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How Tactics Support your Business Strategy

Posted june 4, 2020 by noah parsons.

Once you’ve set the strategy for your business, the next step is to define the tactics that you’ll use to turn your strategy into a reality.

Defining your tactics is the next step in our lean business planning process . If you’re building a lean business plan, download our free template or signup for LivePlan and then follow along to create a simple, one-page strategic plan that will grow your business.

What are Business Tactics?

Tactics are the specific things you do to achieve your strategic business goals.

Strategy vs Tactics – What’s the Difference?

Strategy defines your overall goals. It’s the overall plan for your business that defines what you want your business to be. Your strategy defines the problem that your business solves and who your customers are. Your strategy defines what you want to do at a high level.

Tactics are the concrete things you’re going to do to achieve the goals you set out in your strategy. They’re the specific plans and resources that you will use to achieve your goals. Your tactics include your marketing and sales plan, the team who will execute your plans, and any other partners and resources you may need along the way.

Your strategy is  what you want to do while your tactics are  how you’re going to get it done.

Strategy and Tactics Work Together

One of the greatest military strategists recognized that strategy and tactics by themselves are essentially useless; but, when paired together correctly, they work hand-in-hand, supporting each other:

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” — Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”

No matter how great your overarching business strategy is, it’s nothing without tactics . Tactics are the things that you actually do to make your business work. They make up the implementation plan that will turn your strategy into reality. 

Your tactics are your roadmap. More specifically, they’re your marketing and sales plan, your product plan, the people you choose to be on your team, and the partners you choose to work with. Tactics are all the specific choices you make and the tasks you do to implement your strategy.

Alignment is critical

The most important thing is that your tactics support your strategy. Because your tactics are how you’re going to execute your strategy, the two have to be in alignment.

A company that sells handcrafted leather wallets, handbags, and other fashion accessories to customers that care about things that are handmade has its strategy aligned with its tactics when the marketing campaigns communicate the origin of the leather and the story of the craftsmanship.

“Good tactics can save even the worst strategy. Bad tactics will destroy even the best strategy.” — George S. Patton

When tactics don’t align with your strategy, you’ll send a mixed message to your customers and confuse them. You might even attract the wrong customers—ones who will never buy from you—instead of connecting directly to your ideal target market.

What to include in your business tactics:

Sales channels: How are you selling your products and services? Are you selling directly to your customers online? Are you opening a physical storefront? Or, maybe you’re building a product that will get sold in other companies’ stores. In that case, you might be working with distributors. Outline how you plan on selling in this section.

Marketing activities: How are prospective customers going to learn about your company and your products? Are you going to use traditional advertising? Perhaps you plan on investing in a content marketing strategy. Or, maybe you need to attend a lot of trade shows to get in front of potential customers in your industry.

Team: When you’re planning your business, you have to not only think about what you’re going to do, but who’s going to do it. Even if you don’t have a full team yet, think about the positions that you’re going to need as you get up and running. Create a list of the key roles that you’re going to need to hire for as you grow. Don’t forget to think about your own strengths and weaknesses when you think about building a team. You’ll want to hire people that can fill in the gaps in your own skillset.

Partners and resources: Some businesses need to work with other businesses in order to be successful. If your business has critical partners, list them here. This is also a great place to list key resources your business needs, such as a license for intellectual property.

How to Figure Out your Business Tactics

If you’re a startup, one of the first things you’ll do as you start your business is talking to potential customers to validate your strategy . As you talk to those potential customers, you’ll figure out the right tactics to support your strategy. 

Interviewing potential customers, building a basic version of your product, or even doing a Kickstarter campaign are all great ways to figure out if your idea is going to work. And, as you talk face-to-face with potential customers, you’ll figure out the best ways to market and sell your product. This knowledge will be the foundation you’ll need to figure out the tactics to support your strategy.

Tactics as part of a Lean Business Plan

You developed your strategy as the first step in building a Lean Business Plan . You figured out what problem you are solving and who you’re solving it for. You also thought about how to differentiate yourself from the competition.

As you add tactics to that strategy, start simple and focus on your sales, marketing, team, and key resources that you’re going to need to make your business work.

With a Lean Business Plan, you want to keep your list of tactics short and simple, especially in the early days of building your company. It’s easy to get bogged down thinking of every last thing that you need or want to do to get your business off the ground.

Instead, focus on the main things that you need to do. With Lean Planning, you’re going to be constantly talking to your prospective customers to refine your strategy, and you’ll refine your tactics at the same time as you learn more about your customers and determine what tactics will work.

Just keep things simple

The goal with Lean Planning is to minimize the amount of time that you spend planning and maximize your chances of success. So, move quickly through building your strategy and documenting your tactics so you can get out into the real world and figure out if your ideas are going to work.

This article is part of our series on building a lean business plan. For a comprehensive overview, check out An Introduction to Lean Planning . 

Read the rest of our Lean Planning series:

• How to develop your business strategy
• How to create a roadmap to grow your business
• How to define your business model

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Strategy vs. Tactics: Understand the Difference and Measure Results

By Kate Eby | November 19, 2023

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Businesses and nonprofits need both strategic and tactical approaches to succeed. We’ve spoken to experts and gathered the most useful information and tools, including examples, diagrams, and templates for creating strategic and tactical plans.

Included in this article, you’ll find the differences between strategy and tactics , several real-world examples of strategies and tactics , and the best t ools for measuring strategies . Plus, download a free, printable tactics tracking Gantt chart template .

The Difference Between Strategy and Tactics

Strategy is a long-term plan that outlines the goals of an organization. Tactics are the actions you take to achieve strategic goals. Strategy provides the big picture, and tactics are the immediate, short-term tasks you take to make it happen.

The Prussian military theorist and general Carl von Clausewitz once wrote, “Tactics and strategy are two activities that permeate one another in time and space but are nevertheless essentially different.” 

To better understand the difference between strategy and tactics, refer to the following chart:

“Tactics take time because it might mean writing a press release or coming up with a new logo or creating giveaways that you’ll have at an event,” says Whitney Keyes , a marketing communications consultant, speaker, and instructor for University of Washington’s Communication Leadership program. “Earlier in my career, I was pretty tactical. My family had a small business that I managed, and I worked with small businesses. I often thought of more tactical things like, ‘We should create a flyer, or we should put on an event or do some advertising.’ But I wasn't thinking about the next level up, the big picture of why we should do something. Those are wonderful tactical ideas, but how do they bubble up into something that's bigger that's going to generate revenue or attract more customers?” 

Keyes says that working at big companies such as Microsoft developed her capacity to think strategically: “I learned to think of the bigger idea first, then all the fun stuff afterward.” 

Actions can impress other people and give the appearance of progress. However, if they are random and do not connect back to a high-level, forward-looking view, they might not produce anything of value. As Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War , “All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”

What Is a Strategy?

A strategy is a high-level plan aimed at achieving an end goal. It is rooted in an organization's core values and provides direction for key decisions. Generally stable over time, a strategy provides the framework wherein leadership develops tactical plans.

Organizations create strategies by gaining consensus on goals and taking into account departmental priorities. Typically, top leadership sets the strategy in both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, and front-line teams align their plans and activities accordingly. In larger organizations, individual departments and functional units may set their own strategies and metrics to align with the high-level strategy.

After researching competitors and customers, the organization establishes a strategy that offers an outward-facing and forward-looking perspective on its market position and role in the broader world. Creating a strategy also reveals your competitive advantage. Because the context of your organization can change, it’s critical to periodically review and update your strategy. The cross-functional process of defining a strategy influences project selection, resource allocation, prioritization, and contingency planning.

“Strategies are the ways and means in a commercial setting to beat your competitors,” explains Jim Stockmal , Managing Partner at SK Partners. “In a government setting, strategies fulfill the mission that was handed down by the governing bodies, whether it's Congress, state legislatures, or city councils. For nonprofits, strategies make sure the group is making the best use of the contributed revenues they get from their donors to fulfill the mission as efficiently and effectively as possible.”

Good strategy has a fixed goal and creates contingencies to overcome barriers. According to Richard Rumelt in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy , “The most basic idea of strategy is the application of strength against weakness. Or if you prefer, strength applied to the most promising opportunity.” Rumelt emphasizes that an effective strategy leverages an organization's strengths and turns weaknesses into avenues for growth and success.

A good strategy is characterized by the following elements:

• Alignment With Core Values: For a strategy to succeed and to garner full team support, it must align with an organization’s core values. 
• Clear, Attainable Objectives: The strategy should promote objectives that are not only well-defined but realistically achievable within the given time frame and available resources. 
• Correct Resource Allocation: An effective strategy allocates resources in a way that furthers the organization’s overarching aims. 
• Outward-Looking: A good strategy considers the competitive and economic landscape, relative to the organization’s position within that context. 
• Prioritization of Effort: A sound strategy takes the big picture into account when planning projects.
• Vision: A good strategy amplifies the intent behind the company’s vision and mission statements.

A good strategy also offers benefits that set the foundation for success:

• Facilitates Delegation: With a clear strategy, micromanagement becomes unnecessary because teams understand the overarching vision.
• Guides Planning: A good strategy acts as a North Star for planning all tactical activities.
• Informs Future Decisions: A well-defined strategy prepares an organization for both the challenges and opportunities that are likely to arise, guiding future decisions. 
• Maintains Perspective: A good strategy places issues and setbacks in perspective, helping you focus on the road ahead rather than on obstacles. 
• Streamlines Decision-Making: When you know your strategic objectives, you streamline the decision-making process because you are aware of what you are aiming for. 

As illustrated in the diagram above, several interconnected components comprise the strategic planning process and converge to inform and shape the central strategy.

Get the full lowdown on how to write a strategic plan .

What Is a Tactic?

A tactic , or a strategic initiative , is a specific action or step aimed at achieving a particular goal. It is usually immediate and focused on short-term outcomes. Tactics are the practical means you use to carry out a strategy.

The word tactic comes from the Ancient Greek taktos , meaning arranged or organized. Today, the concept has evolved to signify more than organization alone; it is a detailed, purpose-driven action focused on the present. Tactics operate on a short timeline and are often flexible and reactive, but they serve the important function of contributing directly to an overarching strategy. They answer the questions of who, how, and when.

In a corporate environment, managers execute tactics, directing the team or group to complete specific tasks. These tactics focus on the efficient and effective use of time and resources. They often incorporate triggers that activate based on certain conditions or events.

Good tactics are measurable, aligned with the company mission, and time-bound. They consider the larger context while optimizing the use of time and resources. By directing actions toward a specific end goal, tactics reduce arbitrary actions and expedite decision-making. Furthermore, the results from these tactical efforts provide valuable data for future planning.

How Strategy and Tactics Relate to Each Other

Strategy provides a fixed point of guidance for an organization or initiative. Tactics, on the other hand, are the various paths navigated under this light or the actionable steps taken to reach a strategic destination. 

“Strategies are the plans behind the actions that you want to take to achieve a goal,” says Karan Ferrell-Rhodes, author of Lead at the Top of Your Game and Founder of Shockingly Different Leadership , a global professional services firm. “The tactics are actually what you carry out, the decisions you make, and the behaviors that you exhibit to implement that ultimate strategy or plan. They're sister processes, if you will.” 

Having just a strategy is like planning to plan: You’ll never realize your vision. “They’re both important, and they both weave together,” says Denise McNerney, President and CEO of iBossWell and former president of the Association for Strategic Planning. “If you just have tactics, it's like hamsters on the treadmill. They're running, but for what purpose?” 

“I definitely think there should be a dance between the two,” says Keyes, “and in smaller businesses, CEOs and entrepreneurs need to dance between the two. It's really tough for them to sometimes get out of the weeds and get back to being more strategic.” 

However, in a 2017 Journal of Management Reviews article, “ Recovering the Divide: A Review of Strategy and Tactics in Business and Management ,” David Mackay and Mike Zundel discuss how, in academic and professional management literature, tactics are often minimized, while strategy is vaunted as the way to success. “Tactics tend to be associated with lower military or organizational hierarchies, portrayed as opaque, bothersome minutiae that lack the clarity, rigor and significance of strategy formulations,” they write, adding that their usefulness is often restricted to that of a tool for enacting strategy.

Keyes explains how her experience at some companies reflects this bias. “There was all of this puffing of the chest that we have strategic thinkers and then there are doers,” she says.

Still, sometimes individuals favor strategic thinking over strategy. “What's challenging sometimes is people talk in those high-level terms, but they don't talk specifics,” says Keyes. “The tactical part is the roll-up-your-sleeves-now-we're-actually-gonna-do-it part where you map out the steps that will support that strategy.” The important thing to remember is that favoring strategic thinking without tactical execution can result in grand visions without the practical steps for realization, while emphasizing tactics without strategy can lead to aimless actions without clear direction or purpose. A balanced approach ensures that an overarching vision is complemented by efficient, purposeful actions.

McNerney uses the iBossWell diagram above to explain to new clients the difference between high-level strategy, indicated above the purple dotted line, and tactical implementation, everything below this line. 

Above the dotted line are overarching objectives complemented by metrics. Below the dotted line, the diagram showcases specific actionable steps, such as adding night shifts or increasing staff. While using the diagram, employees should ensure they understand both the strategic vision and their role in the practical steps to provide context and direction to their efforts.

Strategy vs. Tactics Examples

Real-world distinctions between strategy and tactics exist across multiple industries, including social media, environmental management, small business, healthcare, retail, and more. In each sector, overarching goals are complemented by specific actions, highlighting the significance of a balanced approach to planning.

Social Media Strategy and Tactic Examples

Strategy and tactics go hand-in-hand when it comes to effective social media management. Social media strategies range from raising brand awareness to community building, while tactics include partnering with influencers or hosting monthly community challenges or events.

Here are some examples of social media strategies and the tactics that teams can use to achieve the strategic vision:

Environmental Management Strategy and Tactics Example

For successful environmental management, leaders need to design tactics that contribute to their strategic vision. One example of an environmental management strategy is the circular economy framework, which can be achieved with tactics such as rethinking supply chains.

Josh Prigge , Founder and CEO of Sustridge, a sustainability consulting firm, balances the use of strategy and tactics to find success for his clients and his business.

Prigge offers the following example of a strategy, along with several tactics that help achieve it:

• Tactic 1: Rethink supply chains by switching to sustainable materials and using AI data analytics to find and reduce waste.
• Tactic 2: Use product-as-a-service (PaaS). In other words, instead of selling products, use the tactic of leasing or offering a subscription. For example, tech companies can let users subscribe to devices, taking back responsibility for their disposal.
• Tactic 3: Set sustainability goals for employees and offer regular training on sustainable practices.

Learn from experts about PR strategies, best practices, tips, and more .

Small Business Strategy and Tactic Example

Strategies and tactics in small business help you reach overarching goals. The strategy directs your decisions, and tactics provide targeted everyday activities to make goals a reality. 

Academic and Business Strategist Dr. Vickie Cox Edmondson is the author of The Thinking Strategist: Unleashing the Power of Strategic Management to Identify, Explore and Solve Problems . She explains that strategy is a consistent set of decisions and approaches designed to meet financial and strategic objectives, attract stakeholders more favorably than competitors, and address industry threats, even if decision-makers vary. However, people might change tactics depending on their risk and uncertainty tolerance. 

Edmondson offers an example of a strategy and three tactics she would use to improve the competitive positioning of a small business within the next two years:

• Tactic 1: Identify your strategic group of similar firms and conduct a SWOT analysis to identify competitive advantages and disadvantages of each firm.
• Tactic 2: Based on your findings, predict the competitive moves of each player and identify a response based on your firm’s competitive advantages and disadvantages.
• Tactic 3: Track the actual competitive moves of each player and make adjustments as appropriate given your firm’s strengths and opportunities.

