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 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.

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.

No matter whether you’re strategically targeting 18- to 34-year-old high-income males or 65- to 85-year-old fixed income retirees, you’ve got to reach them effectively and efficiently. That means finding the right balance of marketing tools and program elements to create and deliver the right product or service to consumers at the right price, right location, right time, and with the right features and attributes.

Sometimes a strategic positioning statement sounds like a tag line or a slogan. That’s fine, but remember that the purpose of a positioning statement isn’t to be cute. Instead, its purpose is to help guide all your and your staff’s activities associated with a specific target customer group. This positioning statement is the core message you want to deliver in every medium and everything you do.

You need to have a complete picture of your company to adequately prepare a strategic plan, so taking a high-level look at your market is important. Your market is a group of customers that you can easily identify who respond to your products or services in similar ways. Your offering satisfies the needs and wants of the whole group.

Strategic planning answers where you are now, where you’re going, and how you’re getting there. Visualize a famous bridge, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, or Tower Bridge. All bridges have two primary support pillars and a span between the two, allowing one part of land to be connected with another.

For an excellent example of strategic planning at work, consider the following case study. Cisco and Monitor Global Business Network set out to develop scenarios that answered important questions about the future of the Internet. The following example may be relevant to your organization. Although you may not be able to use these scenarios in total because they weren’t created to solve your specific business issue, often you can use them as inputs to your scenario planning process.