Draft the H2 plan while H1 is alive

The H2 plan written in July is a document about the past. The quarter has closed, the evidence has cooled, half the people who could challenge a claim are on vacation, and the plan gets assembled from memory and charity. The H2 plan written in mid-June is a different animal. The funnel is live, the conversations are this week's, and anyone who writes a convenient conclusion can be contradicted by Friday's calls. We noted back on May 1 that the planning window for a different second half opens early. Mid-June is the last stretch of it where the data is still moving.

Page one: what H1 proved

Not a narrative. Evidence, in four short blocks. Which list segments answered and which were mirages. Which message survived contact and which January assumptions died. The funnel itself, stated with the same definitions you have used all year. And what the half cost, all in. Every claim on page one should have a number or a recorded call behind it. If a claim has neither, it is an opinion, and opinions go in the meeting, not the plan.

Writing this page in June has a second benefit: it forces the seeding work to continue. As we argued on June 1, the month has two jobs, closing H1 and seeding H2, and teams reliably do only the first. A plan due before the quarter ends keeps the second job on the calendar.

Page two: three decisions

List. Which segments get H2 capacity, which get cut, and what the tier-one fifty looks like on July 1. This should fall straight out of page one.

Message. The one-sentence thesis H2 outreach leads with, promoted from whatever survived six months of dialing.

Capacity. Seats, and the date each seat must be producing. This is the decision with a fuse on it. A seat that needs to produce in September has lead time stacked in front of it: signing, about ten business days to first dial, then a sixty-to-ninety-day slope to full output. We ran that arithmetic in the September start you decide in June, and it is the reason the capacity line cannot wait for the July offsite.

Keep it to two pages

A plan longer than two pages is a plan nobody re-reads in August, and an H2 plan that is not re-read in August is a January plan with a new date on it. Two pages fit in one sitting, survive a forward, and leave nowhere for a vague commitment to hide. Date the draft, mark the two or three claims you are least sure of, and book a thirty-minute review in the first week of July to confirm them against the final H1 numbers. The plan is allowed to change. It is not allowed to be vague.

If the capacity line on your page two has a September date on it, the math behind the lead times lives on our math page, and the conversation that settles it takes thirty minutes. Book a strategy call, bring the two pages, even in draft, and we will pressure-test them against what we see across our clients' funnels.