Then January gets busy. A new opportunity appears. Someone wants to sponsor an event that wasn’t in the plan. A competitor launches something. A senior stakeholder has an idea. An urgent pitch lands.
Before long, the plan that was supposed to guide your activity has become something you occasionally refer back to rather than something you use to make decisions.
If you want to know whether that’s happened to yours, there are a few reliable signs. Nobody has asked to see it since the sign off meeting. New activity gets added without anything coming off. You can’t say from memory what the top three priorities are. And when a request lands from a partner, you don’t check the plan before saying yes.
A plan should help you say no
Here’s where marketing and BD planning often goes wrong. You treat the plan as something you produce rather than something you manage.
A useful plan helps you answer questions all year. Where should the budget go this quarter? What are you not going to do? What’s working? What’s changed? What needs more attention?
The last one matters most. A plan earns its keep the first time it lets you say, politely, “that’s a good idea, but it isn’t one of our three priorities for this year, so if we take it on, what comes off?” That’s a much easier conversation to have when there’s an agreed document behind you.
If your plan isn’t helping you make those decisions, it’s a record of what everyone thought was important nine months ago.
Marketing and BD can’t own the whole thing
There’s another issue I see regularly in professional services.
Marketing or BD creates the plan with a practice, sector or business unit. Everyone contributes. Everyone agrees the priorities. Then marketing and BD becomes the unofficial owner of making the whole thing happen. You schedule the meetings, update the plan, chase the actions and ask for progress.
Slowly, something that was meant to be a business plan supported by marketing and BD becomes a marketing and BD plan you’re trying to get the business to engage with. That’s a very different thing.
So be specific about ownership. Every priority in the plan needs a named person from the business, not just a marketing contact. Ideally you agree three things with them at the outset: what they’re committing to do personally, roughly how much time that takes each month, and what they need from you to make it possible.
If nobody in the business will put their name against a priority, that’s useful information. It usually means it isn’t a priority.
Run a 90 minute September reset
The good news is you don’t need to bin the 2026 plan and start again. September is a genuinely useful point to revisit it, as long as you don’t turn it into a line by line audit of everything you haven’t done.
Book 90 minutes with the practice or sector group. Send the plan out beforehand with a short covering note saying what’s moved and what hasn’t, so nobody spends the first half hour reading. Then work through three questions.
What are you continuing?
Which activities are working, still relevant or gaining momentum? Look for evidence rather than enthusiasm. Enquiries, meetings booked, opportunities created, relationships that have progressed. These deserve your attention for the rest of the year.
What are you stopping?
What seemed like a good idea in January but hasn’t gone anywhere? Perhaps the market has moved. Or perhaps nobody has the appetite. Perhaps something else has become more important. That’s fine. Plans should change.
Keeping something on a plan because it was agreed nine months ago doesn’t make it strategic. When you stop something, don’t delete it. Move it to a short “not this year” list with one line explaining why. It saves you relitigating the same debate in the 2027 planning session, and it shows that decisions are being made rather than things quietly disappearing.
What are you prioritising?
If you could only make meaningful progress on three things between now and the end of the year, what would they be?
Not twelve. Not every practice, sector, campaign and target client. Three.
Then define what “done” looks like by 31 December for each one. “Grow the sector” isn’t a priority, it’s an ambition. “Ten meetings with target clients in the sector, and two pieces of thought leadership out” is something you can actually check in November.
One of the quickest ways to make a plan meaningless is to make everything a priority.
Keep it alive with 15 minutes a month
A plan stays useful when it gets discussed, not when it gets formatted.
Pull your three priorities onto a single page. Owner, what done looks like, current status, next action. Take that page to an existing meeting once a month, whether that’s the sector meeting, the partner meeting or the practice group call. Fifteen minutes is enough to note what’s moved, what’s stuck, and whether anything needs to change.
That single page does more work than the full document, because people will actually read it. Keep the detailed plan behind it for budget, campaign schedules and the things you need for your own team.
Before you start on 2027
When a plan hasn’t worked, the temptation is to build a better one. With more detail, actions and KPIs. A more sophisticated template.
That usually isn’t what you need. A fairly simple plan that gets discussed regularly, changes when circumstances change and has clear owners will beat a beautifully designed 40 page strategy nobody opens.
So before the 2027 planning cycle starts, go back to the plan you already have. Not to score how much you’ve completed, but to decide what still matters between now and Christmas.
Your 2026 marketing and BD plan probably isn’t the problem. The fact nobody looks at it might be, and that’s a much easier thing to fix.
Need help?
If you would like help with your marketing and business development, bringing on a marketing consultant with a fresh pair of eyes can make all the difference. I work with B2B businesses and professional service firms in London, Kent, the UK, and Europe, specialising as a legal marketing consultant. Please get in touch or book a free 30-minute consultation.
