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WHY DO GOOD PLANS FAIL?

Market leaders generate better returns on marketing investments because they manage marketing differently than average performers. They do this in three ways.

First, their management teams are obsessed with understanding and serving the market, and their insatiable curiosity gives them better insight. This insight produces the Crystal Ball Effect, an improved ability to accurately anticipate what the market needs and how to communicate effectively with them. Companies that haven’t cultivated a culture of curiosity about their market can improve their effectiveness by aggressively identifying assumptions about what influences their success and turning them into facts through research or improved market focus.

Second, market leaders view the purpose of marketing and other operational activities differently. Many average performers ‘do’ marketing to drive sales. For them, marketing (Point A), results in sales (Point B). By contrast, market leaders align everything they do (Point A), with their desire to provide exceptional solutions to the customer, (Point B). Serving the market better than anyone else is what produces superior returns. For market leaders, financial results are Point C, the outcome of the effective alignment between marketing activities and the market’s needs. Companies that don’t share market leaders’ adherence to the Point C Principle, the internal mandate to align everything they do with market needs, can enjoy the benefits of alignment by using the Marketing Alignment Map to evaluate marketing plans.

Basing plans on facts and aligning marketing activities with the market are the first two keys to improving marketing returns in any company. When a company pursues both consistently, it can produce a focused marketing plan with financial returns that exceed industry averages.

Of course, many average performers do both of these things well. In fact, it is not uncommon for companies to produce extremely well-constructed, well-constructed, thorough marketing plans. Yet, many will still fail to produce optimum results. Why is that?

Why do good plans fail?

Because they are missing the third marketing behaviour of market leaders: systematic execution. These plans most often fail simply because they are never completed.

I call this the Tortoise Law, and I’ll explain why.

The remainder of this chapter will address the various ways in which organisations abandon their marketing efforts, the common causes that drive the behaviour and some of the proactive ways a company can avoid losing the marketing race.

THE TORTOISE LAW

Most people are familiar with Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare. The confident hare boasts that he can win any race against his notoriously slow opponent. He shoots out of the gate, quickly leaving the tortoise in the distance behind him. However, at some point, he stops. He stops running the race, pausing instead to take a nap. By the time he resumes the race, the tortoise is within easy reach of the finish line. The hare races to the best of his abilities to beat him, but the tortoise finishes before he can do so. The steady plodding of the tortoise bested the erratic speed of the hare.

Marketing investments are frequently made in erratic spurts, not unlike the hare’s approach to the race. Money is poured into the marketing budget when the economy booms or the executive team wants improved sales results. Unfortunately, most marketing investments take some time to succeed. By the time the executive team instructs the marketing team to move quickly, the market leaders are crossing the finish line.

That’s because market leaders follow the Tortoise Law. They invest in marketing steadily over time, doggedly pursuing their business and financial objectives. Unlike the hare, market leaders don’t take a break to rest when the economy turns downward or shift directions in response to the competitive environment. Market leaders are steadfastly focused on Point C, and they make steady investments in marketing energy and effort until they reach it.

One of the market leader executives interviewed explained his approach to marketing efforts quite succinctly. In economic booms, he said, everyone invests. No single voice is heard well from among the din of competition. Market leaders continue to invest in marketing during economic booms because they understand it is the lifeblood of their organisation, but that is not when they generate the most benefit from their investment.

The greatest benefit, he explained, comes from marketing investments during economic downturns. That’s because most companies slash marketing budgets to sustain or improve profitability. Like the hare, they take a break from the competitive fray. But not the market leader.

The market leader knows that this is when the market will be most able to hear what the company has to say. It is during economic downturns that market leaders acquire market share from their sleeping competitors. Then, when the market rebounds, their profitability soars. This longer-term focus on the finish line, rather than the short-term focus on competitive activity or the bottom line, pays off when market leaders finish in first place.

Intuitively, most clients understand the Tortoise Law. When I talk to them about investing in longer-term strategies, it makes sense to them. If this is the case, why are so many average performers still taking naps during the race?

