We’re a little addicted to the aha moment.
When we’re planning with a client, we’re always looking for the thing they don’t already know. We talk with customers, dig through old research, interview people across the company, look at sales data, and ask to see things that might not look like marketing materials. We’ve found useful insights in some strange places.
Sometimes we uncover something that changes the direction of the plan. Other times, the research confirms what the company already suspected, or helps everyone see that one priority matters more than the others. Those are good outcomes, too, even if they don’t produce quite the same excitement in the room.
The big reveal is fun, and we’ll always look for it. But the real value is a good marketing plan that people can use, along with the habit of making time to plan. After years of doing this work, we’ve come to appreciate another of the benefits of marketing planning: how much a company can learn about itself along the way.
Planning gives us a reason to look more closely
Most businesses know a lot more than any one person in the company knows. Sales knows which objections keep coming up. Customer service knows what people struggle with after the sale. Leadership knows where it wants the company to go. People who work directly with customers know things that might surprise everyone else. And somewhere, there’s probably a folder of research that cost a small fortune and hasn’t been opened in two years.
Even smaller companies are collecting more information than they used to. They have website analytics, customer records, sales reports, survey results, and data from the various tools they’ve adopted over the years. Collecting it has become relatively easy. Finding time to study it, connect it to what people are seeing firsthand, and decide what it means for the business is another matter.
Everybody’s busy doing their jobs, and much of what they know stays within their own departments. Planning gives us a reason to bring it together. It gets people away from their day-to-day work long enough to take a closer look at the business. What are we trying to accomplish? Which customers matter most? Why do they choose us? Where are the opportunities? What do we know, what are we assuming, and what would help us make better decisions? There’s nothing magical about the questions themselves. The interesting things start happening when people make time to answer them, compare what they know, and follow a question far enough to learn something useful.
We’ve worked with businesses generating tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue that have never developed a basic marketing plan. They’ve grown, hired people, launched products, run campaigns, and spent plenty of money on marketing. Along the way, they’ve formed strong opinions about what works and what doesn’t, often based on years of experience. But much of that knowledge lives in separate departments, spreadsheets, and people’s heads. Nobody has brought it all together in an organized way.
For some companies, simply seeing their goals, customers, priorities, strategies, tactics, budget, and responsibilities connected for the first time changes how they think about marketing. They begin to see why certain activities deserve more attention, why others can wait, and how decisions in one part of the business affect another. People who came into the process with different views leave with a better understanding of what the company is trying to do.
Sometimes that shared understanding is the most important thing a company can learn from planning. Other times, taking a closer look at what the company already knows changes the direction of the work.
A fresh look at what you already know
One company we worked with had already spent six figures on customer research. The findings were thoughtful, and the company had drawn some reasonable conclusions about how it should position itself. But the conclusions didn’t quite capture what the research was saying.
The company had focused on the word trust, which was both a categorical truism and the main message above the fold on their main competitors’ websites. Trust mattered, but it wasn’t distinctive, and they didn’t truly explain what their key audiences valued. When we dug in, we noticed that different audiences cared about different things. One audience – the one that actually hired companies like theirs – valued speed to market. Another audience cared about ease and simplicity. And the third audience really cared most about the outcome they needed.
At first, those looked like separate messages for separate groups. But as we worked through the findings, a common thread emerged: performance. It was a more useful way to describe what the company delivered, and it connected the different things all three audiences cared about. That insight helped shape a stronger position in the market.
The information had been there all along. The original research wasn’t wrong, and we hadn’t discovered some secret customer need. The challenge was interpreting the findings and understanding what they meant for the company’s marketing. That takes more than reading the conclusions at the front of a research report.
It’s one reason we like getting into the research ourselves, even when a client has already invested heavily in it. We want to understand the evidence well enough to make good decisions with it. Sometimes that means questioning an earlier interpretation or following a finding that didn’t get much attention the first time around.
And sometimes the research tells us the company’s instincts were right all along. We might confirm that a certain group of customers is the right priority, that a strength really does matter to buyers, or that a direction leadership has been debating deserves deeper commitment. That kind of confirmation can be valuable, especially when it helps people stop second-guessing a reasonable decision and get on with the work.
The people closest to the work often see things everyone else misses
Some of our favorite planning discoveries have come from asking people about things they do every day.
During planning work with a wealth management firm, we asked to see the content the company had created. To our delight, we discovered that its co-founder was a published author who loved writing and had produced more than a hundred thoughtful articles. The company had been considering how to approach content marketing while sitting on a gold mine of material from someone with deep expertise and a genuine interest in sharing it. Once we understood what was available, we had a very different starting point for its content strategy.
In another engagement, we came across a wall covered with customer responses to trouble tickets that a technical support team had printed out and posted. These weren’t testimonials carefully chosen for marketing. They were notes from customers whose difficult problems had been solved, and the team had kept them because the comments meant something to the people doing the work.
There was an interesting common thread woven into the comments: The team genuinely enjoyed tackling complex problems, and customers appreciated that willingness to dig in. Here was a real strength of the company that hadn’t come through clearly in its marketing. The people demonstrating it every day weren’t the ones responsible for explaining the company to the market.
We’re always looking for these kinds of clues. Sometimes they’re buried in research, sometimes they’re sitting in plain sight, and sometimes they’re in a conversation with someone nobody thought to include in the planning process.
That’s why we want to hear from the people who understand the problems and opportunities firsthand, whether or not they are in leadership or have marketing or strategy in their job titles. Someone who works with customers may spot a pattern long before it shows up in a report. A technical specialist may understand a competitive advantage that leadership has never thought to describe that way. A salesperson may know exactly where the company’s story stops making sense to a prospect.
