sales and marketing strategies for business plan

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Blog Business How to Create a Sales Plan: Strategy, Examples and Templates

How to Create a Sales Plan: Strategy, Examples and Templates

Written by: Aditya Rana Mar 25, 2024

The difference between a company struggling to drive sales and one that’s hitting home runs often boils down to a well-crafted sales plan.

Without knowing how to write a sales plan , your sales reps will lack vision, not understand the market, and be ineffective at engaging potential customers.

Most businesses fail in sales planning because they don’t focus on their unique value. If you’re struggling with sales, here’s what you need to do: define your goal(s), create customer personas, and create an action plan for success.

One of the best ways to organize this information in one place is to use sales planning templates . In this post, I’ll show you how to write a sales plan (…with plenty of template examples included of course!).

Click to jump ahead:

What is a sales plan?

Benefits of a sales plan, how to create a sales plan, sales plan example, sales plan templates.

A sales plan is a strategic document that outlines how a business plans to convert leads into sales. It typically details the target market, customer profile, and actionable steps that must be taken to achieve revenue targets.

Here’s a great example of a sales plan that includes all these elements neatly packed into one document.

Every company needs a sales plan, but have you ever wondered why?

Why should businesses invest time and resources in creating sales plan when they could…well…be focusing on sales?

Sales plans are worth it because they tell sales employees what to do.

Without a sales plan, your sales efforts will end up becoming a disorganized mess. Let’s explore the benefits of sales plans in detail.

Help you identify and target the right market

A sales plan helps you figure out the target market that’s most likely to be responsive to your messaging.

I mean do you really want to waste your time trying to sell to someone who has no need for your product or isn’t interested in your offering?

But if you know who your customer is, you can target their pain points.

Help you set goals

All great sales plans require you to set goals that are actually attainable and budgeted for.

Without goals, your sales team essentially operates in the dark unsure of what success looks like and how to achieve it.

One of the best ways to set goals is by conducting a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) to understand the market landscape.

Help you forecast sales

Since sales plans require you to study historical sales data , you have the ability to understand trends, seasonality, and customer buying patterns.

This information can be used to accurately forecast future sales performance.

And when you chart it out visually like in this example, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your sales strategy.

Help you identify risks

Because sales plans require you to study the market, you’ll be able to uncover risks such as market saturation, competitors, and shifting customer needs.

With this knowledge, you have the ability to be flexible in your approach.

Besides market risks, sales plans also help you pinpoint risks within your company such as a lack of qualified leads or unclear communication between departments.

Improve customer service

It may sound counterintuitive but creating a sales plan also actually improves your customer service.

Researching and trying to understand customer needs means new insights that you can share with the customer service team which allows them to tailor their approach.

You’ll also be able to train sales service reps to anticipate questions and concerns so that they can communicate effectively.

Increases sales efficiency

Sales plans help standardize sales tactics and ensure sales reps follow the same best practices to reduce inconsistencies and improve effectiveness.

One of the best ways to standardize practices is to use a flowchart like in this example to make sure everyone knows what to do when facing a decision.

Increases your profits

Sales plans generally guarantee a boost in profits because it allows sales team to laser-focus on high-value opportunities instead of being headless chickens.

Reducing wasted effort and a higher frequency of closed deals is a win in my book any day.

One of the best ways to measure changes in profits is to use a simple template to review performance like in this example.

Help you understand customer needs

Contrary to what you might think, sales plans aren’t just about selling but also about understanding customers at a deeper level.

The process of creating a plan forces you to analyze customer data, buying habits, and pain points, all of which will help you understand what makes your customers tick and build trust and loyalty.

Here’s a great example of a customer persona you can edit to include in your sales plan.

A sales plan is a document that helps you maximize profitability by identifying valuable segments and outlining strategies to influence customer behavior.

Common elements most sales plans include:

• Sales goals : Information on revenue, market share, and more.
• Sales strategy: Information on how to reach potential customers and convert them.
• Target audience: Information on ideal customers and their needs.
• Metrics : Methods to track progress.
• Resources :  Tools, budget, and personnel needed to achieve sales goals.

Let’s take an in-depth look at how to create a sales plan.

( Note : You don’t need to include each of these points in your sales plan but I recommend you cover most of them to build a plan that’s well-rounded).

Define your business mission and positioning

Before you jump into tactics, build a strong foundation by defining your company’s mission and positioning.

Here’s why this step is a must-do:

• Your mission statement defines your company’s purpose and values and gives your sales team and customers something to relate to.
• Your positioning statement defines how your product or service meets a specific need and sets you apart from the competition.

Trying to sell without any alignment to company values will lead to inconsistent messaging and damage your brand reputation.

Here’s a great example of a sales plan template you can customize with your own brand’s mission and positioning statements.

Define your target market

Unless you think you can sell to every person possible, you’ll need to define your ideal target market.

Study your customer base and ask questions like: do most of the customers belong to a specific industry? Or do they all face the same pain point?

Also, keep in mind that target market can change over time due to changes in your product, pricing, or factors out of your control, so it’s important to review and update your target market frequently.

Understand your target customers

This step often gets mixed with the previous one, so pay close attention.

Your target customers are those who your business wants to target because they’re most likely to make a purchase.

You can figure out who your target customers are by creating customer profiles by breaking down your target market into smaller groups based on geography, behavior, demography, and more.

Here’s a great sales plan template where you can edit in your own customer persona.

When making your buyer personas, make sure you answer the following questions.

• Motivations and challenges:  What are customer pain points? What drives purchasing decisions?
• Behaviors and preferences:  How do customers research products? What communication channels do they prefer?
• Goals and aspirations:  What are your prospective customers trying to achieve? How can your product or service help them get there?

Define sales objectives and goals

Setting clear, measurable goals gives you a method to measure performance of your sales strategies.

