Week 3 - Sales Plan

Marketing and Sales Plans

For most small businesses, the marketing plan tends to focus on reaching a local audience or if Internet-based, an online audience of potential customers.

The key parts to research and plan out include:

• What marketing methods are proven effective?
• How much do they cost???
• Who can I hire to help me with this and how much do they charge?
• How fast can I realistically expect results in terms of sales coming in?

For your business plan, it is not usually important to go into great detail explaining the mechanics of a particular marketing method. For example, most readers will understand what you mean by 'email marketing'. More important is that you detail what tools and services you will use to accomplish email marketing. Are you a do-it-yourself person who will setup your own email marketing account, create emails and send them? Or will you need to pay someone to help with this type of marketing.

The tables on the next page can be copied into your Business Plan template to help capture and document this information.