You are the marketing leader who needs to make planning successful this year. The meeting is on the calendar and the deck is filling up. What matters is not whether the team agrees in the room. It is whether the plan still holds once everyone goes back to work.
The Readiness Scorecard is a five-minute, self-guided look at how well your planning is set up to produce decisions that survive the year. A candid, specific result.
Last year's planning ritual was built for a more forgiving moment. This year the plan has to stand up as a business case, absorb new expectations of how the team works, and still give people a year they can actually run.
Marketing's priorities are judged on contribution, cost, risk, and the tradeoffs behind them. A strong internal story is no longer enough on its own.
It changes what leadership will ask about and what the team feels pressure to adopt, often before the operating model is ready. It belongs in the plan as a deliberate choice.
Planning has to produce direction people can act on, not a set of themes that dissolve the moment normal work resumes.
A decade of annual planning, up close
For more than ten years, typeA/planB has worked alongside senior marketing leaders through annual planning — sharpening the thinking they bring into the room, pressure-testing priorities, and turning ambition into a plan the team can carry. That is the work the Readiness Scorecard is built from.
“They understand how marketing actually works — the tradeoffs, the operating constraints, the measurement pressure — and they make the plan stronger before the room ever sees it.”
Jim Weber · former CMO, Comerica Bank
The places annual plans usually weaken: how the meeting is aimed, how priorities get chosen, who owns what, and what happens to the plan once the room clears.
A named set of decisions the meeting must produce, or a list of topics to discuss.
How much of last year has quietly carried into next year. If everything survived, nothing was really chosen.
Real choices about what gets funded, paused, or stopped. A plan that only collects ideas has not made any.
Named owners and real decision rights: who decides, who is consulted, who escalates. Or initiatives no one holds.
The contribution, cost, and risk logic that leadership and finance will expect the plan to defend.
Do people arrive ready to decide, or spend the meeting discovering questions they should have settled first?
Marketing leaders who take planning seriously and want the meeting to produce decisions.
You have a planning meeting coming up, and a team that is capable but stretched. You want the year to start from a clear point of view, not a budget carried over and adjusted at the margin.
You have watched planning meetings produce agreement that felt good in the room and faded by February. This year you want a plan that is still in use in June. That is the situation the scorecard is built for, and it is the work typeA/planB does with a small number of teams.
Fast, because planning season is already moving. Ten questions, and you know where you stand.
About five minutes, on the plan you are actively working on.
Your tier and your score on each area the scorecard checks: where your planning is set up to hold, and where it is most likely to come apart.
The result names the areas worth closing before the meeting, and the one that is hardest to fix from inside.
If the timing works, we can look at your actual plan or discuss a readiness sprint.
This planning season, typeA/planB is running the Annual Planning Readiness Sprint with a small number of teams. It prepares the marketing leader in the weeks beforehand, so the planning meeting produces decisions that hold.
Most of this a strong team could do alone. One part is genuinely hard to do from the inside: forcing the tradeoff that means telling a peer their initiative waits. The person who has to force it also has to live with everyone afterward, so it rarely happens on its own. That is where a senior, outside perspective earns its place.
The sprint is counted back from your planning meeting. It runs in the weeks before, with time to spare.
We have done this work for years inside larger engagements. This is the first season we are offering it as a defined sprint, so we are staying close to each team we take on.
Right up to the meeting, direction and budget are both still movable. After it, changing either costs credibility rather than a conversation. That makes these few weeks the cheapest place in the year to get the plan right, and the readiness sprint is a small, bounded step taken at the moment it still counts.
Senior marketing advisory for complex, cross-functional teams
Ready the Room is from typeA/planB. We are systems thinkers with more than twenty years in marketing, helping teams work through messy, cross-functional problems where strategy, operations, and organizational trust meet.
Annual planning concentrates all of it into one high-stakes moment. That is why we built Ready the Room.
If that distinction is still unclear, ten questions will tell you which one you are set up for.
Free, and about five minutes. Your result appears the moment you finish, with an easy option for us to take a closer look.