More importantly though, they give your sales team targets to aim for which then allows them to work in a structured and focused manner.

Your sale goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). This is to make sure they’re realistically achievable within a set timeframe.

Here’s a comparison of good sales goal setting vs a bad one.

• ✅Drive $100,000 in sales of product X by Y date using Z tactics
• ❌ Increase overall sales in each product line

You can organize this information using a template like in this example, especially if you have multiple product lines.

Define your value proposition

Your value proposition is a concise statement that explains why a customer should choose your product or service over the competition.

Here’s an example of a value statement:

“For busy small business owners, we provide a user-friendly accounting software that saves you time and money, allowing you to focus on growing your business.”

Here are some tips on defining your value proposition:

• Identify customer needs:  What are the core challenges and pain points your ideal customer faces? Understanding their needs allows you to position your offering as the solution.
• Highlight your unique benefits:  What sets your product or service apart? Focus on benefits you deliver that address the customer’s needs.
• Quantify the value:  When possible, quantify the value you offer. Can you demonstrate a cost savings, increased efficiency, or improved outcomes?

Map out the customer journey

Unless you’re extremely lucky, no one is going to purchase from you during the first interaction.

That’s why it’s crucial for you to know the steps a customer takes from initial awareness to purchase. Mapping out their journey allows you to personalize messaging and influence behavior.

Here are some tips on how to create a customer journey map:

• Identify the stages:  Break down the journey into distinct stages, such as awareness, consideration, decision, and post-purchase.
• Define touchpoints: Pinpoint the different touchpoints where your customer interacts with your brand (example: website, social media, customer reviews).
• Understand customer needs at each stage: What information are they looking for at each stage? What are their concerns and motivations?
• Identify opportunities to engage:  Identify opportunities to engage with your potential customers and move them along the buying journey.

Want some help creating customer journeys?

This customer journey map template is an excellent way to bring customer journeys to life.

Gather existing sales data

This step involves collecting and analyzing all available data on past sales performance.

This data is critical in helping you spot trends, patterns, and areas for improvement in your sales operations.

Perform sales forecasting

Sales forecasting is the practice of estimating future sales which can be presented as a report highlighting expected sales volume weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually.

Though not always 100% accurate, sales forecasting is key to writing sales plans because it’ll provide you with a clear picture of the ground reality which leads to better decisions on budgeting.

Here’s a template you can use to perform sales forecasting to makes the sales planning process effective.

Define your sales KPIs

KPIs are a fancy way of saying that you need to set metrics to track effectiveness of your sales strategy and team’s performance.

Some example KPIs you can include in sales plans are:

• Number of sales
• Sales revenue
• Average deal size

This sales report template is a great example of how you can include KPIs in your meetings to test performance and adjust strategy.

Identify gaps in the sales process

This step is all about analyzing your current sales process to figure out gaps and/or potential obstacles preventing you from achieving goals.

When you identify a gap, brainstorm potential solutions so that you can create a specific action plan.

Understand the sales stages

When writing a sales plan, make sure you cover each stage of the sales cycle. If you’re unsure of what the sales stages are, here’s a quick recap.

Prospecting

This is the foundation of the sales process where you identify potential customers who might be a good fit for your product or service.

Preparation

Once you have a list of prospects, you need to research their needs, challenges, and buying habits.

This is all about how you contact and communicate with prospects.

Presentation

This section is your opportunity to showcase the value proposition of your product or service. Tailor your presentation to address the prospect’s specific needs and demonstrate how your offering can solve their problems.

Handling objections

Identify common objections your sales team might encounter related to price, features, competition, or need. Develop clear and concise responses to address these concerns proactively.

Equip your sales team with effective closing techniques to secure commitments from prospects who are interested but might hesitate.

Plan your follow-up strategy based on the prospect’s decision timeline and the stage of the sales cycle. For longer timelines, periodic updates and information sharing through digital sales rooms can maintain engagement and provide valuable resources conveniently.

Organize the sales team

Organizing the sales team entails defining roles and responsibilities clearly to cover all aspects of the sales process effectively.

This might involve segmenting the team based on product lines, customer segments, or territories.

Here’s an example of how it might look:

Sarah — Sales Director — will lead the sales team, set overall strategy, goals and direction. Michael and Jessica — Business Development Executives — will focus on prospecting new leads. They will research potential customers, identify those who might be a good fit for the product, and qualify leads by gathering information and assessing their needs. William — Sales Development Manager — will manage the business development executives and ensuring they follow best practices. Chris and Lisa — Account Executives — will handle qualified leads. They build relationships with potential customers, present product demos, address objections, and close deals.

Using an org chart like in this example is a great way to visualize this information.

Outline the use of sales tools

Sales tools play a crucial role in streamlining the sales process and enhancing productivity.

Make sure you outline the tools your team will use, how they fit into different stages of the sales process, and any training required to maximize their utility.

This ensures that your team has the resources needed to engage effectively with prospects and customers.

Set the budget

Setting the budget involves allocating resources efficiently across various sales activities to achieve your objectives without overspending.

This includes expenses related to personnel, sales tools, marketing initiatives, travel, and customer entertainment.

A well-planned budget balances investment in growth opportunities with the overall financial health of the business.

Create a sales strategy and action plan

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork of what you want to achieve and how you plan to achieve it, it’s time to bring it all together into a single view.

Create an action plan which not includes your strategy but also concrete steps.

Your action plan should outlines specific activities for each stage of the sales funnel from prospecting (lead generation channels) to closing (structured process and follow-up strategy with timelines) and everything in between.

Performance and results measurement

Last but not least, your sales plan should present a clear and quantifiable means to track the effectiveness of sales activities.

How are you going to measure outcomes against predefined targets?