There are a number of reasons, and they typically manifest in one of three ways. First, the company’s executive team makes a deliberate decision to discontinue investing in the plan they had previously approved. Second, the company simply fails to carry out the plan, and it simply drifts away from its investment commitment. Finally, the company finds itself unable to execute and is forced to discontinue its marketing activities.

WHY COMPANIES VOLUNTARILY ABANDON THEIR PLANS

Many companies go through the process of developing a marketing plan, executing it and then discontinue funding it. Many companies do this in response to tightening budgets or other financial constraints. When they are considering how they can trim expenses, marketing and human resources typically top the list. However, sometimes companies deliberately change paths for other reasons.

The most common reasons companies voluntarily abandon an otherwise well-constructed and previously approved marketing plan are addressed in the following paragraphs.

Lack of Executive Commitment

The most common reason that marketing plans are intentionally abandoned is because the executives who approved the plan and corresponding budget were not committed to its execution, either because they didn’t see the investment as important or because they never fully understood how the company would benefit when they approved it.

Several years ago, I worked with a regional construction firm’s marketing and operations team, including their president, to help them construct a marketing plan. We used the Marketing Alignment Map and carefully identified key customer decision process factors we wanted to influence and estimated return. In order to facilitate execution, we identified, recruited and helped them hire an experienced marketing manager to oversee execution.

After about six months, I called the marketing manager to see how she was progressing on the plan. She said she wasn’t. The CEO, who had not been involved in the planning process and who had previously approved the plan, had been talking with a friend who told him the future in marketing was all about social media. When he returned to the office, he told the marketing manager to discontinue several of the more substantial portions of the plan and reallocate the funding to a social media manager his friend had recommended. The other components of the plan, which were designed to work together, were virtually useless independently, and the manager was scrambling to deliver some returns on the CEO’s newly found marketing passion.

This is a common outcome when an executive is not involved in the planning process. In some cases, this can be averted if the executive team is integrally involved in marketing planning. Because they are engaged in the planning discussions, they understand how the components work together, have the opportunity to voice concerns or make suggestions early in the process and have a better understanding of the expected outcomes.

When it is not practical for the executive team to participate in the development of marketing strategies, they should at least take the time to thoroughly understand how the strategies and tactics will affect outcomes and over what time frame. Before the plan is approved, every executive should be able to connect the dots between the market’s needs and the company’s goals, the marketing strategies and related tactics and the expected financial returns.

Leadership Changes

A large not-for-profit organisation once retained me to help them develop a marketing and development plan and corresponding budget to help guide the organisation while they were seeking a new development director. Because we knew a new development director would bring his or her own preferred approach to the table, the plan was relatively short, just 18 months long, which emphasised the continuity of successful programmes, gradual discontinuation of programmes with low or negative returns and relatively few additions. It was designed to span the length of time that the position was open, plus the first few months of the development director’s tenure.

Happily, the organisation was able to identify, recruit and hire the new development director more quickly than anticipated. Unfortunately, she decided to abandon the plan, working from scratch to create a new one. Although the ultimate results were very similar, the time she spent reworking her plan had the same effect as the nap in the tale of the tortoise and the hare. Nothing happened during the transition.

Leadership changes in marketing or in the management team are often unavoidable. To avoid a negative outcome, the remaining team should clearly communicate both its expectations about the new leader’s commitment to the existing plan and the logic behind its development.

Failure to Plan for Change

Sometimes, a plan is deliberately abandoned because it failed to accommodate for changes in the economic or competitive environment. This is often the reason plans are abandoned during economic downturns. During the planning process, no one thought to ask what would happen if the economy suddenly began to sag.

To prevent the need to slash marketing budgets during economic downturns, the executive team, and particularly the financial team, should ask what might happen if the company’s financial resources were more constrained, or, conversely, if the company found that it had more funds available. By preparing both best and worst case scenarios as a part of the planning process, the executive team can be confident that the plan would accommodate economic change.

