Envision Your Companies Future and Success Will Follow

Keep an eye on the sky and your feet firmly planted on the ground. That might be sound advice for anyone seeking to kick start or rejuvenate a marketing plan destined for success in today's somewhat volatile economic scene. The warning signs we have all seen led to a stock market adjustment, to the real estate cool down many have feared - mean its time to shore up your marketing plan.

Unfortunately, your marketing plan is sometimes the first to go, just when you need it most.

When times are challenging, it can be all the more difficult to play the visionary and see all of the possibilities, get a plan in place and stay the course. Hardly anyone has the time to do that in a crisis, but someone has to do it and it may as well be you.

It may be that you don't even know the skills you possess. Early in my career, my employer put a lot of training into his staff, testing management styles and making the professional experience one in which anyone with time, commitment and enthusiasm could learn and grow.

The test they gave me changed the way I looked at my own abilities; it indicated a strong affinity for leadership and described my "management style" as visionary with an eye for detail.

Those traits come in handy as a marketing professional trying to help companies see the possibilities and take the action necessary to realize the dream they and their teams may have for their organization.

So how can you stir up a dream vision of what you want your company to become, look and feel like by the end of 2008? Yes, timelines are important, even to dreamers.

The process of envisioning, as it is sometimes called in strategic planning circles, involves creative thoughts and ideas that coalesce into a vision, which is a more fleshed-out representation of those ideas. It is a bit like writing down your dreams when you wake up so you can make more sense of them later.

Over time, the vision becomes more elaborate and develops an element of seeing the future as it could be. It becomes the long-term view of what the ideal organization looks like, feels like, and acts like, as well as the company it attracts and keeps.

An effective leader possesses the ability to describe to vision to those who must follow. In business, the followers are typically managers, staff, board members, customers, prospects, government officials and the like.

A vision is neither the plan nor the means to get to the desired state. The artist has to conceive before he begins to paint, right? Those who hear the vision are often drawn to it as it represents change, transformation and a better place for those who have a stake. Not all visionaries can execute, as not all artists can paint, but as long as there's a team in pace, inside or out, there is a bridge from dream to reality. That dream follows a few simple steps.

From the vision the team crafts:

• The Mission. This is the purpose or reason for being in business.
• The Goals and Objectives. This is the desired and measurable outcomes.
• The Strategies. This is the means by which the company will get there.
• The Tactics. This is where the specific tasks born of the strategies above are assigned, internally or to the outside agency, to execute activities such as: designing a new product or service; rewriting messaging to reflect company changes; writing new content for the Web; designing an ad; securing photography; developing a media database; writing a press kit; or planning an event or trade show.

We put all those tasks into what we call an action plan and it drives everything we do and it always states what, when and who. It's reviewed on a weekly basis or biweekly basis to be sure we are on the right road to reach the desired dream state for the client.

With the right team in place, the right vision in everyone's mind, and the spirit and energy to get the job done , day in and day out, there could soon be a lot of good reasons for letting your feet leave the ground.

Thanks to Eleanor L. Boineau, E. Boineau and Co., a strategic marketing company based in Charleston, SC