Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

A recent Harvard Business School e-letter article, What Really Drives Your Strategy? talks about (albeit, in academic speak) many of the core problems I see out here in the real world in strategic planning. Most plans fail - not due to quality but lack of execution. As noted in the article, all too often the planning is top-down (top-heavy?) and people tend to forget the plan needs to be implemented.

A key disconnect is between the strategy and resource allocation. Here are three warning signs, based on my experience doing strategic planning for both big and small companies:

1. Setting the budget before the goals. If you box yourself in, the pretty words (Our target market is the “Fortune 500″) are meaningless.
2. Setting too many goals. Sure, there may be multiple billion-dollar markets for your product or service. But, do you have the necessary financial and human resources to go after all of them?
3. Forgetting the field. By the time the plan makes it out into the field (if it ever does), it’ll likely be unrecognizable anyway. So, the overwhelmed/under-equipped salesperson will take the path of least resistance. This can look like closing five $2,000 deals versus working on a $10,000 one (which takes longer). But, the $10K customer would be a better long-term revenue generator and the $10K service has a higher profit margin.

And one last failure point - forgetting the customer. We can pontificate all we want in our plans, but what are the customers wanting, needing and willing to pay for? (This can be three different things. No wonder the harried salesperson takes the “easy” path.) After all, nothing happens until somebody sells something.

Tags: strategic planning, entrepreneur sanity check,strategic planning failure