Marketing plans should also include funding for unexpected opportunities. I once worked with a manufacturing company whose executives wanted to aggressively grow market share. As we developed their marketing plan, we deliberately allocated funds to ‘unexpected opportunities,’ which we agreed might include acquisition opportunities, previously unidentified channel opportunities or technology-driven product innovation opportunities. The expectation was not that these funds would be spent. Instead, we wanted to make sure they would not have to discontinue part of, or its entire, existing marketing plan in order to pursue potentially lucrative, but previously unidentified, activities.

Planning ahead for potential changes, both good and bad, can help a company avoid abandoning an existing plan before it delivers returns.

No Evidence of Progress

The loose use of the word marketing to describe sales has the distinct disadvantage of leading some executives to believe that marketing delivers immediate financial returns in the form of increased revenues. Although this may occasionally be true, it is more common for marketing investments to deliver returns over an extended period, frequently beyond the timeline for the investment itself. For example, investments in product innovations will not pay off until the product is actually purchased by a defined number of customers. Advertising, and many other promotional investments, must be made continually over a period of 12-18 months in order to generate a payoff, and the associated revenues will continue to be recognised after the advertising run is complete.

Unfortunately, this delay in revenue impact causes some impatient executives to second guess their strategies, especially when profitability sags due to upfront investments. If they do abandon the marketing plan, they are often abandoning much of the investment they made before generating any return. This is part of what has caused marketing to develop a murky reputation for dubious returns.

Marketing is not a short-term investment. It is a longer-term strategy. To prevent frustrated executives from cutting funding before the investments can generate a return, the marketing plan should include both clear financial projections regarding required investments and the timeline for expected returns and intermediate metrics, often non-financial in nature, that can help provide reassurance that the plan is on track.

Executive Distrust

Finally, many executives abandon marketing plans before they have delivered a return because they do not trust that marketing will deliver a financial return. They see marketing expenditures as highly speculative and, when funds are tight, the most appropriate expenses to cut.

Unfortunately, marketers often do little to reassure them. Often unversed in the financial language used by executives, many marketers, particularly in smaller organisations, are ill-equipped to provide the type of financial analysis that usually accompanies recommended investments in other aspects of operations. In addition, marketers are often resistant to being held accountable for results. This isn’t entirely surprising because marketers are typically only one portion of the equation. In order for marketers to be successful, the product or service must be produced and delivered to the customer’s satisfaction. Other portions of operations are often out of the control of the marketing team.

In order to address this type of distrust, executives, particularly finance and operations executives, must work with marketers to complete the appropriate analysis and identify other aspects of operations that must be coordinated in order to generate the anticipated results.

WHY COMPANIES DRIFT AWAY FROM THEIR PLANS

Whereas some companies intentionally abandon their plans, others simply drift away. It’s not that they weren’t interested in executing it. They thought it was a good plan when they approved it, and when they discover the binder on their shelf two years later, they wonder why it was never executed.

In fact, it might even be difficult to determine exactly how the company got off track. Often, the company starts with great enthusiasm, but then, slowly, everything reverts to the way things were before the plan was approved. There are several common reasons this happens.

Lack of Executive Commitment

The same lack of executive commitment that can cause an executive to slash or eliminate budgets can cause other executives to drift off course. However, when companies drift off course, the lack of executive commitment is less about deliberately questioning previously approved plans and more often about a pursuit of the latest shiny marketing object. In these cases, the executive isn’t necessarily telling his or her subordinates to discontinue acting on the plan. More often, he or she heard about something exciting or new or have seen something a competitor is doing, and he or she wants the marketing team to add it to the mix.

However, very few organisations operate with significant excess capacity, especially relative to marketing activities. When the executive returns with his or her newest idea, he or she adds it to a very full plate of activities, and something else is pushed off as a result. Sometimes, the most senior marketing person simply makes a prioritisation decision independently. Other times, more junior staff responsible for execution and faced with time constraints simply set aside something already on their plate to make room for the executive’s new pet project.

