Everyone loves a quick win. These days, B2B marketing teams are under increased pressure to hit tighter deadlines and show stronger results. Effective B2B marketing planning is a challenge. You’re expected to launch bold new campaigns; leverage hot new channels and tactics; and deliver the holy grail of B2B marketing: more leads—all with budgets typically much smaller than your B2C counterparts.
When every dollar and decision is increasingly evaluated by its impact, many CMOs and Marketing Directors find themselves in a crunch. You want to elevate, but too often end up falling back on familiar tactics with only minor changes year-over-year. You deliver “OK” results, but you’re not making the impact you want to see—and not impressing the C-suite—because you’re too focused on tactics, vanity metrics and short-term objectives. It’s time to stop. Take a breath. And start reviewing your big-picture goals against business growth and bottom-line performance.
Business Impact and Growth (BIG) Planning is a strategic planning process designed by our team at LoSasso to help you shake things up, get outside the day-to-day and elevate your perspective. It helps quickly uncover opportunities, set goals and develop plans that will drive more meaningful impact for your company.
For an inside look at how LoSasso developed this process and why it matters, check out Episode 3 of our video series, Movers + Makers. LoSasso’s CEO, Scott LoSasso; Chief Strategy Officer, David Fabbri; VP, Group Account Director, Tracey Glibowski; and Louise Rasmussen, Strategic Planning Director, sat down for a casual conversation on how we're measuring B2B marketing success today, why we know it works and recent examples.
How BIG Planning is Different
Every situation is unique, but more than 30 years working with B2B marketers has helped us develop a methodology that is fast, thorough and flexible enough to be applied to virtually any situation. We’ll work with you to bring the right mix of people from your company to the table and dig in—asking the right questions that ensure we understand where your company wants to go and what marketing can do to impact the journey.
What are the benefits of BIG Planning?
- Increases impact of marketing investment
- Re-focuses marketing efforts to more effectively support overarching business goals
- Proven process to quickly identify and prioritize opportunities
- Provides experienced outside perspective
- Delivers a big-picture roadmap with quick wins to show progress
- Elevates marketing relevance and value to management
How to get going with Business Impact and Growth (BIG) Planning
1. Spotlight Briefing
Everything starts with this top-level input brief and meeting. This is where we discuss your needs and challenges—from what you have to get done to where you’d love to do more. We’ll use our BIG input brief to help you organize your thinking and identify important areas where you may need more information. Right from the start, we’ll ask questions that ensure you’re sharing important details, but also elevating your view and thinking big picture.
2. Key Questions
In this step, we take what we’ve learned in the Spotlight Briefing and build out a discussion guide for the cross-team input session in step three. We will ask important questions to help fill the holes where we need more information and help gather new insights into what outcomes are most important to people across the organization.
3. Multi-Disciplinary Input (MDI) Meeting
In B2B, there are people across teams in your organization with highly valuable information and expertise that can help take marketing to the next level. But, if you don’t bring them together and ask the right questions, it’s a lost opportunity. In the MDI meeting, we bring together people from marketing, sales, engineering, product development, product management and other subject matter experts.
Getting the right people around the table can deliver critical information about why certain products were developed and what market needs they meet. Who our key competitors are and how we stack up. Why our best customers choose us and why other deals fall through. Current market trends and opportunities, and so much more. This is also a great place to start identifying subject matter experts (SMEs) that can be leveraged to support content creation. Their technical expertise, with the right coordination and creative elevation, can be pure gold.
4. C-Suite Hot Spots
The folks at the top are the ones with the Vision—and control of the budgets. Taking the time to map out where your leadership team is focused is critical. What are key initiatives for this year? What is the 5-year Vision for the company? Where are they driving for change? What are their pain points? Should you be targeting customers in new markets? Should re-sell or up-sell opportunities to existing customers be a priority? Are internal communications needed to better align the company? The possibilities are endless, but the more you consider what’s important to them, the better your efforts will be received.
5. Success Metrics
BIG planning puts an increased focus on outcomes. Beyond vanity marketing metrics, BIG Planning emphasizes Success Metrics. Whether focusing on how to help boost customer LTV or shape brand positioning to address a competitive opportunity in the market, these are metrics tightly aligned to big-picture company goals and financial impact. As an agency that got its start in performance marketing, we know how to help you set goals that are going to matter and we have the experience to drive engagement and optimize performance of the measures that matter.
6. Quick-Win Map
We’ve honed our process to make building out an impactful strategy and activation plan fast and effective, but we know the pressure you’re under. Even when you’re moving fast, somehow it never feels quite fast enough. If you’ve involved key people from across the organization, you are eager to show results for their efforts. That’s why we always build quick wins into the strategy. These are small but important objectives that can be met in a short period of time and let you shine the light on success while the things that are going to take longer to bear fruit are set in motion.
7. BIG Impact Plan
Always elevated beyond what’s expected, this is where it’s all laid out. It’s the roadmap for how we will move ahead together with focus and confidence that you are using your valuable resources—money, time and passion—in the places that are going to show the greatest return.
It’s Time to Think BIG
It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day whirlwind of tactics and short-term gains. True power lies in thinking BIG. Business Impact and Growth (BIG) Planning will help elevate your strategy, align marketing efforts with overarching business goals and drive meaningful outcomes. By integrating insights from across your organization and focusing on metrics that matter, you can demonstrate marketing's value to the C-suite and ensure your efforts are driving real business growth.
If you'd like to take a step back from the day-to-day grind, embrace your best strategic mindset and contribute to your company's long-term success, we're ready to help you dive in and make a real difference.