Performance measurement is key because it builds accountability and allows you to always have a pulse on customer behavior, preferences, and trends that’ll help you make decisions based on data.

If you’ve made it this far, give yourself a pat! I’ve covered A LOT on elements that you can include in a sales plan.

However, in most cases, you don’t always need to go that in-depth and instead should aim for brevity so that anyone in your team can stay up-to-date without having to worry about the nitty gritty details.

Here’s a sales plan example that’s brief but highly effective. It includes a summary of all you need in one document, a target market analysis, a customer profile, and an action plan.

Want even more sales plan templates for design inspiration or to customize and make your own?

This 30-60-90 day sales plan provides a great way to organize goals, priorities, performance goals, and metrics of success over three three timeframes: first 30 days, first 60 days, and first 90 days.

This sales plan is structured around key components that drive the sales process: objectives, strategies, tactics, and key metrics. It emphasizes a multi-channel approach to sales,, with a strong focus on measuring performance through metrics.

This sales roadmap is a great way to visualize activities such as defining strategy and generating leads to more advanced steps.

Conclusion: Save time on designing and updating sales plans and focus on growing your business with Venngage templates

Though there’s no secret formula for effective sales plan design, it’s good practice to include the basics or information on the target market, a customer persona, and a strategy on how you plan to sell.

What you definitely shouldn’t do is write a sales plan and then never look at it again.

And trust me, I know how time-consuming and frustrating it can be to edit your sales plan especially if you don’t have design skills. One small change might make the icons or numbers go all out of whack.

That’s why I recommend customizing our sales plan templates instead so that you can focus your energy on strategy.

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How to Write a Sales & Marketing Plan: Comprehensive Guide

• March 21, 2024
• Business Plan , How to Write

Creating a sales and marketing plan for your business plan is really important. It shows how you’ll attract customers and make sales, which is crucial for your business to succeed. This guide will walk you through the steps to make a great sales & marketing plan.

Whether your business is new or you’re looking to grow, having a clear plan for sales and marketing can help everyone believe in your business’s success. Let’s dive in!

What is a Sales & Marketing Plan

A sales and marketing plan is a strategic document that outlines how a business intends to reach its target market and achieve its sales goals. It details the strategies, tactics, channels, and tools the business will use to attract and engage customers, promote its products or services, and convert prospects into buyers.

This plan typically includes information on target customer segments, marketing objectives, sales targets, competitive analysis , marketing strategies (like advertising, content marketing, social media, and SEO), sales tactics (such as direct selling or channel partnerships), budgets, and key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring success.

Why do we use a Sales & Marketing Plan?

We use a sales and marketing plan for several critical reasons, all aimed at ensuring a business’s growth and success:

• Strategic Direction : It provides a clear roadmap for reaching and engaging the target audience , guiding the marketing and sales efforts in a unified direction.
• Resource Allocation : Helps in the efficient allocation of resources, ensuring that time, budget, and personnel are focused on high-impact sales and marketing activities.
• Goal Setting : Establishes specific, measurable objectives for what the business aims to achieve through its sales and marketing efforts, such as revenue targets, customer acquisition goals, and market share.
• Target Market Identification : Assists in identifying and understanding the target market’s needs, preferences, and behaviors, enabling the business to tailor its offerings more effectively.
• Competitive Advantage : By analyzing the competitive landscape, the plan allows businesses to identify their unique selling proposition (USP) and differentiate themselves from competitors.
• Performance Measurement : Sets key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to track the effectiveness of sales and marketing strategies, providing insight into what’s working and what needs adjustment.
• Investor and Stakeholder Confidence : A well-thought-out plan demonstrates to investors, stakeholders, and potential partners that the business has a solid strategy for achieving growth, increasing their confidence in the venture.

Why do we use a Sales & Marketing Plan in a Business Plan?

Including a sales and marketing plan in a business plan is crucial because it directly influences investor and stakeholder confidence. This component of the business plan serves several key purposes that reassure investors and stakeholders about the business’s potential for success:

• Demonstrates Preparedness : It shows that the business has thoroughly researched and understood its market environment. A detailed plan signals to investors and stakeholders that the company is prepared to navigate the competitive landscape effectively.
• Outlines a Clear Path to Revenue : Investors and stakeholders are particularly interested in how a business plans to generate revenue. The sales and marketing plan provides a clear strategy for attracting and retaining customers, crucial for the business’s financial sustainability.
• Highlights Growth Potential : By outlining specific marketing strategies and sales targets, the plan showcases the business’s growth potential. It illustrates how the business intends to capture market share and expand its customer base, which is a key indicator of its future success.
• Provides Metrics for Success : The plan includes key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that will be used to measure success. This allows investors and stakeholders to understand how the business will track its progress and adjust strategies as needed, instilling confidence in the business’s ability to meet its goals.
• Facilitates Alignment with Investor Expectations : Finally, a sales and marketing plan helps align the business’s strategies with investor and stakeholder expectations. By clearly communicating how the business intends to achieve growth, it ensures that everyone is working towards the same objectives, reducing potential conflicts and increasing support.

How to Write a Sales & Marketing Plan?

Writing a sales and marketing plan for a business plan involves outlining how you intend to reach your target customers and achieve your sales goals. It’s a strategic document that details the actions, tools, and resources you will use to promote your products or services.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to crafting an effective sales and marketing plan:

1. Define Your Target Market

Identify who your ideal customers are by considering demographics (age, gender, income level, etc.), psychographics (interests, values, habits), and geographics (location). Understanding your target market is crucial for tailoring your sales and marketing efforts effectively.

2. Set Clear Marketing and Sales Objectives

Establish what you aim to achieve with your sales and marketing plan. Objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Examples include increasing website traffic by 20% within six months or boosting sales by 15% in a year.

3. Analyze Your Competition

Understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses , and how you compare. This knowledge will help you identify your unique selling proposition (USP) and position your offerings more attractively.