Consider a large health care system that wanted to improve its marketing department’s efficiency. My company was engaged to conduct a time and motion study and recommend improvements to its operations. As we dove into the project, we found projects that were not within the organisation’s existing marketing plan. For example, one physician, the head of one of the major departments at the hospital, had asked the design team to put together an invitation for his daughter’s school’s auction. Although this project alone may not have been enough to force reprioritisation of the workload, it wasn’t the only one. In fact, the department was handling dozens of special projects, including brochures and other promotional materials deliberately excluded from the organisation’s marketing plan during the planning process. Because the physicians were considered by the marketing department to be their superiors within the management structure, the marketing team members who had been asked to comply were reluctant to refuse.

To help the organisation address this issue, a change order process was designed that gave employees a more formal means of establishing priorities and dramatically reduced the number of extraneous requests. The change order process required that requests outside the plan be presented in writing, along with a budget for time and materials. The request then needed to be approved not only by the person asked to perform the work but also by department management. As a result, the number of project requests dropped, and the management team was better able to evaluate true unexpected opportunities.

In general, organisations can reduce the likelihood that the marketing plan will slide off course by

• creating a similar change order procedure;

• creating a process for evaluating and funding new activities that takes into account both labour and material costs; and

• monitoring progress and investigating departures from planned activities.

Poor Accountability

Often, no one is holding the team accountable for performance. To illustrate this point, consider what happened to a professional services firm. The marketing plan developed and approved by the partner group at a strategic planning retreat included a strong business development (sales) component requiring the participation of its partners. In particular, the plan involved developing personal business development plans for each partner, focusing on the expansion of business among existing clients and the development of new prospective client relationships. Once the plans were completed, the marketing team would pull the common elements from all the plans and create cohesive programmes that would provide leverage to the partners in the sales process.

Unfortunately, no one held the partners accountable. The marketing team tried. They stopped by the partners’ offices, asking, imploring, begging, demanding and otherwise attempting to influence their behaviour. But the marketing team members aren’t partners, and they had little influence on compliance. The managing partner might have had more impact, but he was simply too distracted with his own work. He meant to follow up but never quite made it to his partners’ offices to ask. The initial momentum from the planning retreat began to fizzle.

Without the individual marketing plans, the marketing team could not do its share of the work. They couldn’t sit around doing nothing, so instead, they, too, reverted to old behaviours. Within six months, it felt as if the firm had never created a plan at all. Nothing had changed.

Accountability issues are serious and a common reason for poor performance in many organisations. To improve accountability, the non-marketing executive should focus on more than just asking subordinates to do their jobs. They should

• clearly communicate expectations relative to performance, so that each member of the team knows exactly what they must be doing and why it is important. By communicating clearly and repeatedly about the benefit of the marketing investments a company is making, executives can inspire accountability among those whose compliance is required for successful execution. These communications should be very clear about expectations. Too often, we find that the executive team thought it was clear, and its subordinates all believed someone else would be completing the task. As a result, nothing moved forward.

• address any internal barriers to satisfactory performance. If one group’s process depends on timely execution by another team and that other team does not perform, it will be difficult to hold the waiting team accountable for its performance. The executive team should proactively identify and address potential barriers to marketing success.

• ensure evaluation and reward systems reflect the company’s priorities. The old adage that we get what we measure is as true in human resource management as it is in marketing management. If a company’s performance evaluation and compensation programmes do not reflect the importance of marketing to the company’s success, individuals will continue to prioritise other activities over newly-added marketing activities.

• refuse to tolerate dissent after agreement. Sometimes, especially in professional services environments, team members will agree to an approach while in a planning retreat with their peers, allowing their silence to be perceived as agreement. Then, after the meeting has concluded and the plan has been approved, they will quietly dissent, ignoring the agreement that has been made and continuing their previous behaviours. In other cases, they will quietly express their disapproval to like-minded parties, building up steady resistance to activity until they become a solid barrier to progress. In either case, this behaviour is disruptive and disrespectful, and it should not be tolerated by the executive team.

• establish a schedule for progress reports. Having a fixed schedule for progress updates, along with defined metrics at each stage, helps keep the team focused and improves accountability.

