How To Use And Implement A Business Plan

All businesses work to a business plan and all business use this as a guideline or a focus to gain successful results. The word business planning is used in a business for setting out or planning goals for the company. There are two resulting affects of this which determine the running of the business, whether it leads them to success or to failure.

Some businesses use their business planning skills for profit increase; others devise a non-profit business plan. These are often set out very differently from each, where one is purely based on financial goal; the other is focussed on the business services to their client. Some business plans are focussed internally or externally meaning, that those, which are externally focussed work, plan to target the goals important to stakeholders.

The stakeholders in profit organisation are known as investors or customers, whereas non-profit stakeholders are known as donors, sponsors or clients. Internally focussed business planning involves reaching to target immediate goals for external agents. These plans can work towards restructuring the financial aspect of a business, a new IT system, refurbishment, new product services or a new business service.

Content

With nearly all business planning the content is the most important part of implementing it into the business. All plans begin with a mission statement, a status of where the business is at right now, competitor analysis, history of the business performance and aims and objectives (goals to follow). Often these vary with different types of planning such financial or service based planning.

These plans are often presented in via oral group presentation, a short business pitch to alert the interests of stakeholders, written proposal and planning format, and an internal operational plan that includes management planning objective. An open business plan is one that is made available to the public, via the web. Access to this kind of information was once made confidential; however, new software developments have made it possible for public view.

Business plans are used collectively within a team environment. Not only does this benefit the business for good results, but also stimulates strong communication between staffs. This provides the staff a concrete understanding of their roles and a clear understanding of the methodology. These are normally implemented through setting clear instructions to specific people in their roles.

Normally these are designated purposefully for a specialised area possibly for improvement of this section or area of the business. This is usually discussed during team meetings, whereby during the planning process management and/or staff can input their goals and ideas coming to a mutual compromise.

The overall objective is always discussed first, which acts a central part of the planning process. However, externally planned goals tend to be hand written or discussed via directors and management level. These are generally tailored to meet to stakeholders goals.

Sales Lead Generation Must Start with a Strategy - Step 1

If you're selling professional or technology services to business and you're not satisfied with the options and costs to outsource your lead generation, consider doing it yourself. There are challenges, but they can be overcome, even without a well staffed marketing group, senior marketing leadership or the expense of recruiting.


Keep Your Planning Simple

The first thing you need is a plan. Some companies try to skip this stage because they don't know how to plan a lead generation program or understand why they need one. Trying to skip the planning stage is a huge mistake.

If you’re not convinced, consider the only two reasons you should need to change your mind.


1. Without a written strategy it's difficult to repeat your successes and easy to repeat your failures.

2. You'll save a bundle of money by knowing what you want to do before you start spending.


Creating a strategy is a process like any other. It can be complicated or you can streamline it. Complicating is great if it's all you do and someone else is paying for your hours. But, if you have a business to run and other things to do with your time, go for the streamlined version. There are no guarantees that every lead program will be successful, but it's 100% certain that you will get no leads if you over complicate and therefore never get past writing a strategy.

You can write a workable lead generation strategy in five steps, but don't expect that you can run the program by yourself.

Create a Team to Get the Job Done

Running a lead generation and nurturing program is a lot of work, best accomplished by forming a dedicated team and matching the tasks with the skills. As tempting as it might be to try and do everything yourself, it's not efficient. You might be the best person to make important decisions that impact your business, but there's also a lot of legwork. Delegate it if you can.

Consider a team of three people:


* A Business Leader to spearhead the program. This is someone with an excellent overview of the business operation and the authority to approve whatever needs to be done – or spent. (Like you?) Don't waste everyone's time by creating a Lead Generation team without the authority to spend whatever budget is allocated.

* A Sales Leader. Without participation from Sales, your lead generation program is missing vital information and support. Your sales team knows your customers, their environment, their motivations and the playing field, better than anyone else. They know by being out there – not by reading about it. Many companies ignore Sales as a resource, but you can do better. Have a sales leader on your lead generation team.

* An Administrative Support Person. This person will do the legwork and make a critical contribution to your success. There are many small, important tasks that are not difficult. Assuming that a senior person can do them better or faster is wrong. With the demands on their time, the truth is they'll just become a bottleneck. So assign a motivated, intelligent, sales or marketing coordinator or administrative support person to do the legwork. As an added bonus, this is an excellent training opportunity to develop young talent in your business.



Step One of Your Plan - Define 'What are you Selling?'

The first step in your plan it simply to define what you're selling and what it does. If you're a reseller with a partner to underwrite your cost, write about what you're offering with them. If you have a variety of products or services, decide what you're going to lead with (no pun intended). Remember, you're not going to create any sales leads with puffy generalizations. This is the time to be specific and direct.

