Marketing Planning

Marketing Planning

Now than most companies are getting ready for 2014, hundreds of thousands of professionals will start making their marketing plans.

Issue is that most of times, those plans will start by the wrong end of the process: good old 4 Ps

Product will be already locked down, price and placement almost fixed too and most discussions will be about promotional activities.

It will be an inside out exercise. 

And just at the very end, customers will be included in the equation; 'okay, we have to sell $Xm of products A, B, C with attached product mix to hit our GM targets through our channel...by the way, do we have any value proposition for demand generation activities?'

Of course, during that upside down process, tons of data will be requested. Most companies will do some data crunching and get to information. But only a few of them, those ones really customer centric, will get to insights; because that's the place where insights live, our customers. They are the answer to all 'why?'

Let's review now how a marketing planning process should look like (at least from my point of view). It is 'easy' , you just need to answer 3 questions

Step 1. Background Analysis – Where are you now?

The background analysis answers the question “Where are you now?”. It includes a market analysis, a competitive analysis and a performance history.

Step 2. Objectives – Where do you want to go?

The objectives answer the question “Where do you want to go?”.  It starts with the identification of problems and opportunities that need to be addressed in the plan. Then it moves to the forecast of sales volume -Most (wrong) plans start directly here-, the marketing objectives that specify the market segments from which the volume will be generated, and the positioning of the product in the customers’ minds.

Step 3. Strategies – How can you get there?

This section answers the question “How can you get there?”. They must provide management with a concise marketing and financial summary of objectives and strategies along with requirements to achieve the objectives.

And for all 3 questions the process is the same:

Business Developers

Business Developers

Wikipedia: "Business development and its associated tasks and processes are often indiscernible from traditional management and marketing approaches, such as strategic management, marketing management, sales and marketing, and entrepreneurship."

So...why should you have them?

Any company has general management, marketing and sales executive roles; unless those folks don't do what they are supposed to do, you don't need Business Developers.

They usually tend to be those (poor) guys attending lots of calls and meetings, requesting tons of reports, producing a zillion power points, but accountable for nothing and with no budget...if the guy is a good performer, probably he will burn out, and if it is a poor performer, he will feel at home or even better, like at SPA.

Once again, the root cause of biz dev roles is a lack of leadership, failing to set the right priorities and refocusing the whole organization accordingly. 

True leaders see the future and have no fear to risk the present for the future. Night school managers cannot see the forest for the trees, just care about today's targets and allocate a biz dev role to focus on strategic initiatives, instead of refocusing the department, business unit or company.