There’s no virtue in pretending you can do more than is feasible. Examine the limitations of your budget, resources, production capacity and the appeal of your offering. Then, when you decide, forecast or guess (most of business has elements of inspired guessing involved) what your sales are going to be and what you need to do to achieve them, make sure the plan you aim to achieve looks ‘realistic’.
This doesn’t mean to say you shouldn’t be ambitious and try hard to beat your forecasts. Just don’t overcook it. You’ll regret it if you do.
Don’t try and fight above your weight, which could prove futile and painful.
So decide who you are and the limits of your ambitions:
- Are you doing DIY marketing with a small budget and is what you are involved in a ‘one-off’ with hardly any pennies to count?
- Are you in a small business (maybe even your own business) where every penny really counts?
- Are you in a middle-sized company trying to be a bigger company, with a sense of being squeezed by retailers or distributors and where every penny is important?
- Are you in the marketing department of a big marketing company with access to professional resources (both internal and external)? You should still have an ‘Every penny has to count’ attitude, but there are a lot more pennies and your options are somewhat more extensive.
In life we all discover everything is relative, so don’t try and be a big company marketer in a small parish church and don’t design your own posters in a big company.
Headline questions
Before you write the brief for your plan, think really hard about the following questions. Because in a busy, busy world we spend too much time rushing around and not enough time thinking. Here are some simple, get-that-brain-working questions:
- What are you really selling (or look at it the other way – what are people buying from you)?
- What are you really trying to achieve?
- How hard is this going to be?
- Why?
- Are you sure your key objective is right?
- How much money and other resources do you have to achieve that?
- Over what period of time are you trying to achieve it?
- What’s your simple central story or message?
Remember you are just laying foundations. This process is one where a sudden blinding insight can transform everything. But this is the professional way of starting the process. Thinking, kicking things around and asking the probing questions.
Writing the brief
Briefs are not called brief for nothing, so keep it short and to the point. The discipline of writing a brief will focus your mind. It would be great to get it down to just two or three pages. The aim is to have a simple piece of writing that is so clearly written a stranger will understand precisely what it is you want, need and are looking for.
Sit down with as many people as possible who stimulate or inspire you to talk about your brief.
The selling message is the key to success
Great, simple sales pitches can inspire your imagination, your feelings or your brain. Just don’t be too subtle and don’t be boring.
Think of the great sales messages of our time. Castrol isn’t just oil, it’s ‘liquid engineering’, which implies this is the real McCoy – the one the pros understand. Carslberg used to say it was ‘probably the best lager in the world’ – the word ‘probably’ is heavy with irony: probably = definitely agree or I’ll thump you (probably). And, in a cynical world, how about Innocent saying ‘We sure aren’t perfect but we’re trying to do the right thing’? That’s better than Google’s ‘We do no evil’ because, try as they might, they do – sometimes. Mind you, they do more good and are big, busy and innovative enough to get away with it. But if I were them I’d nick the more honest Innocent approach.
Refining the core selling message is critical. If you have ‘true intent’, expression of it will always be concise: ‘We are going to win;’ ‘We are one of the most exciting companies in the world;’ ‘We are the best shirt-maker in the world;’ and so on.
Focus on the ‘what it is’, ‘why you need it’ part of the message. Do not allow yourself to be accused of producing a message that has people saying, ‘I didn’t know what your product was for and what it did.’ And always think about where the message will be seen. Is it likely to be where you have a captive audience or where you have to shout to be heard or do something really creative?
A new way of looking at brilliance is that less is more.
But whatever else you do, keep it short.
I loved Picasso’s comment to a man who saw him next to a large lump of marble and, on hearing that Picasso intended to hew a horse head from it, said that looked like a jolly hard thing to do. Picasso replied:
‘Not really, what I have to do is chip away the bits that don’t look like horse – that’s all.’
Brilliance in marketing is about chipping away, finding and being thrilled by new possibilities. So let’s get chipping.