Crisis Management Strategy and Tactic Examples

Crisis management strategies and tactics prepare an organization to manage a significant and unexpected negative event. These measures ensure the organization can respond swiftly, minimize damage, and communicate effectively with stakeholders during turbulent times.

Here are several examples of strategies and related tactics to use in crisis management:

For more useful strategies and tactics to help you prepare for, survive, and rebuild after a setback, see this article on crisis management strategies .

Human Resources Development Strategy and Tactic Examples

Human resources (HR) strategies and tactics prepare an organization to nurture and optimize its workforce. These measures ensure the organization can attract, develop, and retain talent, fostering a harmonious work environment during times of change and growth.

Here are some strategies and tactics that an HR department might adopt:

Public Relations Strategy and Tactic Examples

Public relations (PR) strategies and tactics prepare an organization to shape and maintain a positive public image. These measures ensure the organization can proactively manage its reputation, even in the face of unforeseen challenges or scrutiny.

Here are some examples of PR strategy and tactic examples:

How to Measure Strategy and Tactics

To measure strategy, assess the progress toward long-term goals and overarching objectives using key performance indicators (KPIs). For tactics, monitor the immediate outcomes and specific actions taken, ensuring they align and contribute to the broader strategic goals.

“It can be really fun and easy for people to post a lot of content on social media or do other fun things, but if you're keeping an eye on your budget, you need to make sure that those activities are paying off,” says Keyes. “There are so many ways to measure, whether it's through focus groups or surveys or collecting qualitative or quantitative data.”

Remember that measures of success will differ depending on the industry or project in question. For example, the SpaceX rocket launch explosion might be deemed a failure based on a success metric such as “completing a mission without any malfunctions.” However, it can be considered a success using another metric, such as “gathering valuable data for future launches.” The setbacks encountered provided critical learning opportunities for future space travel missions.

Tools for Measuring Strategies

Teams can measure the effectiveness of strategies through key performance indicators (KPIs), such as time to completion, budget adherence, and scope fulfillment. Additionally, regular review meetings help to assess whether strategic outcomes meet the planned goals.

Here are some tools you can use to measure strategies:

• Balanced Scorecard: This tool provides a framework for monitoring organizational performance against strategic goals. Learn more in this all-inclusive article on balanced scorecards .
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): They serve as quantifiable metrics that reflect how well an organization is achieving its stated goals and objectives. Find out everything you need to know about KPIs in this guide to KPI dashboards .
• Objectives and Key Results (OKRs): OKRs are a goal-setting framework used to establish challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. Find tips and step-by-step how-tos in this comprehensive guide to OKR scoring . 
• SWOT Analysis: This tool assesses internal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to inform strategic decision-making. To get started with SWOT analysis, check out one of these free, editable SWOT analysis templates .

Learn more in this comprehensive guide to OKRs and KPIs .

Tools for Measuring Tactics

To measure the success of a tactic, teams can use predefined key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with the desired outcome. The effectiveness of the tactic is determined by comparing the achieved results with these KPIs or set benchmarks.

“Tactics are tangibles,” says Keyes. “If we make squeezy balls that we're giving away at an event, did we give them all away? If you send out a press release, did that press release get picked up by the media outlets where you wanted it featured? Or did a report find it interesting enough to then follow up and write their own type of story? Tactics are very easy to measure.” 

The method of measuring always depends on the tactic. Consider using project management software to set up a regular report. Schedule monthly meetings with managers to monitor these metrics and gather data for benchmarking and future planning. On a basic level, teams can set up a spreadsheet to capture low-level metrics and milestones.

Simple Tactics Tracking Gantt Chart Template 

Download a Simple Tactics Tracking Gantt Chart for  Excel | Google Sheets

Tracking metrics doesn’t have to be complicated. With this simple spreadsheet, you can track milestones, as well as qualitative and quantitative metrics, and changes over time. Customize this downloadable template to suit your project, and measure the progress of your tactics in an easy-to-use Gantt chart format.

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• What is strategic planning? A 5-step gu ...

What is strategic planning? A 5-step guide

Strategic planning is a process through which business leaders map out their vision for their organization’s growth and how they’re going to get there. In this article, we'll guide you through the strategic planning process, including why it's important, the benefits and best practices, and five steps to get you from beginning to end.

Strategic planning is a process through which business leaders map out their vision for their organization’s growth and how they’re going to get there. The strategic planning process informs your organization’s decisions, growth, and goals.

Strategic planning helps you clearly define your company’s long-term objectives—and maps how your short-term goals and work will help you achieve them. This, in turn, gives you a clear sense of where your organization is going and allows you to ensure your teams are working on projects that make the most impact. Think of it this way—if your goals and objectives are your destination on a map, your strategic plan is your navigation system.

In this article, we walk you through the 5-step strategic planning process and show you how to get started developing your own strategic plan.

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What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is a business process that helps you define and share the direction your company will take in the next three to five years. During the strategic planning process, stakeholders review and define the organization’s mission and goals, conduct competitive assessments, and identify company goals and objectives. The product of the planning cycle is a strategic plan, which is shared throughout the company.

What is a strategic plan?

A strategic plan is the end result of the strategic planning process. At its most basic, it’s a tool used to define your organization’s goals and what actions you’ll take to achieve them.

Typically, your strategic plan should include: 

Your company’s mission statement

Your organizational goals, including your long-term goals and short-term, yearly objectives

Any plan of action, tactics, or approaches you plan to take to meet those goals

What are the benefits of strategic planning?

Strategic planning can help with goal setting and decision-making by allowing you to map out how your company will move toward your organization’s vision and mission statements in the next three to five years. Let’s circle back to our map metaphor. If you think of your company trajectory as a line on a map, a strategic plan can help you better quantify how you’ll get from point A (where you are now) to point B (where you want to be in a few years).

When you create and share a clear strategic plan with your team, you can:

Build a strong organizational culture by clearly defining and aligning on your organization’s mission, vision, and goals.

Align everyone around a shared purpose and ensure all departments and teams are working toward a common objective.

Proactively set objectives to help you get where you want to go and achieve desired outcomes.

Promote a long-term vision for your company rather than focusing primarily on short-term gains.

Ensure resources are allocated around the most high-impact priorities.

Define long-term goals and set shorter-term goals to support them.

Assess your current situation and identify any opportunities—or threats—allowing your organization to mitigate potential risks.

Create a proactive business culture that enables your organization to respond more swiftly to emerging market changes and opportunities.

What are the 5 steps in strategic planning?

The strategic planning process involves a structured methodology that guides the organization from vision to implementation. The strategic planning process starts with assembling a small, dedicated team of key strategic planners—typically five to 10 members—who will form the strategic planning, or management, committee. This team is responsible for gathering crucial information, guiding the development of the plan, and overseeing strategy execution.

Once you’ve established your management committee, you can get to work on the planning process. 

Step 1: Assess your current business strategy and business environment

Before you can define where you’re going, you first need to define where you are. Understanding the external environment, including market trends and competitive landscape, is crucial in the initial assessment phase of strategic planning.

To do this, your management committee should collect a variety of information from additional stakeholders, like employees and customers. In particular, plan to gather:

Relevant industry and market data to inform any market opportunities, as well as any potential upcoming threats in the near future.

Customer insights to understand what your customers want from your company—like product improvements or additional services.

Employee feedback that needs to be addressed—whether about the product, business practices, or the day-to-day company culture.

Consider different types of strategic planning tools and analytical techniques to gather this information, such as:

A balanced scorecard to help you evaluate four major elements of a business: learning and growth, business processes, customer satisfaction, and financial performance.

A SWOT analysis to help you assess both current and future potential for the business (you’ll return to this analysis periodically during the strategic planning process). 

To fill out each letter in the SWOT acronym, your management committee will answer a series of questions:

What does your organization currently do well?

What separates you from your competitors?

What are your most valuable internal resources?

What tangible assets do you have?

What is your biggest strength? 

Weaknesses:

What does your organization do poorly?

What do you currently lack (whether that’s a product, resource, or process)?

What do your competitors do better than you?

What, if any, limitations are holding your organization back?

What processes or products need improvement? 

Opportunities:

What opportunities does your organization have?

How can you leverage your unique company strengths?

Are there any trends that you can take advantage of?

How can you capitalize on marketing or press opportunities?

Is there an emerging need for your product or service? 

What emerging competitors should you keep an eye on?

Are there any weaknesses that expose your organization to risk?

Have you or could you experience negative press that could reduce market share?

Is there a chance of changing customer attitudes towards your company? 

Step 2: Identify your company’s goals and objectives

To begin strategy development, take into account your current position, which is where you are now. Then, draw inspiration from your vision, mission, and current position to identify and define your goals—these are your final destination. 

To develop your strategy, you’re essentially pulling out your compass and asking, “Where are we going next?” “What’s the ideal future state of this company?” This can help you figure out which path you need to take to get there.

During this phase of the planning process, take inspiration from important company documents, such as:

Your mission statement, to understand how you can continue moving towards your organization’s core purpose.

Your vision statement, to clarify how your strategic plan fits into your long-term vision.

Your company values, to guide you towards what matters most towards your company.

Your competitive advantages, to understand what unique benefit you offer to the market.

Your long-term goals, to track where you want to be in five or 10 years.

Your financial forecast and projection, to understand where you expect your financials to be in the next three years, what your expected cash flow is, and what new opportunities you will likely be able to invest in.

Step 3: Develop your strategic plan and determine performance metrics

Now that you understand where you are and where you want to go, it’s time to put pen to paper. Take your current business position and strategy into account, as well as your organization’s goals and objectives, and build out a strategic plan for the next three to five years. Keep in mind that even though you’re creating a long-term plan, parts of your plan should be created or revisited as the quarters and years go on.

As you build your strategic plan, you should define:

Company priorities for the next three to five years, based on your SWOT analysis and strategy.

Yearly objectives for the first year. You don’t need to define your objectives for every year of the strategic plan. As the years go on, create new yearly objectives that connect back to your overall strategic goals . 

Related key results and KPIs. Some of these should be set by the management committee, and some should be set by specific teams that are closer to the work. Make sure your key results and KPIs are measurable and actionable. These KPIs will help you track progress and ensure you’re moving in the right direction.

Budget for the next year or few years. This should be based on your financial forecast as well as your direction. Do you need to spend aggressively to develop your product? Build your team? Make a dent with marketing? Clarify your most important initiatives and how you’ll budget for those.

A high-level project roadmap . A project roadmap is a tool in project management that helps you visualize the timeline of a complex initiative, but you can also create a very high-level project roadmap for your strategic plan. Outline what you expect to be working on in certain quarters or years to make the plan more actionable and understandable.

Step 4: Implement and share your plan

Now it’s time to put your plan into action. Strategy implementation involves clear communication across your entire organization to make sure everyone knows their responsibilities and how to measure the plan’s success. 

Make sure your team (especially senior leadership) has access to the strategic plan, so they can understand how their work contributes to company priorities and the overall strategy map. We recommend sharing your plan in the same tool you use to manage and track work, so you can more easily connect high-level objectives to daily work. If you don’t already, consider using a work management platform .  

A few tips to make sure your plan will be executed without a hitch: 

Communicate clearly to your entire organization throughout the implementation process, to ensure all team members understand the strategic plan and how to implement it effectively. 

Define what “success” looks like by mapping your strategic plan to key performance indicators.

Ensure that the actions outlined in the strategic plan are integrated into the daily operations of the organization, so that every team member's daily activities are aligned with the broader strategic objectives.

Utilize tools and software—like a work management platform—that can aid in implementing and tracking the progress of your plan.

Regularly monitor and share the progress of the strategic plan with the entire organization, to keep everyone informed and reinforce the importance of the plan.

Establish regular check-ins to monitor the progress of your strategic plan and make adjustments as needed. 

Step 5: Revise and restructure as needed

Once you’ve created and implemented your new strategic framework, the final step of the planning process is to monitor and manage your plan.

Remember, your strategic plan isn’t set in stone. You’ll need to revisit and update the plan if your company changes directions or makes new investments. As new market opportunities and threats come up, you’ll likely want to tweak your strategic plan. Make sure to review your plan regularly—meaning quarterly and annually—to ensure it’s still aligned with your organization’s vision and goals.

Keep in mind that your plan won’t last forever, even if you do update it frequently. A successful strategic plan evolves with your company’s long-term goals. When you’ve achieved most of your strategic goals, or if your strategy has evolved significantly since you first made your plan, it might be time to create a new one.

Build a smarter strategic plan with a work management platform

To turn your company strategy into a plan—and ultimately, impact—make sure you’re proactively connecting company objectives to daily work. When you can clarify this connection, you’re giving your team members the context they need to get their best work done. 

A work management platform plays a pivotal role in this process. It acts as a central hub for your strategic plan, ensuring that every task and project is directly tied to your broader company goals. This alignment is crucial for visibility and coordination, allowing team members to see how their individual efforts contribute to the company’s success. 

By leveraging such a platform, you not only streamline workflow and enhance team productivity but also align every action with your strategic objectives—allowing teams to drive greater impact and helping your company move toward goals more effectively. 

Strategic planning FAQs

Still have questions about strategic planning? We have answers.

Why do I need a strategic plan?

A strategic plan is one of many tools you can use to plan and hit your goals. It helps map out strategic objectives and growth metrics that will help your company be successful.

When should I create a strategic plan?

You should aim to create a strategic plan every three to five years, depending on your organization’s growth speed.

Since the point of a strategic plan is to map out your long-term goals and how you’ll get there, you should create a strategic plan when you’ve met most or all of them. You should also create a strategic plan any time you’re going to make a large pivot in your organization’s mission or enter new markets. 

What is a strategic planning template?

A strategic planning template is a tool organizations can use to map out their strategic plan and track progress. Typically, a strategic planning template houses all the components needed to build out a strategic plan, including your company’s vision and mission statements, information from any competitive analyses or SWOT assessments, and relevant KPIs.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. business plan?

A business plan can help you document your strategy as you’re getting started so every team member is on the same page about your core business priorities and goals. This tool can help you document and share your strategy with key investors or stakeholders as you get your business up and running.

You should create a business plan when you’re: 

Just starting your business

Significantly restructuring your business

If your business is already established, you should create a strategic plan instead of a business plan. Even if you’re working at a relatively young company, your strategic plan can build on your business plan to help you move in the right direction. During the strategic planning process, you’ll draw from a lot of the fundamental business elements you built early on to establish your strategy for the next three to five years.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. mission and vision statements?

Your strategic plan, mission statement, and vision statements are all closely connected. In fact, during the strategic planning process, you will take inspiration from your mission and vision statements in order to build out your strategic plan.

Simply put: 

A mission statement summarizes your company’s purpose.

A vision statement broadly explains how you’ll reach your company’s purpose.

A strategic plan pulls in inspiration from your mission and vision statements and outlines what actions you’re going to take to move in the right direction. 

For example, if your company produces pet safety equipment, here’s how your mission statement, vision statement, and strategic plan might shake out:

Mission statement: “To ensure the safety of the world’s animals.” 

Vision statement: “To create pet safety and tracking products that are effortless to use.” 

Your strategic plan would outline the steps you’re going to take in the next few years to bring your company closer to your mission and vision. For example, you develop a new pet tracking smart collar or improve the microchipping experience for pet owners. 

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. company objectives?