Ron Ashkenas makes a related argument in his Harvard Business Review article, “Internal Buy-In Will Make or Break Your Growth Strategy.” He describes why it’s important to hear from people who work directly with customers and others who bring useful knowledge to planning, especially when the data doesn’t give us a clear answer.
Of course, inviting more people into planning doesn’t mean inviting everyone to every meeting. The trick is figuring out who has something useful to share, bringing them in at the right time, and listening closely enough that what they say can change the plan. We’ve written more about that in Who should be involved in marketing planning?
Making time for imagination
Research and conversations give us plenty to think about. They can also help us imagine what the business might do differently, which is something most companies don’t spend nearly enough time doing.
People are busy running the businesses they’ve built. They’re dealing with customers, employees, deadlines, budgets, and whatever went sideways that morning. Even when they have good ideas about where the business could go, those ideas compete with the work that needs to get done today. There’s always another meeting to attend or problem to solve, and thinking about what might be possible is easy to postpone.
This is why we believe in putting time on the calendar to plan, and then protecting it. A company can say thinking about the future is important, but if nobody has time set aside to do it, the urgent work will win. Inspiration doesn’t arrive on a schedule, but we can make it more likely by giving people time to think, bringing useful information into the conversation, and creating an atmosphere where they’re comfortable exploring ideas.
Peter Scoblic talks about this in the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast episode “How to Future-Proof Your Strategy.” He describes imagination as an often-overlooked part of strategy and explains how people can develop it by considering different possibilities and hearing from others with different experiences.
One of his examples is the U.S. Coast Guard, which established a planning effort that brought in people from operational roles, including those accustomed to making decisions in the field. The Coast Guard wanted to think more seriously about what its future might look like, so it made room for people with firsthand knowledge of the work to consider possibilities beyond their immediate duties. Over time, that effort helped make thinking about the future a more regular part of how the organization planned.
What interests us about that story is the deliberate effort to create the right conditions. The Coast Guard didn’t expect its people to find time for strategic thinking somewhere between their regular responsibilities. It made the time and brought together people who had different things to contribute.
We see a smaller version of that in marketing planning. Someone from one department asks a question that seems obvious to them but hasn’t occurred to the people who have been working on the problem for months. A new person in the room asks why the company does something a certain way, and everyone realizes the answer is mostly habit. Or a conversation takes an unexpected turn because someone shares a customer experience that changes how the group sees an opportunity.
Getting to those moments takes some work. We try to create an environment where people feel comfortable speaking up, including when their perspective differs from leadership’s. We ask questions, listen to the answers, and sometimes ask the second, third, or fourth question because there’s clearly more to the story. We’re looking for the thing that might be easy to miss when everyone is focused on getting through the agenda.
We love this part of planning, especially when clients begin to see new possibilities in their own businesses. Marketing can become a grind when it’s mostly a matter of getting the next campaign out the door, filling the calendar, or responding to whatever someone needs this week. Giving people room to think about their customers, their strengths, and what they could do differently can bring some of the excitement back.
We want our clients to feel that. We want them to see that good marketing can be thoughtful, creative, and enjoyable, and that they have more to work with than they might have realized. Sometimes an idea comes out of those conversations that changes the plan. Just as often, people leave with a clearer sense of why the work matters and a little more enthusiasm for doing it.
Of course, a promising idea still needs to earn its place. Does it help us reach our goals? Is it worth pursuing now? What would it take, and what would we have to set aside to make room for it? Those are useful questions to ask while everyone is still in the room, before a new idea becomes another item on somebody’s already crowded to-do list.
What companies learn by making planning a habit
There’s good evidence that strategic planning is worth the time. In a 2019 review of 31 studies published in Public Administration Review, researchers found a positive relationship between strategic planning and how well organizations perform.
Since 1997, we’ve seen the value firsthand. Companies benefit from having clear priorities, agreed-upon strategies, realistic budgets, confidence in their messaging, and people who know what they’re responsible for. The harder part is making time for that work when there are customers to serve, problems to solve, and plenty of other demands on the calendar.
The first time a company goes through a serious planning process, there’s often a lot to sort out. Information is scattered across departments, assumptions haven’t been questioned in years, and people may have different ideas about what marketing should accomplish. Sales and marketing might not even agree on what makes a good lead. Working through those questions can take more time than anyone expected, but it gives the company a clearer picture of where things stand and what needs attention.
The experience also teaches people how to plan. They get a better sense of which questions need more work, why it’s worth hearing from people with different views, and why choosing one good idea often means passing on another. They see the value of doing the research before making commitments and the importance of connecting goals to the work that will actually get done.
When planning becomes a regular habit, the company doesn’t have to start from scratch every time. People know what information will be useful, so they’re more likely to collect it and keep track of things worth discussing later. They recognize questions that deserve attention before those questions become urgent. And because they’ve been through the process before, they’re more comfortable having the sometimes difficult conversations about priorities and tradeoffs.
That doesn’t mean reopening every decision or rewriting the plan whenever someone has a new idea. People need time to work the plan they’ve made. But they also need time set aside to look at what they’ve learned, consider what’s changed, and decide what deserves attention next. That’s part of making planning a normal, useful part of running the business.
One of the things we hear most often after a company’s first serious marketing planning engagement is some version of “We should have done this sooner.” People are glad to have a plan they can use, but they’re often surprised by how much they’ve learned in putting it together. They understand their customers a little better, have a new appreciation for what their colleagues know, and see opportunities they hadn’t considered before.
We’ll always be looking for the aha moment. We love finding that one thing that changes how a company sees its business. But there’s plenty to learn without a big revelation, and that’s what makes planning worth coming back to. Each time a company makes room for it, there’s a chance to ask better questions, build on what it already knows, and discover something useful for the road ahead.
We’ll still be looking for the aha moment. But the learning is what keeps us coming back.
