5 Game-Changing Planning Strategies You Might Be Missing

It's that time of the year again. It's planning season, and it's time for some change:

1) Break down the silos between sales and marketing.

If you haven’t done this already, start building this thought into your planning schedule. More than ever, marketing is being pushed towards the revenue targets of businesses. Long gone are the days that we can talk about ‘impact’ or ‘awareness’ without being asked for hard metrics to prove that marketing is indeed part of the pipeline. And sales are your ally.

• Align at least on some goals or KPIs you find in common – start speaking their language, build yourself into their plans and you will be pleasantly surprised to see that these worlds aren’t that far apart.
• Ensure both teams agree on the definition of when to consider a prospect a marketing qualified lead (MQL) or a marketing automation qualified lead (MQAL) for that matter, and when it’s mature enough to become a sales qualified lead (SQL). 
• Consider nurturing that lead sufficiently before passing it on – many leads aren’t converted because they haven’t been nurtured enough by marketing creating what is known as the ‘lead gap’.
• Be open about sharing your plans – not only with sales but anyone that may find it of interest. The greater transparency you build, the better things work, the bigger the impact.

2) Build a holistic view of your go-to-market activity, including EVERYTHING that will hit customers. 

The customer perceives your brand in the way you choose to communicate with them. I have seen it happen time and time again, where different teams reach out at different times, with different messages, to the same customer, risking fatigue due to over communication. You also risk misalignment or repetition of your messaging, casting an incredibly negative view of the brand and essentially pestering the customer until they unsubscribe to your sales gateway.

• Build a go-to-market calendar that can provide a birds-eye view of all your planned external activity: events, communications, product launches, campaign moments, press releases… you name it – anyone that plans to click on a ‘send’ button should have a home on this calendar.
• Don’t forget to build seasonality into this calendar. Moments like summer holidays, Christmas or Black Friday are pivotal considerations to your planned timelines.

3) Get rid of the ‘annual’ when planning. 

Planning once a year and never looking back is a thing of the past. Change comes swiftly. Of course, it is viable and even advisable to have some sort of a master plan – a backbone one could say. But be ready to change, shift, adapt and amend as the year goes by. 

• Annual planning can be seen as hypothesizing. Once put into practice it may work, it may not - people resign, teams merge, tech breaks and deadlines aren’t met. An agile plan will allow for change, improvement or even removal. The beauty of agility is that it provides wiggle room, giving freedom to go back to the drawing board and look at things with fresh perspectives. 
• Ensure you build communication into this flexible way of planning. If you have other stakeholders involved in your projects (and hopefully you do because marketing is a connector across so many other functions) then be aware that if one thing changes it may have a knock-on effect on others. Again, the greater transparency you build, the better things work, the bigger the impact.

4) Build failure into your plan and improve your chance for success. 

After a project, we tend sit down and analyze the outcomes – a post-mortem: what was successful, what didn’t work, what can be improved, etc. However, as cognitive psychologist Gary Klein explains in his ‘pre-mortem method’, this exercise can also be done before a project starts. Asking ourselves why a project could fail, or what could go wrong, can save us a lot of disappointment further down the line. It’s a tough question to ask, but it helps us prepare for the worst (because we are automatically always hoping for the best). 

• Be aware that it is common for people to have a hard time condemning and dooming a project that bares excitement and hope. Providing a solid understanding as to why pre-mortems are important, and perhaps making yourself take the first step towards this critical thinking, will help create a safe space for others to really open up.

5) Rinse and repeat with no shame.

If something worked well in the past, don’t shy away from it just because it’s already been done, promoted, or talked about. Repurpose successful work. Package it up differently, slice and dice it, build on it, but whatever you do, make sure you reuse (where you can) what has already been proven to be a success. 

• A video interview can be transcribed into an article. An article can be converted into a fact sheet, and a fact sheet can be broken down into social posts. One can be incredibly creative about repurposing hard work; the key is to work smarter, not harder.

Conclusion 

I wrap up the above reflections with an all-encompassing conclusion (if it’s the one thing you take away): think customer-first. 

The customer does not see your business from the back end. They do not differentiate between press releases, product promotions and email campaigns. They see advertisements, they are curious, they purchase and (hopefully) come back for more. Don’t forget that their experience with your brand is based on a single line of communication in one direction – from you to them. So don’t overwhelm them. Things can also change quickly in their lives, so be ready to change with them. Don’t fall behind, or your competitor will whip them away. Finally, leverage past efforts that have been successful, and capitalize on them. If your customer loved what you did the first time, they’ll want to come back for more.

Good luck!

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