$$$ and People

A lot of things boil down to money and people, don’t they? Marketing efforts are no exception.

The final components of your marketing strategy should cover these two topics:

Financials – forecast & budgets
Controls – implementation and organization

When we talk about Financials for your company’s strategic marketing plan, we are specifically talking about your sales forecast and your marketing budget to support that forecast. Every organization should understand their sales track record and should use this to support the development of their 12-month sales forecast. You need to:

Review your sales from the most recent 12-month history.
Consider how many sales associates it took to get you to where you are today. Do you have the right people in place to get you to where you need to be over the next 12 months? Do you plan on adding to your sales team? How long will it take for them to begin producing for you?
Review the products/services you sold. Do you see a trend? Can you predict if that same trend will hold true over the next 12 months? Do you have new products/services to sell? If so, how many can you expect to sell with your current staff and at what price point?
Consider other growth opportunities you have over the next 12 months.

Once you have spent time in analysis and consideration, formulate a realistic sales forecast for the upcoming 12 months. Now, the next step! You’ve already brainstormed and come up with what you believe is a good tactical list of programs for your organization and you have validated them against your research. Now we have to put numbers to these programs and see if the marketing spend is realistic based on the sales forecast we just created.

We typically recommend our clients having a marketing budget that is no more than 15% of their sales forecast. This allows for a good marketing mix of programs that can support the anticipated company growth.

Now that we’ve got a budget, the final step is defining the marketing organization and how the plan will implemented. By defining the marketing organization, I mean really putting together a chart of personnel or outsourced organizations and what role each of them will play. Your implementation plan should include major projects, milestones, and timelines so that those driving the bus can determine if they are on the right road!

Whew! All done! That is the final component to developing your organization’s marketing strategy!