When I first joined Google, I was genuinely impressed with the robustness and the effort behind the annual planning process.  It all started in July, with data gathering.  The initial phase was several weeks building a realistic baseline: what are we actually producing, by account, by team, by product type.  Second gear kicked in by the time Labor Day passed.   Everyone understood that getting a good plan requires time and the runway starts with understanding your current baseline.

If you haven't started your planning process yet, this is your nudge. July and August are gone. That's fine. Later is still much better than never, and there's still time to do this right if you start now instead of waiting for the "official" kickoff in Q4.

Before you open a spreadsheet, there's a distinction worth getting straight, because most planning cycles get this wrong.

Your baseline is what you're doing. It's real, it's measurable, it's built on actuals: revenue per rep, conversion rates, account performance. It tells you where you stand.

Your capacity is what you could be doing. And that number is almost never sitting in your dashboard. You have to go find it.

I have seen some teams calculate their baseline and then assume that is the ceiling, the maximum the business is capable of delivering. Next year’s annual plan is just a % increase on the current year’s output.

But maybe this year’s performance benefited from a particular tailwind that is not going to be there next year. Or maybe you are operating below what your team could be delivering. In any case, your baseline indicates what happened, but it doesn’t say anything about what’s possible.

I think about the planning cycle as an engine, with multiple gears interlinked, and not as a document that gets filed away once it is approved. 

The baseline is just the starting point. Top-down targets get checked against bottoms-up capacity, capacity gets stress-tested by scenarios, and the one you choose becomes the plan. Then it gets tracked, and what you learn feeds the next baseline.

If one link is weak, or if you skip straight from baseline to target without ever asking what's actually achievable, the whole engine is compromised.

One place I've found it consistently: inside your own book of business.

I was looking at our book of business, a handful of accounts in the mid-market segment were clearly under performing relative to their potential. But how much more should we expect?  

I built a cohort analysis. Groups of accounts going after the same customers, with similar models and similar sized budgets.  Some accounts were already investing more in our solution (digital ads), and getting real returns on their investment.  This was proof, sitting in our portfolio, that higher level of performance was possible. 

It wouldn’t be fair to assume every under-penetrated account could close the gap. We modeled a conservative 10 - 20 % lift and used that as the basis for our bottoms-up capacity. Achievable, evidence-backed, and still meaningfully more than what the baseline alone would have told us.

That's the real lesson, and it cuts both ways. Stop assuming your current output is your ceiling. Somewhere in your business, a team, a rep, or an account is already performing at a level the rest of the organization hasn't reached yet. 

Also, before you go looking outside for new headcount, new tools, or new territory carve-outs to close a gap, look at where you're already excelling and ask what it would take to bring that performance over to the accounts that are underperforming. Sometimes the capacity you're planning for is already proven. It's just not evenly understood yet.

This isn't a call to reinvent your planning process from scratch. It's a call to check one thing before you finalize this year's numbers. Is your capacity assumption actually evidence-based, or is it just your baseline wearing a bigger number?

Where has this shown up for you, a team or account outperforming its peers with something worth replicating? I'd genuinely like to know.

Jose Celorio Founder, GTM Reloaded
Former Strategist at Google, Mastercard & Deloitte Consulting

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