Incremental Changes

Sometimes, communications about marketing plans resemble the children’s game of Telephone. An executive asks the vice president of marketing to tackle a project. Because it’s not clearly spelled out, and both the executive and vice president believe they know what the other means, the vice president communicates a different message to the communications director. By the time it reaches the fourth or fifth person, the entire intent or scope of the project may have changed.

Although this example may be more extreme than is often the case, the problem is not uncommon. It is especially common in organisations with multiple reporting layers, when junior level team members are uninformed about the broader strategic objectives of the company’s marketing plan and when external agencies or consultants are used, because they may or may not have a complete understanding of the company’s market or marketing plan.

To prevent incremental changes from pulling a plan off course, companies should

• make sure the marketing plan is in writing, reducing the risk that the original intent will be changed;

• include enough detail that the plan cannot be misinterpreted by successors or subordinates;

• exercise particular care when communicating about projects, anticipated outcomes and key requirements with agencies and other vendors;

• ensure that the company’s staff has the skills and resources available to complete the tasks as outlined in the plan, which will reduce the likelihood an individual will adjust the plan to match his or her own capabilities; and

• establish metrics to monitor progress and identify potential drift before the plan is significantly off course.

WHY COMPANIES INVOLUNTARILY ABANDON THEIR PLANS

Some companies with well-aligned, market-based plans fail to execute because they are forced to abandon them. Unlike companies who deliberately abandon their plans, these companies must change plans because they simply cannot execute the marketing plan as approved. The most common reasons organisations involuntary abandon their plans are included in the following paragraphs.

Inadequate Staffing

The most common reason companies are forced to abandon or rewrite their marketing plan is because they failed to plan accurately for the required human resources. This may be because they do not take the time during the planning process to create estimates for the time required for each tactic and related step. It is also common for both marketing professionals and marketers to underestimate the amount of time required to complete a task.

As a consultant, I see this first hand when we hire new team members. After sitting down with a prospective client to discuss a project, I will often ask the most junior team member in our company to create the budget. In most cases, even a team member with extensive experience as an in-house marketing professional will dramatically underestimate the time required to complete the work. Most people are optimistic about how quickly they can accomplish a task and forget about the time required to set it up and wrap it up, as well as the extra time associated with scheduling or collaboration.

The same problem occurs inside organisations. Marketing plans and budgets often exclude a detailed breakdown by skill set or staff member of the amount of staff time that will be required. When they do, the estimates are generally low. For example, a marketing communicator might estimate that the time required to write a specification sheet will be four hours. However, this excludes the time to conduct the interview with the product manager, the marketing director’s time to review the document and the time required to manage printing and upload the final document to shared network drives.

As a result, the marketing communicator commits to the project, assuming it will take just four hours, only to find it is closer to seven. The marketing director also has another hour of unanticipated work on his or her plate. Although these numbers are small, when they are multiplied across hundreds or thousands of projects, the impact is significant.

A related challenge emerges when heavily leveraged resources decide to leave the company. In some companies, turnover among marketing staff is quite high. In one industry within which I work, the average tenure of a marketing professional is about nine months. The volume of work he or she is asked to do by non-marketing executives who have no sense of the time required to accomplish these tasks results in burnout, and the ensuing turnover wreaks even more havoc on the marketing plan.

To avoid this problem, I recommend creating an operating plan for the marketing plan before approval. The operating plan should include a detailed breakdown of who is responsible for which activities and the deadline for completion. It should also include a breakdown of the time required to complete each task, totalled by employee, so that the workload is manageable for all current team members. If new employees are added, this approach also allows more accurate assessments of the type of staffing that might be required: temporary, contract, agency, part-time employee or full-time employee.

Failure to Anticipate Significant Changes

Some companies are forced to abandon their marketing plans for reasons entirely outside of their control: a natural disaster, the death of an owner or some other dramatic change. However, many times, companies are forced to abandon their marketing plans because a more predictable change occurred that left them without the financial resources required to continue execution.

