Creating Actionable Plans
 As Sir John Harvey-Jones said, "The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise."
While it is generally understood that planning is a good thing, the opinion most people have is "planning is a waste of time." The reasons for this are numerous, but it can be reduced to one main culprit: lack of planning "know how."
Many companies, when they get the courage to plan, set out to achieve the impossible. Common planning goals include:
- Maximize sales
- Minimize costs
- Increase market share
- Maximize profits
These goals are not only incompatible, they are vague and have little meaning in-and-of themselves. When organizations make plans like this, it is a waste of time and it undermines future efforts at creating actionable plans. Furthermore, if the process of setting objectives is performed inadequately, it follows that the efficiency needed to achieve such goals will be correspondingly affected, which creates additional negative feelings toward the planning process.
Still, planning is critical to business success, especially when considering the increasingly hostile and complex business environment of the modern era. Hundreds of external and internal factors interact in numerous ways to affect an organization's ability to achieve profitable sales. Perhaps because it is so complex, many companies believe they cannot create adequate plans and choose not to go through a "fruitless" exercise. Instead, they rely only on sales forecasting and budgeting systems. All too frequently, these systems have little resemblance to the real opportunities and problems facing the company.
How we can help
As an objective third-party, Aperio Marketing can help evaluate your planning process for what it is. Furthermore, we are experienced in translating raw strategy into actionable form and can help implement new methods for achieving the goals described in the planning process.
An actionable plan has accountability, quantifiable objectives, and ways to measure progress. It allows for flexibility so, when new opportunities arise, they can be objectively identified as beneficial or detrimental to the overall corporate goals and can be duly incorporated as such.
For example, once it has been determined that the company needs to achieve a specific sales number, this can reduced into smaller goals, until it ultimately results in the number of new calls a sales person should make in any particular period. These smaller goals will also inform marketing as to the number and type of leads that should be obtained, which will also inform where these leads should be found, what the marketing message should be, and so on.
To learn more about how Aperio Marketing can help create actionable plans for your organization, please contact us.
Benefits of good process
A good planning process can make significant contributions to commercial success. The benefits of a planning process include:
- Discovering new opportunities for profit
- Creating meaningful long-range plans
- Creating realistic objectives for sales and marketing
- Owning actionable market information
- Reducing interdepartmental strife
- Reducing managerial frustration
- Reducing expensive product and market experimentation
- Having more understanding and control over pricing
- Reducing vulnerability to environmental changes
- Having more control over the business
If you would like to learn more about our methodologies and how you can turn a strategic plan into quantifiable goals, please download a free sample of one of our Marketing Tools & Diagnostics, "Setting Quantifiable Sales Goals."
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