Uncovering why your customers buy products from your company or use your services is essential to be successful.  Ultimately, the value you provide is only as good as the benefits the customer receives.  Your strategy excels or fails on that perception or lack thereof.  If you ask companies what they sell and then turn around and survey their customers to ask what they buy, you’ll most likely hear two different answers.  Generally, customers give you a different answer or express it in a different way that the company.  Quickly query a handful of your customers to see whether this trend holds true for your organization.  Here are some questions to ask, crafted to your company specifically:

• Who buys our products or services?
• What do they buy?
• Why do they buy?
• When do they buy?
• How do they buy?

Take Netflix, an online DVD rental service, for example.  Employees may say that Netflix sells a service that allows customers to check out and return DVD rentals through the mail or by streaming DVDs online.  Conversely, customers may say that they’re buying convenience.  In order to see your business through the eyes of your most valuable customers, you have to understand what your customers think they’re really buying from you.  You have to think like your customers.

Answers to these questions can be found in information and feedback all around you.  Some of that information is easy to get and some takes a bit more work.  There are many methods you can use to find out why your customers are your customers.  The Net Promoter Score, which we talk about in this newsletter, explains how your NPS score can help you gain insight into what your customers think about you.  Whatever method you choose, any insight into your customers is worthwhile.

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• Past history–lessons learned
• Current products and services attractiveness and profitability
• Financial performance to assess the health of your organization
• Industry structure to uncover underlying dynamics

Naturally, all issues aren’t created equal. To focus your efforts, pare down your list to the select few that you think have the potential to have the biggest impact on your organization during your planning period. Typical strategic issues include answers to the following questions:

• How will we grow, stabilize, or retrench in order to sustain our organization into the future?
• How will we diversify our revenue to reduce our dependence on a major customer?
• What must we do to improve our cost structure and stay competitive?
• What is our new value proposition given that our customers are buying substitute products and we have new competitors?
• How and where must we innovate our products and services?
• Our industry is moving toward commodization; what should we do?

Gain consensus with your planning team around the short list of strategic issues. After you have agreement, identify when you’ll address the issues during your planning process. Where necessary, review and update your planning schedule.

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This question applies to both people who are new to strategic planning and those who have years of experience.  Strategic planning is a business process that is problematic by its own nature because it is not mandatory.  Strategic management needs to be thought of like the budgeting process, where it is process that is conducted with rigor and comes from the top.  The strategic plan has to be supported by the top leaders, otherwise people will not pay attention to it.  Here are some tips to help strategic planning leaders lead successfully:

1. Full organizational engagement: Having staff engagement and engaging the whole organization is essential to making your strategic plan stick.  Most times the strategic plan does not hold because people do not feel like their DNA is part of the plan and part of the priority set.  People need to know that they are part of the plan.
2. Developing a plan that is based on what was said at the offsite: The tendency not to connect and not being mindful of what was decided in the offsite will undermine the outcome of the plan and commitment to the actual goals and objectives. Your responsibility as the strategy leader is to be diligent about capturing those decisions and actions. Capturing those thoughts as you heard them and feeding those very rapidly back out to the organization is essential.  What gets said and what gets produced is very important and if there is a disconnect between those two, people will not be committed to the plan.
3. Starting with the end in mind: As a strategy leader you must think about the strategic planning process as a process and not an event. This idea is very hard for organizations to commit to.  What this looks like is to start with the end in mind and committing to monthly or quarterly strategy reviews in advance.  Once your plan is made it is important to set the date for the strategy reviews before even setting the date for the next offsite.  It is essential to set the expectation that we are checking in on goals, objectives and key performance indicators. You commit to that now so when you go to that offsite, everyone understands where all of this is leading to.

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At minimum, strategic planning software / strategic planning applications can offer some of the following benefits: (the better the software, the greater the benefits):

• Centralized system and result in efficiencies that are both time savings and cost savings.
• Keep the goal visible via reports that are always up to date.
• Real time access to plan updates – no waiting around.
• Keep the plan alive, keep it off the shelf.  Execute against it!
• Collaborative effort so everyone is working toward the same goals.
• Many more… check out the features of MyStrategicPlan.com.

The pains of Excel in the strategic planning process are exhausting.  What version of the file are you using?  Can you get out so I can update something?  Can you help me dbl with this formula?  What is that link referencing?  Excel can temporarily serve a need to get your plan off the ground, but there are better templates for even those at that stage and limited budgets.  If you can, try to avoid this all together and invest in your organization/yourself.  For a full blog post on this topic, see Why Excel falls short in executing Strategic Planning.  Check out some of our inexpensive resources (books / templates) here.

I understand that budgets are tight and software is an expense.  Some justifications are listed above.  At the end of the day, a software can be leveraged to facilitate a better execution of your strategic plan.  Executing strategy is what you are after.  Execution drives change and if done right you can find the same success that those committed to the strategic planning process typically experience – a 12% improvement above business as usual.

We are biased and think we have one of the top strategic planning software’s on the market.  We are also the first to acknowledge that our system is not a fit for everyone – we are not a one size fits all.  We do have VP’s of Strategic Planning for Fortune 500’s that leverage our system for the structure.  On the flip side, we have small businesses that don’t know anything about strategic planning and need the structure in addition to the self-help instruction provided in how to write a strategic plan.  The, we have organizations in between that are for-profit, nonprofit, church, government, education, military and more.

Your planning needs may vary.  If it isn’t us, then find another viable solution.  Move your planning process forward and invest in software. Take the paper-based pain out of your strategic planning.

