Questions and Answers

How do we determine our market share?

You should recognize up front that it might not be possible to get perfect information, but that perfect information is not critical to developing your plan. This being said, you should be able to create reasonable estimates. The two most common methods used in estimating a company's market share are 1) a top down approach., where a broad, unfocused industry size is obtained from some public source (i.e., trade association, industry publications, or published market studies), and then it is cut back by each of the focusing attributes in the market segment definition until it represents the market you are pursuing; or 2) a bottom up approach, where most of the competitors (or alternatively most of the customers) in a segment are identified with the amount of business they do in the segment, and these amounts are summed to estimate the total size of the market. It may be possible to corroborate the findings with non-competitive co-suppliers to the industry. The focus on market segments that the Simplified Strategic Planning process brings should allow you to attain more precision each year. Do not fall into the trap of letting the process bog down or even stop because you feel you cannot assemble perfect data.

How can we get better Action Plans?

Keep in mind what an Action Plan is designed to accomplish. It is basically a project management tool. As such, it is imperative that all steps in the Action Plan be both clear and actionable. In addition, you should recognize that the Action Plans do not exist in a vacuum. They are designed to be used as part of the Monthly Monitoring Process. To be effective they need to have a sufficient number of steps, scheduled such that they allow evaluation in that time frame. For example, an Action Plan that has several steps with a six month interval between start and completion dates would be much less effective as a monitoring tool than if some of those steps were further broken down into activities that had completion dates in most of the months. Another common mistake is not looking ahead on Action Plans. In any particular month, the Action Plan Team should not only focus on the items due for completion that month, but should also be looking ahead to items scheduled for completion during the next month. Doing so will allow for scheduling of meetings or other required resource commitments well in advance. Finally, the scheduling of start and completion dates should never be done arbitrarily. You should have a clear grasp of resource requirements and availability based on our time planning techniques.

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