4. Develop Your Marketing Channels

Outline the strategies you will use to achieve your objectives by listing what are your marketing channels . This might involve:

• Content Marketing : Creating and sharing valuable content to attract and retain customers.
• Social Media Marketing : Engaging with your audience on social platforms.
• Email Marketing : Sending targeted messages to encourage customer action.
• SEO : Optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results.
• Advertising : Paying for space to promote your product on digital platforms, print, or outdoors.

5. Plan Your Sales Channels

Detail how you will sell your product or service by laying out your sales channels . This can include:

• Direct Sales : Selling directly to customers through sales reps or online.
• Channel Sales : Using intermediaries, such as distributors or resellers.
• Retail Sales : Selling through a physical or online store.
• Discuss any sales processes or techniques that will be employed, like consultative selling or solution selling.

6. Determine Tools and Resources

List the tools and resources needed to implement your strategies. This could include CRM software for customer management, social media platforms for marketing, or sales training programs for your team.

7. Set Your Budget

Allocate a budget for your sales and marketing activities. Include costs for advertising, software subscriptions, marketing materials, and any other expenses associated with executing your plan.

8. Define Metrics and KPIs

Identify how you will measure success by setting key performance indicators (KPIs) for each objective. Examples of KPIs include conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and average order value.

9. Create an Action Plan

Break down your strategies into actionable steps with assigned responsibilities and deadlines. This plan will guide your daily operations and help keep your team focused and accountable.

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How to Write a Sales and Marketing Plan

2 min. read

Updated January 3, 2024

You’ve addressed what you’re selling and why in the products and services section. You now have an understanding of the market and an ideal customer in mind thanks to your market analysis. Now, you need to explain how you will actually reach and sell to them.

The marketing and sales section of your business plan dives into how you’re going to accomplish your goals. You’ll be answering questions like:

• Based on your audience, how will you position your product or service in the current market?
• What marketing channels, messaging, and sales tactics will you implement?
• What’s your business model and how will your business operate day-to-day?

By the end of this section, you should have an outline of what growth looks like, what milestones you intend to hit, and how you’ll measure success. Basically, you’re backing up the opportunity you’ve identified with a solid go-to-market plan.

What to include in the sales and marketing section

The sections you should include act as a useful framework for exploring and defining your marketing and sales tactics.

Create a positioning statement

How does your business differ? What do you do that others don’t? If you’re unsure, work through a handful of strategic exercises to create a simple but convincing positioning statement.

Outline your marketing strategy

A marketing plan brings together strategic goals with tangible marketing activities designed to reach and engage your target market—ultimately convincing them to purchase your product.

Craft your sales plan

A good sales strategy provides actionable steps to reach your goals. Estimate how much you intend to sell and outline a process that anyone else in your business can execute.

Optional sales and marketing information to include

The basics of a marketing and sales plan are fairly straightforward. However, it’s also the perfect place to flesh out any details that you think will make your outreach efforts successful.

Create a unique value proposition

What makes your business unique? How does the solution you provide stand out? This is your chance to point to what you believe potential customers will find more valuable about your business over the competition.

Don't forget digital marketing

While we don’t recommend creating separate traditional and digital marketing plans, it may be wise to explore and address them separately within your plan.

Build your promotional plan

How will you convince your customers to buy your products or services? While actual ads and promotions may be months away, it’s best to think through and even mock up designs now.

Conduct a SWOT analysis

With this simple analysis, you’ll better understand your strengths and weaknesses, along with the opportunities and threats you should account for.

See why 1.2 million entrepreneurs have written their business plans with LivePlan

Kody Wirth is a content writer and SEO specialist for Palo Alto Software—the creator's of Bplans and LivePlan. He has 3+ years experience covering small business topics and runs a part-time content writing service in his spare time.

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• What to include
• Optional information

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How To Build a Strategic Sales Plan + 10 Examples

• March 28, 2024

Every sales team has some sort of plan, even if it’s just “sell more of the product/service that you’re employed to sell.”

A sales plan is a portfolio that includes a layout of your processes, target audience, objectives and tactics. It’s used to guide your sales strategy and predict cost and returns. 

Yet without a codified sales plan, it can be difficult to give a sales team the motivation and purpose they need to successfully engage customers and continue to generate revenue.

Not having a sales plan that’s written down and signed off on by stakeholders can lead to confusion around what sales reps should and shouldn’t be doing , which can be demotivating.

It might seem daunting or time-consuming to put together an entire sales plan, but it doesn’t need to be. Here’s how to create a thorough sales plan in 10 simple steps. 

What Is a Sales Plan? 

A successful sales plan defines your target customers, business objectives, tactics, obstacles and processes. An effective plan will also include resources and strategies that are used to achieve target goals. It works similarly to a business plan in the way it’s presented, but only focuses on your sales strategy. 

A sales plan should include the following three components: 

• Ideas: If you use specific business methodologies, you may choose to outline key principles and examples of them in action within your sales plan. An example could be conversation tactics when pitching your product to your target customer. 
• Processes: In order to streamline productivity and business strategy, you’ll want to make sure your processes are defined within your sales plan. Your sales team should be able to refer to the sales plan when they’re in need of direction. 
• Tools and tactics: The most effective sales plans include not only high-level business strategies, but also step-by-step approaches for your sales team to utilize. These tools can include key conversation pieces for your sales reps to use when pitching a product or content to close out a deal. 

Solidifying a sales plan is crucial for a strong business model. Taking the time to narrow in on the components above will set you and your business up for success down the road. 

Sales Planning Process

It’s important to keep in mind that sales planning isn’t just about creating a sales plan document. A sales plan should be a go-to item that’s used every day by your team, rather than sitting on your desk collecting dust. Creating an effective sales plan requires high-level strategy.

