I like and respect Christine Hollinden as both colleague and friend. I am connected to her at LinkedIn, where I also follow her firm. I am friends with her on Facebook, where I also like her firm. I often join her instructive and enjoyable webinars and read her blog (http://www.hollinden.com/blog) and newsletter. This morning, in an announcement of her upcoming webinar, "From Strategy to Results: ensuring solid execution," she said something that really made me stop and think:
"Which is more important: Strategy or Execution? All too often we hear that strategy does not matter as long as you are producing results."
So let's look at this from the perspective of a long-term A/E/C industry marketer.
I am a strong proponent of the axiom, "plan the work—work the plan." The graphic to the left, which is my own personal "4 Ps of Marketing," shows this.
I believe that these four steps are the surest way to winning new projects or turning new clients into clients who come back to you over and over again AND recommend your firm to others.
Obviously, no A/E/C firm succeeds without solid execution. Execution produces revenue, revenue covers expenses, and sufficient revenue results in a profitable enterprise. But how much more revenue—and significant revenue, at that—can be produced if a firm's marketing activities are planned, rather than using what we often refer to as the "ready, fire, aim!" approach to pursuit decision-making.
Pursuing work without some kind of planning—some kind of advance thinking—is like going for a walk without first establishing a destination, and hoping that the place where you end up will be a place where you want to be.
So it seems to me that execution without strategy is a rather hit-or-miss situation. Having a strategy tells you what you want to achieve, where you want to go. And from strategies come strategic plans, which pinpoint where you are and provide the maps of how you think you're going to get from where you are to where you want to go.
And part of the strategy is to use the best decision-making processes you can develop and implement. These include great search capabilities for potential opportunities as well as great pursuit-decision processes to determine which of these are true opportunities for your firm.
You can submit ten proposals in a month, turning them out like factory assembly line production using all standard parts. Given the most-likely-middling quality of each, you might win one of them, but probably no more.
But what if you follow your strategic plan and determine that two of the ten are the kind of work you don't do at all, another two are project types for which you don't have a lot of experience, and one is a project with more liability than your firm wants to assume.
Now you are only making five submittals this month, all of them at a higher quality because each gets more of your time. And of those five true opportunities, you now win three, resulting in more revenue with less stress.