Company objectives are broad goals. You should set these on a yearly or quarterly basis (if your organization moves quickly). These objectives give your team a clear sense of what you intend to accomplish for a set period of time. 

Your strategic plan is more forward-thinking than your company goals, and it should cover more than one year of work. Think of it this way: your company objectives will move the needle towards your overall strategy—but your strategic plan should be bigger than company objectives because it spans multiple years.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. a business case?

A business case is a document to help you pitch a significant investment or initiative for your company. When you create a business case, you’re outlining why this investment is a good idea, and how this large-scale project will positively impact the business. 

You might end up building business cases for things on your strategic plan’s roadmap—but your strategic plan should be bigger than that. This tool should encompass multiple years of your roadmap, across your entire company—not just one initiative.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. a project plan?

A strategic plan is a company-wide, multi-year plan of what you want to accomplish in the next three to five years and how you plan to accomplish that. A project plan, on the other hand, outlines how you’re going to accomplish a specific project. This project could be one of many initiatives that contribute to a specific company objective which, in turn, is one of many objectives that contribute to your strategic plan. 

What’s the difference between strategic management vs. strategic planning?

A strategic plan is a tool to define where your organization wants to go and what actions you need to take to achieve those goals. Strategic planning is the process of creating a plan in order to hit your strategic objectives.

Strategic management includes the strategic planning process, but also goes beyond it. In addition to planning how you will achieve your big-picture goals, strategic management also helps you organize your resources and figure out the best action plans for success. 

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Strategic vs. Tactical Planning: The What, When, & Why

Published: March 01, 2022

Whether you've set personal or business goals, you likely created a plan to achieve them. Without clearly defined steps, it can be difficult or even discouraging to tackle the goal you've set.

One example of a situation where planning and strategy come in handy is during a job search . Let's say you've spent weeks or months scouring the internet for a new sales job, but none of the job postings seem to match your skill set or career interests.

Have you taken a step back and thought about a specific type of sales job you want? And did you consider the most important qualities you're looking for in an employer or career?

Your online job search will become less tedious and disheartening if you have a clear set of objectives to follow. While you might get more search results for "sales manager", you'll find jobs that are a better fit for you if you clarify by searching for "senior sales manager - medical devices."

With your new search strategy, you've identified a seniority level and the industry you'd like to work in. The next steps you set for yourself are to periodically repeat this search and only apply to the roles that seem like the best fit for you and your career aspirations.

Thinking strategically helps you narrow down your search and use your time more effectively. Plus, you'll increase the likelihood of landing a job that's a great fit for you.

Once you aced your interviews and landed the perfect sales job, you'll find that these types of planning, strategic and tactical, are used by many businesses and sales teams to set themselves up for success.

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Strategic vs. Tactical Planning

Strategic planning lays out the long-term, broad goals that a business or individual wants to achieve. And tactical planning outlines the short-term steps and actions that should be taken to achieve the goals described in the strategic plan.

Your strategic plan provides the general idea of how to reach a goal, and the tactical plan is where you lay out the steps to achieve that goal.

Since the objectives set in the strategic plan are more general and are evaluated over a longer period of time, strategic planning typically occurs at the beginning of a year, quarter, or month. These plans should be reviewed every quarter.

Tactical planning occurs after the strategic plan is outlined, and the tactical plan can be reexamined on a more frequent basis — if need be.

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Fill out the form to document your planning process.

Here are some high-level examples that touch on the difference between the two types of planning.

Strategy vs. Tactics

Let's consider the perspective of a hypothetical company analyzing different strategies to improve different aspects of its sales operations.

1. Sales Recruitment

• Strategy — We want to develop repeatable evaluation criteria for hiring the right salespeople.
• Tactics — We will narrow down the specific qualities the company wants out of its salespeople, draft appropriate interview questions to shed light on those qualities, and train recruiters to conduct interviews based on those key tenets.

2. Smarketing

• Strategy — We want to improve sales and marketing alignment.
• Tactics — We will clearly define the qualities of an SQL so that marketing can fous their efforts on those, encourage collaboration between departments on the creation of sales content, and hold interdepartmental retrospectives after each marketing campaign.

3. Technological Infrastructure

• Strategy — We want to build a more sound, technological foundation for our sales operations.
• Tactics — We will adopt a CRM, incorporate a conversational intelligence tool for improving sales calls, and make virtual sales enablement resources available to our reps.

Taken together, the strategies and tactics a sales organization employs — like the ones listed above — comprise what are known as sales plans.

Sales Plans

A sales plan encompasses both strategic and tactical planning and contributes to an organization's overarching sales strategy . It outlines the broad goals your sales team and reps should strive for, and it creates an action plan to reach them.

The strategic plan sheds light on the mission, objectives, and future goals of the organization or individual. Managers, VPs, and executives typically create strategic plans for an organization, but this type of plan can also be used by individuals to achieve personal or professional goals.

These are the key components to include in a strategic plan:

• Mission and background of the business or situation: Where do you currently stand? And where do you want to be in the future?
• Goals and objectives: What would you like to achieve?
• DRIs (directly responsible individuals): Who are the people responsible for these goals?

Strategic planning and tactical planning provide guidelines for businesses, teams, and individuals to follow. And the tactical plan outlines exactly how they'll achieve the final result.

Strategic Goals vs. Tactical Goals

A major part of planning, whether it’s strategic or tactical, is setting goals. You should actually set goals for both your strategic planning and your tactical planning. Having those objectives clearly laid out helps push your plans into direct action. Your strategic goals should be broader while your tactical ones should be more specific.

For example, a strategic goal may be to develop a company culture that encourages growth and retention. A tactical goal may be to survey all existing employees to gain information on why they weren’t retained. If your tactical planning and your strategic planning are related, then the goals for each should also have a connection between them.

Strategic Planning

A strategy is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a careful plan or method for achieving a particular goal usually over a long period of time.” So, strategic planning is meant to achieve something for the bigger picture.

Tactical planning includes the immediate actions that feed into the larger purpose outlined by a strategy. These plans are carried out in the long term and incorporate big, impactful changes. There are nine strategic planning models your business can use as a starting point.

Strategic Planning Examples

Since tactical planning is more direct, it’s often more specific to your team or business. Strategic plans, however, are often broad enough to be applied to a whole niche or industry. For instance, strategic planning for sales could involve some similar goals across different companies, but their tactical plans may be unique. Here are a few examples of strategic plans that could apply to different businesses.

• Acquire 50% more clients by the end of the year.
• Improve SEO rankings by 20%.
• Expand the customer service team where satisfaction is lacking.

Tactical Planning

Tactical planning occurs after a business, team, or individual has created a strategic plan that outlines general goals and objectives. A tactical plan describes the steps and actions that must be taken to achieve the goals from the strategic plan.

Once you've created your strategic plan, it's time to determine the tactics you'll use to reach your goals. This is where the tactical plan comes into play.

It's used to outline the steps a business or individual will need to take to accomplish the priorities that have been set. Here are a few things to consider when developing your tactical plan:

• What is the timeline for achieving these goals?
• Are there tools or resources that are necessary to accomplish these objectives?
• What specific actions should be taken to achieve the intended outcome?

Your tactical plan will provide the answers to these questions to help you meet the objectives of the strategic plan.

So, what do strategic and tactical planning look like in practice?

Tactical Planning Examples

While strategic and tactical plans can vary by company or industry, there are some that can apply to many sales organizations and teams.

Here are a few examples that are common for sales teams and reps. The strategic plans are numbered, and the tactical plans are outlined below.

1. Fill my pipeline with more leads over the next two weeks.

• Spend an hour prospecting each day.
• Leverage social selling, and join five LinkedIn Groups that your prospects belong to.
• Attend an industry networking event.

2. Close more enterprise deals each month.

• Enroll reps in a hands-on training session in your Enterprise product offerings.
• Set a goal for each rep to schedule at least three demos with enterprise-level prospects this quarter.
• Create an incentive for those that close the most Enterprise deals in the month.

3. Hire 20 more entry-level sales representatives by the end of Q1.

• Create a hiring profile that candidates should meet.
• Develop a LinkedIn outreach campaign to find and attract new talent.
• Attend career fairs at 15 local universities.

Your Business Needs Both Strategic and Tactical Planning

There is a purpose to both strategic and tactical planning. Each moves your business’ progress closer to larger goals and objectives. With a solid strategic plan and a detailed tactical plan, you'll be well-equipped to grow your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published on February 28, 2019, and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Strategy vs. Tactics: Decoding the Building Blocks of Business Success

Two of the most common concepts of business planning are strategy and tactics, but how well are these ideas understood? Organizations may conflate these notions or confuse one for the other, but they’re distinct. Strategy sets the direction and long-term vision of a business decision, and tactics provide actionable steps leaders and personnel will take to achieve specific goals.

Both aspects are integral to the planning process. Implementing tactics without strategic planning can result in growth, but this growth is likely to be short-term. Conversely, strategy without tactical planning prevents businesses from making progress towards their goals. Instead, companies are encouraged to take a more cohesive approach, fusing strategy and tactics to foster a better overall strategy and experience more business success.

Defining Strategy: The Big Picture Game Plan

Let’s begin with the definition of strategy. Business strategy is the overarching plan that paves the path for the future of an organization. It details your mission, vision, and long-term goals, and how you plan to make them a reality. Strategic objectives are also incorporated to help direct decision-making.

No two strategies are exactly alike. Businesses operate in different industries with unique concerns and strategic goals. However, there are several characteristics every good strategy maintains. Consider the following attributes to improve the success of your strategy:

Define Clear Goals

Knowing what you hope to accomplish makes devising a solid strategy easier. Create detailed goals that clearly state your intentions for the strategy.

Utilize Data

Strategic thinking starts by looking at the past. In what areas is the business the strongest? Where are there gaps you can improve? Leveraging data from past successes and failures more informed strategic planning.

Consider the Current Business Climate

In addition to analyzing your own organization’s data, glean insights by looking at your competitors and the state of the market. This information can reveal possible challenges on the horizon, enabling leaders to make choices that put the business at a competitive advantage.

Gauge Success with Key Metrics

The best strategy is dynamic. Leaders want to monitor strategies to ensure they work toward the long-term vision and goals. Implementing key metrics to measure a strategy reveals where teams are performing the strongest to keep up the good work, as well as areas for improvement, to optimize results.

Consult All Team Members

A strategy will be difficult to execute without all employees at all levels doing their part. Therefore, it’s important to get input from every department to verify alignment with their priorities and overall strategic goals.

Factor in a Contingency Plan

Having a contingency plan allows you to prepare for the unexpected. These plans outline how a business should proceed with a strategy if an incident occurs that derails operations. Even if damage is done, a contingency plan can help you get back on course without suffering as much loss.

Unveiling Tactics: Executing the Plan With Precision

Tactics are the short-term and concrete actions business leaders take to bring a strategy to fruition. Sometimes called initiatives, tactics encompass the specific actions, best practices, resources, and timelines that all contribute to your long-term strategy. Good tactics will feature the following:

Short-Term Actions

Strategies can be broad, and attempting to make sense of them in their entirety can be overwhelming. Tactics break strategy into more manageable pieces, often increasing the likelihood of achieving business goals. Another benefit of tactics being short-term is that it’s much easier to track their progress and make the necessary changes as you go along.

Strategic Alignment

Unless tactics match up with strategic goals, they likely won’t further your strategy. When initiatives align with the overall strategy, every decision leaders and employees make is designed to help achieve the key metrics of the strategic plan.

Set Timeline

The most successful tactics are bound by the constraints of time. A set timeline establishes what outcomes are expected within this period, whether it’s several months or a year.

The Interplay Between Strategy and Tactics

A great summary of strategy vs. tactics comes thousands of years ago from a Chinese general and military strategist called Sun Tzu. In his most famous publication, The Art of War , Tzu explains the difference between strategy and tactics as follows:

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy are the noise before defeat.

So, strategy and tactics are complementary. The fundamental differences between strategy and tactics are long-term and short-term, the overarching business plan and the small, tangible steps toward realizing it, but they are two sides of the same coin. Therefore, business leaders need not think strategy or tactics but strategy and tactics.

The real challenge comes with balancing the immediate needs of tactical planning with the long-term pursuit of strategic goals. For instance, consider a strategy without tactics. All efforts to achieve objectives stop at the planning stage. On the other hand, tactics can become busywork without strategy over them, often lowering motivation among team members. When short-term initiatives adhere to the long-term vision and goals, all personnel, from executives to entry-level employees, see the purpose behind these actions.

In most cases, you’re starting with strategy and devising tactics in response. However, the relationship works both ways. Through evaluating tactics with metrics, business leaders may find that some tactics are less effective than others. These results may also indicate that aspects of the strategy are leading to the wrong kind of outcomes, encouraging teams to adjust their strategies.

Strategy and Tactics Examples

How do strategies and tactics play out in a real-world business application? Let’s look at an example. Say your business is planning on launching a new product intended to reach a new target audience. Your strategy might be to increase leads by 50% for this target audience.

Your tactics would include a digital marketing plan to reach these potential customers. For example, if the product is targeted at Gen Zers, a tactic may be researching which social media platforms these consumers utilize most and the messaging that resonates with them. From there, you can devise a marketing strategy to reach them.

Aligning Strategy and Tactics for Business Success

Given the relationship between strategy and tactics, businesses want to ensure they’re aligned to promote optimal outcomes. An effective tool for alignment is a strategy map . This diagram puts your entire strategy and the tactics that support it on a single page.

A strategy map not only breaks your strategy into measurable objectives, it also communicates your strategy to your entire organization. You can read your strategy from the bottom up, seeing how the different perspectives affect each other.

This format enables business leaders to communicate strategic objectives in a quick and easily digestible way with everyone in the company, helping personnel understand their role in accomplishing long-term goals. It also ensures employees prioritize the tactics that directly contribute to these objectives, since they may have other projects or duties to complete. While these tasks are important, team members understand they come second to the actions most important for strategy.

Measuring and Evaluating Strategy-Tactics Alignment

Periodic evaluations of a strategy and its accompanying tactics show progress and confirm success with a business plan. Key performance indicators (KPIs) may be different depending on your specific strategy and tactics. Different departments might also have distinct metrics. The following are several common KPIs used for strategic and tactical planning.

Strategic Planning

Effective KPIs for strategies use quantifiable data to assess progress. For instance, if evaluating customer satisfaction, a Net Promoter Score can give a specific number that conveys success with this more abstract idea. Another key component of these KPIs is a realistic timeframe in which you’ll measure progress. Types of metrics for strategic planning include:

• Working capital
• Debt to equity ratio
• Return on equity (ROE)
• Inventory turnover
• Operating cash flow
• Revenue exit rate
• Customer acquisition to lifetime value

Tactical Planning

Gauging the success of tactics is often easier than measuring progress with strategic planning. You’re simply evaluating whether or not you’ve reached your target KPIs within the designated timeframe. Tactical planning metrics include but aren’t limited to:

• Customer lifetime value
• Customer satisfaction
• Cost of goods sold
• Sales by region or service area
• Quality assurance

In addition to metrics, organizations can consider implementing feedback loops to glean insight into the sentiment among customers and employees regarding their business strategy. The feedback loop is a technique for collecting opinions from stakeholders to improve future behavior. The general process goes like this: gather feedback, assess feedback, make changes based on feedback, and follow up on these changes. In following up, business leaders are gathering more feedback, hence the looping model.

