The Importance of a Plan
We’ve all been there. We have an idea of where we want to be at a certain point in the future. Once we know where we want to go, we must establish a plan that will help us move toward our goal.
In most instances, the destination is not what we should spend the majority of our efforts contemplating. Even though the destination is where we want to end up, it will not happen unless we establish (then carry out) a plan.
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”— Yogi Berra
This is the phase we have been in as a company the past couple of sprints. We’ve been working on developing a marketing strategy that aligns with our company goals. Our team saw a need to develop a better way to gather (and track) requirements within Salesforce organizations. So, we created the solution (Catalio). Now we need to get our solution into the hands of people who will benefit.
We know where we want to be in the next 2–6 months — helping Salesforce Admins better manage their organizations. It would be awesome if gaining customers would just happen, but it won’t. This is where the marketing strategy comes to the rescue!
The plan is what helps you get where you need to be. In our case, it’s the marketing plan. However, the plan can look a million different ways depending on your situation.
Here are 3 things we did to develop our marketing plan:
- Do research. We have a variety of channels that we can (and do) communicate through. However, we are trying to reach a particular community. So, we did our homework to find out where Salesforce admins hang out in the digital world. Once we found this out, we know where to put more focus and effort toward reaching them.
- Focus your efforts. Each sprint we are going to focus more heavily on one channel to see how it is working. Instead of putting a little bit into each channel, we are going to target one network at a time (and sprinkling the others) to see if we can reach our target better. Doing this will help us know what is and isn’t working so that we can use time wisely.
- Track your progress. We’ve created a marketing spreadsheet that will track how our individual campaigns are doing. By being more restrictive on the channel and tracking our results, we gain better insight into what works best at reaching (and converting) our target customers. Nobody likes wasting their time by putting their efforts into something that have no return.
Planning isn’t the easiest thing to do, but its return can be the difference between end up where you to be and wasting your time on things that don’t produce results. So, whatever arena you are in, take some time to figure out where you want to go, then make a plan to help you reach it.
Do you have any helpful insights into making a plan?
We’d love to hear about it in the comments below or on Twitter. If you want to follow our journey and see how our plan is working for us, Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date.