You should: 

• Decide on a timeline for your goals and tactics
• Outline the context
• Write out the company mission and values
• Describe the target audience and product service positioning
• Include sales resources
• Draw out an overview of concurrent activities
• Write an overview of your business road map
• Outline your goals and KPIs
• Outline an action plan
• Create a budget 

 Below we dive into each of these steps to create your ideal sales plan. 

1. Decide on Your Timeline

Setting goals and outlining tactics is not going to be productive if you’re not working toward a date by which you’ll measure your efforts.

Determining the timeline of your sales plan should therefore be your number one consideration. When will you be ready to kick-start your plan, and when is a reasonable time to measure the outcomes of your plan against your SMART goals?

Remember that you need to give the plan a chance to make an impact, so this timeline shouldn’t be too restrictive. However, you also want to make sure that you’re flexible enough to adjust your plan if it’s not producing the desired results.

Most sales plan timelines cover about a year, which may be segmented into four quarters and/or two halves to make it a little more manageable.

2. Outline the Context

Use the first page of your sales plan to outline the context in which the plan was created.

What is the current state of the organization? What are your challenges and pain points? What recent wins have you experienced?

Do you have tighter restrictions on cash flow, or does revenue appear to be growing exponentially? How is your sales team currently performing?

While you’ll discuss your business plan and road map later in the document, you can also outline the long-term vision for your business in this section. For example, where do you want to see the business in five years?

Tip: Comparing the current situation with your vision will emphasize the gap between where you are now and where you need to be. 

3. Company Mission and Values

It’s essential that you put your mission and values at the heart of your business. You need to incorporate them into every function – and this includes your sales plan.

Outlining your mission and values in your sales plan ensures that you remember what the company is striving for, and in turn helps ensure that your approach and tactics will support these objectives.

Remember: A strong brand mission and authentic values will help boost customer loyalty, brand reputation and, ultimately, sales.

4. Target Market and Product/Service Positioning

Next, you’ll need to describe the market or markets that you’re operating in.

What is your target market or industry? What research led you to conclude that this was the optimal market for you?

Who within this industry is your ideal customer? What are their characteristics? This could be a job title, geographical location or company size, for example. This information makes up your ideal customer profile .

If you’ve delved further into audience research and developed personas around your target market, then include them in here, too.

5. Sales Team and Resources

This step is simple: Make a list of your sales resources, beginning with a short description of each member of your sales team.

Include their name, job title, length of time at the company and, where appropriate, their salary. What are their strengths? How can they be utilized to help you hit your goals?

You should also include notes around the gaps in your sales team and whether you intend to recruit any new team members into these (or other) roles.

Tip: Communicate the time zones your team members work in to be mindful of designated work hours for scheduling meetings and deadlines. 

Then, list your other resources. These could be tools, software or access to other departments such as the marketing team – anything that you intend to use in the execution of your sales plan. This is a quick way to eliminate any tools or resources that you don’t need.

6. Concurrent Activities

The next step in creating your sales plan involves providing an overview of non-sales activities that will be taking place during the implementation of your sales plan.

Any public marketing plans, upcoming product launches, or deals or discounts should be included, as should any relevant events. This will help you plan sales tactics around these activities and ensure that you’re getting the most out of them.

7. Business Road Map

For this step, write up an overview of your business’s overall road map, as well as the areas where sales activities can assist with or accelerate this plan. You’ll need to collaborate with the CEO, managing director or board of directors in order to do this.

In most cases, the business will already have a road map that has been signed off on by stakeholders. It’s the sales manager’s job to develop a sales plan that not only complements this road map, but facilitates its goals. 

Tip: Highlight areas of the road map that should be touchpoints for the sales team. 

Ask yourself what your department will need to do at each point in the road map to hit these overarching company goals.

8. Sales Goals and KPIs

Another important part of the sales plan involves your sales goals and KPIs.

Outline each goal alongside the KPIs you’ll use to measure it. Include a list of metrics you’ll use to track these KPIs, as well as a deadline for when you project the goal will be achieved.

It’s vital to make these goals tangible and measurable.

A bad example of a goal is as follows:

Goal 1: Increase sales across company’s range of products and services.

A better goal would look something like:

Goal 1: Generate $500,000+ in revenue from new clients through purchases of X product by X date.

9. Action Plan

Now that you’ve laid out your goals, you need to explain how you will hit them.

Your action plan can be set out week by week, month by month, or quarter by quarter. Within each segment, you must list out all of the sales activities and tactics that you will deploy – and the deadlines and touchpoints along the way.

Tip: Organize your action plan by department – sales, business development and finance. 

While this is arguably the most complex part of the sales plan, this is where sales leaders are strongest. They know which approach will work best for their team, their company and their market.

Budgets vary from team to team and company to company, but whatever your situation, it’s important to include your budget in your sales plan.

How are you going to account for the money spent on new hires, salaries, tech, tools and travel? Where the budget is tight, what are your priorities going to be, and what needs to be axed?

The budget section should make references back to your action plan and the sales team and resources page in order to explain the expenditures.

6 Strategic Sales Plan Examples 

You can create different types of strategic sales plans for your company, depending on how you want to structure your sales plan. Here are a few examples.   

Customer Profile 

A customer profile outlines your ideal customer for your service or product. It will usually include industry, background, attributes and decision-making factors.  

Creating a customer profile helps narrow in on the target customer your sales team should focus on while eliminating unproductive leads.  

Buyer’s Guide

A buyer’s guide is an informational sheet that describes your company’s services or products, including benefits and features. This document is useful both for your sales team but also for a potential customer who requires more information on the product before purchasing. 

30-60-90-Day Plan

This plan is organized based on time periods. It includes outlines of goals, strategy and actionable steps in 30-day periods. This is a useful sales plan model for a new sales representative tracking progress during their first 90 days in the position or meeting quotas in a 90-day period. 