Feedback loops are broken down into two types — positive and negative. Positive feedback loops focus on input from employees and help improve internal processes, company culture, and employee turnover. Negative feedback loops are input from customers to enhance products and services and boost customer service.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls: Strategy-Tactics Misalignment

Regardless of the specific strategy and tactics, strategic alignment is essential. While the strategy is supposed to offer clear direction for the entire business, it’s only when initiatives align with these goals that the purpose of the strategy becomes apparent.

Strategic alignment can be challenging. Business leaders are tasked with communicating strategy to all personnel and ensuring it aligns not only with the infrastructure of the company but also with culture and available resources. It’s important to remember that strategic alignment isn’t a one-time action, but an ongoing process that requires constant monitoring and adjustment. It proves worth the effort because misalignment leads to several risks, such as:

• Lack of communication between executives and departments
• Short-term focus without a long-term vision
• Loss of competitive advantage within the market
• Diminished customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Decline in organizational performance
• Lack of cohesive organizational culture

While maintaining strategic alignment is no easy feat, you can employ measures to foster synergy between strategy and tactics The following are some best practices for realizing strategic alignment:

• Making a detailed, compelling strategy: Incorporating elements like vision, mission, values, objectives, priorities, and specific tactics into your strategy makes clear its purpose and how it will be accomplished.
• Communicating the strategy to all personnel: By ensuring every employee understands the strategy and the tactics they’re responsible for to realize it, you increase their commitment to their roles.
• Analyzing the strategy to identify gaps: Think about your organizational structure, culture, and processes. Are there conflicts between these aspects and your strategy? Make sense of possible discrepancies to resolve them.
• Verifying the feasibility of the strategy: Make sure your resources and the capabilities of your talent are enough to achieve strategic goals. If not, you may need to tweak the strategy to make it more realistic.
• Modifying the strategy based on findings from key metrics: Consider insights from KPIs, changing market conditions, the competitive landscape, and similar concerns. Adjust strategies as needed.

Enhance Strategic Planning with Spider Impact

When you know the difference between strategy and tactics, you understand how important each component is to business planning and growth. To experience lasting success, organizations must strategically align action plans with broader strategies. As mentioned, strategic alignment and execution are often difficult, especially as business leaders need to account for many employees whose daily duties and goals may look different than the activities of those in different departments. As such, it’s helpful to use a management tool to assist with strategic initiatives, like strategy and performance management software from Spider Strategies.

Our platform — Spider Impact — helps everyone at your company get on the same page regarding strategic goals. With strategy execution software , employees understand their role in achieving strategies, motivating them to continually drive their performance. Strategic initiative software helps business leaders make informed predictions about tactics, specifically if they can be finished within set timeframes and budgets. It also shows if these tactics affect KPIs.

Our software is used by businesses across many industries to increase success with strategic planning and execution Contact us today to learn more about our solutions or schedule a live demo or free test drive to see the benefits of it firsthand.

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5 Keys to Successful Strategy Execution

• 17 Nov 2020

You’ve set organizational goals and formulated a strategic plan . Now, how do you ensure it gets done?

Strategy execution is the implementation of a strategic plan in an effort to reach business goals and objectives . It comprises the daily structures, systems, and operational goals that set your team up for success.

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Why Is Strategy Execution Difficult?

There are several factors that make successful execution of your business strategy challenging.

According to the Harvard Business School Online course Strategy Execution , some of the most common factors include:

• Poor communication of strategic objectives
• Lack of employee buy-in
• Ineffective risk management

All of these can cause the best strategic plans to fall flat in their execution. In fact, poor execution is more common than you may realize. According to research from Bridges Business Consultancy , 48 percent of organizations fail to reach at least half of their strategic targets, and just seven percent of business leaders believe their organizations are excellent at strategy implementation.

“If you’ve looked at the news lately, you’ve probably seen stories of businesses with great strategies that have failed ,” says Harvard Business School Professor Robert Simons, who teaches the online course Strategy Execution . “In each case, we find a business strategy that was well formulated but poorly executed.”

How can you equip yourself and your team to implement the plans you’ve crafted? Here are five keys to successful strategy execution you can use at your organization.

Keys to Successful Strategy Execution

1. commit to a strategic plan.

Before diving into execution, it’s important to ensure all decision-makers and stakeholders agree on the strategic plan.

Research in the Harvard Business Review shows that 71 percent of employees in companies with weak execution believe strategic decisions are second-guessed, as opposed to 45 percent of employees from companies with strong execution.

Committing to a strategic plan before beginning implementation ensures all decision-makers and their teams are aligned on the same goals. This creates a shared understanding of the larger strategic plan throughout the organization.

Strategies aren’t stagnant—they should evolve with new challenges and opportunities. Communication is critical to ensuring you and your colleagues start on the same page in the planning process and stay aligned as time goes on.

2. Align Jobs to Strategy

One barrier many companies face in effective strategy execution is that employees’ roles aren’t designed with strategy in mind.

This can occur when employees are hired before a strategy is formulated, or when roles are established to align with a former company strategy.

In Strategy Execution , Simons posits that jobs are optimized for high performance when they line up with an organizational strategy. He created the Job Design Optimization Tool (JDOT) that individuals can use to assess whether their organization's jobs are designed for successful strategy execution.

The JDOT assesses a job’s design based on four factors, or “spans”: control, accountability, influence, and support.

“Each span can be adjusted so that it’s narrow or wide or somewhere in between,” Simons writes in the Harvard Business Review . “I think of the adjustments as being made on sliders, like those found on music amplifiers. If you get the settings right, you can design a job in which a talented individual can successfully execute your company’s strategy. But if you get the settings wrong, it will be difficult for any employee to be effective.”

3. Communicate Clearly to Empower Employees

When it comes to strategy execution, the power of clear communication can’t be overlooked. Given that a staggering 95 percent of employees don’t understand or are unaware of their company’s strategy, communication is a skill worth improving.

Strategy execution depends on each member of your organization's daily tasks and decisions, so it’s vital to ensure everyone understands not only the company's broader strategic goals, but how their individual responsibilities make achieving them possible.

Data outlined in the Harvard Business Review shows that 61 percent of staff at strong-execution companies believe field and line employees are given the information necessary to understand the bottom-line impact of their work and decisions. In weak-execution organizations, just 28 percent believe this to be true.

To boost your organization’s performance and empower your employees, train managers to communicate the impact of their team's daily work, address the organization in an all-staff meeting, and foster a culture that celebrates milestones on the way to reaching large strategic goals.

4. Measure and Monitor Performance

Strategy execution relies on continually assessing progress toward goals. To effectively measure your organization’s performance metrics, determine numeric key performance indicators (KPIs) during the strategic planning stage . A numeric goal serves as a clear measure of success for you and your team to regularly track and monitor performance and assess if any changes need to be made based on that progress.

For instance, your company’s strategic goal could be to increase its customer retention rate by 30 percent by 2026. By keeping a record of the change in customer retention rate on a weekly or monthly basis, you can observe data trends over time.

If records show that your customer retention rate is decreasing month over month, it could signal that your strategic plan requires pivoting because it’s not driving the change you desire. If, however, your data shows steady month-over-month growth, you can use that trend to reasonably predict whether you’ll reach your goal of a 30 percent increase by 2026.

5. Balance Innovation and Control

While innovation is an essential driving force for company growth, don’t let it derail the execution of your strategy.

To leverage innovation and maintain control over your current strategy implementation, develop a process to evaluate challenges, barriers, and opportunities that arise. Who makes decisions that may pivot your strategy’s focus? What pieces of the strategy are non-negotiable? Answering questions like these upfront can allow for clarity during execution.

Also, remember that a stagnant organization has no room for growth. Encourage employees to brainstorm, experiment, and take calculated risks with strategic initiatives in mind.

Related: 23 Resources for Mobilizing Innovation in Your Organization

Building the Skills to Successfully Execute Strategy

Setting strategic goals, formulating a plan, and executing a strategy each require a different set of skills and come with their own challenges. Keeping in mind that even the best formulated strategy can be poorly executed, consider bolstering your execution skills before setting strategic goals and putting a plan in place. Developing these skills can have a lasting impact on your organization's future performance.

Are you interested in designing systems and structures to meet your organization’s strategic goals? Explore our eight-week Strategy Execution course and other online strategy courses to hone your strategic planning and execution skills. To find the right HBS Online Strategy course for you, download the free flowchart .

This post was updated on November 9, 2023. It was originally published on November 17, 2020.

About the Author

Why You Need a Strategic Business Plan And How to Actually Write One

Chris Leadley

[email protected]

A strategic business plan is a critical document for any organisation, regardless of its size or industry.

It outlines the company’s vision, mission, and objectives, as well as the strategies and tactics that will be used to achieve them. It also establishes a system for monitoring and measuring progress and making adjustments as needed.

Having a well-written and well-executed strategic business plan is essential for a business to succeed. It provides a clear roadmap for growth and helps to ensure that the business is making the most of its resources, including time, money, and talent.

Strategic business planning

A strategic business plan also helps to align the efforts of all stakeholders, including employees, shareholders, and customers, towards a common goal. In today’s fast-paced business environment, having a strategic plan can give a business a competitive edge, and help it to achieve its goals and objectives.

A good planning framework that can be used to create a strategic business plan is PR Smith’s SOSTAC®  Planning Framework – Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Action, Control.

There is more information about the SOSTAC® Planning Framework here .

PR Smith’s SOSTAC®  planning framework

Here’s a brief guide on how to use SOSTAC® to write a strategic business plan:

Begin by analysing the current situation of your business. This includes analysing the external and internal factors that may be impacting your business, such as the economic environment, competitors, and current market trends. This step will give you a clear understanding of where your business stands and where it needs to go.

Objectives:

Once you have a clear understanding of the current situation, set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART) objectives for your business. These objectives should align with your overall vision and mission and should be specific to different areas of your business, such as sales, marketing, and operations.

Based on your objectives, develop strategies that will help you achieve them. These strategies should be aligned with your overall vision and mission and should take into account the current situation of your business.

Once you have developed your strategies, develop specific tactics that will help you implement them. These tactics should be specific, actionable, and measurable and should align with your overall strategy.

Once you have developed your tactics, create an action plan that outlines the specific actions that need to be taken to implement them. This should include who will be responsible for each action, when it will be completed, and any resources that will be required.

Finally, establish a system for monitoring and measuring the progress of your plan. This should include specific metrics that will be used to track progress and regular reviews to ensure that the plan is on track. Any necessary adjustments should be made based on the results of the review.

By using the SOSTAC®  framework, it ensures that your business plan is well-structured and covers all the important elements. Additionally, it is also a useful tool for monitoring and measuring progress, making adjustments as needed, and keeping your plan on track to achieve your objectives.

Make a strategic change in your business

If you are looking to drive more sales, increase profit, and improve your business’ performance then our Strategic Business Review will help you identify where more sales can be made, how to maximise your profits, and improve your business’ performance.

Find out more about our Strategic Business Review →

Further references

1. SOSTAC® Video (4 mins from PR Smith)  www.PRSmith.org/SOSTAC  (scroll to bottom) 2. SOSTAC® Guide to your Perfect Digital Marketing Plan (2020)  book 3. SOSTAC® Blog (posts from PR Smith):  www.PRSmith.org/blog 4. SOSTAC® Groups are also on  Facebook  &  Linkedin 5. SOSTAC®  Instagram   https://www.instagram.com/sostac_planning/

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Tactical Planning: Creating a Tactical Plan for Your Business

Tactical planning is the practical counterpoint to strategic planning, which describes the overall direction of an organization. Tactical planning tells you how to get there. It’s about execution and, therefore, critical to achieving your strategic goals.

This concept is an important part of project portfolio management (PPM) and project management offices (PMOs). Let’s dive a bit deeper into the subject and explain how it differs from other types of planning, its benefits and more.

What Is Tactical Planning?

Tactical planning describes the action steps, strategies and projects that are deployed by the different departments of an organization, such as sales, marketing, product development and others to contribute to the accomplishment of strategic goals. It breaks down the long-term strategic plans of more than two or three years into short-term plans.

In general, tactical planning is in response to an immediate issue or situation. This can apply to a business or a project team. A strategic plan is responding to where a business wants to be in a long time, but tactical planning can also be used to submit a bid by creating a viable proposal that will win your company that business.

To achieve the strategic goals of a business, tactical plans include focused goals, steps to reach these goals and a timeline in which to achieve them. To organize and manage this process, businesses employ project management techniques and tools, such as project management software.

ProjectManager is award-winning project management software that has robust Gantt charts that help plan the tactical steps on a visual timeline. Our Gantt charts organize tasks, set milestones and link all four types of task dependencies to avoid costly delays. You can also filter for the critical path to identify essential tasks and then set a baseline to track project variance in real time. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.

Tactical planning is one of three types of planning employed by businesses. The other two are strategic planning and operational planning, which we’ll get to in a moment.

Tactical Planning vs. Strategic Planning

Tactical planning and strategic planning are two different levels in the organizational planning of an organization. Strategic plans are high-level view goals of an organization, drafted by company owners, boards of directors and the top-level management team.

Tactical planning isn’t as long-term as strategic planning. It outlines the short-term steps that need to take place to achieve the strategic goals of the strategic plan. Tactical planning is specific, short term with clear deliverables , while strategic planning identifies broader decisions, is long term and has clear goals.

Tactical Planning vs. Operational Planning

Tactical plans can be used by departments within a business to develop and measure their functionality, but it’s different from operational planning. Operational planning is done by the lower layer of management.

Operational planning directs the everyday operations of the business departments. This goes to the most specific guidelines for business processes and daily activities of employees. So if we’re talking about a manufacturing plant, it would include the different standard operating procedures for production workers.

Benefits of Tactical Planning

The longest trip starts with the first step. This applies to how strategic goals benefit from tactical planning. But there are more benefits to tactical planning, a few of which we define below.

Connects All Levels of Management in an Organization

There are three levels to any organization. The top is the board of directors, chief executive or managing director. This is the administrative or managerial level. Then there are department managers, who are the middle level, who execute the plans from the top. After that, there’s the lower level or supervisory/operational level of management. These are supervisors, foremen, etc., who assign and manage the work of the teams. Tactical planning is the string that ties all these levels together and ensures that they’re working collaboratively.

Breaks Down Long-term Strategic Goals Into Actionable, Short-term Projects

As noted, strategic goals are long-term goals that a business wants to accomplish. Once defined, however, they need to be broken down into smaller projects or tasks that, step-by-step, will let the business reach that future target. Tactical planning takes the aspirational goals of the business and makes a practical roadmap that gets the business from where it is to where it wants to be.

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Strategic Plan Template

Use this free Strategic Plan Template for Word to manage your projects better.

Helps Decision Makers Allocate Organizational Resources Strategically

Organizations have limited resources and each department within the organization is likely competing for those resources. Strategic and tactical planning makes it easier to decide what money should be spent on marketing, production and sales as well as other resources. Resources should be spent on the areas that contribute the most to the completion of strategic goals. That’s the criteria to prioritize them when making tactical plans.

What Is a Tactical Plan?

Now that we know what tactical planning is and why it’s beneficial, it’s time to look at the elements that make up a tactical plan. While creating a tactical plan varies from one business to the next depending on their goals, any successful one will have these key elements.

SMART Tactical Goals

Before you can plan to achieve your goals you have to have them. As the top-level management starts to think about what their long-term goals are, they should make sure they’re SMART. That’s an acronym for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound.

Next, you need to establish a timeline . That is, create a deadline and work backward to make a timeline in which you’ll be able to plot the tasks or steps that will get you there. This will improve your chances of reaching that end goal.

