Your 2027 marketing and BD plan has 14 priorities. So it has no priorities.
It’s that time of year again. Marketing and BD plans are being written, sector plans are being refreshed and practice groups are deciding where they want to focus. Partners are being asked what matters most to them for 2027.
And somehow, by the time everyone has had their say, you’ve ended up with 14 priorities.
Grow healthcare. Develop financial services. Do more with existing clients. Improve cross-selling. Raise the profile of three new partners. Launch two new services. Win more international work. Sharpen your thought leadership. Develop key accounts. Raise the firm’s profile. Do something with AI. And, of course, carry on doing everything you did this year.
There’s just one problem. If everything is a priority, nothing is.
Why writing the plan isn’t the hard part
Most professional services firms don’t struggle to come up with things they could do. Quite the opposite. There are usually far more ideas, opportunities and requests than your Marketing and BD team could ever realistically deliver.
Every sector has ambitions and every practice area wants more profile. Every partner has clients they’d like to develop. There are new services to promote, markets to enter and campaigns someone would quite like to run.
Put all of that into one document and you’ll have a very impressive-looking plan. What you won’t necessarily have is a strategy. A strategy isn’t a list of everything the firm would like to achieve. It’s a set of choices.
Nobody wants their priority to be the one that disappears
This is where it gets difficult. Prioritisation sounds simple until you’re sitting in a room deciding what isn’t going to make the list.
Telling a partner that their sector isn’t one of the firm’s three growth priorities this year isn’t a comfortable conversation. Neither is saying “we’re not running that campaign”, “we don’t have the resources to target all six markets” or “we’re going to focus on these 20 clients rather than these 100”.
So instead, everything stays. Nobody has to have the awkward conversation, and everybody can see their area represented somewhere in the plan.
The difficult decision hasn’t gone away, though. It’s simply been passed down the line, usually to Marketing and BD.
How Marketing ends up prioritising by accident
This is where a 14-priority plan starts to cause real problems. Your team still has finite time, budget and resources, and they can’t treat 14 things as equally important.
So priorities get decided by other factors instead. The partner who shouts loudest. The closest deadline. The event that’s already in the diary. The practice group that happens to be most engaged. The senior stakeholder whose email is marked urgent.
Before long, your carefully agreed strategic plan isn’t deciding where Marketing and BD spends its time. Your inbox is. That isn’t prioritisation, it’s firefighting.
What does a real priority change?
One of the simplest tests of whether something is genuinely a priority is to ask what you’re doing differently because of it.
If healthcare is a strategic growth sector, what does that actually mean? Are you investing more budget there? Are partners spending more time building relationships in the sector? Have you identified priority clients and prospects, and are you building a stronger proposition and more relevant thought leadership? Are you putting your best BD resource behind it? And are you saying no to something else so people have the time to do it?
If nothing changes, it isn’t a priority. It’s an aspiration.
There’s nothing wrong with aspirations. Just don’t put 14 of them into a plan and expect your Marketing and BD team to deliver them all at once.
Try putting your priorities into tiers
Not everything has to disappear from the plan, but not everything needs equal weight either.
You might have three genuine strategic priorities, where the firm is making a conscious investment of time, budget and senior attention. Below that, you could have a second tier of areas with a good opportunity but more targeted activity. And then there’s business-as-usual work that still needs to happen but doesn’t need significant growth investment.
This gives your Marketing and BD team a far more useful framework. When a new request comes in, they can ask where it sits against the priorities you’ve agreed. If it supports one of the top three, brilliant. If it doesn’t, that doesn’t automatically mean no. It does mean asking what moves down the list if this one moves up.
Why capacity belongs in the planning conversation
This gets missed surprisingly often. A firm agrees an ambitious plan and only afterwards asks whether the team has the capacity to deliver it.
That conversation needs to happen much earlier. If you’ve agreed five major campaigns, four sector initiatives, a new key client programme, a rebrand and an international growth push, someone needs to work out what that really requires. How many days? Which skills? What budget? How much partner input? And what existing work will stop?
Without those answers, you’ve created a wish list rather than a plan you can deliver. A good plan reflects not only what you want to achieve, but what you’re genuinely prepared to resource.
Let Marketing and BD challenge the list
This is where your senior Marketing and BD people can add real value. Their role shouldn’t be to receive the final list and work out how to market all of it. They should be part of the conversation about what makes the list in the first place.
They can help you ask the useful questions. Where’s the strongest commercial opportunity? Where do you already have credibility? Where are clients actually buying? Which areas have committed partners behind them? And which priorities are on the plan simply because someone senior wanted them there?
Those questions can be uncomfortable. But asking them before the plan is signed off is far better than spending the next 12 months pretending everything matters equally.
Decide what you aren’t going to do
Perhaps the most useful question in your 2027 planning session isn’t “what are our priorities?” It’s “if these really are our priorities, what are we going to do less of?”
That’s when prioritisation becomes real. You might decide not to run an event you’ve held for the past five years, or reduce activity in a sector that isn’t delivering. You might stop trying to create a campaign for every practice area, concentrate BD support on a smaller group of genuinely important clients, or pause an initiative until 2028.
None of this means the thing you’re deprioritising is bad or unimportant. It simply means something else matters more right now, and that’s exactly what a priority is supposed to mean.
Before you sign off your 2027 plan
Take a proper look at the list. If there are 14 priorities on it, don’t start turning them into actions straight away.
Ask which three or four genuinely matter most, and where the strongest commercial opportunities are. Ask where the business is prepared to invest its own time, not just Marketing’s. Ask what you’re prepared to stop, reduce or postpone. And ask whether your team really has the capacity to deliver what you’ve agreed.
The purpose of your 2027 plan isn’t to make sure everyone gets something on the list. It’s to make sure the things that matter actually happen. Get that right, and you’ll start the year with a plan your team can deliver and your partners can get behind.
Sometimes that just means having the confidence to say: “That’s a good idea. It’s just not a priority this year.”
Need help?
If you’d like help with your marketing and business development planning, a marketing consultant with a fresh pair of eyes can make all the difference. I work with B2B businesses and professional services firms across London, Kent, the UK and Europe, specialising in professional services marketing and BD. Get in touch or book a free 30-minute consultation.
