Full disclosure: we are completely biased in our thoughts on this topic. As the leading Strategic Planning software built to help high growth companies communicate their vision, create alignment, and track performance all in one place, we are heavily bought into the idea that Strategic Planning is a key to success for any business. Regardless of company size, industry, or growth goals one universal truth is that every company does some form of Strategic Planning. 

And while Strategic Planning software might make more sense for some companies over others, the reality is that there is significant value in implementing a solution designed to support growth, drive alignment, increase collaboration, and create immense time savings. 

However, over the past few years certain tools that often get categorized as 'Strategic Planning' have tainted the term and caused buyers-remorse for strategy and operations leaders looking for a solution to help build and execute their strategic plans. Rather than naming specific tools that have falsely been categorized as ‘Strategic Planning’, we'll just highlight the certain categories that have led to more pain than value for countless strategy and operations leaders. Included are categories, such as OKR Software, Performance Management, and even Business Intelligence. 

While each of these tools provides value for specific use cases, none of the above categories bring life to the solution for strategy and operations leaders to effectively build, implement, and execute their Strategic Planning efforts. 

So we wanted to highlight the value of Strategic Planning solutions for high growth businesses, and walk through the specific features we've built at Elate to help strategy and operations leaders effectively run their Strategic Planning framework. 

Here are three key features that make Elate the best Strategic Planning software, and justify the value of implementing a Strategic Planning software for your business. 

Create Momentum with Elate's Planning Feature 

One of the most common struggles we see with companies looking to implement a solution for Strategic Planning is they want to jump directly into tracking and updating their goals. While companies start with the best of intentions in building and rolling out their company's strategic plan, often they start by going directly into the execution portion of the plan. Traditional OKR tools have played a role in this process, because they immediately start by setting up OKRs to be tracked, updated, and measured without starting with the 'why' behind implementing any goal-setting framework. 

That is why we built the Elate Planning feature to help companies streamline how they go about planning for the year or quarter ahead. Rather than jumping directly into setting objectives, Elate allows companies to build a strategic plan that aligns with the vision, mission, values, and annual themes for the company. The planning process includes proposing, reviewing, and finalizing the main priorities at the executive level that can then be discussed with managers. 

Rather than forcing a plan on employees, Elate is set up to foster a collaborative environment and follows the critical strategic planning process steps that have been outlined by your team. Elate also has pre-built strategic planning templates aimed at simplifying the overall process of building your plan and creating consistency across different teams and departments. 

In addition to providing clarity and visibility, the Elate Planning feature is designed to save strategy and ops leaders hours of time. By consolidating how your plan is built and providing visibility into the progress and insights on how the plan is coming together across teams, Elate is designed to start your Strategic Planning process in a way that creates momentum for your company. 

Drive Consistent Execution through Elate's Team View 

After the momentum and excitement created by finalizing your team's Strategic Plan, it's easy to have a drop-off if the proper structure isn't in place to support the execution of your plan. 

After your leadership team spends hours proposing, reviewing, and finalizing your plan for the year and goals for the quarter, there should be an agreed upon rhythm and cadence for how your company is communicating at all levels. Further, there should be consensus on how often you are meeting to review objectives as a leadership team. And these shouldn’t be optional rhythms that are abandoned the moment scheduling becomes difficult or leaders start to bail. 

With Elate's Team View, you are now able to provide a consistent, simplified view for your team to execute against your strategic plan. The Team View was built to serve as a single source of truth in reviewing your team's objectives, scorecard, and relevant topics centered on the priorities that truly matter for your business. 

Unlike traditional strategic plan tracking tools, Elate isn't just a weekly check-in that provides little substantive value or that may be disconnected from the overall performance of your strategic plan. Elate's Team View provides a rhythm that can be built into any leadership meeting structure. 

As a Strategic Planning app it's important that Elate's Team View provides three valuable features: 

- Measurement and Performance of Current Objectives  

- Review of Leadership Level KPIs or Scorecard

- Discussion of Key Topics and Action Items for Your Team 

With seamless integrations into your data sources, such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Jira and others, Elate provides a single-source of truth that allows your team to save countless hours updating spreadsheets, presentations, or slides trying to prepare for weekly meetings. 

Elate creates a clear cadence for when your team reviews key objectives, what you are reviewing, and why they are relevant to the overall success of the business. 

Drive Decision Making with Elate's Strategic Reporting  

As strategy and operations leaders, we are constantly searching for insights that can drive better decision making. However, rarely are we truly analyzing past, current, and future performance of our strategic plan in a way to better inform our decision making. Whether you are leveraging a goal-setting framework like OKRs or a custom Strategic Planning template, it's critical that strategy and operations leaders are unifying the insights from these frameworks to make more informed decisions. 

With Elate's Strategic Reporting, leaders across all areas of the business now have access to the trends, insights, and real-time data to help make informed decisions and take action. 

From a range of reports, including Executive Summary Reports, Objective Success Reports, and Objective Progress Reports, Elate is unifying data across every layer of the business for strategy and operations leaders to better understand what’s working and what’s not. 

However, Elate's Strategic Reporting isn't just a static snapshot. With Elate, leaders can now model out different plans across areas of the business and understand how those plans may perform. From identifying areas of the business with too many objectives or even areas with too many critical dependencies, Elate brings a new level of visibility into how strategy and operations leaders are executing their strategic plans. 

Best Strategic Planning Software 

As the leading Strategic Planning software built to help high growth companies communicate their vision, create alignment, and track performance all in one place, Elate is able to provide a new and improved framework for growth. 

While there are certainly legacy strategic planning tools, OKR tools, or even performance management software that can provide value for certain parts of the Strategic Planning process, none of these tools were built to provide an end-to-end Strategic Planning solution. 

So before you sign your company up for a free Strategic Planning software, think about what you are sacrificing by cutting out significant portions of the planning process. Whether in the short or long-term, what should be a competitive advantage will quickly become a weakness in your company's ability to scale effectively if you implement one of the countless free OKR tools. 

As we’ve shared, the case for implementing a Strategic Planning Software is a pretty easy sell when you consider the following: 

• Save on average 9 hours per week with reporting and tracking updates for a leadership team of 5 team members
• Drive decision-making by surfacing reports and insights across every layer of the business 
• Create clear alignment from the leadership level to every employee
• Measure the outcomes and effectiveness of every major initiative 
• Establish a rhythm and cadence for running team meetings  
  

If you're interested in learning more about Elate and how we are working with leading strategy and operations leaders today, let us know! One of our team members would love to speak with you to share how we've built the best Strategic Planning software for high growth companies.