Erica Olsen

A strategic plan is essential for a successful business, and creating a strategic plan that you can actually use is key. Your plan should include certain elements, like mission, values, and vision statements. It should also avoid common pitfalls, like neglecting the specific needs of your organization, so it becomes your road map for success.

In strategic planning, benchmarks are surveys and assessments that help determine how well your company performs compared to other companies in your industry or business size. Following are just a handful of benchmarking tools available: BizStats: Visit the BizStats website for instant access to useful financial ratios, business statistics, and benchmarks.

Before you can really develop a strategic plan, you must know why you’re doing what you’re doing (your mission), where you’re trying to go (your vision), and how you’re going to go about it (your values). These are the glue that holds an organization together. You preserve these elements while your strategies and goals change and flex with the market.

Strategic planning has a basic overall framework. Not to oversimplify the strategic planning process, but by placing all the parts of a plan into the following three areas, you can clearly see how the pieces of your plan fit together: Where are we now? Review your current strategic position and clarify your mission, vision, and values.

Evaluating your financial situation is part of your strategic planning process, because the financial health of your organization is critical to your corporate growth. Want to know how your business is really doing? Evaluate your financial performance by looking beyond the numbers on your balance sheet and income statement.

In the past, collecting data on your competitors for the purposes of strategic planning was difficult. Today’s overabundance of information makes this important analysis much easier. Now you can collect data legally and ethically and through a plethora of sources available to you. Check out the following table for a list of sources.

You need to have a complete picture of your company to adequately prepare a strategic plan, so taking a high-level look at your market is important. Your market is a group of customers that you can easily identify who respond to your products or services in similar ways. Your offering satisfies the needs and wants of the whole group.

When you hear the term product development, you may think about brand new products, but that’s not necessarily the case. Executing a product development strategy can happen by adding more value to your existing product through features, upselling, or cross selling. The best things about this strategy are you’ve already established yourself in your current markets and you know what your customers want.

As your strategy map tells your interrelated strategy story, your road map shows you mileposts from current to future. Strategic planning is as much about the strategy, as depicted in your strategy map, as it is about the planning, as illustrated in your road map. The road map view is extremely helpful to visualize what needs to be prioritized year-by-year to achieve your vision.