Action Steps & Projects

Those tasks are also called action steps, which take you from where you are to where you want to be by your deadline. However, bigger strategic goals and bigger organizations not only require action steps but actual projects, which are more involved. You’ll have to think about risk management, resource management , task management, etc.

Related: 8 Free Risk Management Templates for Excel

Deliverables

Deliverables describe the quantifiable goods or services that are provided throughout and after a project. You’ll want to identify these deliverables, which can be done by using a work breakdown structure . Once you have your deliverables identified, you can also identify the tasks needed to get them.

Resources are anything you’ll need to execute your tactical plan, such as materials, workforce, equipment, finance, outsourcing products and more. Managers need to identify the resources they’ll need and use the timeline to schedule those resources when they’re needed.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Once you execute your tactical plan you’ll need a ruler by which to measure its success or lack thereof, which is what KPIs are. Some KPIs are revenue, new customers, etc.

Tactical Planning Example

Let’s imagine a large appliance manufacturing company that has drawn the following strategic goals for the next two to five years. In this example, we’ll illustrate how those high-level views of strategic goals can be translated into more specific tactical plan goals and action steps .

Strategic Goals

• Increase our net revenue by 20 percent and profit margin by 10 percent
• Cut manufacturing costs by 15 percent
• Improve our customer satisfaction level by 25 percent

Tactical Plan Action Steps per Department

Here are the action steps for key departments of this company. All of these activities work together cohesively to achieve the strategic goals outlined above.

Production & Procurement

• Find suppliers that offer raw materials and components at a lower price
• Outsource and/or offshore a portion of the production process overseas to reduce production costs and increase the profit margin
• Use the excess production capacity to create new products to open new markets and support the objective of increasing revenue
• Optimize the production line to increase its resource capacity
• Purchase machinery to automate the production process and cut down labor costs

Marketing & Sales

• Find new market opportunities for new products through market research tactics
• Create a website to attract customers online
• Partner with online vendors to open new distribution channels
• Create a mobile app that customers can use to learn more about our product and contact our support team

Customer Service

• Open physical locations where users can bring or send their products for maintenance
• Improve the responsiveness of the customer service department by hiring more customer service representatives
• Use the website as a new way to respond to customers by creating a chatbot that answers the most commonly asked questions and directs customers to human customer service representatives

Product development

• Develop products that target new niches as recommended by the market research findings
• Develop new models that are cheaper to produce but retain most of the positive attributes of the current products
• Creating more energy-efficient models which has been known to be a recurring issue for existing customers

To execute each of these tactical action steps, the tactical-level managers will need to define a timeline, estimate the resources that will be required and establish key performance indicators and the tools that will be used to track them.

As discussed above, whenever you create a tactical plan for a business department you must make sure that it aligns with the larger strategic plan of your organization. This free strategic plan template for Word is a great tool for gathering the key elements that will help you define the overall direction of your business in the future, such as its operations plan, marketing plan and business objectives.

How ProjectManager Helps You Track Your Tactical Plan

Project management software can help you with tactical planning, executing those plans and then tracking them. ProjectManager is award-winning project management software that can plan, manage and track your tactical plan in real time. Not only does our software have powerful Gantt charts, but multiple project views, such as kanban boards, task lists, sheet and calendar views. That means teams can collaborate across departments in the same tool with the live data to keep them on the same page.

Allocate Resources and Track Resource Utilization

Being able to plan, allocate and track your resources is vital if you want to deliver on your strategic goals. Our software lets you set the availability of your team, including PTO and global vacations, which makes assigning them to tasks easier. You can track how much work they’re doing and labor costs on our secure timesheets. Then go over to the workload chart to see if anyone is overallocated. If they are, balance the team’s workload from the chart to keep them productive and working at capacity.

Track Costs With Real Time Dashboards

Whenever you need a high-level overview of your project, toggle over to our real-time dashboard. It automatically collects live data and displays it in easy-to-read graphs and charts that show KPIs, such as time, cost, workload and more. There’s no time-consuming setup required as in lightweight alternative products. It’s a status report whenever you want one. If you need a status report, portfolio report or reports on workload, timesheets and more, visit our reporting features. You can filter all reports and easily share them to keep stakeholders updated.

Related Organizational Planning Content

If you want to read more about business strategy and planning projects to achieve those long-term goals, we’ve got plenty. Our website is a destination for all things project management and related topics, with weekly blogs, guides, tutorial videos and free templates. Here’s a sampling of some of the strategic-related content you’ll find on our site.

• Strategic Planning in Business
• Strategic Project Management: Planning Strategic Projects
• Strategic Plan Template for Word (Free Download)
• Project Alignment: Aligning Your Project to Business Strategy
• Project Prioritization: How to Prioritize Projects & Strategy

ProjectManager is online project management software that connects teams whether they’re in the office, out in the field or anywhere in between. You can share files, comment at the task level and stay updated with email notifications and in-app alerts. Get features to manage risk, resources and tasks to keep your tactical plans running smoothly. Join teams at Avis, Nestle and Siemens who use our software to deliver successful projects. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.

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Creating a Tactical Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide

Creating a tactical strategy involves developing a step-by-step plan that aligns with your objectives and leverages available resources. This article provides insights into constructing a tactical approach, irrespective of your role—be it a business owner, marketer, or project manager. This guide elaborates on the nuances of strategic planning and execution to help you drive results through effective actions.

Distinguishing Between Strategy and Tactics

Understanding the difference between strategy and tactics is fundamental for success. A tactical strategy refers to actions taken to secure a competitive advantage.

For example, strategies may include aggressive pricing or bolstering customer service, which are supported by various short-term actions, like a retail store offering limited-time discounts or training staff to respond promptly to inquiries. Likewise, a local government may strive for transparency with a strategic plan that introduces new communication methods, and correspondingly, executes a series of actions such as launching information-sharing platforms. Similarly, educational institutions may embrace digital tools to foster student participation, employing tactics that could range from flipping the traditional classroom setting to professional development initiatives for educators.

It’s vital to remember that while overarching strategy directs the approach, tactics represent the individual steps taken towards the strategic objectives.

The Essence of a Robust Strategy

Obtaining strategic planning templates.

Strategic planning templates are crucial tools that cater to the unique needs and aspirations of an organization. Many entities provide templates that can be tailored to specific circumstances—for instance, a municipality intent on enhancing transparency might utilize a template that incorporates measures for establishing more open communication channels. On the educational front, templates might be customized to accommodate the integration of tech into instructional methodologies.

These templates serve as a schematic to ensure that proposed strategies and supporting actions resonate with the organization’s broader aspirations, thus simplifying the strategic planning process and ensuring that measures are effective and quantifiable.

Characteristics of Effective Tactics

Rule of thumb: think strategy, act tactic.

Effective tactics are concrete measures that support the pursuit of strategic goals. Consider a business aiming to boost customer contentment by incorporating a CRM system; here, tactically astute initiatives might include in-depth staff training or the launch of a customer loyalty scheme. A municipal body might aim to foster public trust through the use of modern communication channels, with tactics like creating dashboards for community engagement.

In healthcare, strategies targeted at betterpatient flow could translate to efforts in refining operational procedures and tactics directed at minimizing bottlenecks. Regular analysis of these actions is instrumental as it provides transparency regarding the overall strategy’s success in reaching desired targets.

Strategy Versus Tactics: Various Field Examples

Local government strategies.

In local governance, articulating strategies with distinct initiatives is key to realizing objectives. Envisioning a more transparent operations model might entail the establishment of open data dashboards, bolstering public insight into civic affairs. In contrast, educational strategies might revolve around enhancing student involvement through digital amenities and hands-on tech, accompanied by tangible actions like the provision of hardware and teacher training.

Healthcare systems, striving for streamlining processes, could focus on meticulous planning and execution of tactics such as workflow management software implementation or revamping triage protocols to uplift the quality of patient care and operational efficacy.

Educational Strategies

In the context of education, tactical strategies crystallize as actions for reaching academic aims like better engagement and heightened educational achievements. Consider the strategic aspiration to integrate technology into pedagogy, augmented with practical steps like the adoption of e-learning resources and inverted classroom models.

Another strategic objective—enhancing transparency with educational stakeholders—might see implementation of systematic information sharing via digital bulletins, consistent messaging systems, or interactive forums for discussion with parents and faculty. These approaches substantiate the strategic direction and offer quantifiable changes that contribute to broader educational successes.

Healthcare Strategies

In healthcare, everyday maneuvers are designed to refine patient care and streamline operations. A goal to curtail waiting times could involve pinpointed measures such as adjustment of admission protocols or rebalancing staff rosters. In valuing tactical effectiveness, healthcare entities might employ KPIs and strategy reporting tools to visually connect plans with performance, facilitating wise decisions and milestone evaluations.

A robust healthcare game plan is data-driven, consists of explicit aims, and is supple enough to tackle unforeseen challenges.

Monitoring and Tracking the Plan

Assessing the strategy’s effectiveness.

Evaluating the impact of a tactical strategy is fundamental. Consider a retail firm’s ambition to amplify customer loyalty through a reward system supported by targeted discounts. Manufacturing may seek enhanced process efficiency, applying new technologies and tactics focused on workflow optimization. The utility of strategy reporting solutions like ClearPoint lies in elucidating the relationship between high-level plans and day-to-day actions, providing insights into progress and decisions.

Tactics should be time-bound, goal-oriented, and ultimately, a contributor to the strategic vision.

The Interconnection of Strategy and Tactics

Tactical approach within business functions.

A tactical approach within business functions centers on day-to-day initiatives aimed at securing a market vantage. For public administration, this might encompass deploying comprehensive communication plans buttressed by digital town squares for public discourse. Education sectors may prioritize tech integration in teaching, implementing actions measurable in educational advancement. Healthcare strategies prioritize patient care, operationalizing tactics like procedure optimization.

Organizations use performance indicators and strategy visualization tools to forge a link between higher objectives and granular actions, promoting informed leadership.

People Team Tactics

The human resources function employs strategic actions to achieve educational excellence, such as digital learning integration and interactive application usage for knowledge assessment. Government agencies focus on fortifying transparency, with tactics like digital dashboards for public information. The healthcare scene aims to enhance patient processing, using techniques like process improvement initiatives to streamline services.

Employing KPIs to evaluate effectiveness, these sectors are able to scrutinize their tactical agenda, align it with strategic priorities, and steer towards their ultimate goals.

Digital Marketing Team Tactics

Digital marketing strategies encompass targeted actions, such as online campaign initiation and customer outreach personalization. A goal to increase e-commerce might involve optimizing the digital storefront, launching curated adverts, and email campaign refinement. By measuring the impact of tactics through KPIs, digital marketing teams can ensure their actions are conducive to achieving strategic marketing objectives with tangible outcomes.

Web Development Team Tactics

In web development, strategic undertakings focus on user experience, with tactics aimed at expediting site performance and aesthetics. Actions include image size reduction, backend optimization, and content loading strategies. These endeavors are geared towards elevating user satisfaction and loyalty by providing a seamless online experience, with measured results ensuring alignment with the organization’s broad aspirations.

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Planning for Success: A Guide to Tactical Planning in Business

Let’s take a look at what tactical business planning is, why it matters, and how to use it to improve your business outcomes.

When it comes to running a successful business, planning is key. But how do you make sure your plans are effective and achievable?

That’s where tactical business planning comes in. Tactical planning focuses on the “how” of getting things done. It’s the difference between having an idea and making it happen.

What’s the Difference Between Strategy and Tactics?

Have you ever heard someone talk about strategy or tactics in business, and wondered what the difference was?

It is actually simpler than it might sound:

In a nutshell, strategy refers to your big-picture plan, while tactics are more focused on your day-to-day implementation of that plan.

Let’s take a look at each of these concepts and how they work together.

Strategy: The Big Picture

A strategy is an overarching plan that guides your decisions and helps you achieve your goals.

It is created by looking at your current situation, evaluating the potential outcomes, and determining how best to achieve your desired results.

Strategy should be based on data and research, as well as an understanding of past successes and failures. A good strategy will set out specific objectives, identify key stakeholders, outline potential risks, and provide an actionable timeline for success.

Tactics: The Nitty Gritty Implementation

Tactics are the ways you go about executing your strategy. They are specific actions taken to achieve desired results.

Tactics can include anything from developing marketing materials to launching a new product or service. A tactic could be a specific way your team sells your product, or a certain method you've created to support your customers, or even a growth hack you use to grow your business.

Tactics should always be tailored to meet the needs of your business as well as those of your customers or clients. When creating or implementing tactics it's important to consider the impact on both your short-term goals (such as increasing sales) and your long-term goals (such as building brand awareness).

Tactical plans should also include measurable metrics so that progress can be tracked over time.

Strategic vs. Tactical Planning?

When it comes to planning, there are two main approaches — strategic planning and tactical planning .

Both involve setting goals, assessing progress, and making decisions that will help you reach those goals.

But what exactly is the difference between these two types of plans, and how can understanding their differences help you make better decisions for your business?

Let's take a closer look.

What Is Strategic Planning?

At its core, strategic planning involves looking at the big picture.

This type of planning focuses on long-term objectives and goals, taking into account any external factors that could impact your progress.

A key part of strategic planning is considering which strategies could be implemented in order to achieve your "big picture" goals, and which factors might influence the success or failure of those strategies.

For example, when creating a strategic plan for your business you might consider factors like market trends, potential growth opportunities, and the competitive landscape, in order to determine which actions should be taken in order to reach your desired outcome.

What Is Tactical Planning?

Tactical planning is focused more on short-term objectives than long-term ones.

A tactical plan looks at specific tasks that can be completed in order to achieve a goal or objective within a certain time frame, and it focuses on utilizing resources efficiently in order to complete those tasks successfully.

For example, if you wanted to launch a marketing campaign for your business within the next month, your tactical plan might involve creating an actionable timeline with steps such as researching target markets, creating content assets for the campaign, and budgeting for your project, in order to ensure everything is completed before the desired deadline.

What is Tactical Planning in Business?

Tactical planning in business involves developing an actionable plan using available resources, while at the same time attempting to minimize the risk levels associated with the different options.

Let's break that down.

A tactical plan starts by identifying measurable goals or objectives related to specific outcomes (such as increasing revenue or improving productivity).

Then, one develops the steps required to reach those objectives within a predefined time frame. A tactical objective is usually something achievable within a short period of time, say 1–6 months.

When building a tactical plan for your business it's important to take into consideration any potential obstacles or roadblocks that might get in the way. By predicting challenges and coming up with solutions for overcoming them, continual progress can be made towards completion of the goals set out in your tactical plan.

It's also important to establish performance measures so that progress can be tracked over time in order to determine if key objectives are being met.

Why Does Tactical Planning in Business Matter?

Tactical planning is an essential tool for businesses and organizations wanting to succeed (which most certainly is all of them).

Without a comprehensive plan of action, well-defined goals, clear strategies and a focus on implementation, it becomes difficult to accomplish anything worthwhile, and many organizations fall into the habit of foregoing tactical planning.

Tactical planning forces managers to regularly assess their operations — making sure they don't become complacent while also encouraging them to be creative in finding new opportunities. It also helps with decision making and aligning to future objectives.

All this promotes growth and progress, helping organizations reach their full potential as efficiently as possible. It's easy to see why tactical planning matters!

How to Build a Tactical Plan

As they say, " failing to plan is planning to fail. "

And it's true — you can't hope to reach your goals without having a plan in place.

Whether it's for personal or professional reasons, there are some core steps you should always keep in mind when creating a tactical plan.

Step 1: Identify Your Goals and Objectives

The first step when creating a tactical plan is to identify your goals and objectives.

