A short, well-articulated marketing and sales strategy is critical for delivering your financial planning services to existing clients and new leads. Once you’ve got one, you can’t just set it and forget it.
You must review your sales and marketing approach regularly. It is a valuable way to take stock of your strategy and any external market changes or challenges. Here’s a plan.
State of the nation
A ‘State of the nation’ (SoN) is a review process that works for any business, advises my business partner and marketing strategy specialist Luke Maddison, from Corpwrite Strategy.
The SoN forces you to review the objectives you’ve delivered, and those you failed to meet. It’s entirely up to you how often you implement this but for me, it should be an annual event.
In my business, we break the SoN down into three parts:
- What’s happening in the market? This stage allows you to appraise your market(s) and assess how your original strategy is stacking up. Has it changed? Also, be sure to look at your competitors.
- What tactics have worked in terms of generating new leads and revenue?
- What tactics or aspects of the strategy haven’t worked and why not?
This three-part process crystallises your thinking as a business owner.
Tweaks and balances
When reviewing your strategy, there are a couple of things you should look at before changing it.
For starters, resist making rapid wholesale changes to your approach unless you’re 100 per cent certain that it’s wrong. What we often find with clients is that the strategy and associated tactics aren’t necessarily flawed. They simply need an adjustment. With a series of small tweaks, the original approach is still relevant.
Second, try to be objective. Using your gut may work, but make sure it’s balanced with some facts. For example, don’t be afraid to evaluate what part of a campaign didn’t work. You’ll often find that the campaign may have been successful, but your call to action wasn’t strong enough.
Make it a core part of your business
Make sure that you make a strategy review part of the calendar. Invite the people in your business who contributed to the strategy initially to take part in the review as part of a formal, or at least a semi-formal, process. For example, plan the review early and don’t let the excuse of day-to-day business get in the way. Lock in the date and time, and prepare in advance. Take yourself offsite and book a meeting room somewhere. The critical issue is to make the review a priority.
Assessing your strategy gives you a chance to rejuvenate it and the plan and tactics that flow from it. Attaching a level of significance to the review makes your team realise that your approach is a priority and provides everyone with a blueprint to follow.
