What’s Your Strategy?

Strategy is about the path — knowing where you are headed and knowing everyone you deal with (from employees to suppliers to clients) knows and is on the same path with you. Tactics are all the things you do to keep you on that path and get you to your destination.

An illustration — You live in Atlanta and your strategy is to get to San Francisco. Your tactics will be things like:

• decide whether to fly, take a bus, a train or drive
• buy a ticket (or determine best route)
• get to the airport
• get from the airport to where ever you are going in San Francisco
• etc.

On the Internet. Your strategy may be to get to the top of the search engines without paying for placement. Your tactics may be things like:

• determine what key words we can realistically rank for (low competition)
• establish mass content around these key words — articles, independent web pages, blogs, etc.
• perform on-page optimization such as page name, h1 tags, named images, etc.
• as we begin to rank for these “low hanging fruit” key words, move into more popular words through the same process

General sales strategy: (Note, each bullet below will have it’s own set of tactics.)

• We are going to bring in new clients by offering information, education, bonuses and risk reversal.
• We are going to give them an awesome experience
• We are going to introduce them to our other products and services
• We will stay in touch and continuously educate and inform them about all our products and services
• We will sell other people’s products if they enhance our client’s experience and match with our own
• We will make a profit from all our products
• We will develop new products, new markets and new applications for them

Now the thing about strategy and tactics is that you need to have systems in place so that you know if you are on the path or off the path. And, when you fall off the path, you need a plan to get back on.

The military saying, “no plan survives the battle” is true in business and marketing as well. That’s because your clients and the market are involved. It’s an interactive process and adjustments must be made. Many football teams will script the first 10-15 plays. They jump out there and just run these plays — no matter what. However, once those plays are over, they being to adjust to what they learned during those plays and the rest of the game is made through this action and reaction. They figure out what the other guys is doing and make adjustments.

Take a strategy like the one listed above, “we are going to give them an awesome experience.” In order to come full circle for this strategy you will need to answer two questions — develop two systems:

1. what is our system for delivering the “awesome” experience?
2. what is our system/measurement for understanding that the “awesome” experience has been delivered?

The system for delivering “awesome” service may go something like this:
Once they become a client, we will do the following:

• personal phone call to thank them, confirm order and explain program
• follow up letter outlining all you just said
• immediate — send out thank you note and gift (if appropriate)
  Send thank you note/gift/commission to referring party (if applicable)
• postcard/E-mail stating progress of delivery
• personal phone call to schedule delivery
• champagne gift delivered the day before the product arrives
• follow up call the day or day after the product arrives
• 6 month follow up – personal phone call
• monthly/quarterly email with new offerings and updates – separate premier NL
• annual survey

How we measure whether or not we delivered “awesome” experience may be something like this:

1. Referrals — we expect 20 to 30 percent of our clients will refer business to us
2. Repeat Business — we expect existing clients to buy our other products and services:
   • accessories— 50% of accessory sales will be to existing clients
   • second product — 30% of our clients will purchase a second product from us
3. Testimonials— we expect to receive testimonials from 60% of our clients
4. Survey response— when we send out our annual survey, we expect to receive 100% of them back
5. They are genuinely happy to receive correspondence from us because we can hear it in their voice and see it on their face

The goal is to pick the most important parts of your business (the one, two, or three things you MUST do in order to grow/survive/thrive) and develop these types of strategies, tactics, procedures and follow up. Remember to always inspect what you expect so that you know the team is following the system. This also gives you the opportunity to adjust and enhance the system where it isn’t working as well as it could.

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