This includes both short and long term goals, as well as measurable milestones that indicate progress along the way.

It's important to be realistic when setting your goals — if they are too ambitious, you may end up burning yourself out before you even get started! Instead, break down the larger goal into smaller, achievable tasks that can be completed over time.

Step 2: Assess Your Resources and Capabilities

Once you have identified your goals, take an honest look at your resources and capabilities. Do you have enough time? Money? Knowledge? Skills ?

If not, consider how you can act on those resources and capabilities in order to make progress towards your goal. Also consider any external factors that could affect the outcome of your plan, like for example, if there is new legislation coming into effect that could impact the success of your project.

Step 3: Create an Action Plan

Now it's time to start putting together an action plan.

This includes outlining what tasks need to be done in order to achieve each goal or milestone within the timeline set out in the previous steps.

Make sure each task in your tactical action plan is detailed with specific deadlines and assigned roles so everyone knows exactly what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by. It's also important to include contingency plans in case something goes wrong along the way; this will ensure that any disruptions are minimized as much as possible.

Step 4: Monitor Progress and Adjust As Necessary

As with any project, monitoring progress is key if you want it to succeed.

Be sure to regularly check in with team members and adjust plans as needed. This will help ensure that everything stays on track and no one gets left behind or overwhelmed due to lack of direction or guidance from leadership .

Step 5: Celebrate Successes!

Once all of your hard work has paid off and all of the planned tasks have been completed successfully, don’t forget to take some time to celebrate your successes!

Whether it’s sending an email thanking everyone involved, or inviting your team to a celebratory dinner, taking some time out from all the hard work is essential for staying motivated.

Executing a successful tactical plan isn't easy. It takes coordination, communication, and commitment from all parties involved in order for it to work properly.

But if done correctly, tactical planning can yield amazing results for your business.

By following the steps of defining your strategic goals, identifying tactics, and then executing the plan, you'll have everything you need to succeed.

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Strategic vs. Tactical Planning: Which One is Better?

At a business meeting, management has set an ambitious goal of new sales to hit by the end of the year. The salespeople are excited, and company leadership is eager for their organization to achieve new heights. The question remains: How will they reach this new goal? That’s the dilemma many organizations struggle with as they seek to grow their businesses. Anyone can set goals and objectives, but achieving them is another matter. Planning your strategy and tactics is essential. Knowing the difference between tactical vs. strategic planning is often the difference between succeeding or failing to reach those goals.

What is a Strategic Plan?

What is a tactical plan, what is the difference between strategy and tactics, examples of strategic and tactical planning, how to create a strategic plan, how to create a tactical plan, be both a strategic and tactical leader.

Few people doubt the importance of planning ahead before tackling any project. A  study  published in the Journal of Business Venturing found that planning impacts a business’s overall performance in a positive way. A business plan helps companies grow as well.  Research  has found that organizations that plan grow up to 30 percent faster. For this reason, businesses need to prepare in advance to remain competitive and successful. Recognizing where strategic and tactical business planning come into play makes a difference. In this article, find out the difference between strategy and tactics and how to create each type of plan.

Key Takeaways

• Strategy and tactics are key aspects of business planning.
• Strategic planning is the process of mapping out what a business wants to achieve in the long term.
• A tactical plan describes how the business will achieve its strategic goals.

A strategic plan explains  what  organizations want to achieve by looking at the big picture to set goals. The strategy businesses adopt maps out the long-term plans they intend to follow. This can also apply to individuals seeking career advancement and professional development. Strategic planning for this purpose outlines the overall goals, identifying the destination you want to reach in the future.

A tactical plan describes  how  a business will accomplish its goals. Tactical plans focus on the steps, tasks, and specific actions needed to achieve goals set by the established strategic plan. In this way, the tactical business planning process emphasizes short-term measures that contribute to a larger business strategy. Whether used for corporate planning, team planning, or individual plans, this type of planning is necessary for following through on strategic objectives.

Strategic planning represents the long-term view of an organization. Strategic plans mainly deal with broad goals and objectives. Many strategic plans have time frames of months or even years. They also involve looking at what resources the company has available and what kind of people can tackle the project.

The tactical planning process, on the other hand, is far more specific than strategic planning. Much of the time, tactical planning looks at the day-to-day activities required for reaching broader objectives. A tactical plan should consist of milestones and deadlines that help companies know if they’re on track with their strategic plans. This type of planning also emphasizes execution, ensuring that things don’t just get done but done well.

With those differences in mind, let’s take a look at some examples that highlight how strategic and tactical planning work. A strategic plan might say something along the lines of “recruit highly skilled individuals to form a capable and talented team.” That’s a goal with some broad strokes, but a tactical plan will get into the specifics. In this instance, tactical or corporate planning would include steps such as conducting surveys of current employees to find out what they like and don’t like about their jobs. It may also include attending job fairs, creating effective exit interviews to figure out why some talented people leave the company or developing a training program to improve  leadership skills . All of these tactical steps will contribute to the strategic plan.

Here’s how strategic and tactical planning might appear, with the strategic plan listed on top and the tactical plans shown underneath:

• Goal: Double sales by the end of next year.
• Hire ten new salespeople before the end of the current quarter.
• Create and send out client surveys to determine where the company can improve.
• Adopt new CRM software to handle an increased workload.
• Reach out to past clients to find out why they left and if they have an interest in returning.

That’s just a brief example of how strategic and tactical planning might look. Leaders can also write each part of the tactical plan in smaller steps if that’s what the company wants. The more details worked into the plan, the easier it will be to follow and measure progress.

1. Identify a Big Picture Goal

What ultimate destination do you want to end up at? That’s the question every business and individual must ask when making a strategic plan. Do you want your company to become the leader in their industry? Do you want to head up a new innovative company? The big picture goal should be lofty and aspirational, even if it’s not too specific.

2. Evaluate Your Current Position

Take the time to look closely at where the company is now. Try using SWOT analysis, which is a strategic planning tool that analyzes strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. For example, ask questions like:

• How does the business compare to competitors?
• What recent successes has it had?
• Where has it failed in the past?

By evaluating your current position, you can get a good idea of how much distance the company must cover to reach its long-term goals. If the distance is short, then maybe the goal isn’t big enough.

3. Align Goal With Company Values

Whatever goal companies choose, they must make sure it aligns with their values. Every organization should have a  mission statement , so a goal that runs contrary to that mission statement should be thrown out. Take your values and convictions into account as you are strategic planning, as they can often inform you if the destination you’ve identified is actually where you want to end up.

4. Determine How to Monitor Progress

The goal set by the organization is likely many months or years into the future. Progress may appear slow at times. Because of this, determine early on how you should measure that progress. For example, with a marketing plan, what would you like to see six months from now? Where should sales be by the end of the quarter? By doing this, you’ll know if you need to course-correct before you’ve gone too far off the path.

1. Keep Strategic Goals in Mind

Strategic planning provides the destination and general outline of what the company wants to achieve. Create every piece of the tactical plan with that overall goal in mind. Operational planning like this gets into the nitty-gritty details, so it’s easy to become bogged down in unnecessary information. Note why each step of the tactical plan exists, and if it doesn’t make progress toward the goal, eliminate it.

2. Divide the Plan

When you know your ultimate destination and the approximate time frame needed to reach it, break up that goal into individual steps. Start with where you want to arrive at the end of each month, then each week, and then each day. These steps represent your progress and help teams keep track of where they are. Breaking up larger projects like this enables you to visualize how you’ll reach long-term goals.

3. Organize Teams

Once all the steps of the tactical plan have been established, note how many teams you need to achieve success. Then organize those teams to handle the different elements of the tactical plan. When engaging in corporate planning like this, you should have a good idea of what kind of expertise you have on staff. Based on the skills of the available personnel, you can determine where to place each person, so they have the best chance at success.

4. Determine Resource Allocation

At the same time, companies can also divide up the available resources, so each team has what they need to succeed. Everyone should know that these resources aren’t limitless, so make sure to explain why they get the amount you’ve allocated. This step can involve difficult choices, but with a firm tactical plan in mind, you’ll have a good idea of where your resources need to go.

5. Measure Progress

Determine how to measure progress for a tactical plan. Measuring progress for this plan will happen more frequently, such as at the end of each day or week. Determine how well you and each team did during the day and see if you need to make any changes to keep on schedule. If changes need to be made, make sure they address the problems you encounter most often.

Focusing too much on one side of strategy or tactics will lead to frustration and failure in operational planning. The best practices in a business involve both strategy and tactics. As you lead others, note the importance of having both strategic and tactical plans at the ready. Aim high with your strategies, and pinpoint the details with your tactics. The best leaders will use both to take their organizations to where they want to go. The result will be a company that experiences  business growth  and success.

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Strategy vs. Tactics: What’s the Difference?

When discussing strategy implementation, strategy and tactics are two common terms in a business environment .

Although these terms are widely used across industries (sports, warfare, or business), there is widespread confusion over similarities and differences.

Business owners and executives use tactics and strategies to achieve their goals and objectives. Without proper tactics and strategy planning, your business will struggle to track its progress and succeed.

This article will teach you the relationship and differences between strategy and tactics and the core facets of a good business and marketing strategy.

What's the Difference Between Strategy and Tactics?

Strategies and tactics originated from the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu who wrote about them as military terminology in his famous book “The Art of War” some 2,500 years ago.

Today, the strategy vs. tactics argument pops up in the daily struggle for the most efficient method to achieve the desired result.

Both terms are often used interchangeably, but a more comprehensive look at strategy vs. tactics opens up a world of similarities and differences that distinguishes them from one another.

Despite being two different concepts entirely, the strategic vs. tactics argument has pointed out over the years that they both differ but unite for the same purpose of guaranteeing the planning process's success.

When compared and used in the everyday world, strategy vs. tactics describes the act of achieving success, be it in sports, warfare, or business.

Tactics and strategies have their individual and collective contribution to aiding the project or industry in question to better track its progress and ensure it delivers desired results.

As important and alike as these two methods are, they have notable differences.

Here are some of the notable differences between tactics and strategy:

The term strategy defines a series of plans and actions designed to ensure the achievement of an organization, community, or country's objectives and goals in the most efficient manner.

Tactics comprise a series of well-defined specific actions to ensure the success of the plans birthed from the planning process.

2. Inclination to Changes

Strategy is a long-term vision because it is difficult to tweak or change due to external factors upon implementation.

At the same time, you can adjust tactics to ensure it conforms to the right direction of the main objective.

3. Effect on the Plan

Specific tactics are concrete actions defined by the right strategy. This definition implies that a solid strategy more or less can affect changes in a target audience through well-defined tactics, but tactics do not have that same effect on the strategy of a plan.

4. Long-term Vision vs. Short-term Action

A strategy helps point out key components of an organization's long-term vision and detailed steps to achieve them. Your high-level strategy defines the pathway required to ensure the business goals are met.

Tactics, unlike strategies, are more like short-term actions as they have a finite timeline that drives their implementation. Tactics ensure the best practices, plans and resources are utilized efficiently to contribute to a business's success actively.

The Relationship between Strategies and Tactics

Strategy and tactic share a unique relationship. Despite tactics being more solid and visible to observers concerning the ultimate goal of success, you can not rule out the impact an overarching strategy would have on the business goals and objectives.

Your focus should not be on strategy vs. tactics but on strategy and tactics. It becomes more evident that these two techniques must coexist if any project is worth pursuing.

Depending solely on a long-term strategy without corresponding tactics is a recipe for failure. Tactics work as actions needed to deliver the desired outcome.

By only implementing strategies without an overarching plan, the organization is not ticking all the necessary boxes in proper planning. Tactical plans are the actions needed to achieve your organization’s goals.

Similarly, you can not achieve your business goals solely on tactics alone. Tactics without the corresponding tactical plan result in aimless work. The needed guidance to ensure the actions are aligned with the business grand strategy is missing.

As much as strategy and tactics benefit a business if applied individually, they are grossly efficient in delivering success. Strategy and tactics are complementary methods that work best as a team.

What Makes a Good Strategy?

A good strategy depends on a series of factors that distinguishes it from other strategies.

1. Data-Informed Decisions

The act of developing a good strategy involves coming up with a detailed plan through carrying out extensive research and accounting for external factors.

A good long-term strategy should include information from previous similar projects as a relevant guide to influence future decision-making processes.

Consider a business that operates seasonally due to weather constraints . Knowing what and how to do their activities based on historical data is excellent strategic planning. Some of the best strategic planning software include Monday.com, Wrike, and Teamwork.

2. Clearly Defined Goals

Clearly defined goals characterize the most efficient strategies. Having proper knowledge of what you expect to achieve gives room for the thought of a good strategy.

Clearly defined goals make up an integral part of the overall planning process of a long-term strategic plan. Learning to plan your business and strategic goals simultaneously can help make the project process more efficient.

Without the presence or sight of an end goal for your business, your strategy would be in the dark. When drawing out your goals, adopt CLEAR goals.

3. Contingency Plan

Every project or business is designed with an expected outcome. This expected outcome acts as the metric to track the progress and level of execution of the implementation plan . Similarly, the success of a strategy is a determinant of these expected outcomes.

A contingency plan works to assist your strategy in overcoming challenges that intend to derail or impede a successful outcome.

This plan details the right steps for the team in dealing with these bottlenecks, ensuring they do not interfere with delivering set goals and objectives.

What Makes Good Tactics?

Tactical planning, unlike strategic planning, is short-term. It involves breaking down the strategic plan into short-term, more easily measurable sets of actions.

Tactics comprise short-term actions that help achieve specific goals. Here are a series of factors that determine good tactics.

1. The Relationship Between Tactics and Strategy

Strategy and tactics cannot be forced to co-exist despite being so inter-relatable. Note that not all tactics are the best for your strategic plan.

In as much as strategy is solely dependent on work being done, and this work goes a long way in ensuring the goals and objectives of a business are met, choosing the right tactic is equally as important as the work itself.

OKRs are a good goal-setting strategy to connect short-term goals to long-term visions.

2. Tactics Should Be Actionable and Time-Bound

The best and most efficient way of ensuring the business's tactical planning outlines its goals and objectives is by confining these plans to a specific time frame.

Tactics are similar in operation to most goal-setting strategies. They must be created and implemented alongside the constraints of a schedule with a set time frame.

A tactic is given the overall pass and acceptable mark if its actions deliver expected results within the set time frame. Methodologies such as the SMART goal methodology help businesses create actionable and time-bound tactics.

3. A Clearly Defined Purpose

Every good tactic has a corresponding clear purpose that guides the implemented strategy.

For a business or organization to act tactically, it must have a finite time frame for implementing tasks and projects. The organization must make necessary pre-determined measures to determine how these tactics interact in a business context.

Core Facets of Business Strategy

A business strategy is more or less a method of detailing how to achieve a specific outcome or long-term goals. Strategic planning is an effective guide for key decision-making processes made by individuals or collaboratively as a team.

Irrespective of the nature of a business and its activities, strategic planning can be utilized up to the highest decision ranking body.

Although most strategies might seem to have taken the slowest route as regards a business operation, its effect is maximum in assisting the business in making progress.

Here are some core facets of a business strategy:

1. Competitive Advantage

As a business, your competitive advantage is determined largely by your strategic plan. A strategic business plan highlights the more effective way of distinguishing products or services from a rising number of other businesses.

Your competitive advantage can be as simple as seeking to expand market share or create a monopoly in the market. Maintaining a sustainable competitive advantage requires constant changes to your organization's strategy.

With an influx of new competitors with a similar product or service delivery specifications or old competitors with new ideas, your organization must perform a SWOT analysis.

