It's a new year! Time to take a fresh look at your strategic plan for the year ahead. What do you hope to achieve by December 31, 2010? Better customer service? Stronger branding? Greater social-media buzz? All of the above? And just as important: How will you convey that plan, once it's developed, in a clear and concise way to your team?

Ben McConnell at the Church of the Customer Blog says the best way to keep employees in tune with a customer-relationship plan is to map it out.

"A strategic plan has a better chance of being successful when it's easy to understand, easy to find, and easy to share," he explains. "That's why, after we create longer-form strategy documents for social-media or customer-evangelism planning, we convert them into one-page infographics." He offers a sample—and here's how to build a similar chart, to say it with pictures:

• Top row: Objectives. List your top objectives for the year (e.g., "Become a word-of-mouth success story") straight across the top of the page.
• Second row: Goals. Position your goals ("80% customers signed up from WOM") beneath the top row to match them with the appropriate objective.
• Third row: Strategies. Detail the strategies you'll formulate to reach those goals ("Make company founders more visible").
• Fourth row: Tactics. List the tactics you'll employ to implement those strategies ("Launch SM accounts for founders, company").

"The word-driven complexity of a strategic plan is easier to comprehend when it's displayed graphically," McConnell concludes.

→ end article preview
Read the Full Article