You are the marketing leader accountable for the plan. The planning meeting is on the calendar and your deck is filling up with strategies and programs. What matters is not whether the team agrees in the room. It is whether the plan is still driving your decisions through next year.
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.
The plan gets scrutinized, not just presented. It answers to finance, to leadership, and to the team that has to live with it for a year.
Marketing's priorities are judged on contribution, cost, risk, and the tradeoffs behind them. A strong internal story has to be coupled with results that matter to the business.
Leadership now expects every function to have an AI story, marketing included. The pressure often arrives from above rather than from the work itself, so the plan has to take a deliberate position on it even when the operating model isn't ready for one.
Planning has to produce initiatives people can deliver, 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 ideas into plans the team can execute. 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 quietly carried into next. If nothing was cut, nothing was chosen, and the team is left trying to do all of it.
Real choices about what gets funded, paused, or stopped. A plan that only collects ideas has not made any.
Named owners with the authority to decide, and clarity on who calls it, who is consulted, and who escalates.
The contribution, cost, and risk logic that leadership and finance will expect the plan to defend.
Whether people arrive ready to decide. When they don't, the meeting gets spent discovering questions that should have been 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 but 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 in motion. 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.
We can look at your actual plan together and see whether a readiness sprint is the right next step.
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.
Even strong teams are too close to their own plan to weigh it on the merits, because everyone involved has a stake in it. The hardest call is what to stop or pause so something else can be funded, and it is the one least likely to get made from the inside. A senior outside perspective can put every priority on the table and judge it on contribution, not on who proposed it.
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.
Before the planning meeting, direction and budget are still movable. Afterwards, changing them costs credibility. That makes these few weeks the most valuable time of the year to get the plan right. The readiness sprint is a small, bounded step, taken when it can still make a meaningful difference.
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.