The purpose of the SWOT analysis is to determine the impact these new changes would have on its market viability.

2. Top-Level Resource Allocation

Resource allocation is a key component of every organization's structure, and it involves using limited resources such as time, energy, and human resources to deliver the expected Return on Investment ( ROI) .

Prioritizing the team's task and schedule is part of the resource allocation process. Strategic planning assists organizations in determining the best resource allocation method that is peculiar to their structure.

Some of the best resource scheduling tools to allocate and optimize your resources effectively include Monday.com, ClickUp, and Wrike.

Here are some of these strategies that help in the better management of scarce resources,

• Determine Your Project Scope: The project scope defines what it is about, its selected goals and objectives, and a schedule and timeline that guides its implementation. Your strategy must consider the project scope and the estimated completion time.
• Identify Available Resources: Resources are as crucial as they are limited. Strategic planning helps you factor in the likely resources to expend, how much space, and how many employees you need to prevent scarcity of resources at any point in time.
• Devise a Contingency Plan: Placing the focus of a large share of resources in a specific area can harm the project's success. Consider factors beyond your control in your strategic planning and implement mechanisms to curb their effects.

3. Long-Term Vision and Company Objectives

Gear your strategy towards a specific vision or objective. All strategy segments are designed to actively contribute to a company's long-term vision and objectives.

Better communication on the direction the team is heading keeps everyone on the same team. Every member better understands the company's aligned vision and objectives.

4. Markets, Audiences, and Products

Strategic and tactical planning each come with their respective benefits to a project.

Tactical planning lays out a route for the business to reach the select target audience and sell your idea to them. Strategic planning identifies this select audience.

Your marketing plan to a large extent is tied to strategic planning, which includes internal reflection and research on trends, competitors, and consumer habits.

5. Brand Positioning

Brand positioning involves providing your product with a distinct mark from the other similar products in the market.

The strategy employed in your brand positioning would go a long way in helping the audience recognize and be more familiar with your products or services.

Your brand positioning largely depends on adequate and well-informed research and very little on tactics.

You can utilize effective messages, social media marketing, and other advertising strategies to drive your brand presence in the market.

Examples of Business Strategy and Tactics

Business strategies and tactics emanate from various levels of an organization, all geared at bringing the written down objectives into reality.

Here are some practical business strategies and tactics examples that your organization can incorporate into its structure.

1. Profitability

Working to increase the profitability of a business is one of the most common objectives of small and large-scale business enterprises.

Some strategies and tactics examples to improve the profitability of your business are:

• Reducing costs throughout the business operations
• Restructuring jobs and workforce to eliminate redundancies and improve overall service delivery of the team
• Acquiring key project resources from lower-cost suppliers aimed at reducing the direct cost of goods
• Improving the quality of your goods aimed at increasing the price of goods and profit margins

2. Market Share Growth

At the top of most organizations' strategies is to gain market shares from competitors in the same sphere.

Some strategies and tactics to employ to gain ground over your competitors include:

• Reducing your prices for a brief period in the growth stage to provide room for adequate penetration of the consumer space
• Reallocating considerable resources in mass advertisement to attract the attention of prospective customers
• Providing discounts and coupons to loyal customers to further make your products and services more attractive

3. Quality Control

The essence of utilizing quality control in your organization structure is to cut considerable costs due to waste.

A few examples of tactics and strategies aimed at improving the quality control of your organization include:

• Devoting considerable resources to providing periodic and regular job training for the employees aimed at improving the quality of skilled hands available
• Setting the highest attainable standards for the quality of materials being sourced and products produced
• Providing adequate incentives and benefits to employees to minimize the likelihood of human error on the path of employees

Track Progress of Your Strategy and Tactics with the Right Tools

Strategy and tactics are complementary elements geared toward helping your organization achieve long-term success. Keeping track of the progress made with your strategy and tactics is important.

Various tools are available to help you track the progress of your employed strategy and tactics.

1. Tracking the Progress of Your Strategy

Key performance indicators ( KPIs ) are important parameters for measuring strategy using real-time and measurable data to improve your overall processes.

KPIs are crucial in setting strategies for your organization. Account for the KPIs you would be working on depending on the chosen strategy and break them down into easy-to-achieve timeframes. You can use project planning software to help you develop your business strategy.

Consider market conditions and structure to measure the strategy appropriate for your organization. By reviewing your organization's past performance to set targets, you are afforded the needed information to place new targets.

There would be cases where your KPI performance might be inconsistent with the desired results . In such cases, consider adding a backup to your KPIs to spur much-needed engagement.

2. Tracking the Progress of Your Tactics

Tactics deal a lot more with effective planning and its means. They are bound by a defined start and end date, allocated resources, and achievable milestones . Keeping track of these components of your tactics is keeping indirect tabs on your tactics.

Your organization should be structured so that each tactic implemented is tied to a certain member of the accountability organization.

By tracking the progress of your tactics, your tactics provide the necessary means to measure strategy and its KPIs.

Keeping tabs on allocated resources and their use plays a huge role in the success of your organization's plans. You can use project management tools and resource management software to track the progress of your tactics.

When Should I Use Strategy vs. Tactics?

Most organizations fail to see the difference in strategy and tactics and often refer to them as the same thing. Failing to spot their different and individual qualities can negatively affect an organization.

Strategy and tactics are largely co-dependent and should be used across all areas of the project process.

Before deciding on an adequate strategy, you must get the necessary backing from key company stakeholders.

At this stage, any hesitation concerning the chosen strategy is addressed and subjected to a series of adaptations until the team generally accepts it.

Circulate the final approved strategy throughout the organizations to provide context to each team's task and obligations to the process.

All team members must understand your chosen strategy and tactics and the respective impact these strategies and tactics would have on the organization. A thorough review and evaluation of your chosen strategy are required after implementation. It provides room for needed adaptations to changes encountered during implementation as no business has a static procedural environment.

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Martin loves entrepreneurship and has helped dozens of entrepreneurs by validating the business idea, finding scalable customer acquisition channels, and building a data-driven organization. During his time working in investment banking, tech startups, and industry-leading companies he gained extensive knowledge in using different software tools to optimize business processes.

This insights and his love for researching SaaS products enables him to provide in-depth, fact-based software reviews to enable software buyers make better decisions.

Differences Between Strategy, Plans and Tactics

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Which Type of Strategy Is Most Appropriate for Your Organization?

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• What Is a Strategic Goal?

People use strategy, plans and tactics to accomplish successful outcomes in their business projects and personal goals. The three concepts work together and are, in fact, interdependent on each other. You cannot develop plans without a strategy, or tactics without a plan. A solid competitive strategy helps businesses gain market share.

Strategy involves a blueprint for gaining a competitive advantage. For example, eyeglasses had glass lenses for more than 400 years. A company developed a strategy to design plastic lenses that would be cheaper, almost unbreakable and lightweight. This product gave the company a competitive advantage over other eyeglass manufacturers. Its strategy included all of the complex plans necessary to bring this project to fruition.

People use strategies in their personal lives to improve their competitiveness or financial stability. For example, a newly hired college graduate develops a strategy to climb the corporate hierarchy. His strategy includes capitalizing on his strengths and overcoming objections.

Plans are the second-level goals in the hierarchy. A complex strategy may contain many plans. Using the eyeglass example, the manufacturer had to identify an appropriate plastic that was hard enough for daily use but soft enough for grinding to the correct magnification; locate or design equipment to grind and buff the lenses; contract with suppliers; find outlets to sell the product; and advertise its new invention to the public. Each part of the strategy has a separate plan to accomplish its goal.

Tactics are the step-by-step methods you use to accomplish a plan. Continuing the eyeglass example, to complete the plan of identifying an appropriate plastic, the tactics would include: identify all businesses that produce plastics, buy samples of each type of plastic, test samples and record pros and cons, and decide whether one plastic is appropriate or if the company needs a custom formula.

Putting It All Together

In addition to identifying competitor strengths and weaknesses, understand your market and know which niches you can develop profitably. You need this information to develop a sound competitive strategy.

• Public Relations Blogger: Public Relations Strategies and Tactics - The Difference Between the Two

Diane Perez is a writer who contributes to various websites, specializing in gardening and business topics, and creates sales copy for private clients. Perez holds a Bachelor of Science in education from the University of Miami.

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Alight’s Strategic Focus on BPaaS and Divestiture Plan Underpin Buy Rating

Canaccord Genuity analyst Joseph Vafi has maintained their bullish stance on ALIT stock, giving a Buy rating today.

Joseph Vafi has given his Buy rating due to a combination of factors related to Alight’s financial performance and strategic moves. The company’s focus on recurring revenue streams, particularly from its Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) offerings, is a key driver. The growth in BPaaS is underscored by the solid performance of the flagship Worklife platform, with a 21% revenue increase in this segment. This growth trajectory is bolstered by significant deals, such as the ongoing GE deal and another major Fortune 10 deal, which are expected to contribute to future revenues, particularly from 2025 onwards. The planned divestiture of Alight’s professional services and payroll units to H.I.G Capital for up to $1.2 billion is another strategic decision that supports the Buy rating. This move is anticipated to enhance the company’s financial health by increasing gross and adjusted EBITDA margins, boosting the proportion of recurring revenue, and accelerating deleveraging efforts. Vafi expects these changes to lead to a more favorable valuation of Alight over time, with reduced debt, enhanced margins, a higher percentage of recurring revenue, and an increased focus on as-a-service revenue streams, which are projected to continue growing at a healthy rate.

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Alight (ALIT) Company Description:

Foley Trasimene Acquisition Corp is a blank check company.

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Stuart Varney: Biden's 'lawfare' strategy is falling apart

Biden's plan to have trump convicted before november 5 is election interference, varney argues.

Stuart Varney: Bidens lawfare strategy is falling apart

Varney & Co. host Stuart Varney argues Bidens plan to keep Trump tied up in court before the 2024 election is failing.

During his "My Take," Wednesday, " Varney & Co. " host Stuart Varney argued Biden's plan to keep Trump "bottled up" before the 2024 election is failing, as the 45th president continues to campaign effectively and meet with enthusiastic crowds while President Biden is met with hecklers and protesters.

STUART VARNEY : Biden's plan was to bottle up Donald Trump in court until the election.

That plan is not working out as the president hoped.

BIDEN TRAILS TRUMP IN MOST BATTLEGROUND STATES AS VOTERS SOUR ON US ECONOMY

On Tuesday in the hush money trial, the judge warned the court about Stormy Daniels' salacious testimony. 

45th President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference at 40 Wall Street after a pre-trial hearing in New York City.  ((Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images) / Getty Images)

She was giving details of sexual activity that had nothing to do with election interference. 

She admitted she hated Trump. She admitted to selling her story and making money off the case. 

Trump's lawyers requested a mistrial. 

TOP 5 MOMENTS OF TRUMP TRIAL AFTER ‘SALACIOUS’ STORMY DANIELS TESTIMONY   

The judge rejected that, and she was allowed to continue her testimony.

I'm not a lawyer, but that doesn't pass the smell test of a fair trial.

Here's another blow to Biden's lawfare strategy. 

Pretty obvious Democrats' lawfare strategy is not well thought out: Christopher Bedford

The Federalist senior contributor Christopher Bedford discusses the latest election polls and concerns regarding GOP mega donors.

The documents trial has been postponed indefinitely and the Georgia case has run into delays.

This means there may be only one trial before the election.

That's the one going on now in New York and that has obvious problems of fairness.

CONFIDENCE IN BIDEN'S ABILITY TO DO THE RIGHT THING FOR AMERICA'S ECONOMY SINKS TO HISTORICAL LOW: POLL

Biden didn't plan on this. He wanted Trump convicted and hopefully jailed before November 5th. 

That strategy is, pure and simple, election interference.

He hasn't even succeeded in bottling Trump up. 

NYC's love of Trump wrecks the liberal media narrative: Sean Duffy

The Bottom Line co-host Sean Duffy reacts to Trump meeting with New York City firefighters after a day in court on Varney & Co.

When the New York court is not in session, Trump is out campaigning very effectively. 

Wherever he goes, he's met with enthusiastic crowds. 

ANTI-ISRAEL ‘CHAOS’ WILL PROVOKE A BACKLASH AGAINST BIDEN: VARNEY

Wherever Biden goes, he's met by demonstrators and hecklers.

Biden is in trouble . His strategy of keeping Trump tied up in court is falling apart, and he has no plan b.

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A Plan to Remake the Middle East

While talks for a cease-fire between israel and hamas continue, another set of negotiations is happening behind the scenes..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

[MUSIC CONTINUES]

Today, if and when Israel and Hamas reach a deal for a ceasefire fire, the United States will immediately turn to a different set of negotiations over a grand diplomatic bargain that it believes could rebuild Gaza and remake the Middle East. My colleague Michael Crowley has been reporting on that plan and explains why those involved in it believe they have so little time left to get it done.

It’s Wednesday, May 8.

Michael, I want to start with what feels like a pretty dizzying set of developments in this conflict over the past few days. Just walk us through them?

Well, over the weekend, there was an intense round of negotiations in an effort, backed by the United States, to reach a ceasefire in the Gaza war.

The latest ceasefire proposal would reportedly see as many as 33 Israeli hostages released in exchange for potentially hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

US officials were very eager to get this deal.

Pressure for a ceasefire has been building ahead of a threatened Israeli assault on Rafah.

Because Israel has been threatening a military offensive in the Southern Palestinian city of Rafah, where a huge number of people are crowded.

Fleeing the violence to the North. And now they’re packed into Rafah. Exposed and vulnerable, they need to be protected.

And the US says it would be a humanitarian catastrophe on top of the emergency that’s already underway.

Breaking news this hour — very important breaking news. An official Hamas source has told The BBC that it does accept a proposal for a ceasefire deal in Gaza.

And for a few hours on Monday, it looked like there might have been a major breakthrough when Hamas put out a statement saying that it had accepted a negotiating proposal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the ceasefire proposal does not meet his country’s requirements. But Netanyahu says he will send a delegation of mediators to continue those talks. Now, the terms —

But those hopes were dashed pretty quickly when the Israelis took a look at what Hamas was saying and said that it was not a proposal that they had agreed to. It had been modified.

And overnight —

Israeli troops stormed into Rafah. Video showing tanks crashing over a sign at the entrance of the city.

— the Israelis launched a partial invasion of Rafah.

It says Hamas used the area to launch a deadly attack on Israeli troops over the weekend.

And they have now secured a border crossing at the Southern end of Gaza and are conducting targeted strikes. This is not yet the full scale invasion that President Biden has adamantly warned Israel against undertaking, but it is an escalation by Israel.

So while all that drama might suggest that these talks are in big trouble, these talks are very much still alive and ongoing and there is still a possibility of a ceasefire deal.

And the reason that’s so important is not just to stop the fighting in Gaza and relieve the suffering there, but a ceasefire also opens the door to a grand diplomatic bargain, one that involves Israel and its Arab neighbors and the Palestinians, and would have very far-reaching implications.

And what is that grand bargain. Describe what you’re talking about?

Well, it’s incredibly ambitious. It would reshape Israel’s relationship with its Arab neighbors, principally Saudi Arabia. But it’s important to understand that this is a vision that has actually been around since well before October 7. This was a diplomatic project that President Biden had been investing in and negotiating actually in a very real and tangible way long before the Hamas attacks and the Gaza war.

And President Biden was looking to build on something that President Trump had done, which was a series of agreements that the Trump administration struck in which Israel and some of its Arab neighbors agreed to have normal diplomatic relations for the first time.