Present the plan as though you mean it
Presenting your plan to a board, investors, a business partner, or your wife or husband whom you want to buy into your decision to stop looking for a job and start a new business instead, needs to be treated seriously. And it needs to be done with confidence, style and thoroughness.
Check your plan for any holes. Ask yourself ‘Would I buy this?’
Presenting a plan shouldn’t be a process – you should give those to whom you’re presenting ‘an experience’. Be creative. Do it somewhere unusual. From the top of a high building – talk about perspective, vision, being above the battle – or have a meeting in the Cabinet War Rooms and talk about the competitive strategies you are facing in your ‘brand war’. Or do it in a box at a local football ground where, looking at the green striped grass below, you can talk about the big words in football – commitment, possession, pace and creativity.
Now present it really fast
Like me I expect you hate jargon, which I’ve tried my best to avoid. So I hate the phrase ‘elevator pitch’. The last time I was in a lift and someone said ‘Can I pitch you an idea?’ my heart sank and I lost concentration, because that’s just old-fashioned interruption selling.
Write a script – think ‘Twitter-short’ – and divide it into three parts:
- Why people want what you have.
- How your product is better.
- What makes your marketing likely to succeed.
Be creative. You’re allowed to start ‘My grandmother hated Marmite but she loved Vegemite so I thought…’. Get thinking – personalise the consumer – be interesting.
Never stop planning or expecting the unexpected
Plans are not written in stone. As the increasingly impressive JM Keynes said to someone criticising him for changing track:
‘When circumstances change, I change my mind, sir. What do you do?’
Be prepared to tear up your plan.
A plan is just a plan. Things can change. Be prepared to review on a very regular basis to be sure nothing needs tweaking or changing. If it does, change it. It’s that simple.
Why small plans are the best ones
The Google headquarters I visited, companies such as Apple (which feels like a company I know rather than use), call centres such as BUPA (who sound like they know you), all act small. Acting small means they are all into detail – your name, your history – you, not a number.
Great businesses remember … that’s one of the key differences between good and bad businesses. Good ones remember. Great ones remember and know all about you.
In writing your plan put in an extra section, ‘How we must plan to make our customers feel special’. This may be the most important part of the brief. It’s also the biggest opportunity that small businesses have.
Remember all you can about your customers (especially if you’re small). The other guys have what they laughingly call a database; you have memory and humanity.
- Your product or service. What is it, what does it do, who is it for, where do I get it, why is it good, who is the owner/promoter of it and what, in a nutshell, is it all about?
- What is/are the unique assets, characteristics of your product? Also list and explain all the characteristics that may not be unique but are still interesting and worth talking about. Try and identify your ‘key message’. This is your opportunity to be passionate, excited and exciting. Sell yourself.
- What does your consumer think? Is there any research? What are the good and not so good things? See if you can define what it is that is most important to the potential consumer. How do you think your consumer or customer feels, as opposed to thinks, about your product? How do they use the product? How do they buy it? Who are they? Why do those who use it like it?
- What can we learn from sales? Where, when and why do they peak or trough? How do you achieve them? What does anyone at the sharp end of sales say about what’s needed?
- Your competition. Who and what are they, how do they compare in price, quality, presentation, people, star appeal, benefits and size? What do people think about them? Which of you’d win in a stand-up fight and why?
- What does this campaign have to do? Does it have to sell something, open the door for someone to sell something, merely inform, change a given group’s opinion about something or so on. Avoid the temptation of asking for more than one thing to be done. And if you can’t do that, isolate the most important task.
- What specific challenges need to be overcome? These might be the economy, recent competitive activity, adverse news coverage, your competitors’ weight of marketing spend, or suspicions that your product is inferior to other products, anything – this is our ‘Please be honest’ time.
- What will success look like? Put a number on it: sales; market share; penetration increase; distribution gain; PR stories. Don’t be vague. Be brave.
- What’s your budget? Ditto.
- What other resources do you have? People (employees or volunteers), free material, premises, anything you can think of …