CHAPTER 7 | DO YOUR STRATEGIC PLANNING WIND SPRINTS

Nobody wants to go to strategic planning.

Nobody wants to do sales role play.

Nobody wants to do team-building.

Not even the people who run these exercises want to do it.

They can feel your chill.

Plus the world is moving too fast for fluff.

Is strategic planning with a group important? YES, CRUCIAL. Because nobody skips down the hall and says, “I have an idea that may impact our collective futures. Can we have a chat?”

So much money and time are lost when leadership is not on the same page. Especially in marketing.

In Chapter FOUR, it was suggested that a skilled marketer should run a company’s strategic planning. This person would be from outside of the organization so internal marketing leadership can attend. Why?

> If you can’t communicate the essence of the planning effectively, no one in an organization will intuitively know how you want them to behave and why. Brands live in hallways, and in the actions of people who are responsible for creating products and delivering services.

> If you can’t see the landscape of interconnectivity in a business – a skill that most marketers have – a single internal component of the business will get too much focus at the expense of other parts of the business and customer-facing implications.

Traditional business strategic planning defines the game the organization is playing, outlines the resources (human and financial) available to play the game, and snapshots the present score.

Market-based strategic planning defines how the organization will win the game in the future.

When you combine the two approaches and consider them simultaneously, you create action rather than a declaration of state of the state and objectives that no one can wrap their minds around.

We all know that speed to market is important.

So is speed to planning.

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