TURNING STRATEGIC PLANS INTO MARKETING INITIATIVES

This RMS WEBrief(TM) is intended to help marketing managers identify a few ways to turn Strategic Business Plans into Actions from a marketing point of view. Similar approaches apply to other business operations. Support from Rockwood Management Services is available to assist in these efforts. You are invited to send us comments on this article and suggestions for other ones. Please send to:

It is difficult to think of a major company that does not have some type of formal business planning process. Usually there is a group that is charged with pulling information from each of the companys operating units, analyzing the data and merging it with external economic and competitive information and developing a strategic business plan covering, say, the current year together with the next five years.

Those of us who have spent time in a corporate business planning role have, no doubt, seen major effort and expense to develop these detailed plans. Unfortunately, because of competitive concerns, plans are often prepared and disseminated in restricted, numbered binders; the binders are only directed to top executives where they end up on bookshelves without reaching the working levels. It is our objective to help you locate and turn these plans into valued actions.

First, where are they to be found?

Start with the group that prepares the plans. Try to get a copy from them or at least an extract that covers topics related to marketing, sales and product management. If that fails, ask who in your own group or building was sent a copy. Go to them or their staff and ask to borrow it.

Assigning Resources:

Once you get a copy, examine the plan for data on sales revenues. You should be able to determine, in priority order, which products and services are the most important to your companys future. If your job is to provide marketing support services for these products and services, knowing the priority order will enable you to allocate your own scarce time and other resources to those products and services in a way that will give the biggest bang for your buck. (Hopefully, your performance, recognition and BONUS will be directly related!)

All the information you need will probably not be obvious from a casual review of the strategic plan. You need to know what to look for and how to analyze the message it tells. For example, position in the product life cycle is very important and should be looked for. Looking at product revenue data plotted over time, it should be evident which products have either growing, flat, or declining sales. Be sure that you assign your resources to those products and services that will be around for awhile and are not ready, or nearly so, to be replaced by new ones.

Communicating and Convincing:

Determining the important products and services is the beginning; next, there are a number of other challenges that must be faced relative to communicating information on these products and services. You need to know what information is needed and be convincing enough to cause favorable purchasing decisions on the part of prospective customers. You must determine who needs convincing and how best to do it. In fact, before even attempting to convince, you need to let prospects know that you are out there with something they might want and be able to use.

Role of Databases:

Databases help match available products and services to prospects needs and interests. (Please refer to the RMS WEBriefTM that covers marketing databases.) Unfortunately, keeping all data up-to-date is a major challenge and collecting every possible piece of data to provide a perfect match is seldom possible or practical. The big thing to remember is to use a database to narrow the field and identify the target audience for your marketing message.

Repeating the Message:

Using different media to repeat your marketing message is important. Not everyone is exposed to the same media and even if they were, the more times people hear something, in this case your sales pitch, the more likely they are to respond positively.

With todays electronic media, there are even more choices for disseminating information. Electronic search tools help users find things, but many people still rely on traditional print media and have not begun to use the newer information technology. Even when they do, full capabilities may not be used and users still frequently rely on print messages to alert them to look for something in the electronic world. You will, therefore, need to package your information in a variety of different ways to meet these diverse requirements.

Questions are Inevitable:

If you have done your job right, prospects will find something in your message that attracts their attention. Unfortunately, interest almost always leads to questions. Your next job will be to find ways to communicate answers to questions in a way that support personnel are not overwhelmed with routine repeat requests. Develop categories of requests and strategies to handle each one.

Tiered Support:

What could be more difficult than helping people learn about and use new technology? That is the job faced by Microsoft Corporation a pre-eminent model of success in the technical universe. Microsoft is a master at using diverse and layered customer support to assign requests and questions to higher cost resources by order of difficulty. Interactive Voice Response helps to assign calls, and some support is even outsourced.

Questions usually are divided between pre-sale and post-sale with expert systems and hypertext search tools linked to question and answer databases. These databases allow support personnel to see how similar questions were resolved previously without going through the research process each time. Microsoft even sells subscriptions to its interactive technical support tools that allow users to solve many of their own problems. The net result is that only new requests should reach the most highly skilled support technicians. (Perhaps your job involves repetitive requests that could be solved without your involvement each time.)

Marketing Communications Resources:

Having a wide variety of different marketing communications that facilitate selling products and services is critical. A corporate database can be invaluable in managing and tracking currently available marketing resources. The data is especially useful when communications plans identify schedules and topics for future collateral material that should be looked for by sales and sales support personnel. For example, with it, they can determine if a brochure is available, when it is scheduled to be reissued, and in some cases how many are in stock.

Case Studies:

Finally, when developing marketing materials, information on features and benefits is important, but application information that facilitates using products and services to solve business problems can suggest creative ways to use them. This extra step can set your efforts apart from the competition. After all, if you, the expert, does not know how your products and services will make a difference to a customer, no one else will either. Testimonials from satisfied customers can add the frosting to the cake!

A few thoughts . . . :

The items covered here represent the tip of the iceberg. Contact us at Rockwood Management Services to help you develop these and other suggestions for increasing your marketing successes and finding and entering new markets for your products and services. In particular, consider developing a database to manage contacts and facilitate direct marketing; building a knowledgebase of questions and answers; creating an expert system for help desks; and adding on-line references for customers. The latter may be provided via an Internet web site, a bulletin board, CD-ROMs or diskettes.