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The A to Z of Small Business Sales Market Planning

Written by: Norm Tucker

Article Overview: Market planning sets up your short, medium, long term plan to meet growth needs and expectations. It will help keep you focused and on track. It helps build confidence and tells you when you need to make some changes. “Market Planning Guide - Creating a plan to successfully market your business, product, or service” by David H. Bangs Jr. is a valuable tool for any small business owner.

The A to Z of Small Business Sales Market Planning

Behind most successful people is a vision and mission for their life and work and a series of plans and processes by which they implement their vision. For those of you that laugh at plans, they do not need to be complex. They’re merely a roadmap and perhaps more importantly they put down on paper the positive steps that are required to achieve success.

Along the way, awareness of and openness to receive and take advantage of new opportunities helps a small business person create financial success. In life, we may not be able to change the wind, but we certainly can adjust our sales.

Detailed and comprehensive Market Plans are the purview of large corporations. They are needed to motivate and control a large organization employing many people. Large organizations tend to have substantial volume, overhead, dependencies, variables, low margins, and investors, al of which require a level of detail not required in small business.

The key to a small business is to keep it small and simple and sweet. KISS.

Every small business though needs a Market Plan, a Sales Plan (included in the Marketing Plan) and a Business Plan. These plans set up your short, medium, long term plan to meet your growth needs and expectations. They help keep you focused. They help to keep you on track. They help build confidence. They tell you when you need to make some changes.

As much as anything Plans form a practical and pragmatic side of visioning that enable you to start working on your future now and stay away from the past. Why reinvent the past? Move forward in a positive vein with some good, basic planning.

For your marketing Plan, you can find all your minimum requirements from Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0793159717/104-3297382-0458331?v=glance&n=283155} and purchase “Market Planning Guide - Creating a plan to successfully market your business, product, or service” by David H. Bangs Jr. (author also of “Business Planning Guide”). It will only cost you $15.61 new or as little as $7.15 used. What a deal!

Mr. Bang Jr.’s book gives you everything you need in 240 pages, It includes forms and worksheets to fill out, examples, explanations, definitions and more. It covers everything from vision, mission, products, services, customers, prospects, advertising, publicity, promotion, pricing, competitors, segmentation, tools, differentiation, targets, strengths weaknesses, strategies, sales and more.

I can’t say any more than buy the book and work your way through it. You’ll self discover everything you need to know about your business and everything that you don’t know but need to know and need to research. Small business is an ongoing and ever learning process. If you’re not endlessly inquisitive about your business, you probably should try something else.

As you’re going through the process, may I suggest you keep the following points necessary for people who work on their own and for themselves, in mind:

1. All your problems can be solved or made better by relationships and by people. Therefore make people and nourishing relationships #1. Include yourself as a relationship to nourish.

2. Be committed to endless curiosity and learning from everyone and every situation and have a process where you record what you learned.

3. Do not be afraid to fail but take small and simple steps. Most progress in and throughout life is made with small hardly noticed steps - evolutions not revolutions.

4. Be prepared to be disciplined and discipline yourself with necessary good habits, and learn about that as well.

5. Stay positive all the time.

How detailed a Marketing, Sales, and Business Plan you need depends on your needs for money from investors or banks who will tell you what THEY need. They probably will need more paper in order to get approval from their superiors. Work through their needs and consider it a learning experience. It will surely teach you a lot about business and your business.

I have an exquisite, detailed, lengthy plan in front of me now. An old friend of mine had it prepared by a consultant and accountant team. It cost big bucks. The business failed by the way, and within three months of start up. it was the wrong business, at the wrong time, in the wrong location. But the real reason it failed was the partnership soured. The relationships failed and neither side was committed to success in that area.

The lesson to learn here is that plans are not the be all, end all. They are tools. new information and your intuition may often override your original plans which will then need to be changed. The changes using the planning format and process will provide you with a benchmark for your new ideas and make sure you do not overlook important details.

Someone once said, friendship isn’t just one big thing, it’s a million little things. Plans are just one thing, but not the main thing.

What IS marketing? According to Mr. Bangs Jr., it is “the process of creating customers for your products and services, in enough numbers and rapidly enough so that you can make your business successful and profitable.” Marketing, even more simply is about getting and keeping profitable customers and then getting them to do more business with you. The Marketing Plan documents why customers will do business with you. If you don’t know why, you’ll never be able to sell to a customer.

The difference between marketing and sales is quite simple. Marketing is the relationship. Selling is the transaction. In fact long term success depends entirely on the relationship as we have described in earlier articles on the Sales Process. And that’s why I think relationship and relationships are #1 in most peaceful human endeavors.

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