Right, they’re called the Abraham Accords.

That’s right. And, you know, Biden doesn’t like a lot of things, most things that Trump did. But he actually likes this, because the idea is that they contribute to stability and economic integration in the Middle East, the US likes Israel having friends and likes having a tight-knit alliance against Iran.

President Biden agrees with the Saudis and with the Israelis, that Iran is really the top threat to everybody here. So, how can you build on this? How can you expand it? Well, the next and biggest step would be normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

And the Saudis have made clear that they want to do this and that they’re ready to do this. They weren’t ready to do it in the Trump years. But Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, has made clear he wants to do it now.

So this kind of triangular deal began to take shape before October 7, in which the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia would enter this three way agreement in which everyone would get something that they wanted.

And just walk through what each side gets in this pre-October 7th version of these negotiations?

So for Israel, you get normalized ties with its most important Arab neighbor and really the country that sets the tone for the whole Muslim world, which is Saudi Arabia of course. It makes Israel feel safer and more secure. Again, it helps to build this alliance against Iran, which Israel considers its greatest threat, and it comes with benefits like economic ties and travel and tourism. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been very open, at least before October 7th, that this was his highest diplomatic and foreign policy priority.

For the Saudis, the rationale is similar when it comes to Israel. They think that it will bring stability. They like having a more explicitly close ally against Iran. There are economic and cultural benefits. Saudi Arabia is opening itself up in general, encouraging more tourism.

But I think that what’s most important to the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is what he can get from the United States. And what he has been asking for are a couple of essential things. One is a security agreement whose details have always been a little bit vague, but I think essentially come down to reliable arms supplies from the United States that are not going to be cut off or paused on a whim, as he felt happened when President Biden stopped arms deliveries in 2021 because of how Saudi was conducting its war in Yemen. The Saudis were furious about that.

Saudi Arabia also wants to start a domestic nuclear power program. They are planning for a very long-term future, possibly a post-oil future. And they need help getting a nuclear program off the ground.

And they want that from the US?

And they want that from the US.

Now, those are big asks from the us. But from the perspective of President Biden, there are some really enticing things about this possible agreement. One is that it will hopefully produce more stability in the region. Again, the US likes having a tight-knit alliance against Iran.

The US also wants to have a strong relationship with Saudi Arabia. You know, despite the anger at Mohammed bin Salman over the murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, the Biden administration recognizes that given the Saudis control over global oil production and their strategic importance in the Middle East, they need to have a good relationship with them. And the administration has been worried about the influence of China in the region and with the Saudis in particular.

So this is an opportunity for the US to draw the Saudis closer. Whatever our moral qualms might be about bin Salman and the Saudi government, this is an opportunity to bring the Saudis closer, which is something the Biden administration sees as a strategic benefit.

All three of these countries — big, disparate countries that normally don’t see eye-to-eye, this was a win-win-win on a military, economic, and strategic front.

That’s right. But there was one important actor in the region that did not see itself as winning, and that was the Palestinians.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

First, it’s important to understand that the Palestinians have always expected that the Arab countries in the Middle East would insist that Israel recognize a Palestinian state before those countries were willing to essentially make total peace and have normal relations with Israel.

So when the Abraham Accords happened in the Trump administration, the Palestinians felt like they’d been thrown under the bus because the Abraham Accords gave them virtually nothing. But the Palestinians did still hold out hope that Saudi Arabia would be their savior. And for years, Saudi Arabia has said that Israel must give the Palestinians a state if there’s going to be a normal relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Now the Palestinians see the Saudis in discussions with the US and Israel about a normalization agreement, and there appears to be very little on offer for the Palestinians. And they are feeling like they’re going to be left out in the cold here.

Right. And in the minds of the Palestinians, having already been essentially sold out by all their other Arab neighbors, the prospect that Saudi Arabia, of all countries, the most important Muslim Arab country in the region, would sell them out, had to be extremely painful.

It was a nightmare scenario for them. And in the minds of many analysts and US officials, this was a factor, one of many, in Hamas’s decision to stage the October 7th attacks.

Hamas, like other Palestinian leaders, was seeing the prospect that the Middle East was moving on and essentially, in their view, giving up on the Palestinian cause, and that Israel would be able to have friendly, normal relations with Arab countries around the region, and that it could continue with hardline policies toward the Palestinians and a refusal, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said publicly, to accept a Palestinian state.

Right. So Michael, once Hamas carries out the October 7th attacks in an effort to destroy a status quo that it thinks is leaving them less and less relevant, more and more hopeless, including potentially this prospect that Saudi Arabia is going to normalize relations with Israel, what happens to these pre-October 7th negotiations between the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel?

Well, I think there was a snap assumption that these talks were dead and buried. That they couldn’t possibly survive a cataclysm like this.

But then something surprising happened. It became clear that all the parties were still determined to pull-off the normalization.

And most surprisingly of all, perhaps, was the continued eagerness of Saudi Arabia, which publicly was professing outrage over the Israeli response to the Hamas attacks, but privately was still very much engaged in these conversations and trying to move them forward.

And in fact, what has happened is that the scope of this effort has grown substantially. October 7th didn’t kill these talks. It actually made them bigger, more complicated, and some people would argue, more important than ever.

We’ll be right back.

Michael, walk us through what exactly happens to these three-way negotiations after October 7th that ends up making them, as you just said, more complicated and more important than ever?

Well, it’s more important than ever because of the incredible need in Gaza. And it’s going to take a deal like this and the approval of Saudi Arabia to unlock the kind of massive reconstruction project required to essentially rebuild Gaza from the rubble. Saudi Arabia and its Arab friends are also going to be instrumental in figuring out how Gaza is governed, and they might even provide troops to help secure it. None of those things are going to happen without a deal like this.

Fascinating.

But this is all much more complicated now because the price for a deal like this has gone up.

And by price, you mean?

What Israel would have to give up. [MUSIC PLAYING]

From Saudi Arabia’s perspective, you have an Arab population that is furious at Israel. It now feels like a really hard time to do a normalization deal with the Israelis. It was never going to be easy, but this is about as bad a time to do it as there has been in a generation at least. And I think that President Biden and the people around him understand that the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians is intolerable and it is going to lead to chaos and violence indefinitely.

So now you have two of the three parties to this agreement, the Saudis and the Americans, basically asking a new price after October 7th, and saying to the Israelis, if we’re going to do this deal, it has to not only do something for the Palestinians, it has to do something really big. You have to commit to the creation of a Palestinian state. Now, I’ll be specific and say that what you hear the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, say is that the agreement has to include an irreversible time-bound path to a Palestinian state.

We don’t know exactly what that looks like, but it’s some kind of a firm commitment, the likes of which the world and certainly the Israelis have not made before.

Something that was very much not present in the pre-October 7th vision of this negotiation. So much so that, as we just talked about, the Palestinians were left feeling completely out in the cold and furious at it.

That’s right. There was no sign that people were thinking that ambitiously about the Palestinians in this deal before October 7th. And the Palestinians certainly felt like they weren’t going to get much out of it. And that has completely changed now.

So, Michael, once this big new dimension after October 7th, which is the insistence by Saudi Arabia and the US that there be a Palestinian state or a path to a Palestinian state, what is the reaction specifically from Israel, which is, of course, the third major party to this entire conversation?

Well, Israel, or at least its political leadership, hates it. You know, this is just an extremely tough sell in Israel. It would have been a tough sell before October 7th. It’s even harder now.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is completely unrepentantly open in saying that there’s not going to be a Palestinian state on his watch. He won’t accept it. He says that it’s a strategic risk to his country. He says that it would, in effect, reward Hamas.

His argument is that terrorism has forced a conversation about statehood onto the table that wasn’t there before October 7th. Sure, it’s always in the background. It’s a perennial issue in global affairs, but it was not something certainly that the US and Israel’s Arab neighbors were actively pushing. Netanyahu also has — you know, he governs with the support of very right-wing members of a political coalition that he has cobbled together. And that coalition is quite likely to fall apart if he does embrace a Palestinian state or a path to a Palestinian state.

Now, he might be able to cobble together some sort of alternative, but it creates a political crisis for him.

And finally, you know, I think in any conversation about Israel, it’s worth bearing in mind something you hear from senior US officials these days, which is that although there is often finger pointing at Netanyahu and a desire to blame Netanyahu as this obstructionist who won’t agree to deals, what they say is Netanyahu is largely reflecting his population and the political establishment of his country, not just the right-wingers in his coalition who are clearly extremist.

But actually the prevailing views of the Israeli public. And the Israeli public and their political leaders across the spectrum right now with few exceptions, are not interested in talking about a Palestinian state when there are still dozens and dozens of Israeli hostages in tunnels beneath Gaza.

So it very much looks like this giant agreement that once seemed doable before October 7th might be more important to everyone involved than ever, given that it’s a plan for rebuilding Gaza and potentially preventing future October 7th’s from happening, but because of this higher price that Israel would have to pay, which is the acceptance of a Palestinian state, it seems from everything you’re saying, that this is more and more out of reach than ever before and hard to imagine happening in the immediate future. So if the people negotiating it are being honest, Michael, are they ready to acknowledge that it doesn’t look like this is going to happen?

Well, not quite yet. As time goes by, they certainly say it’s getting harder and harder, but they’re still trying, and they still think there’s a chance. But both the Saudis and the Biden administration understand that there’s very little time left to do this.

Well, what do you mean there’s very little time left? It would seem like time might benefit this negotiation in that it might give Israel distance from October 7th to think potentially differently about a Palestinian state?

Potentially. But Saudi Arabia wants to get this deal done in the Biden administration because Mohammed bin Salman has concluded this has to be done under a Democratic president.

Because Democrats in Congress are going to be very reluctant to approve a security agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia.

It’s important to understand that if there is a security agreement, that’s something Congress is going to have to approve. And you’re just not going to get enough Democrats in Congress to support a deal with Saudi Arabia, who a lot of Democrats don’t like to begin with, because they see them as human rights abusers.

But if a Democratic president is asking them to do it, they’re much more likely to go along.

Right. So Saudi Arabia fears that if Biden loses and Trump is president, that those same Democrats would balk at this deal in a way that they wouldn’t if it were being negotiated under President Biden?

Exactly. Now, from President Biden’s perspective, politically, think about a president who’s running for re-election, who is presiding right now over chaos in the Middle East, who doesn’t seem to have good answers for the Israeli-Palestinian question, this is an opportunity for President Biden to deliver what could be at least what he would present as a diplomatic masterstroke that does multiple things at once, including creating a new pathway for Israel and the Palestinians to coexist, to break through the logjam, even as he is also improving Israel’s relations with Saudi Arabia.

So Biden and the Crown Prince hope that they can somehow persuade Bibi Netanyahu that in spite of all the reasons that he thinks this is a terrible idea, that this is a bet worth taking on Israel’s and the region’s long-term security and future?

That’s right. Now, no one has explained very clearly exactly how this is going to work, and it’s probably going to require artful diplomacy, possibly even a scenario where the Israelis would agree to something that maybe means one thing to them and means something else to other people. But Biden officials refuse to say that it’s hopeless and they refuse to essentially take Netanyahu’s preliminary no’s for an answer. And they still see some way that they can thread this incredibly narrow needle.

Michael, I’m curious about a constituency that we haven’t been talking about because they’re not at the table in these discussions that we are talking about here. And that would be Hamas. How does Hamas feel about the prospect of such a deal like this ever taking shape. Do they see it as any kind of a victory and vindication for what they did on October 7th?

So it’s hard to know exactly what Hamas’s leadership is thinking. I think they can feel two things. I think they can feel on the one hand, that they have established themselves as the champions of the Palestinian people who struck a blow against Israel and against a diplomatic process that was potentially going to leave the Palestinians out in the cold.

At the same time, Hamas has no interest in the kind of two-state solution that the US is trying to promote. They think Israel should be destroyed. They think the Palestinian state should cover the entire geography of what is now Israel, and they want to lead a state like that. And that’s not something that the US, Saudi Arabia, or anyone else is going to tolerate.

So what Hamas wants is to fight, to be the leader of the Palestinian people, and to destroy Israel. And they’re not interested in any sort of a peace process or statehood process.

It seems very clear from everything you’ve said here that neither Israel nor Hamas is ready to have the conversation about a grand bargain diplomatic program. And I wonder if that inevitably has any bearing on the ceasefire negotiations that are going on right now between the two of them that are supposed to bring this conflict to some sort of an end, even if it’s just temporary?

Because if, as you said, Michael, a ceasefire opens the door to this larger diplomatic solution, and these two players don’t necessarily want that larger diplomatic solution, doesn’t that inevitably impact their enthusiasm for even reaching a ceasefire?

Well, it certainly doesn’t help. You know, this is such a hellish problem. And of course, you first have the question of whether Israel and Hamas can make a deal on these immediate issues, including the hostages, Palestinian prisoners, and what the Israeli military is going to do, how long a ceasefire might last.

But on top of that, you have these much bigger diplomatic questions that are looming over them. And it’s not clear that either side is ready to turn and face those bigger questions.

So while for the Biden administration and for Saudi Arabia, this is a way out of this crisis, these larger diplomatic solutions, it’s not clear that it’s a conversation that the two parties that are actually at war here are prepared to start having.

Well, Michael, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

On Tuesday afternoon, under intense pressure from the US, delegations from Israel and Hamas arrived in Cairo to resume negotiations over a potential ceasefire. But in a statement, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear that even with the talks underway, his government would, quote, “continue to wage war against Hamas.”

Here’s what else you need to know today. In a dramatic day of testimony, Stormy Daniels offered explicit details about an alleged sexual encounter with Donald Trump that ultimately led to the hush money payment at the center of his trial. Daniels testified that Trump answered the door in pajamas, that he told her not to worry that he was married, and that he did not use a condom when they had sex.

That prompted lawyers for Trump to seek a mistrial based on what they called prejudicial testimony. But the judge in the case rejected that request. And,

We’ve seen a ferocious surge of anti-Semitism in America and around the world.

In a speech on Tuesday honoring victims of the Holocaust, President Biden condemned what he said was the alarming rise of anti-Semitism in the United States after the October 7th attacks on Israel. And he expressed worry that too many Americans were already forgetting the horrors of that attack.

The Jewish community, I want you to know I see your fear, your hurt, and your pain. Let me reassure you, as your president, you’re not alone. You belong. You always have and you always will.

Today’s episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Clare Toeniskoetter, and Rikki Novetsky. It was edited by Liz O. Baylen, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

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• April 30, 2024   •   27:40 The Secret Push That Could Ban TikTok
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• April 26, 2024   •   21:50 Harvey Weinstein Conviction Thrown Out
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Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Michael Crowley

Produced by Nina Feldman ,  Clare Toeniskoetter and Rikki Novetsky

Edited by Liz O. Baylen

Original music by Marion Lozano ,  Elisheba Ittoop and Dan Powell

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

If and when Israel and Hamas reach a deal for a cease-fire, the United States will immediately turn to a different set of negotiations over a grand diplomatic bargain that it believes could rebuild Gaza and remake the Middle East.

Michael Crowley, who covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times, explains why those involved in this plan believe they have so little time left to get it done.

On today’s episode

Michael Crowley , a reporter covering the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The New York Times.

Background reading :

Talks on a cease-fire in the Gaza war are once again at an uncertain stage .

Here’s how the push for a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia looked before Oct. 7 .

From early in the war, President Biden has said that a lasting resolution requires a “real” Palestinian state .

Here’s what Israeli officials are discussing about postwar Gaza.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state. More about Michael Crowley

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