What many organizations call a “strategic plan” often turns out to be a mix of aspirations, goals, tools, and measurement ideas. It gives a sense of direction but not enough clarity to actually start executing. And that’s where the struggle begins.
We often hear something like this from our users: “We already have a strategic plan, we just need to implement it.” It sounds like a great starting point — but when we take a closer look, things are not that simple.
“We Have a Strategy, We Just Need to Implement It”
Here’s a typical example we see, a list of objectives like this one:
- Strategic objective: Enhance digital presence
- Strategic result: Increase the company’s visibility and positioning by developing and updating its website, social media, and digital materials to generate more leads and build trust with current customers.
On the surface, this sounds reasonable. But when the client tries to put it into strategic planning software, they get stuck. Why? Because what’s written here isn’t really a strategy that’s ready to be implemented — it’s more like a collection of good intentions. It says what the company hopes for, but not what exactly will be done and how success will be measured.
Looking Closer at the Words
If we read this “strategic result” carefully, we’ll see that it’s actually made up of several different ideas:
- “Increase the company’s visibility and positioning” — this is an aspiration, it’s what we want to achieve.
- “By developing and updating its website, social media, and digital materials” — these are methods and tools to achieve the desired results.
- “To generate more leads and build trust with current customers” — this is the expected result.
The strategy isn’t bad — it’s influenced by SMART criteria, but that’s not the kind of structure that can guide action in strategy execution.
Making the Strategy More Tangible
The aspiration “Increase the company’s visibility and positioning” is very high level. We won’t lose anything if we simply reframe it as “Enhance market presence.” In fact, this makes it more focused and easier to use as a reference point for execution.
Then, we can define one of the key objectives under this aspiration as “Enhance digital presence.” If the company has other channels — physical stores or partner networks — those could become separate objectives later on. But if digital is the only focus, we can merge aspiration and objective into one.
Next, we look at the methods — website, social media, digital materials — and list them as specific initiatives. And finally, we clarify expected results — more leads, more trust with current customers.
- Level 1 (aspiration): Enhance market presence
- Level 2 (objective): Enhance digital presence
- Level 3 (initiatives): Update website, work with social media, update digital materials
- Level 4 (expected results): Increase number of leads, build trust with current customers
Why This Still Isn’t Enough
Even with this structure, a marketing or technical team still wouldn’t know what exactly to do tomorrow morning.
A statement like “Update the website so that we get more leads” doesn’t say much.
That’s why before moving to execution, we need to ask some basic but important questions:
- How do customers find us now?
- What’s our cost per acquisition — and can we grow without increasing it?
- What does “trust” actually mean to our current customers?
- How will we measure it? Returning customers? Engagement? Something else?
These questions don’t always have ready answers. Moreover, depending on the business area, the nature of these questions can vary a lot. In some industries, the answers are obvious and tied to clear cost or time centers. In others, things are more complex — we may need to choose one of the well-known business frameworks to make better sense of the operating environment and identify what really drives performance.
Turning Aspirations Into Real Actions
For example, the company might decide to:
- Use content marketing to generate leads — write a defined number of expert articles with the goal of reaching a specific number of qualified leads by the end of the year.
- Work with influencers to build trust — sponsor a defined number of influencers aiming for a target number of meaningful interactions with the brand on social media.
At this point, we’re moving from “big ideas” to specific actions that can be tested, measured, and adjusted.
Marketing teams will also need the right tools — analytics, research, monitoring — to track what’s working and what’s not. Respectively, in their scorecard we’ll see objectives formulated in the Internal and Learning Perspectives that reflect the development of these capabilities and supporting processes.
Connecting Company Strategy and Team Work
Once these initiatives are defined, we need to make sure they don’t live in isolation. They should be linked to the company’s strategy through clear indicators. In this example, the two key indicators are:
- Number of qualified leads — showing whether digital marketing is bringing in potential customers.
- Returning customer rate — showing whether we’re building trust and long-term relationships.
These indicators connect the company-level scorecard with the marketing team’s work. Now, the high-level aspiration isn’t just a sentence on paper — it’s tied to something that can be tracked and improved over time.
Company Strategy Scorecard
- Level 1: Enhance market presence
- Level 2: Enhance digital presence
- Level 3: Website updates, social media, digital materials
- Level 4 (key indicators): Number of qualified leads, returning customer rate
Marketing Team Scorecard
- Marketing goals: Generate qualified leads, build customer trust
- Supporting activities: Content marketing, influencer engagement
- Metrics: Number of articles published (leading indicator), number of qualified leads generated (lagging indicator), number of influencer collaborations (leading indicator), number of interactions (lagging indicator)
Looking a Bit Further
Numbers like “number of leads” are a good start, but they don’t tell the whole story. It’s just as important to look at how much each lead costs, or how the campaign affects long-term outcomes like brand awareness. The same goes for “trust with current customers” — marketing can influence it, but product quality and support play a big role too. A good strategy connects all of these elements together, and some of those elements will be articulated in other scorecards — for example, in product, support, or sales teams — to make sure everything aligns around shared outcomes.
Key Takeaways
We started with a vague idea: “Enhance digital presence.” We also had an ambiguous “strategic result” that mixed aspirations, methods, and expected outcomes. It sounded nice, but it wasn’t something a team could act on. By splitting it into aspiration, objective, initiatives, and measurable results — and linking it with specific indicators — it became something tangible and actionable.
This is the moment when a “strategic plan” stops being a list of good intentions and starts becoming a real strategy — one that can be implemented, tracked, and improved.
Different organizations might use different terms — goals, objectives, drivers, enablers, KPIs, results. But whatever the naming, what I expect to see in a strategy that’s ready for execution is clear:
- First: A structured decomposition of objectives that moves from broad aspirations to actionable steps.
- Second: Clear quantification that applies to activities, expected outputs, and success factors, so progress can be meaningfully tracked.
- Third: A clear separation between aspirations, activities, and metrics, so that each plays its own role in the strategy.
We often practice this kind of structured breakdown during our onsite training sessions. It helps teams turn vague plans into strategies that are truly executable. At BSC Designer, we support this process through both our software platform and training programs that help companies overcome the very challenges discussed in this article.
Alexis Savkin is a Senior Strategy Consultant and the CEO of BSC Designer, a Strategy Architecture & Execution Platform. He has more than 20 years of experience in the field, with a background in applied mathematics and information technology. Alexis is the author of the “Strategy Implementation System”. He has published over 100 articles on strategy and performance measurement, regularly speaks at industry events, and his work is frequently cited in academic research.