Why you don’t need another marketing plan.
You don’t need another marketing plan.
You need a practical operating system.
I see too many companies investing time and talent in yearly offsites and documents that promptly get shelved when teams move into the real-world, fluid, unpredictable work of getting it done.
A typical plan-on-a-page says here’s where we’re going and what we’ll do. But without the agreed rituals, workflows and principles that underpin it and provide a tangible path to execution, these plans often end up more of a tick-the-box process than a real, pragmatic roadmap.
Because collaboration is hard. (Don’t we know it!)
And in the flush of innovating industries and products and experiences, innovating how and when we come together to do that is easy to sideline.
This leads to people going off and doing their own thing. Those separate things can then lead to a disjointed experience for the customer (and frustrated internal teams).
If this sounds familiar, here are some ideas you may wish to consider:
1. Working with external partners?
Invite them to contribute to your implementation plan as a collective so you flush out interdependencies and potential duplication of work across the group. Then meet regularly to help everyone and everything stay in-sync.
2. Budget for alignment.
Collaboration takes extra time, resource, imagination. Traditional approaches to strategy and execution allow for doing “the work”, but if you want true buy-in and tight alignment, factor in coordination time and effort too.
3. Identify your behavioral constraints and enablers.
Working back from your desired outcomes, look at what’s likely to get in the way of achieving those. Is strategic leadership choppy so communications fall through the cracks? Agree a solution upfront to smooth the way forward.
Disrupting the industry doesn’t have to mean a disruptive, disparate way of working.