Strategic planning can form the foundation for tremendous business success. Of course, most strategic plans fail to get fully implemented. That's often due to a lack of a clearly defined destination.

That's one reason we couple Strategic Marketing Planning with an Opportunity Analysis. This allows us to identify benchmarks and goals, and build the necessary elements of an overall plan designed to reach them.

During this step, we review several areas of your business, including:

• Your Customer Lifecycle - From how you attract interest to how the relationship is managed and built upon
• Database Management - How you are managing your prospect and client data
• Online Marketing - Current and past online marketing activities
• Offline Marketing - Current and past offline marketing activities
• Website / Apps - How your technology-based assets are positioned to support your marketing
• Financial Data - Your key metrics affecting business health, including pricing modeling, and profitability

The result of the review and analysis in this step is a clearly defined roadmap showing where opportunity exists, defined benchmarks and goals, and the necessary actions required to achieve them.

Most businesses never invest time or energy in identifying a Unique Selling Proposition (USP).  That's a big mistake. Because when you have one in place, you can remove waste from your marketing and selling process by targeting better prospects, creating better offers, developing better business alliances, increasing conversion rates, and improving your overall Lifetime Customer Value.

The USP Discovery step is a thorough examination of your organization, what you sell and how as well as who buys from you and why. Here, we interview your organization's leadership, employees, customers, referral partners, and other stakeholders. The goal is to uncover overlooked opportunities for you to drive more revenue with less waste.

For most businesses we work with, this step alone is responsible for being able to drive more cash, more quickly than anything else we do.

In this step, we develop and implement the tools needed to leverage your USP. These typically include:

• Database / Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM) - Help you set up essential customer database and communication systems using new or existing software
• Marketing / Communication Campaigns - Help you build and deploy campaigns to (re-)engage your current customer list and systems for engaging and following-up with new prospects and contacts
• Lead Magnets - Help identify or guide creation of lead magnets targeting your ideal customer (for example,  copy review and design work as needed and agreed)
• Short-term Nurture - Work with you to develop a situationally appropriate multi-contact follow-up campaign to nurture new prospect relationships and guide them toward a transaction
• Client Attraction Plan - Develop plan for where and how to most effectively attract your ideal customer

There's a big difference between what you sell and how you sell it. Too many businesses overlook the importance of the latter. In this step we work to optimize your selling process in order to convert more of your prospects into buyers by tapping into the things that matter most to them.

In this step we work with you to reposition what you sell by wrapping it inside a compelling offer that enhances its actual and perceived value, and gets your prospects to say "yes" more easily. This includes consideration of how, when, and where the offer is presented, what's included, and how you charge for what's being delivered. For organizations currently competing based on price, this step can be a game-changer for driving more sales and higher revenue.

In this step, we'll also review and optimize your process for making sales happen and collecting payment with less friction.

So much money goes unclaimed by businesses because they don't have any kind of "stick" program in place. "Stick" programming is designed to keep prospects moving forward until they are ready to engage in business - and to keep your existing customers glued to you, so they'd never consider doing business with anyone else.

There are two major elements in this step:

• Long-term Nurture Program - This is a critical, ongoing activity that keeps both prospects and existing customers glued to your business. We'll work with you to develop a program for consistently communicating with your list in a targeted, meaningful, and profitable way.
• Surprise, Delight, & Wow Your Customers - This is the ultimate stick strategy for getting customers to buy more frequently and in larger amounts... not to mention send you referrals. We'll work with you to identify "Surprise, Delight, & Wow" activities you can institutionalize into your business.

This step is all about identifying and formalizing the right targeted activities that keep your prospects and customers on track and glued to your business.

You're probably sitting on a goldmine... you just don't know how to extract the gold. But if you've invested in creating a meaningful "Delight & Wow" program (step 4), that gold's so much easier to get your hands on.

In this final step, we identify the best places to bring in additional revenue, and work with you to develop and implement activities to do so. The two areas we focus on are:

• More Sales to Current Customers - Together we develop systems to naturally upsell, side-sell, and make new offers to your existing customers
• Referral Systems - Together, we'll create and implement a systematic approach to identifying and managing referrals from current customers and allied business partners.