How to turn year-end dollars into long-term strategic gains

It’s a rare but tricky challenge: you’ve reached the end of your fiscal year and find yourself with leftover budget. You can’t roll it over, and you don’t want to waste it. So, how do you use those funds to create real, lasting value?

Our advice? Focus on investments that strengthen your strategy, your teams, and your insight into the market.

1. Invest in Customer and Stakeholder Understanding

Use your surplus to get smarter about your customers. Some of the ways that you can do this is by commissioning targeted research, conducting quick-turn interviews, or even holding a “Vietnam Card Sort” exercise to identify decision criteria and unmet needs. (The Vietnam Card Sort technique – explained here in 5 minutes – is the most powerful customer insight technique with the simplest setup that we know of.)

If you can’t conduct external research, consider hosting an internal workshops to map out evolving stakeholder influence—especially as power shifts within your customers’ organizations.  We have found that many companies unintentionally miss shifts in power in their markets from one influencer to another.

Why do they not see it coming?  Well, it’s normal to get comfortable with the “language” that your company speaks when communicating with a long-time customer type.  And it’s easy to miss when that stakeholder loses power to a different kind of customer who speaks a different “language.”  Trends and changing customer needs drive this – like in the medical world where power can shift back and forth from clinical decision makers who can handle technically-rich messaging to economic decision-makers who want to understand ROI and payback. 

Our own stakeholder mapping tool is unique in that it forces teams to recognize these kinds of shifts before competitors do.  If this is an issue for you and your teams, contact us and we’ll give you an overview of how to use our influence map tool (free), so that you can facilitate this important discussion with your teams. 

2. Bring People Together

Some of the best insights emerge when diverse teams connect. Use your budget to hold a cross-functional session that includes marketing, sales, R&D, finance, and even legal. We’ve seen these sessions spark breakthrough ideas—particularly when you provide a casual environment (yes, pizza helps). From there, capture early concepts and test them with advisory boards or qualitative research.

The tool that really helps here is our Ability to Win tool.  We call this tool the “cold shower of reality” because it forces teams to look objectively at customer needs, and your product’s (and competitor’s) ability to deliver on those needs.  The cross-functional view is invaluable, and with the proper perspective, can lead your team to an infinitely better understanding of your product’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats than any SWOT analysis. The reason companies seldom reach this kind of clear-eyed view of their competitive situation is also very normal.   When an individual becomes responsible for a product, they feel like they need to always advocate for its benefits.  And most of the time they should!  But as the great Jack Welch once said, “first you have to face the facts!”  When it comes to create strategy, you have to start with the starkest vision of reality that you can conjure.  Otherwise, you won’t fix the things that you need to address – the things customers think are important and perceive your offerings to lack.

If this sounds like something your team needs, again contact us and we will walk you through how to use the Ability to Win tool.  Our clients that have used it make it a permanent part of their strategic toolbox.

3. Fuel Innovation and Scenario Planning

Dedicate part of your surplus to forward-looking work. That might mean running a trend workshop to anticipate what could accelerate—or disrupt—your market in the next few years or hosting a wargame to pressure-test your plans against competitive or regulatory changes. AI tools can make these simulations faster and richer than ever before.

Our tools will allow you to facilitate rich trend and wargame instructions in one to two days –  if you would like us to talk you through it. 

4. Strengthen Capabilities and Clean Up the Data

Training is one of the highest return investments you can make. We are seeing more clients fund their AI literacy and conducting strategic planning courses for their teams. You could also take the opportunity to clean and refine your data – CRM systems rarely get enough attention. You’ll enter next year sharper and more efficiently.  You may even consider hiring an intern to help you.

5. Invest in Engagement and Culture

Small, well-designed internal initiatives—like sales challenges, idea competitions, or team incentives—can reignite creativity and collaboration while strengthening alignment around next year’s goals.  We have found that by using some of our innovation tools, big ideas flow as easily as the straightforward ones.

The Bottom Line

Don’t waste a budget surplus on things that don’t move the needle. Invest in insight, alignment, and skill-building—the initiatives that make next year’s strategy stronger from day one. And by investing in a half-hour call with us, we can make sure that you have the proper tools to maximize whatever you spend your surplus on.