Put it in writing and try for 10 words or less. This might sound unnecessary, even silly, but when you try to put something in writing, you'll often discover that what you thought was crystal clear in your head, is difficult to write. That's because it's not as clear as you thought. Strategy demands absolute clarity.

If you're like many of your business colleagues, this simple question leads you into your first brick wall - and it reads like this:

'A comprehensive solution to optimize your business processes'

'Systematized process management and workflow optimization'

'Business intelligence software to maximize the value of corporate data'

'A complete range of value-added services'



Look familiar? Technically these statements are accurate (even if they do all sound the same). They're even meaningful to the right audience. But if you try to drive your lead generation, with an offering that is so bogged down in jargon that it's meaningless to the average business person – you're dead in the water.

A good strategy is a lot like a good CIO, it bridges the communications gap between jargon and the rest of the business world. What you need to eventually communicate are the benefits that will speak to the interests of business decision makers. They won't likely care about infrastructure optimization, but they'll probably understand a replacing five pieces of equipment with one. Don't worry about fine tuning any meaningful benefits. That will come later. For now, simply describe what you're selling.

So, try it one more time. You're done when you have a statement that's a truthful representation of your offering, that any reasonably intelligent person can understand.

As well as providing a platform for the rest of your strategy, this simple first step will help you acquire the most incredibly important communications skill. You're framing your message from target's point of view.

This is only the beginning of a process that will evolve as new pieces of information are unearthed, considered and integrated. Right now, your audience is generalized and we haven't looked at the benefits or competitive advantages that you have to offer.

But stop here for now. You have formed your team and you've defined your offering in a way that your prospects can relate to. It's not carved in stone. If you find a better definition you can go with it. Just remember that if you can't put it in writing, it's not as clear as you thought.

Getting Some Research Started

Have your sales or marketing coordinator (or your administrative jack of all trades) assembling information under the direction of your Sales Leader. You'll use it to create your Customer/Prospect Profile. Your Sales Leader will also need to contribute to Step 3.

Step 1

Identify 10 of the customers you most wish you could clone and five of your top prospects. Get some level of consensus from sales, accounting, customer service and other relevant groups. They will not necessarily be your biggest customers. Here are six questions to consider when choosing. If there are other key points that are important to your company, add or substitute as necessary.


1. Total revenue contribution

2. Good margins, pay their bills on time

3. Potential to increase revenue from this customer

4. A door opener to a larger opportunity; a division of a larger company, a marquis company that will attract others or a wedge into a new vertical

5. Does this company create an opportunity to expand or extend your product or service offering?

6. Reasonable to work with, not overly demanding or disorganized, not abusive to your people



Step 2

For each of the selected companies you need to identify: the industry, geographic location, # of employees and revenue. Set it up on a spreadsheet to make life easier. There is a sheet already set up on my site. Go to the Back Issue and Downloads Page and choose the Customer Profile Spreadsheet. Enter the names of the companies along the top and working though each company, mark the appropriate boxes.

Step 3

To be completed by Sales/ Sales Management
For each of these customers – What was their first purchase and as you recall– what was your first contact (cold call, partner referral, website inquiry, etc.) with them? For prospects, what do you expect the first sale to be and indicate your first contact.

Very simply, the first sale was your foot in the door. This is a deliberate look at which foot you've been using successfully in the past. It might help to focus your lead generation approach. If you have a big product line up, it's never a bad idea to use the product which you usually sell first to drive your lead generation. Sounds pretty obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many companies choose to lead with something else.

The next step in your plan will be to examine "Who are you selling to?"

http://www.your-marketing.net is the new website for LAC Marketing Manuals. This company was formed to provide complete lead generation instruction to businesses with small marketing departments and budgets.

Run the Business / Change the Business - Dual Perspective Proves Key to Success

Change management is a lot like artificial heart transplant surgery: A crucial surgical objective during the implantation of an artificial heart is to keep the patient alive while the surgery is going on. Not exactly a minor detail!

Actually, keeping the patient alive turns out to be a pretty complicated process; it requires very special machinery that has been developed and tested over many years. In fact, there may be more patents on the stay-alive-during-surgery technology than on the artificial heart itself!

When we implement change, we use two kinds of technology as well; in this case the first technology is the body of knowledge - or expertise - associated with the change, which is analogous to the artificial heart. Let's assume that the change in which we are interested in implementing is Process Management. In this example, we would need the Process Management body of knowledge which we are implementing (implanting) in the organization (patient).

The second technology is analogous to the surgical procedure. It is our Change Management system. And like our surgical procedure, it has the dual objectives of changing the business (implanting the heart) and running the business (keeping the patient alive during the procedure).

