Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Dear Susanna,

Might it depend on who you are showing your plan to and where you're showing it?

If you're showing this to me in my office and I'm your bank manager, a PowerPoint presentation won't really help. There are too many extra steps for me to go through before I get access to the details of your plan.

But surely the BIGGER issue is what the document SAYS?

https://ezinearticles.com/?Marketing-Strategy-and-Template-for-Independent-...

https://www.quickmba.com/marketing/plan/

https://starkreality.onlybusiness.com/Member/StarkReality/Images/ImageGalle...

As for your GANTT plan, I think the purpose of this document is more to do with broader strokes and multiple tasks and how they interconnect and overlap.

https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/plan-and-schedule-more-complex-projects.html

So this would mean your marketing plan fitting into a narrower slot within your wider vision. Likewise your finance plan, business plan, disaster preparedness plan, technology plan, and your longer term visions for product and project development and their relative time lines, deadlines, production schedules, and your sales processes and pathways and your client fulfillment and guarantee systems.

Are all of these things ESSENTIAL? Probably not, at least not right away. But at least worth thinking about so that they're on your radar.

I hope this helps. Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

I usually start with the objective. Then the overall marketing strategy -- HOW am I going to go after the objective ... a kind of overview.

Then I develop a Positioning Statement, followed by strategies for each area of the Marketing Mix that are consistent with the Positioning Statement and overall strategy. Here's where I deal with product, pricing, packaging, promotion, etc. -- at least at a strategic level.

Then I take the marketing strategy set and develop tactical plans so I can get a sense of timing, costs, how I'll measure results, etc.

That's the big picture approach. Does this help?

Think of your strategy document as your overview of your tactical plans (as others have mentioned, develop your tactics from your strategy), and your positioning statement as an overview of your strategy.

Since the strategy document should stand alone (without you presenting it), probably a Word document to be able to describe in detail your key points.

Dear Susanna

In a word, use Word. In two words, use Word for the explanations and Excel for the cash-flows, sales plan, targets, profit forecast and marketing cost analysis. In three words, if you have to present it and then justify it to a roomful of people, do a PowerPoint presentation based on the data in the last two and give them the original documents for reference. Oh and if you use PowerPoint, don’t accidentally bore anyone to death.

Your Gantt chart on Excel should simply be the individual elements of a marketing plan set out with the additional dimension of time. It is used to keep your individual projects on target, in cost and on time. It should also identify the critical path for any individual project and the marketing plan as a whole. This allows you to identify the aspects of the plan which affect your delivery. If something on the critical path does not get done, then unless you have made errors in constructing your Gantt chart, nothing else will get done and delivered! That’s why it is called the critical path.

A further visual aid to help you manage the plan and the projects within it is a PERT chart which allows you to better analyse the paths of projects through the plan as a whole.

I rather like the ideas put forward by Garry and others, so I won’t add to your template scrutiny burden. I’d like to add that I almost always start from mgoodman’s perspective of defining the objective in terms of products, sales, costs and profits. That is best done on a spreadsheet. If the plan assumes that you have business from the previous year carried forward. I.e. it was forecast last year but should be booked in this year then the last year’s carry-forward forecast should be included.

Then I work backwards asking questions such as “If the turnover objective is to become our target, what product mix is implied by it?” If you are a manufacturer you will need to make things in time for your sales objectives to be fulfilled, thus your buying plan and your manufacturing plan will actually fall out of your marketing plan.

What you actually buy and what you actually make will depend on the ongoing sales forecast and your performance against your target will come from sales booked YTD and the sales forecast for the future. The sales forecast reverts to the figures in the Marketing plan once you have run out of concrete sales opportunities to include in the forecast. For example, I used to do the plan for Comark. The forecast was based on every single sales person’s expectations of future business all added together. The sales forecast is work in hand and the name of the opportunity, the value of it and the close date are the only things I needed. As we rarely had sales which took more than 3 months to close, lose or vanish into a black hole, then there was no way we could have forecast July’s figures in January – that reverted to the sales target figure which in turn are evolved from the marketing plan.

If you do it this way round, then everything adds up in whether you look at it by sales by product, by sales revenue and the sales plan of both of these month by month should give your FD his cash-flow.

Then I look to the activities needed to support a sales team in achieving their objective such as those which generate leads. These activities can then be costed and timed so that they fit into your Gantt time-frame. To manage the transition from marketing driven lead generation through to forecast sales, you will need to look at how you score, analyse and nurture your leads and then monitor how many you are generating and how you view their quality in terms of them leading to business.

Next I ask myself, “Is this likely to happen? Is this credible? What is the change year on year in your and month on month sales revenue expectations and your product sales expectations? Lastly does your proposed plan involve a step change anywhere? If it does or if the increase year on year or even month on month is high and if you don’t deliver the resources to meet the sales objectives, it ain’t going to happen.

Lastly I look at the key performance ratios. If last year it took 10 leads to get an appointment and an average of 4 appointments to make a sale, then you are not going to fulfil your sales plan by only funding the delivery of half the leads needed for your sales people to make the target you have set unless something quite improbable happens to the conversion ratios of leads per appointment and appointments per sale. Or unless something dramatic happens to the average value of a sale over the year.

I hope this makes sense – I used to feel quite guilt about providing this sort of plan for clients and charging them £800 a day to do it when it is all so bleeding obvious that they could do it. Then one tough client saved me by saying, “Look, Steve it might be obvious to you but it is not to me. Yes I could probably do it myself but it would take me 6 months and even then I wouldn’t believe it”

What a nice client!

Steve Alker
Xspirt

The questions asked above about how the document would be used are important - if it is just for you/internal use, the format doesn't matter that much. But if you are presenting to investors, then it could be very important.

The content of the plan is what is most important.

That all said, if I was going to write up a Marketing Plan, I would first thing to do it in word. If I then need to present it, I would take the information that I wanted to present (presumably a subset of the whole plan) and put it in PowerPoint.