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1. Pull together a diverse, yet appropriate, group of people to make up your planning team. Diversity leads to a better strategy. Bring together a small core team –between six and ten people–of leaders and managers who represent every area of the company.
2. Allow time for big picture, strategic thinking. We tend to try to squeeze strategic planning discussions in between putting out fires and going on a much needed vacation. But to create a strategic plan, your team needs time to think big. Do whatever it takes to allow that time for big-picture thinking (including taking your team off-site).
3. Get full commitment from key people in your organization. You can’t do it alone. If your team doesn’t buy into the planning process and the resulting strategic plan, you’re dead in the water.
4. Allow for open and free discussion regardless of each person’s position within the organization. Don’t lead the planning sessions. Hire an outside facilitator, someone who doesn’t have any stake in your success. When you do, people wonder whether you’re trying to lead them down the path you wanted all along. Encourage active participation, but don’t let any one person dominate the session.
5. Think about execution before you start. It doesn’t matter how good the plan is if it isn’t executed.
6. Use a facilitator, if your budget allows. Hire a trained professional who has no emotional investment in the outcome of the plan. An impartial third party can concentrate on the process instead of the end result and can ask the tough questions that others may fear to ask.
7. Make your plan actionable. To have any chance at implementation, the plan must clearly articulate goals, action steps, responsibilities, accountabilities, and specific deadlines.  And everyone must understand the plan and their role in it.
8. Don’t write your plan in stone. Good strategic plans are fluid, not rigid and unbending. They allow you to adapt to changes in the marketplace. Don’t be afraid to change your plan as necessary.
9. Clearly articulate next steps after every session. Before closing the strategic planning session, clearly explain what comes next and who’s responsible for what. When you walk out of the room, everyone must fully understand what they’re responsible for and when to meet deadlines.
10. Make strategy a habit, not just a retreat. Review the strategic plan for performance achievement no less than quarterly and as often as monthly or weekly. Focus on accountability for results and have clear and compelling consequences for unapproved missed deadlines.

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Sign up now to learn how MyStrategicPlan:

• Brings all the elements of an effective strategic plan together in one place
• Allows for dynamic planning
• Helps organizations sustain a living strategic plan
• Creates alignment by cascading the plan throughout your organization
• Provides individuals with consistent reports they need to execute the plan
• Improves accountability by tracking performance numbers

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Before you get too far into your strategic planning process, check out our top 10 tips below — your quick guide to getting the most out of your strategic planning process:

1. Pull together a diverse, yet appropriate, group of people to make up your planning team. Diversity leads to a better strategy. Bring together a small core team — between six and ten people — of leaders and managers who represent every area of the company.
2. Allow time for big picture, strategic thinking. We tend to try to squeeze strategic planning discussions in between putting out fires and going on a much needed vacation. But to create a strategic plan, your team needs time to think big. Do whatever it takes to allow that time for big-picture thinking (including taking your team off-site).
3. Get full commitment from key people in your organization. You can’t do it alone. If your team doesn’t buy into the planning process and the resulting strategic plan, you’re dead in the water.
4. Allow for open and free discussion regardless of each person’s position within the organization. (This tip includes you — the CEO.) Don’t lead the planning sessions. Hire an outside facilitator, someone who doesn’t have any stake in your success. When you do, people wonder whether you’re trying to lead them down the path you wanted all along.  Encourage active participation, but don’t let any one person dominate the session.
5. Think about execution before you start. It doesn’t matter how good the plan is if it isn’t executed.
6. Use a facilitator, if your budget allows. Hire a trained professional who has no emotional investment in the outcome of the plan. An impartial third party can concentrate on the process instead of the end result and can ask the tough questions that others may fear to ask.
7. Make your plan actionable. To have any chance at implementation, the plan must clearly articulate goals, action steps, responsibilities, accountability, and specific deadlines. And everyone must understand the plan and their role in it.
8. Don’t write your plan in stone. Good strategic plans are fluid, not rigid and unbending. They allow you to adapt to changes in the marketplace.  Don’t be afraid to change your plan as necessary.
9. Clearly articulate next steps after every session. Before closing the strategic planning session, clearly explain what comes next and who’s responsible for what. When you walk out of the room, everyone must fully understand what they’re responsible for and when to meet deadlines.
10. Make strategy a habit, not just a retreat. Review the strategic plan for performance achievement no less than quarterly and as often as monthly or weekly. Focus on accountability for results and have clear and compelling consequences for unapproved missed deadlines.

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Give this article a read and let us know what you think.

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I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum. - Frances Willard

To this order, educating your team about the strategic planning process itself can create an understanding of how the process culminates into a final plan (i.e. how a SWOT is used for determining potential areas of priority, which are then developed into strategic themes). A simple flow chart may be all that is needed to make sure everyone knows the general development route your strategic plan will take.

In the development and execution of the plan, there will be dialogue. To optimize these exchanges and keep them constructive, the entire team needs to recognize the balance needed between informing, recommending and deciding in order to have a true collective outcome. In the delivery of this dialogue, we can’t stress enough the importance of language symmetry. For example, are your organization milestones considered “objectives” or “goals”? Do these terms change at different stratums, for say a department or an individual? There is no right or wrong answer; the point is that whatever resonates best with your organization should be identified and incorporated. Language must name the key features of your strategy landscape with rigorous consistency so that any adaptations toward a common direction can be achieved without confusion.

After you are finished ironing out any contentions of what a strategic plan is or is not, just remember it is your job as a driver of strategy to continually develop those common nodes of understanding (process, roles, communication) as they relate to the strategic execution cycle that your organization should have in place. Commit to a shared language standard, and find ways to incorporate repetition into the sharing of ideas and concepts. Make it ritualistic throughout your strategic development and execution cycles. Remember, it takes courage and discipline to practice an art that is never fully mastered.

STRATEGY CHECK: Does everyone in your strategy voyage understand the flight plan?

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A common question that we get from clients is: How do I run an effective strategy review? This webinar presents some of the best practices for running strategy reviews.

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