This type of sales plan is also ideal for businesses in periods of expansion or growth. It’s helpful to minimize extra effort in onboarding processes. 

Market Expansion Plan

A market expansion plan clarifies target metrics and list of actions when moving into a new territory or market. This sales plan model is typically used with a target market that resides in a new geographical region. 

You’ll want to include a profile of target customers, account distribution costs and even time zone differences between your sales representatives. 

Marketing-alignment Plan

Creating a marketing-alignment sales plan is useful if your organization has yet to align both your sales and marketing departments. The goal of the sales plan is finalizing your target customer personas and aligning them with your sales pitches and marketing messages. 

New Product/Service Plan 

If your organization is launching a new service or product, it’s best to create a sales plan to track revenue and other growth metrics from the launch. You’ll want to include sales strategy, competitive analyses and service or product sales positioning. 

Sales Plan Template

4 additional sales plan templates.

Here are some additional templates you can use to create your own unique sales plan. 

• Template Lab 
• ProjectManager

5 Tips for Creating a Sales Plan 

Now that you’ve seen and read through a few examples and a sales plan template, we’ll cover some easy but useful tips to create a foolproof sales plan. 

• Create a competitive analysis: Research what sales strategies and tactics your close competitors are using. What are they doing well? What are they not doing well? Knowing what they are doing well will help you create a plan that will lead to eventual success. 
• Vary your sales plans: First create a base sales plan that includes high-level goals, strategies and tactics. Then go more in depth on KPIs and metrics for each department, whether it’s outbound sales or business development . 
• Analyze industry trends: Industry trends and data can easily help strengthen your sales approach. For example, if you’re pitching your sales plan to a stakeholder, use current market trends and statistics to support why you believe your sales strategies will be effective in use. 
• Utilize your marketing team: When creating your sales plan, you’ll want to get the marketing department’s input to align your efforts and goals. You should weave marketing messages throughout both your sales plan and pitches. 
• Discuss with your sales team: Remember to check in with your sales representatives to understand challenges they may be dealing with and what’s working and not working. You should update the sales plan quarterly based on feedback received from your sales team. 

When Should You Implement a Strategic Sales Plan? 

Does your organization currently not have a sales plan in place that is used regularly? Are you noticing your organization is in need of structure and lacking productivity across departments? These are definite signs you should create and implement a sales plan. 

According to a LinkedIn sales statistic , the top sales tech sellers are using customer relationship management (CRM) tools (50%), sales intelligence (45%) and sales planning (42%) .

Below are a few more indicators that you need an effective sales plan. 

To Launch a New Product or Campaign 

If you’re planning to launch a new service or product in six months, you should have a concrete marketing and sales strategy plan to guarantee you’ll see both short- and long-term success. 

The sales plan process shouldn’t be hasty and rushed. Take the time to go over data and competitor analysis. Work with your team to create objectives and goals that everyone believes in. Your sales plan should be updated formally on a quarterly basis to be in line with industry trends and business efforts. 

To Increase Sales

If your team is looking to increase revenue and the number of closed sales, you may need to widen and define your target audience. A sales plan will help outline this target audience, along with planning out both sales and marketing strategies to reach more qualified prospects and increase your sales conversion rate. 

Now that you’ve seen sales plan examples and tips and tricks, the next step after creating your sales plan is to reach those ideal sales targets with Mailshake . Connect with leads and generate more sales with our simple but effective sales engagement platform.

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• 4 April, 2022

How to Develop a Complete Sales and Marketing Strategy

Peanut butter and jelly. Salt and pepper. Puppies and treats. Beach days and ice cream. 

Some things are inseparable and are bound to go together. 

Sales and marketing cannot be done well without the other. 

Creating a synergy between sales and marketing lets you build a connected business that attracts more leads and converts higher-quality customers. 

In this article, we’ll share everything you need to know to create a cohesive sales and marketing strategy. You’ll learn: 

• What sales and marketing are.
• How to develop a sales and marketing strategy.
• How to align them to maximize growth and productivity.

Let’s begin! 

Building a sales and marketing strategy to create alignment and increase revenue

The first step is to distinguish the differences between the two and learn how to integrate them , so they work in tandem. 

Traditionally, sales and marketing teams have worked on polar opposites of the spectrum. In reality, they are two alliances working together to accomplish the same mission — grow your business. 

A marketing strategy is how you reach your target audience, while a sales strategy is how you convert those leads into customers. 

Your marketing efforts should deliver your core message and build interest in your brand.

Conversely, a sales strategy maps the process of turning leads and prospects into paying customers.

Both endeavors are crucial to the success of a business. Each side plays a vital role in the customer journey from awareness to end purchase.

Why is it important to have a sales AND marketing strategy? 

Every aspect of your business needs a plan. Without a plan, your business is bound to wander aimlessly. 

Your marketing strategy should clearly define the activities and processes needed to attract the right audience to your business.

Additionally, the marketing needs to nurture prospects so they are more likely to buy. 

The sales strategy focuses on tactics and processes to forge a relationship with prospective clients to convert them faster.

A sales and marketing strategy is the cornerstone of alignment. If the two teams aren’t fully in-sync about their responsibilities and what is going on on both sides of the fence, you will end up with a lot of miscommunication, missed opportunities, and stagnant growth. 

58% of marketing and sales professionals reported that collaboration provides increased customer retention. Furthermore, highly-aligned sales and marketing strategies experience 32% year-over-year growth, while less aligned businesses see a 7% decline in revenue. 

Understanding the competitive landscape 

Before developing your sales and marketing strategy, a business owner should clearly understand the market landscape. 

A competitive landscape analysis lets you analyze your competitor’s strategies, so you can define your value proposition and develop strategies that can outperform the competition. 

