Strategic planning helps organizations set goals, identify new opportunities and prepare for the future. It can add significant value and contribute to tangible positive sales outcomes.
In this article, you’ll learn what strategic planning is and how it benefits a sales function. You’ll also discover how to approach the strategic planning process successfully.
What is strategic planning?
Strategic planning is when business leaders set organizational goals, develop the company’s long-term vision and map its direction.
Strategic planning is fundamental to strategic management, the discipline of building and executing plans to achieve business goals.
The strategic planning process isn’t about identifying short-term “wins” for a business. Instead, it’s about establishing long-term objectives and defining metrics for success.
Strategic planning requires multiple senior stakeholders to engage in high-level decision-making. They must collaborate to align on business priorities and ensure all stakeholders contribute to and support the strategy.
Note: Strategic planning is a more complex activity than business planning. Business planning focuses on daily operations. Strategic planning is the process of setting a business strategy and establishing long-term goals for an organization.
What are the benefits of strategic planning in sales?
Strategic planning aligns companies on vital sales issues, like how to allocate company resources and which opportunities to pursue.
It also establishes which organizational goals sales will support in the coming months or years.
Strategic planning produces a robust organizational action plan, which sales leaders develop into a sales plan with their teams.
The sales plan is a roadmap that sales reps use daily to ensure they tackle the most important sales opportunity and pursue the organization’s goals to boost sales.
What is the strategic planning process?
The strategic planning process is the series of steps leaders follow during strategy development.
Key stakeholders involved in the process include the company’s senior leadership team and leaders from each business function, including sales.
A robust process helps ensure discussions result in tangible outcomes. Let’s take a look at the basic steps of effective strategic planning.
The steps of the strategic planning process
There is no single right way to approach the strategic planning process. However, the following steps offer a good general process foundation:
1. Analyze the business
Most organizations begin their strategic planning process by assessing the business environment. This assessment reveals core strengths, areas for improvement and opportunities for growth.
When analyzing the business, consider both the internal and external environment. You should also consider both positive and negative factors.
2. Establish the company’s vision and mission
A company’s strategic plan must align with its vision and mission statements to be effective.
Although the phrases are sometimes used synonymously, “mission” and “vision” are two distinct concepts:
An organization’s vision articulates its long-term aspirations
An organization’s mission describes how it will achieve its vision through the work it does
Vision and mission statements are simple sentences of intentions that companies can share with staff and the wider public.
For example, General Motors’ mission is “A world with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion”.
The company’s mission statement explains how it will achieve its vision.
Your company may already have mission and vision statements you can update as part of the strategic planning process.
In companies new to strategic planning, leadership may need to craft statements during its first strategic planning initiative.
3. Identify long-term goals and success metrics
Once you’ve articulated the company’s vision and mission, identify long-term goals that align with them.
Set objectives for each business unit that will support your mission. Then, define metrics for success for each goal.
4. Create the company’s strategic plan
The strategic plan is the output of all the work in the earlier stages of the strategic planning process.
This document outlines your company’s desired outcomes, articulating how it will use its resources and define success. Strategic planners will refer to the strategic plan throughout implementation to keep efforts focused on priorities and track progress.
There’s no specific strategy formulation or strategic plan format to use. However, you generally want to include the following information:
The company’s mission and vision statements
The company’s objectives for the period ahead (e.g., the next quarter, year, etc.)
Success metrics for those objectives
A broad plan of action or approach for ensuring success
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Strategic planning tools and frameworks
There are tools and frameworks to support the steps in strategic planning and implementation. Let’s look at some of the most popular strategic frameworks along with a strategic plan sample scenario for each step.
Assess the business environment with a SWOT analysis
SWOT analysis is a type of competitive matrix, a tool that helps companies identify their competitive advantage. It also helps organizations understand how they measure up against competitors.
Conducting a SWOT analysis involves reviewing the business against two internal factors and two external factors, as follows.
Strengths (internal factor): What does the company do well? Consider product features or brand recognition.
Weaknesses (internal factor): Where does it fall short? Consider customer sentiment, poor infrastructure or an outdated offering.
Opportunities (external factor): What external factors can the company leverage for business growth? Think about emerging technologies or new markets.
Threats (external factor): What issues in the external environment could impact business? Think about economic conditions or disruptive technologies.
These four factors are often visualized in the quadrant format shown below.
Strategic plan example: SWOT analysis in action
To complete a SWOT analysis, assess your company in each quadrant. List your findings under each heading.
Here’s an example of a completed SWOT analysis for a tech startup:
Strengths
| Weaknesses
|
Opportunities
| Threats
|
Conducting a SWOT analysis helps strategic planners better understand the positive and negative factors that could shape the company’s strategic direction.
