Market Activity Planning

Most managers will agree that a sensible way to manage the sales and marketing function is to systematically identify a range of options and choose one of them. The next step being to schedule and cost out what has to be done to achieve the objectives. This process is marketing activity planning, which is the planned application of marketing resources to achieve marketing objectives.

The problem is, that while as a process it is intellectually simple to understand, in practice it is the most difficult of all marketing tasks. The reason is that it involves bringing together into one coherent plan all the elements of marketing, and then justifying the decision.

In our experience the main reason for this difficulty is that there is not much guidance available to management on how the process itself might be managed. Plans get written,  reviewed and considered against the company's overall strategies, programs, budgets and the rewritten and back again.

This can continue until some kind of acceptable compromise is reached between what is desirable and what is practicable, given all the constraints that any company has.

Or in the worst cases no compromise is reached which often results in a disappointing market performance.

The Forward Focus Group with its broad experience can help in quickly developing a comprehensive plan (with the existing team) which recognises the opportunities and the constraints. We also try to transfer the techniques so “next year’s plan” is do-able

If this sounds like it would be useful to you, talk to our current contact person now - 
Mike Davidge - direct on 0408 504 939