For example, the United States has experienced an economic recession about every ten years for more than a century. Economic downturns are not only a normal economic occurrence, they are relatively predictable. Market leaders not only anticipate economic downturns, they plan for them. After all, they see those periods as times of marketing opportunity.

Unfortunately, most companies fail to plan for economic downturns. Then, when a downturn occurs, they find themselves without the resources to continue normal operations and no reserves upon which to draw. As they scramble for financial dry ground, they abandon every discretionary ‘weight’ on their operations. Typically, the first among them are human resources and marketing expenditures.

This is short-sighted in more than one way. First, it abandons any outcomes that might have been generated on sunk cost marketing investments. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it eliminates the company’s ability to enjoy the growth in market share that can be the result of decreased marketing competition. On the other hand, this isn’t a voluntary choice. The company undoubtedly faces significant financial pressure. Unless some expenses are eliminated, the company may suffer even more dramatically as a result.

At the same time, this problem can often be avoided. I recognise that it is exceptionally difficult for many small businesses, including start-ups, and companies with narrow margins. However, businesses that are no longer in those vulnerable first years should be able to begin anticipating, and even building, financial reserves to protect against shifts in economic conditions.

In many cases, proactively anticipating what would happen if the company experienced a dramatic shift can allow the company to build contingencies into the existing plan. This has several benefits. First, it allows the company to sustain critical marketing initiatives, remaining on plan in some sense, while preserving its financial viability. Second, it conveys a sense of assurance to both employees and the market during times of uncertainty. Finally, it reduces the possibility that reductions will be made in haste, without appropriate reflection about which remaining mix investments will deliver the greatest returns.

Failure to Anticipate Opportunities

Similarly, some organisations are forced to abandon marketing plans midway because they fail to proactively plan for opportunities. This is especially common in small organisations in which a given opportunity is likely to consume a greater portion of available dollars. For example, consider a restaurant chain that hosted a popular wine tasting celebration at one of its locations. The company had a strict planning and budgeting process and managed its finances closely. After the budget had been approved, one of my colleagues identified a unique partnership opportunity that could yield significant exposure and dramatically increase event revenues. Although the potential was significant, it would require additional expenses not originally anticipated.

Companies that have limited reserves or whose marketing plans contain limited flexibility might have been forced to abandon the plan, rewriting it to accommodate the new opportunity or to pass on the proposed partnership. Fortunately, the restaurant chain was not in this position. They had reserves allocated for just such opportunities and criteria for evaluating opportunities to determine when and if the reserves should be used.

Other companies with no funding available for reserves use a different approach. They determine, before the plan is approved, which activities could be eliminated in a downturn or during other financial challenges and use the same list when considering unexpected opportunities. They evaluate the new opportunity against preestablished criteria and make the substitution determination based on comparative returns.

By anticipating opportunity as well as challenges, organisations can respond more fluidly to changing situations without completely abandoning their marketing commitments.

QUESTIONS FOR NON-MARKETING MANAGERS TO ASK ABOUT KEEPING A PLAN ON TRACK

In order to win the marketing race, organisations should be consistent and focused in their efforts. The most successful companies follow the Tortoise Law, mimicking the deliberate, consistent, focused approach of the tortoise, rather than the erratic behaviour of the hare from Aesop’s famous tale. To successfully apply the Tortoise Law, non-marketing executives should carefully consider the following questions before approving a marketing plan:

• Is the executive team able to articulate why the company is investing in specific marketing activities, and what return is anticipated as a result?

• If we needed to cut budgets, how would this affect the plan? Have we planned for this situation? What would the impact be on outcomes?

• If we had another dollar to allocate to marketing, how would it be used and what incremental return would be realised?

• Do we have a process to evaluate unexpected opportunities? How would we identify and fund such an opportunity?

• How can we tell that the plan is on track?

• What other aspects of our operations need to change or be adjusted in order for the plan to be a success?

• How will we handle proposed changes to the plan?

• How will we monitor work product managed by external vendors?

