Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is a buzz word that is thrown around a lot, but unless you know how to develop and implement a strategic plan, the term is useless. It’s important to understand that strategic plans will differ greatly among practices and therefore, a “cookie cutter” approach will not be beneficial. In this post, I would like to offer a few tips to driving successful strategic planning and implementation.  

1.    Involve your entire staff.

It is important that everyone in the practice be included in the process in some way. By collecting the insight of the people on the front lines, the plan will likely be more accurate, practical, and actionable. Also, by being inclusive, everyone will feel that they are an important part of a team and they will be more inclined to drive the implementation.

2.    Conduct a situation analysis.

Begin by looking at internal and external factors. Internally, explore your operations, human resources, and finances - budget, profits, revenues, and debt. Externally, look at your competitors, market condition, and the economy. Lastly, conduct a thorough SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses (internally), and opportunities and threats (externally). This assessment will be the basis for your strategic plan. Figure out what you do well and what needs to be improved to build your practice and create a sustainable competitive advantage.

3.    Develop business objectives.

These goals should be SMART – specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-driven.  Potential goals can be focused on sales, profits, growth, or image and positioning.   

4.    Develop an overall strategy.

Your strategy should support your objectives. These will drive your tactics and determine how you will execute. During this phase, you should examine the variables that may affect your strategy and determine if they are controllable or uncontrollable. Typically, the internal variables will be controllable and the external variables will be uncontrollable.

5.    Create control measures.

Lastly, you will create key control measures that will measure the success of the initiative. It may help to think of this step in terms of who does what… when… and how. Implementing control measures will help keep strategic planning a process instead of simply a document.

The key with strategic planning is developing specific goals with a specific implementation plan, while also being flexible enough to change within the changing environment of business.  

Service, Service, Service

There is a key element that we have not discussed directly that will make or break the success of a marketing strategy. That element is customer service. It doesn’t matter what your clinic does to drive traffic to it, at the end of the day, if the customer doesn’t have a positive service experience, they are not going to return.

I am taking a class this semester on services marketing and I have learned so much about all of the elements that come together to create a strong service experience for the customer. Most of the businesses that we have studied are large corporations, but it is remarkable how applicable the concepts are to small businesses.

Our next post will discuss strategic planning, but first, I want to create a sense of urgency for delivering superior service. Truly, if your clinic can master this art, it will be the most valuable thing that you can do for your business. I could write an entire blog about the foundations of services marketing, but I’ll leave you with a few principles to dwell on.

The framework of service marketing begins with identifying the right service, which you have done by establishing your practice. The next level is focusing on delivering quality service. This includes learning how to perform the service right the first time, performing the service very right the second time, and managing and exceeding customer expectations. Truly, this level is where most businesses need to spend a majority of their time.

The next level is maximizing your marketing potential. Once your business is consistently delivering quality service, you can focus on marketing to new customers, marketing to existing customers, and also marketing to your own employees. I’d like to make a quick comment about how important internal marketing is. I’m sure you all know how valuable it is to have quality employees. Take a moment to think about your current staff. Can you confidently say that the vast majority are the very best people to have in your practice? If so, that’s wonderful, you are succeeding at internal marketing. If not, perhaps you should dig a little bit deeper into the concept of internal marketing.

 I’d like to direct you to a book, written by my professor, Dr. Leonard Berry, which explores the nine drivers of developing a sustainable service model within a business. It’s called Discovering the Soul of Service  and it’s available through Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Discovering-Soul-Service-Sustainable-Business/dp/0684845113

The Secret to Success: Creating Value (Part 3)

The G-STIC Framework (cont.)

T – Designing the Tactics

Tactics are the set of activities that are used to execute a specific strategy. These tactics are defined by seven elements, commonly referred to as the marketing mix. These are the key decisions that build on the marketing strategy.

Product: It’s key functional characteristics. Implies transfer of ownership.

Service: Also reflects functional characteristics, but does not transfer ownership. Services are inseparable from service providers. 

