Plans not only provide us with a visualization of what we will be doing (a calendar can do that) but also point us in a specific direction and, step by step, lead us to our goals.
Planning is crucial to success – more specifically, adequate planning that is pointed at results. Forget marketing plans comprising spreadsheets and PowerPoints laying out a few webinars and events coming up in the next quarter. Instead, these plans need to align to corporate strategy and contain goals.
This means we have to get the math right, as well. Everything we put in our plan will yield some kind of results. We need to project out those results and aggregate them, removing duplicates, so that we can determine whether or not our plans will, in fact, or at least in theory, lead us to our goals.
