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134 • The 100 Greatest Ideas for Building the Business of Your Dreams

Campaign goals are goals where a major milestone is taking an order from a cus-
tomer for the supplier's products and/or services. The methods used for campaign
planning are explained in Idea 52.

Having decided what you want to achieve, you get to the last part of the plan-
ning process - the activity plans.

Plan the activities necessary to achieve the objectives
It is very much a personal decision as to the amount of detail into which activity
plans have to go. Some people are comfortable with quite macro actions and mile-
stones that are weeks or even months apart. Other people try to plan all the activities
required to achieve the objective in the minutest detail, even down to a telephone
call.

It is personal preference. Either will do if it achieves the aim of activity planning
which is to estimate the resources required to achieve the objective.

The team should now be in a position to produce its best forecast of its achieve-
ments in the account both short and long term and the amount of resource invest-
ment required from the supplying company to achieve these results.

Re-sort the activity plan into a resource plan
The resource plan is actually a re-sort of the activity plan. If you know what has to
be done and who has to do it, you can produce your best estimate of the resources
required.

This enables us to move to the next step in the planning process. This is either
part of the normal budgeting cycle or on some occasions a special case to take to
management as a long- or short-term business investment plan.

It is vital to narrow down accurate definition of the resources that will imple-
ment the plan. Too often the team starts to implement the early part of the plan,
only to find a resource problem later.

The team needs to get itself into good order to move to the next step, which is
to persuade management to put those resources at the team's disposal.