Planning for the New Year

It’s that time of year for festive oblivion. What better time to get ahead on the New Year’s resolutions and focus on ways to make 2005 start with a strong kick-off. Easter’s pretty early in the coming year and it’ll be psychologically important to hit your stride before then.

Here are 10 things to consider:

1. Cut out the jargon. At the office, everyone conspires to understand each other, but you’d never speak to your Gran with the same words (she’d think you’d landed from Planet Zog). Keep it simple and you could really slim down the point-of-difference between your company and your clients or prospects.

2. Segment your CEO. Putting the CEO in his box is the best way of gaining your freedom. If you can work out where he’s coming from and where he wants to go, then you’ve worked out your brief. Is he the company founder who hasn’t realised he should shift to let an administrator take charge? Is he the top salesman in the business who bullied his way into management? Is he the intellectual who needs to show how much cleverer he is? Is he the friendly policeman who wants to keep the peace?

Make sure that you approach with a tight game plan that ‘up-manages’ so that he thinks he’s coming up with all the ideas.

3. Do less, not more. There’s always a temptation to plan a marketing campaign with the all ‘bells and whistles’, particularly as there are so many new tactics to try. And a plan can look pretty impressive if you’ve got fireworks going off every month. Hang back. Cut the plan in half and place some bigger ‘umph’ behind fewer activities. Keep the old faithfuls going, but always explore something new in as much depth as possible.

4. Spend a day at your agency. This is an investment worth making. Firstly, they’ll panic at the thought of you seeing ‘the inside’. Secondly, they’ll be flattered that you seem to be committing. Ask for sessions with all the key people in the business and on your account – and something, which isn’t just the old patter.

Spend time with the creatives, particularly. Agency thinkers have a different take on life, which can give you some valuable insights into what they think you think we all think about.

This may be total tosh, or it could be startling.

5. Give your agency breathing space. Having seen how much they care, give the agency a bit more free rein. They’ll appreciate the breathing space and should flourish.

6. Go out on a sales call with each of your salesmen. I think we can merrily admit in the pages of a marketing magazine that salesmen don’t have a clue about the difference between sales and marketing. Life would be simpler if they could see what you are trying to achieve from your point of view. But, if you can’t beat em’ join em’. Go out with several and you’ll probably see just how mangled the message can get.

7. Be brave. To paraphrase some Chinese wisdom: It’s better to live a day as a tiger, than a lifetime as a sitting duck. In other words have a stab at something ‘really out there’. It will win enemies. It will get you noticed. Business is so competitive, so global, so ‘same-y’ that even if you make a terrible hash of it, you’ll give it some welly. And, given that we’re all going to be working until we’re 70 plus these days, your career will have time to recover from the nasty after-shocks.

8. Act now. Subtle point here. Sometimes you spend your whole day fleshing out details to move projects on – and this can take on a life of its own. Often personalities and politics are involved. If everyone can really see that you are going to take two years going around in circles to avoid upsetting someone, but that you actually want to get to that point… don’t mess about. Make a bee-line for it and brush the complaints aside. You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. And actually, often, you’ll feel better for cutting out the wiggles.

9. Do something online. It never ceases to amaze me what I can now buy or research online. Then I think about my own business and home life… and just how rubbish my online presence is. I bet I’m missing a lot of tricks.

I could be clearing my attic on eBay, saving a fortune on every shopping purchase and buying the ultimate holiday for every day off. But the map doesn’t really work on our office website and I can’t send it as an attachment. I don’t think we’ve done enough to raise our Google ranking. We haven’t ever placed a banner ad or developed a e-newsletter with supersonic links to really useful stuff. And yet, we all know there are people out there who have got tech’d up and are trading for huge worldwide rewards at the end of a mouse click.

10. Get the case studies written. Writing case studies means spending time with customers, not prospects. Do it yourself, because you’ll learn just what the customers think of your business: why they like it, what drives them mad. And fixing the little niggles will mean they stay with you longer and buy more of your widgets. Send these case studies around to other customers, the press, partners, colleagues – and then wait for the orders to come back.

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