How effective is your marketing strategy? Do you have one? How often do you revise it? In the past few weeks in client and prospect meetings, I have had more conversations than usual about Marketing. It’s likely because of the time of year. In November and December in particular we think about our priorities and where we are spending our time and energy.

The purpose of this article is to cause you to reflect about how you approach marketing, how it supports your sales and business development efforts and to outline a process for creating a Marketing Plan. This process can be used for an organization, a team, or an individual.

Here are the specific steps that support this model:

Step 1 – Expand Current Perspective Through Analysis

The purpose of this step is to reflect on current practices in order to learn from the past.

One of the biggest challenges I have found in helping professionals and groups devise a marketing plan is the “dive-in” syndrome. A lot of professionals want to “dive-in” to the plan and the action steps before doing any analytical work first. This thinking step is critical to developing insights that will inform future direction. Here are some analysis activities to include with this step:

a/ SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) – this analysis will help you to step back and look at the big picture.
b/ Competitive Analysis – What are three of your core strengths you can leverage?
c/ Network Analysis – What are Centres of Influence (friends, colleagues, customers etc.) you can connect with?

Here are some other questions to consider in this step:

• How do you currently market?
• What is the balance between nurturing current clients and creating new ones?
• What marketing activities created new business leads in the past year? Which activities should you stop?

Step 2 – Establish 3 Year Vision

Step 3 – Assemble Plan

Here are some questions to consider when assembling your marketing plan:

• Is this a collaborative or individual effort?
• Would it help to have someone facilitate the process?
• How can you engage “front of line” professionals in the process?

Step 4 – Engage Key Stakeholders

Step 5 – Execute and Refine

We hope this gives you some food for thought!

To the Field – Prepare Well for New Business Conversations

Buyers everywhere are becoming more and more selective in agreeing to set up appointments with suppliers. So there is a premium on preparation. Annually, monthly, weekly, daily and of course - planning for individual sales conversations. Professional athletes take their preparation seriously – do you?

Here is a model that can help you prepare well for sales conversations:

We welcome two new Fusion Learning team members:
Inti Ali
Sales Learning Coach
and
Samantha Dann
Desktop Publisher

We're expanding into a new office space! Ask your Fusion Learning representative for a tour in the New Year.

"Fusion Learning enhanced our strategic thinking when planning for & interacting with our key accounts customer base."
- Jeff Armstrong, Molson Canada, Director, Training and Development
November 2004




The Tipping Point, How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown And Company

Why you should pick it up:
This is a cleverly written book that will get you thinking deeper about trends and how they impact your business.

A Quote from the Book (page 166):
"When we are trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we’re trying to change our audience in some small yet critical respect: we’re trying to infect them, sweep them up in our epidemic, convert them from hostility to acceptance. That can be done through the influence of special kinds of people, people of extraordinary personal connection. That’s the Law of the Few. It can be done by changing the content of communication, by making a message so memorable that it sticks in someone’s mind and compels them to action. That is the Stickiness factor. I think that both of these laws make intuitive sense. But we need to remember that small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics, even though that fact appears to violate some of our most deeply held assumptions about human nature."

Please click here to send us the e-mail address of any colleagues or associates who might benefit from insights! ...

To unsubscribe
click here

To talk with a human please call
416-424.2999 Ext. 23