If you haven’t noticed, I am trying to stay on theme with my last few blogs by focusing various thoughts around the development of marketing plans. I still believe this strategic marketing planning process is the most important steps you can take to ensure your yearly activities stay within the line of logic resulting from the process. The successful outcome of a strategic plan really relies on methodical process for input from several sources upfront. This information gathering and analysis takes a large amount of time, but it will pay off if you stay with it.
This brings to me to a few key points of caution when of developing your plan. Mike Schultz identifies a few cautionary situations that tend to naturally happen when writing your strategic plan. So take a quick look and avoid these as best possible.
1. Build the strategy from the top down
Nothing turns off partners, division leaders, and other leadership types more than being handed a strategy and told to, “Make it happen.” Force feed the strategies f and you’re likely to get compliance and not commitment. Practice leaders may take the strategy and run with it, perhaps even put a bit of effort and sweat into it, yet they can and frequently do walk away at the first sign of trouble.
Without going through the process of crafting the strategies with input from key players, your plan will not garner the support necessary to ensure success.
2. Don’t consult with expert tacticians
Equally as devastating as a top-down strategy is a strategy built without input from experts familiar with the underlying marketing and business development tactics. When you identify your specific tactics—even if the tactics are largely decent choices for a successful marketing strategy—without talking with people who have deep, relevant experience, the actual outcome will likely differ from the one you envision.
3. Look only at your own industry and competition
I have addressed this in previous posts and believe every industry can learn a few things from exploring how similar business models in different industries address strategic issues. It is a great source for fresh thinking as long as you can prove the recommendations have relevancy to your specific issues.
4. Don’t create an environment of fervent execution
If you allow your leaders to craft the company and practice area growth plans and you have not informed and created accountable steps for the tactical execution, you will stay in the land of terrible marketing.
As Mike points out, this is a strategic issue and not a tactical one. Company strategists and leadership must make sure the environmental factors are in place: with set clear expectations ,tools and resources available, incentives and consequences in place to guide people’s behavior.
5. Don’t plan for behavioral or organizational change
Almost without exception, a marketing strategy’s success is contingent on some level of change, be it evolutionary or revolutionary. Doing nothing different from what you have done in the past is sometimes, all by itself, a terrible marketing strategy.
6. Form a marketing committee
Service oriented firms tend to employ smart people. Most like to involve themselves and weigh in on important decisions, such as marketing strategy. Marketing committees form. When these lovely decision-making bodies get nice and big, two things happen:
A. Innovative and interesting ideas get squashed before they can gain momentum. With anything new or visionary, it’s difficult to get everyone to agree and easy for people to say no and poke holes in ideas. The tired, less exciting ideas remain on the table.
B. People begin to agree with watered-down and uninspiring ideas because they think other smart people agree with them so they must be OK, they’re sick of the ongoing committee discussion, and actions eventually need to be taken. They also know better ideas won’t make it very far, so they publicly swallow the pill and declare “I agree. Let’s go!” Privately they think, “This is a terrible idea, but I guess it’s where everyone wants to go.”
These six cautionary activities can hamper the strategic development process at any time and take you off course. Take a moment and survey your progress to make sure you have avoided these costly mistake.