• How will we communicate with internal audiences about the plan? Is there anyone from whom we expect resistance? If so, how will we prevent actions that will derail the plan?

• Have the individuals to whom responsibilities for activities are assigned accepted those responsibilities? Do they have the skills and time available to complete them?

• Do we anticipate any significant leadership changes? If so, how do we ensure that the plan remains intact?

• Under what circumstances would it be appropriate to abandon the plan?

• How did we estimate the staffing required to execute the plan? Will we need to add any additional team members?

CHAPTER 12 SUMMARY

Market leaders listen to their markets and align their marketing function with their desire to deliver better solutions to those markets. These two behaviours help them develop solid marketing plans. However, they distinguish themselves from other companies that have developed solid plans by exhibiting a steadfast commitment to marketing, in good times and in bad. I call this the Tortoise Law because, like the focused, consistent winner of the race between the tortoise and the hare, the market leaders’ consistent investment and execution of marketing plans is a key reason they are the winners of the competitive race.

Average performers don’t do this. Like the hare, their performance is erratic. They tend to develop plans but fail to complete them. Because of the nature of marketing, which requires sustained investment to optimise returns, they abandon any potential benefit they may have gained and have less money to invest in subsequent initiatives.

The reasons these companies have problems consistently executing their plans are the same reasons they fail on other strategic planning initiatives. These include poor communication, lack of commitment, poor accountability, incomplete planning, inflexibility in the face of obstacles or opportunities, insufficient or inexistent metrics to measure progress, operational barriers and mixed messages about priorities.

To address these issues, it is helpful to understand the common reasons plans are abandoned and address them proactively.

In some cases, plans are voluntarily abandoned after they are approved. The reasons this happens include the following:

• Lack of commitment from the executive team. To address this, managers should involve the CEO in plan development, whenever possible, and ensure all executive team members can connect the dots between plan activities, objectives and anticipated business and financial outcomes.

• Leadership changes. Although management changes are inevitable, careful communications about why a plan was developed can help a new team member remain committed to the plan.

• Failure to plan for changes. Situations do change. The economy booms or sags, unexpected opportunities arise and competitors’ behaviours threaten current plans. The most effective plans incorporate contingency plans and funds to allow companies to sustain forward momentum while addressing these shifts.

• No evidence of progress. Sometimes, executives cut funding because they don’t see progress. To avoid this situation, managers should ensure the plan includes a clear timeline for success and defined intermediate metrics that help assure the executive team the plan is on track.

• Executive distrust. Executives sometimes cut funding because they don’t understand the value marketing delivers. Companies can avert this cause of abandonment by ensuring complete and appropriate financial analysis took place and was shared with the executive team prior to plan approval.

In other cases, companies simply drift away from their plans. The reasons this happens include the following:

• Lack of commitment from the executive team. In this case, the lack of commitment manifests as internally-mandated changes to marketing plans that are not consistent with its strategies. To avoid these issues, a solid change order management process, along with a process for evaluating newly proposed activities and a means of monitoring progress on existing commitments, can help keep the plan on track.

• Poor accountability. This leads to a lack of performance and can be prevented with clear and consistent communications about the plan’s value and associated performance expectations, evaluation and reward programmes that reinforce the importance of execution and routine reporting that highlights executive commitment and dissuades dissent.

• Incremental changes to the plan. Plans often drift off course because the company inadvertently changes the original intent. To prevent this, plans should be in writing, with adequate staffing an established intermediate metrics.

Finally, some companies are forced to abandon their plans. This is often because of the following:

• Inadequate staffing. Many times, an organisation’s plan fails for human resource reasons. They do not have enough staff or the right skills on hand. To prevent this, marketing plans should include operations plans for staffing that forecast human resource needs.

• Failure to anticipate changes. As noted previously, situations do change. Established companies can often avert a negative impact by building reserves. Companies of any size should build contingency plans into their marketing programmes.

• Failure to anticipate opportunities. Sometimes, a plan is abandoned because what appears to be a better opportunity arises. This issue can also be averted with careful planning.