Brand: Create a unique set of associations that enhances the product/service value beyond simply the functional benefits.

Price: The amount of money the business charges for the product/service

Incentives: Tools used to enhance the value for customers, collaborators, and/or employees. Can be monetary or non-monetary.

Communication: Informs current and potential clients about the offering. Can include elements from the other six marketing mix variables.

Distribution: The channels by which the client receives the offering.

I – Defining the Implementation Plan

Implementation is the logistics of executing the offerings strategy and tactics. There are three main components.

Business Infrastructure: Refers to the organizational structure. Involves identifying the business unit in charge of the offering, and identifying key personnel and collaborators.

Business Processes: Depict the activities involved in designing and managing the offering (flow of information, goods, and money).

Implementation Schedule: Identifies the sequence and time frame for tasks to be performed.

C – Identifying Controls

Controls serve two functions: to evaluate a business’s progress toward its goals and to analyze the changes in the business’s environment.

Performance Evaluation: Monitors the business’s progress toward reaching goals and maximizing performance.  

Environmental Analysis: Monitors the environment to be sure that the action plan remains optimal.

Conclusion

A visual representation of the G-STIC framework as described in the action plans that we’ve presented in the previous two posts can be seen below.

 Figure 1: The G-STIC Action Planning Pyramid

Because the purpose of any marketing plan is to guide the business’s actions, this framework is the most important component that will determine the viability of the marketing plan.

The Secret to Success: Create Value (Part 2)

The G-STIC Framework 

G - Setting a Goal

This is a pivotal part of the strategic planning process. Without a clearly defined goal, the other elements of the value creation process, and the overall success of the business, are doomed for failure.

There are two decisions involved with goal setting: identifying the focus of the businesses actions and setting specific benchmarks for measuring the business’s performance. The focus determines the key element of a business’s success and often includes elements such as net income, sales revenues, and market share.  Benchmarking looks at the goal and defines its temporal and quantitative aspects.

S - Developing a Strategy

A strategy outlines the activities that are needed to accomplish the business’s goals. This element is characterized by two key decisions: Identifying target customers and developing a value proposition.

The markets in which a business’s offerings compete can be best illustrated by the 5-C framework.

Figure 1: The 5-C Framework

Customers: Potential buyers who have needs that the business’s offerings aim to fulfill

Company: The business managing the offering

Collaborators: Entities that work with the business to create value for target customers

Competitors: Business’s whose offerings target the same customers

Context: Relative aspects of the environment in which the business operates

Target Market

Identifying your target market involves two key decisions: selecting which clients to serve and identifying actionable methods for reaching these clients.  Selecting which clients to serve, also known as strategic targeting, is done based on the businesses ability to fulfill a client’s needs in a way that is beneficial to the client, business, and collaborators. Often, a client’s needs are not easy to see, so a business will need to identify observable characteristics that can be used to reach the client, also known as tactical targeting. These characteristics may include demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral factors.

Value Proposition

As you have probably noticed, mutually beneficial value is a major theme in almost all discussions about marketing. True business success is achieved if a business creates a product offering that provides a client with more value than the competition’s offering in a way that creates value for the business and the collaborators. The value proposition is simply a definition of the value that the offering creates. This value proposition includes all of the benefits and costs associated with the offering. The next step is to define the positing strategy, which highlights the most important benefit of the offering. The most important benefit should be poignant and serve to differentiate the product in the mind of the client.

The Secret to Success: Create Value (Part 1)

As we discussed in the first post, the very heart of marketing is value creation. In fact, this leads us to the key marketing principle that serves at the foundation of all marketing activities: Optimizing value for the business, its collaborators, and its customers. A business’s success is reliant on value optimization. Because this is the fundamental marketing principle, value management is at the forefront of designing a marketing strategy and tactics.

The process by which a business creates value can be explained by the following set of five key activities:

    

Figure 1: G-STIC Framework

Congratulations! We’ve just been introduced to our first framework. This process for creating value is also known at the G-STIC framework for action planning. In our next post, we will discuss these elements in greater detail.