No change initiative (like Process Management) occurs in a vacuum. The initiative must necessarily go on while the organization is "staying alive," doing its "day job" of producing products, serving customers, collecting monies, and so on... in order to make a profit for share/stakeholders.

While in most cases there will be a number of moving parts to a full-blown run-the-business / change-the-business system, simple examples do exist. Imagine a senior executive team that meets every Monday. They might use the morning session to focus only on run-the-business issues (e.g., progress toward financial targets, status on actions to fix customer upsets, manufacturing breakdowns, etc.) In the afternoon they might focus only on change-the-business issues - like our Process Management implementation (e.g., who are the next managers to receive training, what is the progress on the pilot project in each department, how far along is the task force that is mapping core processes, how far along is HR in designing an incentive compensation system that supports Process Management, etc.).

The regular practice of the two executive meetings each Monday becomes a rudimentary "management system" that provides focus and balance to both running and changing the business. This simple but powerful idea can be extremely valuable to organizations trying to implement change because it moves their thinking from an unconscious "change the business OR run the business" to a conscious "change the business AND run the business."

It takes heroic leadership to maintain this duality. Daily temptation lurks everywhere...

* "Let's cancel the afternoon meeting; we don't need it. We had a good change-the-business session two weeks ago."

* "We really need the time this Monday afternoon to get to the details of the current customer problem in the southern region."

Just as a heart patient makes a heroic decision to permit the implanting of an artificial heart, we need executive leadership at the very top making the heroic decisions the organization needs to stay the course of organizational change.

Senior executives must make the decision to lead a fully-committed change effort, providing the personal "in front of the troops" presence and direction, to provide the needed resources and organizational time... while continuing to run the business on a daily basis in order to meet or exceed the year's business goals.

Doing Business In The Future - Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is a set of activities performed by organizations to improve or streamline their business processes. Since software tools are usually used to aid these activities, these software tools are referred to as Business Process Management Systems.

- Business Process Management Systems

Business Process Management has been in place for some time now. Due to the introduction of software tools, however, there has been renewed interest in the body of knowledge pertaining to BPM. These software tools make design and implementation of Business Process Management easier, cheaper, and more efficient. There are three categories of Business Process Mmanagement activities - design, execution and monitoring.

1. Design

Designing BPM involves capturing the existing processes in a business environment. These processes must be modeled in a way that they can be simulated and tested. Modeling these processes usually involves graphical representation methods that document the processes and stores this data in repositories.

2. Execution

Traditionally, to implement automation in a business organization, developers would have to be contracted to develop applications that automate certain processes. Unfortunately, the scope of these projects was often too narrow. The result of which is that the automation is not well integrated into the business environment since the automation only deals with a particular department or function. BPMS champions a method that pushes for the development of applications that encompass the entire business process. It aims to fully automate the business environment only stopping to query the user when human intervention is absoultely necessary.

3. Process monitoring

Process monitoring involves observing and taking note of the performance of the individual processes so that evaluation and intervention become more straightforward for the business organization. From the information gleaned from here, the business organization's leaders can make further decisions on the direction the business process takes. The data from this activity can be used to generate different kinds of statistics that are necessary when having to make critical decisions. Business Process Management is an iterative process.

4. The Future

Although BPM strives to automate the mechanical processes of a business, there has been interest in developing BPMs that move into the territory of human judgment. Some of the processes involved in a business environment are not included in the automation because some sort of human decision is needed. With the growing complexity of information systems - especially studies into decision support systems and artificial intelligence - some human decision-making processes can actually be automated. This is the future goal of BPM, to futher automate previously unautomatable processes.

- The Business Process Management Ideals

In 1920, Frederick Taylor outlined three waves of business ideals in managing processes. These waves represented the ways of thinking business process engineers had.

Wave 1. Processes Set In Stone

They are secured in business policy manuals. The manual is the basis of the process, and the organization has to abide by it.

Wave 2. Processes Changed Once In A While

Using a one-time activity, changes can be made. This means that the business would have to build their processes around a fixed system since change can only come once in a while, and at a great cost.

Wave 3. Processes On-The-Fly

The primary consideration in such systems is flexibility to change. Businesses that adhere to this goal create business environments that can adapt to its changing needs. This setup also allows the business to constantly fine tune its operations. This wave is not about business-process reengineering. It is about maintaining an environment that is constantly on its toes, ready to adapt to the circumstance, and maximize its strengths while downplaying its weaknesses.

Change is the only constant, they say. In this modern day and age, this could not be truer. The survival of a business could very well rely on its ability to constantly tweak its processes according to the whims of change. With the growing body of knowledge concerning Business Process Management, the path towards a sustainable market advantage based on a streamlined, flexible business organization can only get clearer.