Annual Business Planning: Unlocking Value Early On

Introduction

Annual Business Planning (ABP) is one of the most powerful tools in the business toolkit. When done well, it’s where ambition turns into action: aligning strategic priorities, sharpening financial targets, allocating resources, and setting teams up to win. Its where long-term vision meets short-term execution. ABP is also tightly interlinked with S&OP. ABP sets the direction. S&OP keeps you on course.

Over the next months, we’ll share how to get more value from ABP, moving beyond box-ticking to build a plan that drives clarity, focus, and results. In this first edition, we focus on the early stages (Exhibit 1): sensing the world around you and turning that insight into a powerful first draft.

Exhibit 1 - Annual Business Planning Cycle

Falcon Consulting - ABP Cycle

Start With What’s Changing

Your long-term strategy shouldn’t be rewritten every year, but it must be stress-tested regularly against what’s shifting in the outside world. The first step in effective planning is building a clear view of macro and micro trends. This means looking at:

• Evolving consumer needs and behaviours

• Channel & Retailer dynamics

• Competitive moves

• Regulatory or economic shifts (ex. Tariffs)

Most trends will already be factored into your strategy. But every year brings surprises—from emerging competitors to pricing pressures or new customer pain points. The real challenge? Many of these aren’t obvious from a desk. We recommend speaking directly with consumers, customers, suppliers, and partners. What are they seeing? What’s worrying them? What’s shifting? These conversations often reveal the early signals of change and help you separate noise from true disruption.

Look Hard at Performance, But Don’t Get Lost in It

Too many organizations spend more time explaining performance than making things happen. Annual planning is your moment to step back from weekly reporting cycles and take a deeper look at what’s really driving outcomes. It’s important to focus on structural underlying performance, disregarding phasing or one-off effects. Where are you growing? Where are you stuck? Are your promotions still delivering? Is your pricing aligned with value perception? Which partnerships are still creating mutual value, and which need to be challenged? Summarise the key take-outs.

At Falcon Consulting, we use a simple but effective framework to assess both internal performance, external competitiveness and commercial partnerships. It helps uncover opportunities already sitting within the business, whether it's fixing the basics or scaling what’s working.

Draft the Plan: Focus on Fewer, Bigger Bets

Once you’ve mapped your trends and understand your performance, it’s time to shape the plan. Here’s where many teams fall into a common trap: chasing shiny new initiatives while neglecting the core business. A Nielsen study showed that “just 50% of innovation launches show growth by the second year – meaning the other half are headed for delisting”[1]. A plan starts with a one-page outline of next year’s direction:

• Financial Targets

• 3 Strategic projects, 3 “Must-Win” battles and 3 biggest risks

• Strategic role of your biggest channels / customers to reach your goals (Exhibit 2)

Exhibit 2 - Example of Strategic role by Customer

Why three? Because focus is the first ingredient in execution. Trying to do everything usually means doing nothing well. With this outline, your teams know what to focus on in the next couple of weeks.

This is another great moment to exchange ideas and even concrete projects with consumers, customers, etc. If one of your upcoming activations strongly aligns with a customer’s strategic priorities, exploring an exclusive partnership could significantly enhance its impact.

Use Summer for Workshopping & Scenario-building

By the summer, your rough plan should be drafted. Now it’s time to go deeper. We recommend forming cross-functional teams to explore the enablers and blockers of your strategic bets. Brainstorm ideas, test them early, and always quantify potential impact. It forces prioritization and filters out distractions. Remember: the best ideas take time to mature. Don’t wait until the final week of August to pull the pieces together. Great planning is not about slotting in some innovation and adding a few promotions. Now it’s time to build strategic flexibility. Scenario planning is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s a necessity.

Looking Ahead

Come September, internal planning should be largely complete. But that doesn’t mean you're done. Planning is a living process. The next step: aligning with external partners and turning plans into commitments. We’ll dive into that later in the series. In our next edition, we’ll zoom in on the external forces shaping 2026 and how your business can start preparing for them.

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Curious how this could apply to your business? Let’s talk about how to turn planning into a competitive edge. You can reach us through our website or by sending a mail to jonas.geleyn@falcon-consulting.be

Let’s make this year your most focused yet.

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Sources

[1] Nielsen: ‘Beyond Vitality: Redefining CPG innovation for incremental growth’, https://nielseniq.com/global/en/insights/report/2025/beyond-vitality-redefining-cpg-innovation-for-incremental-growth/