Here are two competitive landscape frameworks you can implement to collect insights for your marketing and sales processes. 

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning method that puts your organization in perspective using a visual quadrant with strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 

Using a SWOT analysis helps identify areas where your business can improve and maximize opportunities while simultaneously determining negative aspects that could reduce your chances of success. 

Use the SWOT analysis to identify: 

• What do you do better than others (strengths)?
• What are weak areas in your business (weaknesses)?
• Opportunities to stand out above the competition.
• Things that could be a roadblock, such as competitors, market conditions, lack of automation, etc. 

How does this tie into sales and marketing strategy? 

Using SWOT analysis lets you identify your value proposition so that you can identify the right audience for your product or service. 

You’ll also know opportunities you can leverage to help build your brand and help your brand “stick” in the minds of other companies. 

For example, Peloton offers convenience to customers by providing customers the ability to create a fitness regime around their own timetable instead of a gym’s schedule. It’s highly customizable since they allow users to attend live-streaming studio cycling classes based on their fitness level. 

In fact, it was the ultimate “covid proof” business model. While many gyms were forced to implement restrictions and shut down, Peloton was growing.

Peloton sees the lack of convenience in most fitness models. Gyms can be inconvenient because consumers have to go to the location physically. Online personal classes or trainers were great, but it’s difficult to customize to your personal needs and interests. Peloton has developed equipment and an array of classes that suit the end-user.

BCG Matrix 

The BCG Matrix is a framework that helps businesses decide how to strategically prioritize products, services, or particular areas of the business. This matrix categorizes products into four categories: 

• Pets: Products with low market growth and low market share.
• Question marks: Products with high market growth but low market share.
• Stars: Products with high market growth and high market share.
• Cash Cow: Products with low market growth and high market share.

To place your products into one of these four categories, you’ll need to gather data on your sales growth year over year and compare that to the market share within the industry. 

Here’s an example of what Apple’s BCG Matrix would look like: 

Apple BCG Matrix

Why are these products categorized this way? 

Question mark: Apple TV has seen tremendous growth, but it still is a question mark as to how it’ll perform long term. It may become more popular when people begin to appreciate the importance of the Apple ecosystem. 

Star: The iPhone is the clear star product of Apple. With every new update, they are adding an innovative feature that is breaking record sales and cementing themselves further as the leader in market share for mobile devices. 

Pet: iPods are probably one of their least purchased items compared to the iPhone and iPads. Although they one sold many of them, the longevity of the music player isn’t viable. 

Cash cow: Macbooks and iPad still hold a lot of popularity and dominance in their respective markets. These products may not grow exponentially in revenue but offer a steady repeatable source of sales for Apple. 

How it applies to your sales and marketing strategy: 

Getting clear on how your product fits can help your sales and marketing teams determine which products to push. 

When there is a disconnect between what your audience wants and what you’re trying to sell, there’s a lack of product-market fit. 

Your sales team should have a strong pulse on what the product does and its benefits. Ideally, the sales and marketing personnel should actively use the product themselves so that they can put themselves in the customer’s shoes. 

Developing a Marketing Strategy 

When developing a marketing strategy, it’s crucial to understand the sales funnel stages and define the leads based on their demographics, firmographics, and readiness to buy.  

These are the 7 most commonly used leads that you’ll run across in your business: 

Cold leads are generally unresponsive to interactions. Perhaps, they recently signed up to your email list but haven’t yet opened any of the emails. Fortunately, with a good lead nurturing email sequence , you can turn a cold lead into a warm lead. 

Information qualified leads

Informational leads have performed an action where they request more information from you. This could be submitting their contact information to receive a free webinar or report about a form on your website. 

Warm leads have demonstrated interest in your product or service. Maybe they’ve gone through your webinar or viewed your sales page but haven’t taken action yet. 

Hot leads have shown significant interest in your product. They may have booked a call with your sales rep to learn more about your product. 

Sales-ready leads

sales-ready leads have contacted your businesses inquiring about your help. These prospects may have reached your live chat or customer service to learn more about your product. 

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) 

Marketing qualified leads have been qualified by your marketing team. The process entails leading scoring your leads by assigning numerical values to them based on their behaviors, demographics, and psychographics. Once they pass a given threshold, they’ll be considered as MQLs and sent to your sales team for contact. 

Sales qualified leads (MQLs)

Sales-qualified leads have been qualified by your sales team. You have many appointment setters to hop on brief calls to qualify your prospects. They typically ask qualifying questions to ensure the person is a good fit for your product. 

Demand generation 

Demand generation is the process of generating awareness and interest for your products and services. It means growing your audience and attracting new visitors to your website and introducing them to your offerings. Generally, it’s when the prospect first becomes aware of your brand. 

Demand generation entails: 

• Increasing brand awareness to attract the target audience 
• Educate your audience 
• Build trust 
• Spark interest 

Lead generation 

Lead generation is the process of converting your audience into leads by capturing their information. Note that most people aren’t ready to opt-in immediately; therefore, demand generation is essential to generate interest in your brand and product. 

Marketing channel strategy 

With new platforms arising every year, many marketers are getting “shiny-object syndrome” trying to hop from one platform to the next. Learning where your audience hangs out, and each platform’s value is critical to determining your marketing channel strategy. Without knowing where to distribute your content, you won’t be able to build demand or lead generation. 

According to HubSpot, the top marketing channels are social media, SEO, email, and content marketing. 

We’ll cover the best channels you can use for your business. 

Search engine optimization (SEO)

62% of customers turn to the search engine when they want to learn more about a new product, service, or business, while 41% use the search engine when they’re ready to make a purchase. Not to mention trillions of searches on Google are made annually, making them the go-to place for finding information online. 

