• by Scott Davis , Fred Geyer , September 2, 2010

What does winning look like at your organization?

Defining success may sound simple, but few strategic plans come to grips with this question. Instead, management teams fall back on broad-brushed vision statements. "To be the best ... the biggest ... the leading ..." that lack the specificity employees need to implement the strategy or provide the benchmarks that leaders can use to measure progress.

Should growth strategies be visionary? Certainly. But they should also be concrete. That's what Plan to Win is all about.

Plan to Win is a market-driven approach to strategic planning that creates an actionable growth strategy and aligns the organization around implementing it. It relies on senior business leaders, including both business unit and functional heads, to join in identifying what's key to driving growth.

It starts by specifically identifying what winning looks like. When McDonald's built a Plan to Win several years ago, it successfully married the aspirational ("To be the world's best quick service restaurant") with more granular ("same store growth") customer-focused outcomes.

Next comes identification of obstacles in the way. These must be concrete, important, and most of all, surmountable. McDonald's lack of healthy foods meant mom wasn't buying, even when her children were eating a Happy Meal.

What's difficult is not listing the barriers to growth, but prioritizing what's surmountable and will make a big and immediate difference. The trick lies in identifying key barriers for each of marketing's four Ps -- product, price, place and promotion. This involves understanding customer needs and assessing the importance of meeting these needs to drive growth and improve the bottom line.

For McDonald's, flattening beverage consumption among its customers was a clear barrier to growth given beverages' role in fast food as an important profit center. But shifting consumer preferences for coffee and fruit drinks had left McDonald's with a big problem: It wasn't seen as a natural outlet for any of these fastest-growing beverages.

Its Plan to Win strategy prioritized beverages, so the product development and marketing teams rapidly created the strategies, plans, and business case to address the issue. And it worked. Published reports say the chain is well ahead of its goal to see specialty beverages add $125,000 in additional sales per restaurant.

The final step is to identify and address the organizational implications for execution against the plan. Who will lead the effort to address each growth plank? What roles will different employees play? Part and parcel of this stage is reaching agreement on the best metrics to track success, and a plan to integrate the growth planks into a unified and improved customer experience.

Electrolux was another company using Plan to Win to help it build its U.S. kitchen appliance business. Its brand relaunch featured actress Kelly Ripa as a spokeswoman. But the plan started two years earlier, first by building the scorecard to measure success at the consumer, trade partner and employee levels. From there, its teams went on to develop the products and the channel and communication strategies.

Results were outstanding, with Electrolux brand awareness rising from less than 5% to 60% among premium appliance buyers. More importantly, Electrolux share of its segment rose from 2% to more than 30% in only a year.

Planning to win works because it departs from the modus operandi of most strategic initiatives. It defines winning in tangible terms, along with the most critical, yet surmountable, barriers to achieving it. When effectively executed against, winning is the logical outcome.