10 danger signs of short-term thinking: you cannot acquire a reputation for excellent customer service in a day or build a brand in a week. Here are the warning signals that your bank is spending too much time focused on the less important day-to-day issues.

The evidence continues to pile up that most of the nation's businesses are focused on short-term results. With boards, management, investors and analysts ready to strike if the numbers are "right," it's no wonder that everyone seems focused on immediate results.

Whatever the pressures to make the benchmarks, there's another side of the ledger--the benefits of thinking longer term, particularly in marketing and sales.

While there are always immediate needs, there are also long-range issues that deserve to be addressed. The care and tending of the brand is one of them. The care of customers is another, as is thinking through future growth issues and product/services refinements.

If you're interested in evaluating your organization in terms of its short-term orientation, here are 10 indicators that the longer term may be suffering.

1 No planning or plan. It seems as if what passes as planning is often nothing more than talk. Little gets actually nailed down. Meetings end with an aura of vagueness in the room. Even if assignments are made, there's often little follow-up. Everyone knows that nothing has changed and nothing is going to happen.

The clearest, easiest way to understand good planning may be something like this: "Who's going to do what to whom, why and when?"

2. Scrambling for sales. "We've got to get sales up" is the common cry. Throw together a quick "sales contest."

Yet, these same organizations are short on consistent prospecting programs. Their sales reporting systems focus on what's happening last week and what's coming next week, not on thinking about the far more demanding task of finding ways to grow the business.

Developing, implementing and managing a carefully crafted prospecting program that has management's support is the ultimate answer to increasing sales. Yet, we find quick fixes more attractive than the hard work involved in program management.

3. Jumping from one activity to another. Broken field running is a fine art in many organizations. Everyone dashes around zigging and zagging, looking for an opening. Unfortunately, they are not as agile as they like to think they are. First it's a sales contest, next comes a newsletter, then it's an e-mail blitz or a broadcast fax.

4. Constant crises. Periodic crises occur, of course. It's the pattern that's the problem. One business executive said, "I think something's wrong if we're not having a crisis." Even if there is marketing and sales planning, the programs are often derailed by one crisis or another. It happens in every organization because no one says that staying on track is essential.

The prospect database wasn't complete because something else intervened. The telephone follow-ups weren't made because Sally had to fill in for someone else who was out sick.

5. Focus on competitors. It often appears that organizations lacking good planning may be taking their cues--their direction--from the competition. While competitive intelligence is essential, organizations make decisions based on unsubstantiated rumors picked up on the street. Because they lack adequate planning, they leave themselves vulnerable to reacting in capricious and costly ways. The tendency to play "follow the competitor" may be a major error since competitors make mistakes, too.

6. An unclear image. The image inside an organization may be quite different from the way it is perceived on the outside. One financial services firm has a very clear picture of itself. A customer survey, however, revealed what the company viewed as its strengths were perceived as less than adequate.

Another organization's sales force takes great pride in building personal relationships with customers; yet, a customer survey revealed that personal relationships were at the bottom of the list of customer priorities.

One of the essential objectives of good planning is shaping and protecting the brand.

7. A lack of anticipatory thinking. Good planning is the result of anticipating the results of an idea, program, activity or project. A lack of planning generally produces half-baked action. Thinking about the outcome of actions is the essence of planning.

8. Confusion between strategy and tactics. To put the issue in as few words as possible, tactics are fun but strategy is tough. It's easy to get interested in what the direct mail piece will look like. The question of why it's being done and who should receive it sounds like work. It is.

Far too many ads and brochures are designed with the idea of winning awards rather than figuring out how to meet a clearly defined objective.

9. Difficulty in understanding branding. It's almost impossible to escape a new book, article or seminar on branding. Yet, for all the talk, it's amazing that there is so little translation into making certain every aspect of a business coheres to the company's brand concept.

Branding doesn't begin and end with a great logo and a glitzy tagline. Planning makes branding possible.

10. Mistakes. The best has been saved for the last. Errors are one of the clearest indicators of poor planning. Mistakes in marketing and sales programs generally come about because of a lack of serious thought or, as we call it, anticipatory thinking.

Try this and then jump to the next idea. Run ads this quarter and then switch to direct mail. Throw in a "special offer" for the month. Without a plan, it's one mistake after another. We all make them, of course. But good planning keeps us from making them all the time.

If it isn't down in black-and-while, and if it isn't reviewed regularly and updated often, it isn't a plan. It's just another exciting idea that will waste time and turn out poorly.

John R. Graham is president of Graham Communications, a marketing services and sales consulting firm in Quincy, Mass. He is the author of The New Magnet Marketing. E-mail: [e-mail]