Marketing and sales are vital components of a business plan, so ensuring they work cohesively to help meet company goals requires planning. In this article we’ll look at ways you can develop such an action plan.
A comprehensive sales plan should include details about your target customers, revenue goals, team structure and any strategies or resources necessary for meeting them.
Marketing Strategy
Your marketing strategy provides an overview of your approach for selling products or services, detailing how your business stands out from competitors and strategies that will encourage customers to purchase in sufficient amounts.
A solid marketing strategy covers four Ps of selling: product, price, place and promotion. This plan details how your product or service can stand out among its target market and reach consumers through channels which offer the lowest cost-per-consumer acquisition costs for your company.
A successful marketing strategy also involves defining your target market and competitors to assess your viability in that marketplace, providing a more accurate depiction of where to go in order to be successful.
Marketing Tactics
Marketing is the practice of creating, communicating and delivering value to customers at a profit. It involves knowing your target market, competitive differentiation strategies, pricing triggers and buying behaviors so as to deliver optimal value proposition.
Your business plan must also contain an element addressing your unique value proposition – which details how your company will distinguish itself from competitors in terms of quality, price, customer experience and patents or trademarks you own. This section should include key offerings, positioning statements and any patents or trademarks owned.
Establish who your ideal customers are and where they live or work; this will have a direct bearing on branding, pricing strategy, and channel selection to reach them.
Sales Strategy
An effective sales strategy provides a roadmap to meet your business goals and should reflect both the products and services you offer as well as your target market.
Consulting firms may employ a sales strategy that involves attracting leads and then qualifying them before scheduling appointments for them to meet with sales team. Once appointments have been scheduled, sales personnel then provide guidance toward solutions tailored specifically to meet individual client needs.
Investment in an efficient qualification process allows your reps to focus their efforts on the most valuable opportunities from their pipeline and save time by avoiding calls and emails to unqualified prospects.
Sales Tactics
Sales tactics are strategies you can employ to attract more customers and close more deals, including using websites to increase online presence or promoting social media posts on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
An effective strategy may involve employing multiple strategies at once to determine which are most successful. For instance, a small business owner could try various free webinars to see which generate leads most effectively and result in paying customers.
As part of your business plan, it’s essential that you cover various aspects of your operation such as competitive analysis, marketing plan and operations and management plan as well as financial statements. Sales strategy will be of particular significance in determining whether your venture succeeds or fails.
Sales Metrics
There are various sales metrics you can track depending on the goals and structure of your business, but it’s essential that you choose and track only those which provide accurate data.
Average Annual Contract Value (AACV) is an important metric used by subscription-based SaaS companies to evaluate their deal sizes over an entire year, as well as understanding where your customers come from globally.
Average customer lifetime value (LCLV) can also be an invaluable metric, enabling you to understand how much revenue each customer generated for your company throughout their relationship with it, so that strategies and campaigns designed to increase it may be implemented more successfully.