Will Your Plan Survive A Punch in the Face?

Before a World Boxing Championship fight Tyrell Biggs boosted, he had a plan to beat heavyweight Boxing champion Mike Tyson.

But the man they called “Iron Mike” was not impressed and is quoted as saying,

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face”.

For CEOs and Founders, that line should hit hard. It’s happened to most of us at some time. Usually unexpected.

In business, the punch rarely lands as a single dramatic blow. It shows up gradually and can be in many forms, for example:

• Unexpectedly, an important, critical quarter-end deal slips.

• A salesperson resigns, but you hadn’t seen it coming.

• A key prospect or partner doesn’t return your calls.

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is rising faster than revenue.

• A large customer delays or worse, cancels a renewal.

• An investor loses confidence or unexpectedly withdraws.

• An unforeseen event changes the market.

I work with many growth-stage SaaS and technology businesses across Europe, and during my career have worked through many of the challenges that I listed above (and more!).

Most leadership teams have a strategy deck. What separates durable plans from fragile ones is whether that strategy was built to withstand this kind of turbulence and change, and not perfect market and business conditions.

In my experience, there are two planning disciplines that consistently show up in companies that respond well to unexpected events: the first is to identify these scenarios and pre-plan for them, and the second is to stress-test your revenue engine.

Pre-plan Your Moves

In this exercise, we identify the risks, play out these scenarios, and then plan for each. 
This is ideally done in a facilitated session, with the entire leadership team, to capture the broadest set of business risks.

An example scenario could be:

If the sales pipeline drops 25%, what do we do in week one?

The leadership team then evaluates the impact this would have on the business. In this example, a drop in the pipeline will probably lead to a downstream drop in revenue.

Working with finance, if the pipeline reduction scenario has the impact of revenue dropping by 25%, the team needs to then play out the remediation actions, for example:

• Which spend pauses?

• Which hires freeze?

• Which segments receive investment?

• Which ones don’t?

You get the idea.

The outcome of this exercise is:

• A clearly defined risk register

• A set of scenarios for each of those risks

• High-level plan against each of these scenarios  

Pressure Test

Scenario planning for unexpected events is essential, but sometimes that punch in the face comes slowly, through the atrophy of good, well-intentioned processes.

So, as well as considering how we might respond to an unforeseen event, we need to pressure-test our day-to-day operations. In sales and marketing, this starts with your Go-To-Market Strategy (GTM).

I recommend running regular stress tests on pricing, partners, sales cycles, and churn assumptions. If one customer or channel goes cold, it breaks the revenue or financial model. It isn’t resilient.

Here are three simple actions all revenue leaders can take to build resilience into the business.

• Your sales strategy must work. Clear qualification, deal governance, and forecast hygiene create the speed and flexibility to re-prioritise and ‘shift’ when conditions change.

• Develop multiple routes to market. More than one enterprise champion. Two active partners, not one hopeful one. Options mean leverage, flexibility, and risk reduction.

• Calm, data-driven leadership beats heroic speeches or panic. Reset the plan, communicate fast, and move forward.

For leaders, the challenge isn’t avoiding disruption. It’s designing resilient businesses with systems and processes that can take an unexpected punch on Tuesday and be back in control on Friday.

To close on the analogy I started with.

Tyrell Biggs might have had a plan to beat Mike Tyson, but he lost to a technical knockout in the seventh round.

According to the commentators at the time, his plan, to last the distance through a strategy of moving slowly to conserve energy, “backfired completely; standing still guaranteed he would never make it anywhere close to the final bell”.

According to the same commentary, Tyrell lacked the stamina to execute the plan. It had not been pressure-tested by his trainers, and he couldn’t react to the change.