The Challenge: Go Public Before Spring
Monica has just started negotiations with the customer. She prepared a great brief proposing how this marketing project should look like. She included the ideas how to make the campaign laser-focused and not to loose millions on prime time ads.
Monica proposed to focus on: LinkedIn, hard copy business magazines and on sending bunch of CEO-only discount coupons to selected CEOs who can forward them to their business partners. Also included ads in a few fashion and lifestyle magazines that are read by office assistants, who often have a great influence on the place where their bosses eat lunches. She was well prepared, she had optimistic approach and a lot of enthusiasm! She invited Olivier and his team for the presentation.
And the meeting became a disaster. She presented all the ideas listed in the brief. Bullet after bullet. Olivier put Monica through the hoops asking about subtle details of every single step in the campaign: dependencies, effort required and costs. She has not been prepared for such a detailed conversation and she had a feeling that the customer’s hidden agenda is to depreciate the value of the campaign or herself personally.
Finally Olivier expressed his doubts whether the campaign will achieve the goals as expected. He underlined the tight timeframe, as people are motivated to eat healthy when first sunny days come. So it is important to go public before spring begins.
The Problem: Sense of Security
The customer was reluctant to the campaign proposal, because Monica hadn't ensure his sense of security. The skepticism resulted from missing important piece: the schedule clearly shows the ownership of each step.
Olivier was afraid that his small marketing team will not manage to perform the campaign in such a short time, while in fact Sophie assumed (but not stated clearly enough!) that most of the work will be done on her side.
Not having all the data, Olivier thought that this campaign schedule might be too ambitious. He realized that the project can become a constant death march and can miss the goal to start promotion of his slow food restaurants on the spring solstice.
The Lesson Learnt
Once you have your project plan ready, you need to communicate with the customer. Of course you can use a spreadsheet or a to-do list, but the best way is to plan the project with an appropriate project management software.
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