Define long-term objectives and success metrics with OKRs
OKR stands for “objectives and key results”. It’s a goal-setting framework many companies use as part of the strategic planning process.
The OKR methodology involves articulating objectives and the goals that will determine success:
The objective is what the company wants to achieve. It’s expressed in an engaging but concise way to ensure that teams find it motivating and memorable.
Key results express how the company will measure success against each objective. They include metrics for tracking progress.
Strategic plan example: OKRs in action
Say the tech startup in our previous example determines that it needs to address its weakness in audience understanding. The company might craft the following OKR for customer education:
Objective | Key result |
Customers fully understand the power and value of our technology |
|
Traditionally, companies use the OKR methodology in quarterly planning cycles.
Set goals and track progress with the balanced scorecard methodology
In the balanced scorecard (BSC) methodology, strategic planners consider the company’s mission and vision through four critical perspectives:
Financial performance
Customer satisfaction
Internal processes
Learning/growth
They then identify goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each area of focus.
Strategic plan example: balanced scorecard in action
Here’s how this might play out in our tech startup example:
Financial performance | Goals: Becoming profitable, achieving a certain number of sales KPIs: Revenue, profit margins |
Customer satisfaction | Goals: Reducing complaints, finding ways to make its target audience happier KPIs: Customer service metrics like customer satisfaction scores |
Internal processes | Goals: Eliminating bugs from the software, creating content to educate customers on the technology behind the product KPIs: The number of bugs reported, the number of educational content downloads |
Learning/growth | Goals: Spending more time with customers, improving the engineering team’s technical capabilities KPIs: The number of customer interviews team members conduct, the amount of time engineering spends on learning and development activities |
The BSC methodology helps companies avoid the pitfall of setting goals and success metrics for only one business area.
Once the strategic plan is in place, sales leaders and other strategic planners can use the balanced scorecard to track progress against each relevant area.
Communicate the plan with a strategy map
Strategy mapping is an essential element of the BSC methodology. It visualizes the relationship between your strategic objectives on a balanced scorecard.
It places each objective within one of the four perspectives of the scorecard and shows how they’re connected.
Strategic plan example: strategy map in action
Here’s how our tech startup might list the following objectives in a strategy map:
A strategy map helps everyone in an organization understand the company strategy.
Using a CRM for strategic planning and implementation in sales
A successful strategic planning process requires up-to-date sales and customer data. A sales-focused CRM like Pipedrive can be a highly effective planning tool. The software enables sales leaders to quickly collect, analyze and interpret this data.
Accurate numbers help stakeholders decide which objectives to pursue and how to measure success.
The data can also help sales leaders and their teams operate effectively as they implement the strategy.
Here’s how a CRM can support strategic planning and implementation.
Using a CRM to support strategic planning
Accurate and up-to-date sales data is vital for assessing the business environment, setting objectives and crafting a strategic plan.
Sales reporting and dashboard functionality help you gauge your progress. Many CRMs provide additional insights into how your team and company are currently performing.
Interactive dashboards like those in Pipedrive (shown below) display convenient charts and graphs to help strategic planners visualize KPIs for sales.
CRM reporting can also help sales leaders monitor important performance indicators. These include the number of leads the team has created, archived and converted into deals over time.
Conversion reports in your CRM can reveal valuable insights into your leads-to-deals conversion rate. These reports show how well your sales and marketing efforts reach your audience.
Using a CRM to support strategic implementation
Your CRM can help you monitor your sales team’s progress against the benchmarks during strategy execution.
Pipedrive provides a visual representation of each pipeline stage (shown below). This pipeline management functionality gives you more control over your sales tasks and activities.
Many CRMs allow you to visualize your sales funnel. This view helps you identify weak points in the process and swiftly intervene when reps need support.
Sales pipeline management features can also reveal valuable insights into your customer journey and sales process.
Meanwhile, sales forecasting features provide a clear picture of business costs and revenue, making day-to-day cash flow management more straightforward.
These features help sales teams work toward strategic goals by revealing which activities and deals to focus on. They also help sales leaders anticipate what’s ahead so they can make better decisions.
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Final thoughts
The strategic planning process allows business owners and company leaders to prepare for the future in a structured and intentional way.
CRM automation speeds up workflows and automates time-consuming tasks, freeing up time for critical forward-looking activities like strategic planning.
Pipedrive’s sales-focused CRM offers businesses quick and easy access to customer data and other metrics to ensure a successful strategic planning process. Sign up for a free 14-day trial to try Pipedrive and start streamlining your strategic planning efforts today.