“All who wander are not lost” may be a great motto for soul-searching, but not for business. Instead, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else,” is a more accurate philosophy for firms competing in the marketplace. Without a clear goal—and a plan to get there—your business could be wasting valuable time and resources without fulfilling your mission.

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Yet, only 64% of team members report that their organization formulates strategies to respond to changing market conditions. Out of those that plan, 61% struggle to actually implement strategic initiatives. An overwhelming percentage of businesses don’t have effective strategic planning in place to reach success, so they aren’t achieving their goals. 

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Working with a strategic planning process model provides your organization with structure to kickstart your planning process. In this article, we’ll explain the essential components of a strategic plan and the criteria for effective strategy, so your next plan can be your best yet. Let’s get started.

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What Is Successful Planning?

Successful strategic planning includes three essential phases:

1. Build
2. Execute
3. Review

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Building a Successful Strategic Plan

When building your strategic plan, you need a goal. Using the SMART framework can help determine which end results are worth pursuing. SMART goals set you up for success from the beginning because they are:

• Specific: Is your goal understandable as described, or is it so broad that it could mean anything and nothing at the same time? Consider the differences between these goals: Growing the business & Hiring and onboarding six new engineers

Growing the business isn’t specific enough, but hiring and onboarding six new engineers is much more targeted.

• Measurable: Having measures of success lets you know how close you are to achieving your goals. Instead of  wanting to increase brand awareness, you could have a measurable goal of growing your Instagram following by 5,000 followers or plan to attend four trade shows by the end of the year. 
• Achievable: Be ambitious, but realistic with your goals. Impressive yet unattainable goals set you and your team up for failure.
• Relevant: Your business doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and neither should your goals. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Why? Knowing how one goal impacts another can help guide execution.
• Timely: Goals need a deadline. Otherwise, you could be stuck in the execution phase without ever finishing anything. When setting deadlines, it’s still important to consider whether or not they are achievable. Quickly-approaching deadlines can motivate your team to work hard, but they can also cause burnout and lower-quality results if they aren’t realistic.

With a goal set, you need to gather a team to see the plan through. Who will be responsible for executing various tasks within the plan? Who will ensure the plan stays on track? And who will provide feedback when the process is complete? Assign these roles in writing within the plan itself so there are no questions during future stages. 

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Executing Your Strategic Plan

With a destination in mind and your team ready to get to work, it’s time to put your strategic plan in motion. However, as anyone who has ever made a plan knows, things rarely work out as you intended. Still, there are steps you can take to meet challenges and stay on course.

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What 3 Factors Can Contribute to Strategy Success?

While the conditions you execute your plan in can become unpredictable, there are ways to proactively make your plan more resilient. At Elate, we’ve found the following to be key success factors in strategic planning:

• Stakeholder Buy-In: For your plan to succeed, you need everyone involved to be on board from the start. You can do this by setting long-term goals with regular checkpoints that clearly explain when progress will be made and who will be affected.
• Communication: Strategic planning is not a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. You need the ability to communicate with stakeholders throughout the process. Team members should be able to flag issues and brainstorm ideas. Brand representatives benefit from celebrating wins with their audience. Leadership needs to be able to communicate shifts in direction.  
• Real-Time Reporting: Feedback is essential to success, but you shouldn’t only look for feedback after your plan has run its course. Real-time reporting is essential to keeping track of key performance indicators and flagging problems before they compromise your entire strategy. 

See how your strategic planning can benefit from unified stakeholder buy-in, transparent communication, and real-time reporting—all in one platform. Schedule a demo today. For more strategic planning tips, keep reading.

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Reviewing Your Strategic Plan To Promote Future Success

Once your plan has run its course, it’s important to take a step back and see what worked as well as what didn’t. To get a complete picture of your strategic plan’s success, you need feedback from all stakeholders. Customers, upper management, and team members at all levels will have unique and valuable insight on how to improve your strategic plans.

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Why Is Success Important in Planning?

Planning for planning’s sake is tedious and may not actually yield results. You need to have a goal or a vision for success. Otherwise, what are you planning for? Focusing on achieving a tangible outcome is the difference between spinning around a hamster wheel and reaching the peak of a mountain. Both require effort, but only one comes with a beautiful view.

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Chart a Course to Success from Start to Finish

The last thing that helps a strategic plan to succeed is a stack of programs for each function. Instead of trying to coordinate functions across applications that don’t work together the way you need them to, get all of your essential capabilities in one platform—Elate.

Your team can use Elate to:

• Collaboratively plan and keep all stakeholders on the same page
• Track objectives, metrics, blockers, and wins all in real-time
• Establish a cadence for reviews and get the feedback you need with custom reports

‍Explore our website to see how to transform your strategic planning and schedule a demo to see how simplicity brings you closer to your goals.