Consider a company that has a major goal of helping remote teams work together. While everyone within the company is working towards that major goal, there will also be other priorities and goals that need to be part of the overall strategic plan. Finance departments will be aiming to stay on budget, while marketing teas might be prioritizing brand awareness. Individually, staff may be aiming to learn a new skill, develop their leadership skills, or receive a promotion.
So, how do you balance all these competing priorities into one cohesive strategic plan? A Strategic Plan template is a simple framework that can help you visualize the various goals, and strategize accordingly.
What is the Strategic Plan template?
The Strategic Plan template is a framework that plots the various strategies within an organization on one page. This single document is an invaluable resource to help teams understand how their individual goals fit within the business’ strategic plan. It also allows managers to keep track of competing priorities related to finance, customer needs, stakeholder interests and HR.
The Strategic plan template is often used by project teams or managers who need to bring clarity or alignment within teams. By completing a strategic business plan as a team, it ensures everyone is on the same page. Secondly, it considers varying perspectives within the overall goal.
The template is divided into four main areas. Let’s take a look at them.
What are the key elements of a strategic plan?
It’s important to always start with your overall mission: Your raison d’être. If you need help with this, start with the Golden Circle template to find your purpose. With your overall goal in mind, look at the four key elements of your business. We’ve defined them as financial, customer, internal and growth. The Strategic Plan template is broken up into these four main elements.
Within these perspectives, there will be countless smaller areas of focus. It’s up to your team to work together to define them. These can often be grouped into top-level goals or strategic priorities.
We’ve listed some below, but when completing your own strategic template, they may differ greatly.
1. Financial perspective
Within this area of the template, you might have goals related to both saving money or boosting profits. These may include bringing down manufacturing costs, attracting high-value customers, driving up the share price, or increasing lifetime customer value.
2. Customer perspective
The customer perspective relates to things such as reducing customer service response times, increasing NPS (Net Promoter Score), or developing a strong referral campaign by improving branding.
3. Internal perspective
Internal processes, systems and documentation are always areas that can be improved. These may be related to customer communication, innovation, R&D, operations or legal.
4. Growth perspective
Which major areas of growth do you want to prioritize? Hire more staff? Increase product range? R&D? Or strengthen company culture?
Creating a Strategic Plan template
Get a head start by using our online template purpose-built for remote teams. Invite everyone to join the collaborative session and as a team, layout your overall goals, objectives, values together in real-time.
- Start by brainstorming as a team to come up with no more than 20 strategic objectives. Add them as sticky notes on the board.
- You will then move the objectives into the main them they belong to: financial, customer, internal or growth.
- Within these horizontal themes, you can then group related strategies and put a box around them.
- Use the shapes tool to add arrows to connect interrelated strategies. This will help your team see how their goals fit into the broader company strategy.
- Once you’ve completed the template, it will be a valuable resource. Share it with stakeholders, new employees or the wider team to ensure everyone has a clear understanding of the strategic plan and objectives.
Tip: It’s important to return to the business strategic plan regularly to map out any strategic changes or identify areas of weakness.
Try out the Strategy Map template
As you can see, the strategy map template can help your team work together and align competition priorities towards great goals.
Check out some of our other great resources designed to help your strategic business planning:
Conceptboard helps you map out complex information in a visual way, making it easier to understand and see connections. Best of all, our remote-first whiteboard enables all teams to collaborate with ease. Discover all the templates we offer in our library and try them for free today with a free 30-day trial.
