Planning Provides a Roadmap for Decision Making

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Eisenhower said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  Planning was important to Eisenhower because he used it to guide his decision making in the heat of the battle.  It’s not much different for us when we’re competing in the marketplace, which can often feel like a battle!

Top leaders understand that instead of viewing planning as a low-value but necessary exercise, it’s a worthwhile endeavor that will prepare them to make more informed decisions throughout the year.  When challenges or opportunities come along, they can be evaluated against the plan for overall fit with the strategies and tactics that have been chosen.

So it’s not about the long, fancy plan, it’s about roll-up your sleeves and do the dirty work kind of planning that will be a roadmap for day to day decision making.

The Best Performance Management is Done in Real Time

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The ‘best performance management’ often doesn’t get done because it requires the discipline of honoring an on-going commitment.  It’s akin to exercise—everyone knows it’s good for you and you need to do it on a regular basis to get the full benefit, yet many people don’t do it.

Often companies do a good job of evaluating employee’s on a yearly basis in the form of a performance review which usually include goals for the coming year.  These might include revenue goals, new initiatives or projects to launch, or developmental areas to focus on.  All worthwhile topics for discussion and review, but often those documents are only revisited again at the end of the year.

Effective performance management needs to be an on-going process so that individuals can make adjustments to their activity in real-time, rather than reflecting back over an outcome, good or bad, months later.  Ideally the performance management discussion is held monthly and reporting out is done in advance of the meeting, so face time is not wasted on reviewing of spreadsheets and reports.  Once the habit is established within an organization, it feels odd to not be reviewing performance in real-time—it leaves people with the vague feeling that they’re missing something important.

End of Third Quarter Provides Opportunity for Evaluation of Metrics

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This time of year tends to ‘strike’ most of us like the blasts of cold Canadian air that will be coming our way soon.   How did we get to the fourth quarter of the year already?  Wasn’t it just the Fourth of July?

This is the perfect time of year to evaluate the measures we’ve been using throughout the year, both to monitor our year to date performance, and to begin to evaluate whether or not the measures have been helpful in directing our strategic decision making.

The key question to ask yourself relative to what you’ve been tracking this year is whether or not the results have been part of any ‘meaty’ discussions you’ve had as a management team.  Have your scorecard results been reviewed with exceptions discussed and options evaluated?  Have metrics not met been the catalyst for robust discussions on allocation of resources?

If your metrics are helping your management team to talk about the “why” of business results instead of just reporting out, then they’re probably worthwhile measures to continue evaluating into the next fiscal year.

Sales Plan Requires More Science than Art

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When I started in sales for the Business Imaging Systems division of Eastman Kodak after college, my notion of a successful sales person was someone who could talk to anyone, had a good personality and was likeable.  Once I actually got into the position though, I quickly began to realize that true consultative selling is actually more about the science of selling than the art of selling.

The science of selling requires looking at the process from beginning to end, and defining what needs to happen at each step of the way to advance the process forward.  Most complex sales cycles take weeks if not months to come full circle.  This means that the incremental steps that advance the process need to be monitored and measured to insure forward motion is occurring. 

If your organization doesn’t have a defined sales process, consider engaging a systems oriented person in your company, or form a task team to analyze your sales process.  This should include an analysis of the sales cycle from beginning to end including the marketing activities that create opportunities and the success rates at each step of the sales process.  This analysis could also include interviews with your salespeople and perhaps a few customers to get their perspective.  The goal is to have a solid picture or framework of all of the steps that need to occur and some best practices around each of those steps. The time spent understanding the science behind your sales process will be well worth the investment as it leads to stronger sales results over time. 

A Business Plan Represents a Set of Decisions

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Have you ever found yourself struggling to create a plan for your business?  Clients tell me that writing a business plan can be overwhelming.  First of all, the writing part of it trips a lot of folks up—it can feel a bit like writing a term paper.  Then there is the analysis that’s required—for those that don’t like the numbers it can feel a bit like doing math homework.  And finally, there’s the defining the future part of the plan—what will this business be when it grows up? 

One way to reorient your thinking on the subject is to realize that a business plan is basically a document that communicates a set of decisions.  Deciding is a powerful thing—it focuses your energy and provides clarity.  A business plan in essentially asking you to answer five questions:

1.      What am I building?

2.      Why does this business exist?

3.      How will we grow this business over time?

4.      What results will we measure?

5.      What is the important work to be done this year?

The on-going benefit of the business plan is that the decisions you make in the creation of the plan will guide your day-to-day decisions and provide a path for moving forward.