As consumer, shopper and customer trends continue to evolve across the world, many of our clients find that it is becoming increasingly difficult to grow their categories. Often, when business performance is suffering, our clients’ Sales and Marketing functional teams tend to work less closely together and can blame each other for poor commercial results. Because, after all, isn’t marketing all about strategy and sales all about execution?
We have proven that co-ordinating the efforts of Sales and Marketing teams in integrated planning leads not just to better cross-functional collaboration, but to better-executed strategies and a resulting step change in overall business performance. There is no quick fix, integrated planning requires a change in behaviours, ways of working and trust between key parts of the commercial organisation.
Here’s how it works: our key aim in integrated planning is to combine sales and marketing efforts to produce integrated plans across the product portfolio that are manageable for the business to execute, and, crucially, deliver the category and business strategy.
This is achieved through identifying the few, critical things to do well, and strive for fresh, bold, objective, quantified and simple plans that transform strategy into action.
1. ASSESSMENT
Firstly, we carry out a structured assessment of the Sales and Marketing functional teams, to find the key issues, where a lack of integration between these teams are preventing optimal execution of their strategies.
2. STREAMLINE
We streamline, and enhance, where necessary, the established processes to focus on delivering the critical outputs that deliver powerful, executable plans.
3. DEVELOP
We focus on Sales and Marketing teams developing their functional strategies and plans in parallel, and then bring them together at key points in the process, where they share their inputs, and align their outputs, ensuring that a holistic view of consumer, shopper and customer perspectives is placed ahead of efforts to protect different functional disciplines or budgets.
4. INTEGRATE
We facilitate integration across these teams, in a series of cross-functional interventions, coaching the teams to adopt the behaviours, streamlined processes, tools and ways of working that align the goals, objectives, activities and measures to deliver sustained business performance.
Oh, and let’s not forget: integrated planning does not just deliver sustained business results for our clients’ category growth strategy, but it also builds key capabilities for their Sales and Marketing teams involving strategic and creative thinking in equal measures; opening the door to greater cross-functional collaboration, efficiency and effectiveness.
Get in Touch
If you would like to find out more about the benefits of our approach to implementing integrated planning for your Sales and Marketing teams, please contact us. We also have a powerful case study that provides more insight into how these benefits have been achieved