Planning Meeting Facilitators Can Be the Key to Developing Highly Effective Marketing Plans

New Interactive Online Training for Facilitators and Planners Can Improve Their Skills to Help Planning Teams Chart the Right Course.

You know the challenge if you’ve ever tried to wrangle a group of strong-willed team members into reaching consensus about marketing plans.

Without procedures in place and strong leadership setting the courseof action, the process can be very daunting.

That’s why skilled marketing planners and facilitators can have an oversized impact on the success of a company’s strategic marketing planning efforts. Their role in guiding team members into meaningful discussions helps ensure that planning meetings are efficient, focused, collaborative, and achieve results.

An interactive online training course for marketing planners and facilitators is now available through Marketing Convergence Solutions. A free preview of Lesson 1 and Quiz of the five training lessons is available here.

These lessons are important to help marketing planners and facilitators sharpen their skills to execute better planning team organization and leadership. Their role in guided discussions, time management, and consensus building is vital in formulating effective marketing plans.

Each of the five reading lessons, followed by a 10 questions quiz to test each participant's retention of the subject matter, includes: 

Lesson 1: The Basics of Strategic Marketing Planning Using Marketing Convergence Techniques

• Bridging internal sales and marketing silos

• Barriers to sales and marketing alignment

• Defining the roles of sales and marketing in the planning process

• Advantages of group thinking vs. individual creative thought

• Key takeaways from marketing convergence strategic planning

Lesson 2: Planning Organization and Building the Strategic Marketing Planning Team

• Establishing the goals and purpose of the planning

• How planning team members should be identified from sales and marketing

• Roles and responsibilities of the facilitator

• Planning team member qualities

• Other planning participants

• Who should be excluded from the team

Lesson 3: Team Preparations Required for Strategic Marketing Planning

• Organizing the preplanning session for team members

• Reviewing the situation analysis and assigning responsibilities for completion

• Reviewing and instructing team members on how to prepare preplanning worksheets

Lesson 4: Conducting the Strategic Marketing Planning Meeting

• Useful planning meeting tools including the PowerPoint guide and flip charts

• Need for confidentiality

• Creating sub-teams

• Presenting the situation analysis

• Reviewing impediments to success from the planning team

• Determining sales goals

• Conducting a SWOT analysis

• Formulating objectives and strategies

• Discussing tactics

Lesson 5: Writing the Final Marketing Plan and Executive Summary

• Introduction to sections in the interactive worksheet planning form in the planning package

• Reviewing examples of marketing convergence objectives, strategies, and tactics

• Introduction to sections in the executive summary interactive worksheet planning form in the planning package

• Implementing the plan

• Followup, tracking, adjustment

Want More Marketing Planning Ideas?

Go to Marketing Convergence Solutions for more practical ways to align sales and marketing to help you strategically generate more sales, leads, and customer loyalty.

A preview of the guidebook is available here.

Order the complete marketing planning package, which includes the training.