Flight plan template for B2B SaaS

The flight plan with three columns a subscription business needs: which slice of the ideal customer profile this week is reaching, where in the funnel it acts, and what sales is expected to receive from it.

Everything else is the general flight plan, unchanged. One row per week of one line of spend, a phase on every row, a share of the flight on each, and a decision point at the end of every phase.

Use it when the result of a week will not be visible for a quarter, which is the normal condition of software sold to a company. A weekly plan is what lets you judge the things that are visible now — reach, cost per lead, sales handover — without pretending they are the outcome.

Write it after the media plan is approved, and read it every Monday with the sales leader who receives the leads. That meeting is the point of the document.

The awkward fact about advertising software to a company is that the thing you are buying takes a quarter to arrive and the things you can act on move weekly. A plan that only has a quarterly rhythm gives a team nothing to do for eleven weeks and then a post-mortem. A plan with weekly rows gives them the inputs.

Those inputs are real and they are worth managing: how much of the named segment has been reached, how quickly the list is being exhausted, whether the creative is still being clicked by the same kind of person, how many handovers sales received and what they thought of them. None of those is the outcome. All of them predict it, and all of them can be changed while the flight is running.

So the discipline in this version of the plan is to write weekly questions that weekly evidence can actually answer, and to keep the outcome question for the row it belongs in — which is usually one or two cycles after the flight ends.

The ICP segment column sets the message, the objection and the expected cycle. The funnel stage column sets the event being bought. Neither can be shared.

A week that reaches two segments produces a cost per lead that is an average of two markets with different deal sizes, which is a number with no decision attached to it. A week that spans awareness and demand capture produces a blended figure in which demand capture — cheap, because the intent was already there — makes the whole line look efficient while nothing upstream of it is being evaluated at all.

Splitting them costs more rows and buys the ability to answer the only question that matters mid-flight: which segment, at which stage, is worth more weight next week.

The phases in a subscription flight are usually four. A build phase, where the audience is being reached for the first time and the only honest metrics are reach and engagement. A capture phase, where the demand created starts arriving and cost per lead becomes readable. A conversion phase, where sales is working what arrived and the flight's job is to keep the same people warm rather than to find new ones. And a wind-down, where spend falls and the last of the cohort is followed up.

The common mistake is to skip the build phase because it cannot be measured on a cost per lead, and then to be surprised that the capture phase runs out of people. A build phase with reach targets and no lead target is a legitimate phase, and writing it into the plan is what protects it from being cut in week two.

The sales handover column looks like a courtesy and is the highest-leverage cell in the sheet.

A campaign that produces thirty leads in a week nobody warned sales about produces thirty badly handled leads. They are called late, called by whoever is free, or not called at all, and the campaign is then judged on a conversion rate it did not cause. Writing the expectation into the row — a volume band, a segment, a named list, or explicitly nothing this week — costs one sentence and removes the most common reason good demand generation gets a bad reputation internally.

It also makes the Monday meeting short. Both sides are looking at the same row, which says what was expected and what arrived.

Every phase carries a decision point, and in a long cycle the discipline is to write questions that the week can answer.

Week four can honestly answer whether the segment is responding and whether the list is deep enough to sustain the weight. It can answer whether the creative is reaching the right titles. It cannot answer whether the pipeline converted, and a plan that asks it to will conclude, wrongly and expensively, that the segment does not work.

Keep one decision point for the outcome and put it where it belongs: a row at least one cycle after the flight ends, owned by somebody, with the number named in advance.

In account-based flights the dependency column is usually about content — a report, a page, a webinar. There is a second one worth adding: the list itself.

A named account list has a finite number of people in it, and a flight at full weight will reach most of them quickly. When that happens the frequency climbs, the cost per lead rises, and the account looks fatigued when it is actually exhausted. Put the list and its size in the dependency or notes column, and write a decision point for the week the plan expects it to be covered.

Every week of every line has a row. Every row names one ICP segment and one funnel stage. Every week says what sales should expect from it, including the weeks where the answer is nothing. Every phase names its first week, its last week and its intent. No decision point falls before the evidence for it can exist. And every dependency, including the list itself, has a due date before the week that needs it.