Starting A Small Business Series: The Marketing and Sales Plan

In this part of our developing your business plan series, we will go over the Marketing and Sales Management part of the business plan.

Here you tell your potential investors and yourself how you are going to develop the market for your business.

How do you plan to penetrate the market? How do you plan to expand your business through marketing? Do you plan to add locations, franchise, have distributors or any other ways you will look to expand your business. Also, if you are manufacturing a product how will you get it to market? Will you sell direct, to wholesalers, or some other way?

In the final part of the marketing strategy you will want to go into detail on how you plan to reach the market. Will you have an advertising budget that will allow for television or will you look to some other means such as newspapers and magazines. What kind of online presence do you plan to have? Will you have a basic website or a full blown e-commerce site? What other kinds of marketing do you plan to do such as catalogs, brochures, trade shows, or other kinds of promotions?

Next you will focus on sales. Will you have a internal sales force that people come in to visit or external that they go out and visit or both? Will the sales force be direct employees of the company or will they be contractors and the reasons you decided to make that decision. You will also want details on how you plan to recruit your sales people, train them, and compensate them. Explain all details and how you came to those decisions.

From there you will need a detail plan of how the sales force will sell your business. What their requirements are going to be and how they will get customers. Will they cold call on a list you buy or will they be knocking on doors.

Next week we will get into the product line part of the business plan.