Game planning should happen before the game, not after.

Recently, a company asked me to evaluate specific challenges they were having related to increasing revenue in a highly competitive market. I was pleasantly surprised they were leveraging many modern approaches to attract modern buyers. After a brief discussion, the root cause of their challenges became readily apparent...NO GAME PLAN!

The company was hot to trot with the latest and greatest marketing plays; seo, pay-per-click, landing pages, etc. Yet, they hadn't taken the time to develop a game plan for winning. They knew they wanted to get with the game, but the plan stopped there and they went right to the playbook.

Here are three extremely important parts of a viable game plan:

1. Know your customers and how they make purchase decisions. I highly recommend getting a set of customers and potential customers into a room together to play Innovation Games. The Innovation Games 'Start Your Day' and 'Show and Tell' would be great starting points to get into the heads of your customers. Going through this process will prove instrumental in making sure everyone that touches customers or prospective customers understands the actions they are trying to drive.
2. Develop crystal clear roles and responsibilities for those charged with increasing sales, and deploy sales and marketing assets across the entire customer acquisition process and insure you don't have any gaps. Specifically, you'll want to assign teams to drive action at the top, middle and bottom of the sales funnel. Keep in mind each stage may require collaboration for people outside of sales and marketing.
1. Top of the Funnel: reach (#), unique visitors (#), direct search traffic (#), downloads (#), subscribers (#), etc.
2. Middle of the Funnel: lead conversions (#,%), lead quality (BANT), leads (#)
3. Bottom of the Funnel: lead to customer, customer retention, up-sell ($), cross-sell (#,$)
3. Establish crystal clear key performance indicators! These numbers will help you determine when you need to substitute a player on the team, objectively.

Developing a game plan is hard work and requires extensive knowledge about sales 2.0, SEO, blogging and social media. To get the most bang for your buck, have a playbook and game plan for acquiring customers that is worked out in advance. The game plan can be adjusted based on the metrics, but developing a game plan as the game unfolds is a sure fire way to consume hard earned dollars and not get much to show for it.