7 Corporate Strategic Planning Techniques

You have essential goals you want to achieve for your company, but how will you get there? If you can help every employee in your company focus on the same objectives, it’s possible. Still, they’ll need guidelines they can use every single day to help them reach those goals, and that’s where the corporate strategic planning process comes into play.

What Is Corporate Strategic Planning?

The goal behind corporate strategic planning is to develop the right plans to achieve your bigger goals. This will mean defining those goals at the outset and creating an implementation plan to ensure they cascade through every level of your company.

Key Techniques to Consider

The corporate strategic planning process is a reasonably long one, and its success will depend extensively on the techniques you use. What should you employ while you’re creating your plan? Consider these options.

1. Testing & Measuring:

One of the most basic things you can do for your business is to constantly test what works and what doesn’t work while also measuring your success (or failure) from what happened. How are you ever going to make an informed decision about your business if you don’t know what you are looking at, how to measure data that is relevant to your business or professional goals, or how to properly test new methods? Don’t leave yourself at a disadvantage and begin to truly know your business by testing and measuring what you do.

2. Budgeting: 

Often, people confuse corporate strategic planning with budgeting, and for a good reason. The two are closely tied together. While your overall strategic planning session should be about much more than a budget, it should undoubtedly include a closer look at your overall numbers.

3. Business Models:

The framework you’re using to help transform your company or shift your priorities can change how you do business. Your planning strategy may better define your business model and help you add the products and services necessary to capture more value.

4. Business Plan:

Often associated with getting investors or additional funding, developing this during your planning process is an absolute must. You’ll want to consider adding this any time you enter a new market or transform your company in some essential way.

5. Capability Analysis: 

What can you really do? Where do you fall short? Understanding these key factors is part of corporate strategic planning. It will help you better understand what makes your company weak and where you could potentially expand in the future.

6. Competitive Intelligence: 

Learning more about what you face is a must, and that’s precisely what competitive intelligence can do for you. It’s essential if you’re planning your strategy for the future because it offers you key information about your competitors and the markets you may not have entered yet. It may also provide you with additional information about customers who are working with your competitors.

7. Goal Setting: 

You want certain things from your business. Creating a plan to get those things means developing a strategy that considers both the opportunities and the threats within the market. It also means developing a strategy that has every single part of your company contributing to that goal, from the executives at the top to the individuals at the bottom.

Corporate strategic planning can be a fairly lengthy process, but it doesn’t have to be one you undertake alone. Let AMB Performance Group help guide your strategy. Contact us today to learn more.