‘Can you do good marketing without a marketing plan?’

Q: Why do you need a marketing plan when we’re doing so well? And we’ve been doing so well for the past 11 years! While we’ve not grown to become a large company, we’ve become a good medium-sized one and we did well even during the hard times.

I’m the marketing director and I’ve taken over this job some six years ago when the former marketing director passed away. Those three statements came from me and I said them last quarter of last year when we were into our annual corporate strategy planning.

I said them because those were what I heard from you in a marketing conference where you spoke. I was with my four marketing friends who were marketing executives in some other companies and who also do marketing without any formal marketing plan.

We felt so liberated by what you said, we forgot to ask you to elaborate or explain.

But now my CEO is asking me to explain because it looks like we won’t hit our topline and bottom-line numbers this quarter and if that’s the case, this will be for the first time in 12 years. So please explain why we can still do good marketing even without a marketing plan.

A: In logic, that’s the kind of trouble you get into when you remember only the conclusion but forget the premises.

However, if what you’re saying about how long it has been that you’ve been getting good results without a marketing plan is true, then you must be either extra-blessed or you’re an extra-lucky gambler.

Out of own experience in helping companies, it doesn’t take that many flights to figure into an accident when you’re always on auto-pilot whenever you’re landing. That’s what marketing without a good marketing plan is like.

We’re often asked why top management of companies that are run without a formal marketing plan tolerates the practice.

CEOs and COOs of these companies tell us that “there’s the annual business plan anyway.” The three-day or one-week annual retreat at the start of the last quarter or the end of the third quarter of the year for corporate strategy planning comes out with the business plan.

This is basically summarized in the company’s projected FSs (financial statements) consisting of the projected income statement, balance sheet and cash flow.

The topline sales figure of the projected income statement is marketing’s and sales’ targets for the coming year. By the time marketing and sales get these targets and deliberated on them, often there’s not enough time to translate them into the necessary marketing and sales plan for attaining them.

So, marketing and sales do the next “best” thing. That’s to come out with a list or a calendar of marketing and sales activities and events.

For all intents and purposes, this calendar becomes the company’s marketing and sales “plan.”

You didn’t mention the basis or framework you use for doing marketing.  If you’re a sales-driven company like almost all of our clients, then it’s likely that you have an annual calendar of sales and marketing activities as that basis.

Such a checklist of activities acts as the company’s crudest form of marketing plan. We seem to recall that it was no less than the management guru of all times, Peter Drucker, who noted that “quotas” (a calendar of activities qualifies as a bundle of quotas) have a self-fulfilling quality and character about them. If you have good implementors (and in your case, those are the people in your sales force and below-the-line team), the self-fulfilling will happen and quotas will be attained.

That’s not such a big “if” as many alarmists would think and say. And we’re confident that’s what you believe as well.

Most sales-driven companies have a good single-minded sales target implementors who are also natural-born BTL [below the line] enthusiasts.  If you have such implementors and enthusiasts, this will explain to quite an extent your 11-year-long “doing-so-well” record. At the same time, for as long as sales and marketing successes in your industry are driven by those implementors and enthusiasts, you will continue “to do well.”

But do you know that successful sales and marketing this year or next year will still be largely driven by these two factors?

You mentioned that there’s actually a big sign in your scorecard in terms of the first quarter’s likely quota non-attainment signaling that this year may be the start of a new marketing game. Unfortunately, you’re not sure.

You don’t know what specifically is working against you in that likely shortfall in sales performance. If you’ve done a year-to-year analysis, you would have known your areas of weakness, and you could have prepared a plan for correcting weaknesses.

If you had dug deeper into those forces working against you, you would have also found the major threats to your business growing.

If only you found these out, you could have prepared your defenses in your contingency plan.

You also don’t know what’s working for you that prevented your likely sales shortfall from becoming much larger.  f you have included this question for your year-to-year analysis to answer, you could have known your areas of strength, and therefore planned a reinforcement campaign for those strengths.

Strengths need reinforcing because if you don’t they tend to be eroded and forgotten. If you also had dug deeper here, you would have uncovered areas of opportunities for growing your business and market.

If only you found these out, you could have prepared your product and process innovation initiatives.

These are the basic elements of the marketing plan that you still believe you do not yet need. But think about it. It’s better to start now than later when it may be too late.

Keep your questions coming. Send them to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. God bless!