Strategic planning

It’s always best to have a roadmap for your business, whether it is specific to market development or with a more broad purpose, such as organizational best practices. A plan forces you to actualize the ideas swirling around in your head, converting fragments and parts into a coherent framework. The process itself allows you to gain insights and wisdom from others, elevating your logic and creating buy-in at the same time.

The upside to strategic planning is considerable. It’s the opportunity to achieve consensus about your company’s values, quantify business goals and integrate objectives across multiple business areas. The challenge, however, is instilling the organizational discipline to honor benchmarks and track performance in order to pivot as necessary. I can work with your the team to formulate a plan, from big-picture market analyses, to strategies for staying on task.

Market research & Performance analytics

John Sculley once said, “No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data.” Comprehensive market assessments constitute the foundation that shapes your strategy. They typically consider:

• Economic outlook, sources of funding and market valuation.

• Industry and/or sector growth and future trends.

• Regional attributes and demographic projections, and the anticipated market impact.

• Target clients, strategic partners and the competitive landscape.

Even a simple market assessment can provide important insights to inform your strategy.

The complement to a market assessment is a review of your company’s performance analytics. Success is predicated on whether your business experience, leadership and staff, practices and resources are a match for your target market.

Communications

To grow your business, you need credibility. To achieve credibility, you need to be authentic.

It starts with clarity about your company’s value proposition in the marketplace. A lack of consensus translates to disparate beliefs in what you stand for. Communications become jumbled, from marketing and business development all the way across the board, from fees and pricing to the provision of client services.

Once established, branding and messaging will flow readily. Marketing elements can be developed with narrative and graphics that reinforce your company’s standards, logic and creativity. Marketing plans can be built-out with strategic actions that will connect with your target audience and at the same time are in balance with your staff and budget resources.

Branding is not just an external discipline - your company’s culture is reinforced by deliberate communication practices as well.