Belief, focus & engagement - 3 crucial ingredients for the success of marketing & BD initiatives, particularly in B2B environments, where there are normally a number of people with driving roles in initiatives.
Choosing to focus
Many strategic initiatives fail because they are trying to do too much. Or they run out of steam because people lose focus somewhere along the way. How do you establish a clear focus for your initiative to help you meet your project goals? How do you get people excited about this and keep them on track?
Simplicity
Simplicity is at the centre of effective focus.
Having simple project goals, with simple steps for those involved to carry out, will maintain their focus and make their contribution and project outputs easier to measure.
Look at your goals - are they realistic? Are they linked to eachother or disparate?
Most project plans I see these days have about 10 broad goals and 60 unassigned actions for each one. Too much and too vague. In an effort to cover all the angles and develop a "sophisticated plan" simplicity has been sacrificed.
Ambitious goals are great, but unrealistic or too many goals will frustrate those involved - they will feel they have failed from the get-go and won't focus on delivering what is required.
Step by step phases
If your goals are multi-directional, they may confuse your key people or ask too much of them - try to break the project up into phases to allow a primary focus for each phase. People involved will be clear what they are doing in each phase rather than trying to tackle everything at once, getting overwhelmed and losing focus.
A simple one page phased plan with a goal or two for each phase and clear steps for each individual involved will keep your project focused and allow you to measure the outcomes easily.
The phase structure should be supported by regular review meetings/calls to analyse progress, encourage deeper involvement and decide any further action to be taken.
Measurement
Once again I mention measurement - but in the context of "focus" for your project, measurement can either be a great tool to keep people focused and excited by what they are doing, or it can be the reason good initiatives die.
B2B companies and particularly professional services are notoriously bad at measuring their marketing & BD projects/initiatives. Either because there is a general sense it is hard /impossible to measure soft results - such as relationships, brand awareness, engagement - effectively or because the true results - increased revenue - can take months or even years to become apparent in relationship-based businesses, which disheartens people.
This does not have to be the case if you set expectations from the outset. Make sure you are measuring the right things along the way and give people a sense of what might be a reasonable "result" for each phase of your project.
For example - "we expect it will take 6-9 months to meet our over all goal of 3 additional [dealtype] transactions through [company type] clients. In phase 1, the team should have 20 meetings with [company type] firms on a defined list, see a 50% take up of our event invite, drive 25% of them to our webpage...."
These sort of metrics are easy to measure against and so clear that it gives those involved in your initiative comfort that they are on the right track, or that they can change the track a little to see better results. They are less likely to get distracted by alternative routes or disheartened by any perception of slow progress.
A lack of focus is the core reason lots of marketing & BD initiatives & projects get started and not finished - people lose faith in the absence of clear goals, instructions, and expectations.
By keeping goals simple, breaking projects into phases and using measurement correctly, you can keep a diverse team focused on delivering what your project or initiative needs to be successful.
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Triona Saunders is a marketing consultant and founder @ Buckley & Partners Consulting, a marketing and business development consultancy for professional services and other B2B organisations