Strategic Planning vs. Tactical Planning for SaaS Sales

By Charles Richard On Jul 15, 2019

Ever created a clear plan to achieve, be any personal or business goals? Well, it can seem difficult or even discouraging sometimes to handle or achieve the goal without defining clear steps to set for it. In general, there are two common mistakes made by any business when planning and operating their SaaS functions, as the mistakes lie in the area of tactics and strategy. In simple terms, the strategy is a big picture overview of your plans and actions, whereas tactics are the minute details you can actually do to achieve your strategy. Both the Strategic and Tactic marketing or planning does not oppose each other, but instead, they complement each other.

Let us take a closer look at what each type of planning revolves around.

Strategic Planning

You need to go through a complete understanding of the demographics of your consumers and their buying habits for gaining a competitive edge in marketing. Also, the businesses need to be up-to-date on the latest trends to decide what are their future goals to maintain a competitive position. After you have formulated all your goals, it is time to develop a strategy to work on these goals.

Strategic planning wants you to recognize all of the industry-related threats and opportunities to overcome them, including the strength and weakness in one’s area. Ask yourself if your company strong enough to tackle all the threats and grab your opportunities? You can never plan overall strategies for your business as with the market trends, the nature of risks varies accordingly.

In the beginning, you need to focus on elements which can actually fill the gap to gain a competitive edge. Moreover, filling the industry needs becomes your ultimate strategy or your goal. This type of planning also requires long-term goals for your company, be it expanding your business or exploring new demographics or even creating up a new brand name. Therefore, Strategic planning needs to have deeper insights into your financial status to analyze if you possess adequate funds to achieve your goals.

Tactics Planning

We get to know about how Strategic planning looks after the goals of the company, but here, tactical planning will focus more on the details to achieve that goal. With the right strategy at pace, you need proper tactics to reach your goal into the motion. Preparing the appropriate tactics is not only supporting your marketing strategy get involved in the detailed customer profiles, but it also lets you know about your target demographic, so you can select the right advertising media and decide which one is most.

In general, Tactical marketing includes general leads, building the websites, placing advertisements, and following it up. This also includes advertising, sales, and promotions with some other activities which support your Strategic marketing plan directly. Tactical planning also looks after budget establishment, which is included during the Strategic planning phase where it considers financial limitation into the account for carrying out further activities. Strategic planning and Tactical planning are mostly interdependent and worked upon in combination. Your business goal begins with a strategy followed by detailed tactics as the presence of both will enlighten you with successful marketing.

Which One to Choose for your Business?

In wider terms, it is seen that most companies initiate to plan Tactical marketing by selecting activities like email, pay-per-click, SEO, trade shows, and much more. But it can result in a big mistake. Heading on with Tactical marketing without addressing the strategic plans makes it more like building a house without a blueprint that is based on a strategy of hope, which has a guaranteed failure. Therefore, if you want to have the highest impact on your marketing, then opt for strategy first and then move to tactics as it will drive the growth and generate more business. Keep Learning!