Marketing planning, pain or pivotal?

Marketing article 2 – Marketing planning, pain or pivotal? (4 of 4) 

Iterative

There are many good books on marketing planning(3). Whatever process you choose or create as appropriate for your organization, rapid iteration is required to tune it with reality. Planning must be iterative because the real world constantly changes.

Treat the plan like a rolling financial forecast, it should never be finished or polished and filed away. But to control planning anarchy and confusion, set near-term tactical activities in stone, add new knowledge as it arrives, but control decisions and changes of direction with a solid sign-off process. Decision making is at the root of why you are creating a plan: a formal planning process provides rigor to decision making.

Best practices we’ve experienced in this area include an annual full-on planning session that goes back to the basic core competency and business review, quarterly adjustment and refinement at the product and program level, and monthly review of progress at a tactical level. This enables an organization to simultaneously correct for short term aberrations and link back to overall capabilities and business objectives.

Holding to a documented, iterative planning cycle like this both increases plan effectiveness and reduces planning pain. It means that you’ll always be planning at some level, but planning effort will be spread throughout the year.

Visible

Marketing’s activities are usually pretty invisible, even inside their own organization. Include visibility in your consideration of the planning process, the plan itself, and in tracking the plan’s progress and results.

A visible planning process helps maintain focus on the objective and marks progress through the decisions that have to be made. But don’t turn the process into the objective. One sheet of paper should be enough to outline your planning process.

We’ve seen marketing plans that are annotated tomes in three-inch binders. But the best plans contain only succinct facts, assumptions, and activities. Reasoning, historical data, analysis, etc. can all can be relegated to appendices or “voice-overs”. To make plans succinct use graphics, but avoid the PowerPoint scourge which limits creativity and triggers a sleep response in most people.

Plans themselves must be visible – binders on shelves or electronic copies don’t count. Ideally, you’ll have a large graphical plan posted on one wall where everyone can see it. You’ll add new information as it arrives (reports, emails, photos), and post results as charts and graphs. You’ll also have team meetings where the plan can be seen. At the very least your plan should have an aura of “special” – it needs to be seen as the central focus of your work efforts.

Neither can the presentation of the plan be underestimated. Stand up in front of a crowd and make an impact with your plan. This firmly commits you to carrying out the plan and often results in healthy personal interaction.

Fast

Every organization operates at a different decision-making rhythm, regardless of quarterly financial cycles. Technology companies suffer from an over-abundance of analytical decision-makers. But companies that arrive at decisions faster than the competition have a head start; it’s not only decision quality that counts.

To overcome planning paralysis and speed up decision making, the US Marines reportedly use the 70% rule(4). Once 70% of the facts are known, the decision is made. One of the fastest companies we’ve been involved with appeared to reduce this level to about 50%, leaving experience and capable, adaptable execution to fill in the gaps. We’d argue that in their case business results suffered from lack of planning rigor, but the lesson is that you’ll need to determine an appropriate cut-off point for your organization.

One way is to use a set of pre-defined, pre-agreed questions to determine when you’ve got the necessary facts to move on. Or, because internal milestones are usually allowed to slip, look for external dates or key events to drive planning timelines. Failing that, simply limit planning time by pre-set decision dates. You’re trying to hit a moving target, and unless you make decisions and act on them quickly, you’ll be out of sync with reality.

Summary

A marketing plan captures goals and strategies, provides focus and priority, identifies resources, tracks costs, measures success, and drives revenue. The plan must be realistic, appropriate for its audience, contain as much creativity as you can muster, be linked to other plans and your customers, measurable, iterative, highly visible, and fast. There’s pain in creating it, but even more pain in not achieving your objectives.

But remember, it’s the execution of the plan that brings results.

1. Business Review Nov–Dec 1996, reprint 96608.
2. A good place to start is Edward De Bono’s Serious Creativity – Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas. HarperBusiness, ISBN 0887306357.
3. Winning Market Leadership, Strategic Market Planning for Technology-Driven Businesses (Ryans, More, Barclay, Deutscher) presents a clear strategic marketing planning process and is one of the most readable books on the subject. John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0471644307.
4. See the 27 June 2005 issue of Fortune magazine to read about inspiring decisions. The reference to the Marine Corps is on page 98.
    

Written by Stephen Hale, CEO and principal of Hale! Marketing

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