Erica Olsen

A strategic plan is essential for a successful business, and creating a strategic plan that you can actually use is key. Your plan should include certain elements, like mission, values, and vision statements. It should also avoid common pitfalls, like neglecting the specific needs of your organization, so it becomes your road map for success.

In strategic planning, benchmarks are surveys and assessments that help determine how well your company performs compared to other companies in your industry or business size. Following are just a handful of benchmarking tools available: BizStats: Visit the BizStats website for instant access to useful financial ratios, business statistics, and benchmarks.

Strategic plans can come in many different shapes and sizes, but they all have the following components. The list below describes each piece of a strategic plan in the order that they’re typically developed. Mission statement: The mission statement is an overarching, timeless expression of your purpose and aspiration, addressing both what you seek to accomplish and the manner in which the organization seeks to accomplish it.

Before you get too far into your strategic planning process, check out the following tips — your quick guide to getting the most out of your strategic planning process: Pull together a diverse, yet appropriate group of people to make up your planning team. Diversity leads to a better strategy. Bring together a small core team — between six and ten people — of leaders and managers who represent every area of the company.

Strategic planning can yield less than desirable results if you end up in one of the possible planning pitfalls. To prevent that from happening, here’s a list of the most common traps to avoid: Not having a burning platform: Fundamentally, organizations don’t have to have a strategic plan. Really, they don’t. Yes, you’ll run a better operation and, yes, a strategic plan is an outstanding management tool.

Strategic planning has a basic overall framework. Not to oversimplify the strategic planning process, but by placing all the parts of a plan into the following three areas, you can clearly see how the pieces of your plan fit together: Where are we now? Review your current strategic position and clarify your mission, vision, and values.

Strategic planning can create a ton of questions. If you already have a long list of questions, you’re not alone. Here are some answers to the most commonly asked questions. Who uses strategic plans? Everyone uses strategic plans — or at least every company and organization that wants to be successful. Companies in every industry, in every part of the world, and in most of the Fortune 500 use strategic plans.

The difference between strategic planning and strategic management can be profound to an organization when understood. Strategic planning usually refers to the development of a plan. Strategic management refers to both strategy development and execution. Strategic management is a business process. Strategic planning is an event.

After you’ve determined which products or services make money and which ones take money, evaluate which ones to invest in by looking at how attractive the market is. A widely used tool for conducting a portfolio analysis is the Market Attractiveness Framework, which provides a structure that works with your products and services as listed in the previous section.