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Every time I attend a planning workshop, people are still annoyed by the critical process of gathering information in planning.

Do you know why?

Gathering information in planning is really asking the relevant and most basic questions about the business. Most entrepreneurs and middle managers hate going to basics.

Everybody is so gung-ho about just drawing their marketing guns, loading and firing away! If that doesn't work they call in bigger guns. (Bigger budget, bigger promotions. You can list the rest of the big things you've done already.)

Everybody seems convinced that the answers to the basic questions are obvious. The funny thing is that this is one of those obvious things they find hard to write on paper.

Asking the Most Basic and Relevant Questions

Who is your customer?

Oh, yisshhh here we go again.

Don't give me that oh-yiiiissshhh-here-we-go-again, scratch-your-head, and look-at-the-heaven routine.

You should have been asking this question over and over again until you are convinced you truly know who is paying your salary, your rent, your benefits, and hey, your Christmas bonus.

What does your customer need?

What are the current products and services you have that meet this need?

How are you going to deliver these products and services to the customer?

I can bet you have no clear answer to these questions until now. I would not even wonder if you are five or ten years in the business and still have not answered these questions.

Understanding The Same Thing, Thinking The Same Way

Let the lead technical person in your company write his answer to these basic but relevant questions.

Do the same thing with your lead marketing guy. Don't let them discuss. Just let them write it on a scratch paper.

Don't let them write more than seven points. No paragraphs just short key points.

If key words match, that is a positive thing.

If your two lead persons are the people who define the function, the process or work methodologies in their respective department, unit or teams, you can conclude that they are in synch.

You can have a lot of perception and coordination problem if this is otherwise.

Getting Your Customer Profile Right

Do you have a list of your primary customers who contributed 80% of your gross revenue?

Can you categorize your customer under a special group or groups based on the amount of services delivered and mode of payment?

Do you have quantitative and qualitative description of your existing customer?

How much profit contribution value do you attribute to each customer in a year or a lifetime based on historical revenue and profit margin contribution?

If you don't have the numbers from last year in a spreadsheet, you are going to need a crystal ball guessing the baseline projection.

You must be able to at least approximate the dollar value of each account from last year.

Make a list of your customer constituting 80% of your revenue and net profits. Rank them according to net profitability.

Do you have a compelling reason why you should retain the account that is the most expensive to serve?

Do You Understand Your Market Positioning

What is the positioning of the company?

What is the positioning of the products & services?

Can you describe how the positioning is actually achieved?

Write your answer to this and then ask your lead marketing guy to do the same.

If your choice of words is almost identical, you are in good hands.

If what your Customer sees is not the picture you are supposed to be painting yourself for their perception, you have a positioning problem. This can be easily resolved if you know who is your best customer.

You cannot project an image beyond what they already see unless you deliberately come up with the strategy backed up by a process to reverse or change this perception.

Knowing Your Strategy: Do You Have One?

Have you defined your strategy?

Have you deliberately designed your structure to work the strategy?

Have you defined the business or functional units under the structure?

Do you have a clear definition of functions for the business units under the structure?

What are your measurable goals under the strategy?

This part I find amusing even in what are suppose to be stable companies.

Most of the statements on strategy, vision or mission statement are just cheap advertising.

The irony of this is that the really strong and enduring organizations have based their policies and philosophy of doing business on these statements.

In fact, the strategy, mission and/or vision statements can be a forceful reflection of their internal values or belief systems.

The question now is this: Do you have a value system? Is this evident in the way you treat your customers, employees, partners, suppliers and competition?

(If you don't have, whatever you are doing now is just plain hype?)

Knowing Your Internal Business Processes

What is the internal process for delivering the product/service to the customer?

Who is accountable for the integrity of the delivery process?

Who is accountable for the result of the delivery process?

What are the points of contact by the customer?

What is the internal process for each to guarantee you establish the contact, control content, manage interaction, and provide feedback?

Who is accountable for the integrity of the process?

Who is accountable for the result of the contact?

Now do this exercise. Get your lead person for technical support or marketing then pick a process in your business.

Let the lead guy make a diagram of the process.

You do your own diagram of the process. Compare.

How does it look?

9 out of 10 chances is that you are looking at a totally different diagram.

Half of the time, the diagram is never finish because either you don't know how to begin or you don't know where it stops.

Where is your organization in this equation?

Know Your Numbers

Can you rank products and services according to gross revenue contribution?

Can you rank products and services according to net profit margin contribution?

Do you know the proportionate share of each product and services in the Gross Revenue in percent?

Do you know the cost of acquiring a new customer?

Do you know the cost of servicing a customer in terms of per visit or per hour?

Do you know the cost structure of your service as rendered to a customer?

This is just really to build confidence on how you do your math and relate or link it to your operations.

If you have personally

-seen the process behind how the numbers are derived,
-walk through the process of how the formulas are used, and
-stamp your vote of confidence in the integrity of the process and of course, your accountant,

I can assume it is safe to trust the numbers.

The question is do you have the templates and the process to use these numbers from your end right down to the person responsible for either generating revenue or managing cost.

Documenting Anything Relevant and Important: Processes, Procedures & Policies

Do you have written sales and marketing policies?

What is your written customer support policy?

If you don't have an honest to goodness philosophy of designing products and services that really deliver value to customers, don't even pretend to be interested about putting policies on paper.

These policies are literally not worth the paper they are written on.

Knowing and Documenting Your Knowledge Resource

Do you have a skills and knowledge inventory of your staff?

Do you already have a training manual for technical support?

Do you already have a training manual for your sales staff?

Do you have technical support escalation process?

You will always hear people bragging that there people are good at this and excellent in that.

You can even read they have years and years of experiences making you almost think that they've been around longer than the microchip.

I made this ridiculously simple request from my former employer.

I ask their team leaders to actually make a table that will outline who has knowledge in what, how much experience related to a set of knowledge and skills, what training they have undergone, and exactly from what projects they have either applied or derived their knowledge, skills and experience.

Not one can come up with this knowledge resource inventory. Not one! They all assumed that a whole bunch of resumes in their 201 files is *The Inventory*.

If you can get the related information for the above, at least a piece or pieces at a time, you can actually schedule milestones leading to a full-blown strategic planning at the end of the year.

You can choose which is more tactical for you and what is strategic.

The Facilitator or Consultant can only provide you a series or a bunch of alternatives or choices.

The Consultant's responsibility is to make you understand that there are choices and if such choices seem invisible or unavailable, the Consultant then tries to put you in an environment in which you are force to "create" your choices.

Remember that a decision must be made. You will have to select from among many choices.

You must make that judgment call to find the best option for you. It's your decision. It's your responsibility.

If you are not confident that you can make that decision then ask the Consultant to help you come up with the criteria, benchmark or guidelines on which to base your decision.

Then, improvise a system or a process for your decision-making responsibility.

The Best Ones Stick to The Basics, The Rest They Wing it!

Most will never finish any material related to planning.

Let's face it planning takes time, patience, cost, and probably lost opportunities to do something else.

Most people and organizations that don't plan do a lot of 'something'. Whether they get anywhere is a totally different equation all together.

In the middle of the desert, somewhere is nowhere! One thing really certain, there will be a lot of dead things and skeletons along the way.

If you want to start planning, I suggest you open and print a set of things you should already know about your business.

Start with what you know.

Let's go through the checklist: (All of these items must be in paper)

-Your mission statement

-A brief description of sales and marketing campaigns implemented

Every item that you have in the above means one less work to do.
Every item not available means a certain key process in your business is undocumented or is not seamlessly link to other business processes.

Bottom-line: You really are just "winging it".