Strategy Distraction: A Sales & Marketing Epidemic!
As many of you know, we are passionate supporters of strategic planning. We believe your sales and marketing success depends on it. We believe in a well-built strategy that tightly integrates the sales and marketing process and consistently communicates a company's position (who you are, what you do, and why you) in your market. And, we believe a strategy based on the knowledge your target market is not everyone, your product/service does not do everything, and you do have competition will win every time—especially when executed flawlessly, consistently, and as planned. And so it is with great sadness we report an epidemic—"strategy distraction." And like most epidemics it is running rampant and wreaking havoc throughout sales and marketing organizations everywhere. In fact, this epidemic can often be traced to the very top. Adam Hanft in his inc. magazine article "It's Swing Time" perhaps illustrates it best: "I've seen CEOs change strategic direction over a weekend—and not even a long holiday one—based on a single article they read, or a cocktail party comment, or because they confused the inability to execute with bad strategy."
Aside from having no strategy at all, it is this last reason (failure to execute) that we see as the most significant cause of strategy distraction. If you honestly analyze your sales and marketing effort and find a) your messaging varies from sales rep to sales rep and marketing piece to marketing piece, b) your marketing plan keeps changing with your newest idea or target market shifts, or c) executing your marketing plan only becomes a hot priority when sales are down, then it is time to cure yourself of strategy distraction:
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Build a strategy of uniqueness—it must be relevant. This article assumes you've built a plan and like many have had trouble completely executing it. However, if you haven't yet built your plan, visit our previous tips on successful planning: The Best Laid Plans Really DO work! and Three Elements EVERY Marketing Mix Should Have. Again, the key to a strong strategy is understanding the integration points between sales and marketing, having a good understanding of your target market, product positioning, and competitive landscape, and building a marketing mix that communicates your unique value and leverages the impact of multiple vehicles.
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Get REAL buy off from your team—they must believe. Real buy-off requires real input. Don't create your strategy in a vacuum. Include the sales and marketing team throughout the entire process. And, before you begin execution, present the final strategy and implementation plan to your sales and marketing teams for one last buy-off. A team that believes in the strategy (and they should, they helped create it) will by nature be more inclined to execute it as planned.
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Execute the plan—you must commit. As the introduction of this tip indicates, building a strong strategy with internal buy-off from your team is important, but will only get you halfway there—execution is critical. Don't bite off more than you can chew. If the plan isn't something you have the resources to implement and stick with, scale it back to something that you can more easily commit to. Then, build a detailed project plan for implementation, detailing departmental dependencies, resource allocation, project tasks, and key deadlines on a weekly basis. And, hold each other accountable to delivering on the strategy, whether strategic or tactical.
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Measure, measure, and measure—we must be accountable. Measurement of your strategy should be multi-faceted. First, did you execute what you planned to execute? After all, if you failed to nail down your positioning statement, missed a mailing, never got that article written, didn't get your email out on time, were unable to reach your target market, etc., then can you really tell if your strategy was on target? Next, assuming you did execute completely, what were the results? Create a scorecard based on the goals you set out for yourself in the planning process (i.e. # of leads, web traffic, information inquiries, proposals/bids, sales, etc.) for tracking this monthly. Of course to do this you will need to get disciplined about asking, "how did you hear about us" at every contact.
Remember this key point as you continue to analyze your results—failure to execute a strategy is very different than failure of the strategy itself.
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The Sales and Marketing Toolkits BUNDLED contains:
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Over 60 sales and marketing templates (DOC, XLS, PPT, and PDFs)
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Loads of "how-to" articles and examples
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8 Training sessions (MP3 audio files) for your computer or iPod
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