The One Word You Will Forget in Your 2015 Plans

“Execution”. Short posting right?

We have reached that time of the year again where sales teams are trying desperately to meet their goals and put together last minute sales plans, where CFO’s are developing the financial plan and top line revenue budgets to be met in 2015, and where leaders are revising business plans and looking to make changes based on the lack of meeting goals this year or the hopes of making goals next year.

It is also that time of the year where you (the sales and marketing experts) start down the annual marketing plan path looking to do market research, re-define your target markets, plan the content for your new products and services to launch, make SEO changes to your website, update social media profiles, revisit your SWOT and competitive analysis, communicate your mission statement, develop your marketing communications tactics and activities, schedule tradeshows, look at the 4 P’s, begin the begging process for a budget from your CFO, establish  goals, define what metrics your are going to use to measure success, hopefully use some sort of system to track the results of your efforts, and put all of this nicely into a report that makes you look really busy to the powers that be.

Sound familiar?  This scenario is being played out in companies all over the globe.  You have all the latest articles that tell you what the trends are for next year, you have the latest templates downloaded from the various marketing associations for planning, you have your three focus words for the year, You even have a useful spreadsheet that a consultant left behind which performs brilliantly as a tool for organizing it all.  But there is still something missing when all of the planning is complete and the appropriate approved forms are filled out and submitted to the leadership team for their 2015 files.

Where is the execution in all of this? Someone will eventually have to do the activities that are necessary to make all of these plans work. I guarantee that most of you will overlook the following questions and just submit plans on what you “want” to do and not what you are “going” to do. You will need an execution plan and it will need to answer the following questions:

• What exactly has to be completed?
• When does it have to be completed by? What is the timeline?
• Who is going to complete the activities?
• Who is capable of completing the activities or do we have to invest in training?
• What additional training and skills do we need to invest in?
• What tools and resources have we given that person to make sure they are successful?
• What benchmarks do we have to measure improvement?
• What happens if that activity is not completed? What are we at risk of losing if we don’t get that activity completed?
• What changes are we prepared to make if we can’t get the activity completed?

At the end of the day, the word “execution” and the execution plan are the only things that should matter to you for achieving your goals in 2015 and future years.  Without execution, your plans mean nothing and you can guarantee that you will fall short. Look for our next article on how to develop an execution plan.