The cost of changing plans?

What is the cost of changing plans, I want to share with you a little experience that I've been having over the last two and a half weeks, about two and a half weeks ago, I set a target to go live with a new product, I was like, Okay, I want to do this blueprints, the idea that marketing blueprints, when you have those built out, then that allows the planning of the rest of your campaign that you can build out your sales funnel, your ads, your products, your customer experience, all based off that marketing blueprint.

So you get those right, and then you can build out the rest of the plan.

But then from there, the execution of the plan can be thrown off.

And this comes into project management.

And what I mean by that is, as I've gone along, it's been very tempting to make changes to one or two or three of the elements of the execution.

But each time I come back, and I'm like, You know what, if I make this change, it means more work, not just in making the change to the actual particular part of the funnel or the campaign, but also all of the other parts that get affected.

Now I could choose not to make those changes at all.

But what's going to happen then, is that I'm going to get an inconsistent funnel.

And the problem is with inconsistent Funnels is that when somebody clicks an ad, or responds to a piece of content or an email, they have a particular problem that they're looking for help with, they're looking for a solution to, and they click through.

But then if they hit a page that is not consistent with that original conversation, then they're like, Ah, this isn't what I wanted.

If it is consistent, then they have the choice to continue on through.

But when I make changes to my plans, and I don't course correct, I don't make the changes in all of the places that it affects, then I will end up with an inconsistent funnel, incomplete, inconsistent campaign.

Now, this ends up being the same place as if I didn't plan at all.

And this is going on all the time.

Almost certainly, you've gone through like, okay, great, I'm going to create a new product and you build out the product, and then you Oh, I better sell this thing.

So you create a sales experience for products.

But in the creation of the sales experience, you get little improvements, little changes.

And now that sales experience doesn't match the products.

So then you got to come back to the products and either change that or change the sales experience, both of which blow out your timeframes.

This can happen with your advertising as well, that even if He managed to match your sales experience to your products, it is easy to then go ahead and create ads that don't match either of them.

You're like, oh man, it'd be so good if we did this.

And you might wonder what's the solution to this? Well, the solution is to have good plans.

Just like as if you were building a house, a skyscraper or any structure, the blueprints that you have will determine the final structure.

And what is easier in actual building a house is usually if you change the configuration of the kitchen, let's say that you move the bench around and put it somewhere else, you put the dishwasher somewhere else, then that doesn't affect the rest of the house.

But if you move the entire kitchen to a different location then that will.

And what is prevalent in business is that it's really easy to start moving the kitchen around and not realize that when you move the kitchen, you also have to move whatever was where the kitchens going and put that somewhere else.

This risk of this problem not only means that you have inconsistent funnels, but it also blows out the timeframes.

Next time you come to build a campaign, across your sales experience, your product experience, your advertising, and your customer experience.

First of all, build those plans and then don't change them.

And if you want to build consistent plans, then get your marketing plans on point first, you get your marketing on point first.

And then you cascade that out to all of the other areas marketing to sales, marketing to ads marketing, to product, and marketing to customer experience.

Now, now you're sitting pretty now you've got a consistent experience across all four of your actual front-end production that your customers see.

And then when you go to take those plans to execution do not change them lightly.

Have some kind of decision-making process that you assess whether it's worth it to make a change There's a story in a book that I read and they described that a marketing executive was like I want three gherkins you've only got one girl can show it.

And they were final production.

That's all been done.

And the guy goes, You know what I want three gherkins.

And so they came back and said, Look, you can have three gherkins, but the cost of that is $50,000.

04 weeks.

And He was like, Oh, that's not worth it.

But that required someone to actually assess whether that change was worthwhile.

If you just slide through and make changes here and there without thinking about them, thinking about the consequences on cost, on time on consistency, then you are high risk of having fat sales that fail, that you will get customers that are unhappy and your profits will suffer.

All of this comes from a systems thinking methodology.

When you begin to see that haphazard planning leads to haphazard execution and poor results versus a systematic approach, build your marketing plans, build your sales plans, your ad plans, your customer experience plans, or product plans, and then systematically execute.

This means that your projects stay on time.

This means that your projects go to market on time.

And this means that your profitability stays high.

That's all I got for you today.

I'm still here in beautiful Thredbo we just went down to the leisure Center found out that they got a kick-ass basketball court table tennis gym, and pool, and just want to let you know that every now and then there's a little bit of genius that shows up we were doing long-range basketball shots, I was messing around I took one from the foreign key, my Miss completely, my son steps up throws it and it went in nothing but the net super cool, awesome day as I was done.

Let's finish on that awesome night.

And I will also finish here.

I hope you'll have an awesome day.

I look forward to seeing you on next episode, Canadians journey into the power of systems to create results specifically around the ability to stay on time and on the budget for your projects.

Look forward to seeing your next episode.

See you then.