Search engine optimization is the process of getting your website to rank high on the search engine results pages for a specific keyword or term. This ensures your content is easily accessible and visible to people searching for the term. 

Some of the common ranking factors include 

• Keywords: What’s your website’s content about? 
• Site structure: How can the search engine organize and prioritize your content? 
• Crawlability: Can your content be easily found by the search engines? 
• Backlinks: Does your content provide credible information on the topics you’re writing about 

Most users never scroll past the first page on the search engine result pages. That’s why it’s critical to rank high on Google. Here are some ways to improve your SEO. 

• Learn keyword optimization: Find relevant keywords that your ideal audience is searching for online. Make sure it has a large volume yet is still realistic enough to rank for. 
• Optimize your website for mobile search: 48% of buyers use their mobile phones to begin their search, and they account for 53% of paid-search clicks. Mobile optimization means adjusting your site’s structure, design, and speed so that it is more conducive for mobile browsing. Google has a mobile-first indexing policy, meaning they predominantly use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking. 
• Produce high-quality content: Visitors won’t stay on your site very long if you’re not providing them with valuable content. Over-deliver on content by providing better, easy-to-read, or more in-depth content than other sites. 

Content marketing 

Bombarding prospective customers with “buy now” messages simply doesn’t work anymore. They’ll likely run to hills and avoid you like the plague. Not to mention, that’ll earn you a negative word of mouth and a bad reputation for being overly salesy. 

Content marketing is a consumer-centric approach centered on consistently producing and distributing valuable content such as blog posts, infographics , case studies , videos, white papers, interviews, and others to attract a targeted audience. The goal is to attract the right audience, drive leads and nurture them into customers. 

Most organizations use content marketing for the following reasons: 

• Build and position a brand 
• Generate leads 
• Improve brand awareness 
• Increase sales 
• Provide pre-and post-sale information that their prospects are looking for 
• Established credibility and authority in their market 
• Support social media marketing and SEO initiatives
• Retain customers 

Here are ways you can get content marketing to work in your favor: 

Content marketing is meant to help you in the long run: Rome wasn’t built overnight, and neither are digital companies. It takes time to build trust and authority. However, consistently delivering highly shareable and valuable content helps to become the go-to expert in your industry. Content lets you reach out to prospects and customers, address their pain points, and allow them to get to know, like, and trust you. 

It shouldn’t be used as a standalone marketing distribution strategy: Content marketing helps drive other forms of marketing. Therefore it’s best used in combination with other digital marketing channels. For instance, social media marketing can amplify the reach of your high-quality content, while gated content like email can bridge the gap between a traffic visitor to a buyer. 

Email marketing 

By the end of 2023, there will be over 4.3 billion email users worldwide. The widespread use of emails is why they are a powerful way to engage your audience, especially if they have demonstrated interest in your brand, product, or service. 

Email marketing is the process of using emails to forge relationships with prospective and current customers. It’s a channel typically used to nurture leads based on where they are in the buying journey, as well as onboard trial users and customers . 

Here are tips to help you succeed with email marketing: 

Personalize your campaigns and messages with segmentation:

 Don’t send out random emails to random people on your list. Instead, you should find ways to segment your audience . Create multiple lead magnets to better segment your list and categorize them by groups. Then create unique email sequences based on their segmentation. 

Improve your subject lines and email copy skills:

  64% of people will determine whether or not to open the email based on the subject line. You can follow these guidelines to improve your email copy instantly: 

• Personalize emails by referring to their name 
• Take commonly asked questions about your product or service, and answer that in your email. For example, let’s say prospects are concerned that marketing automation is expensive. Your email subject line could be “Es marketing automation expensive?” Then we’ll explain how Encharge can save you money based on not hiring X employees and saving you time from doing unnecessary tasks. 
• Use specific numbers in your subject line. Numbers add specificity and prevent your message from sounding vague. For example, if I was writing an email for Encharge, our subject line could be, “how this one mistake cost me $109,894” Then I’d write about how marketing automation cost me a lot of money and a big mistake. Tie the message back to the product, which is Encharge. 

Need some subject line inspiration? Try out our Free AI-powered Email Subject Line Generator .

Social media marketing 

3.6 billion people use social media, and the average person spends 144 minutes per day on it. 

Social media marketing leverages social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, YouTube, Pinterest to build their brand, establish relationships, grow their audience, and generate sales. Follow these tips to boost your social media marketing strategy: 

• Create a social media calendar. Just like content marketing, you’ll need to post high-quality and relevant content on a regular basis to build a strong social media presence. A social media calendar helps you to build brand voice consistency and demonstrates to followers that you are a reliable source of information. 
• Focus on in-platform strategies: Each strategy has its own algorithms that make them unique. YouTube is a search platform; therefore, using keywords, attractive thumbnails, and increasing watch time will help YouTube push your content to new people. Conversely, Instagram posts won’t be seen on the feed more than a few days out. Thus, it’s better to use hashtags and collaborate with other people within your niche to grow. 

Online advertising

Online advertising uses various platforms to promote a product or service. These ads typically appear on Google, Facebook , Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, and others. Advertisement types include 

• PPC Ads: Advertisers pay every time a visitor clicks on their search ad. These ads appear on the first page of the search engine, typically at the top or bottom of SERPs. 
• Social Ads: Ads in the form of pictures or videos that appear on the social platform. In the case of Facebook, they can appear on the timeline, messenger, or right column. 
• Retargeting Ads: Retargeting ads consist of targeting people who have already seen or interacted with your content. 
• Influencer ads: An brand pays an influencer to promote their product or service to their audience. 

There’s a place for every marketing channel. The challenge is to choose the right channels that are best suited for your business. It may be advantageous to leverage multiple channels together to increase your chances of success. For instance, producing blog content consistently while sending paid ads to visitors who didn’t opt-in your leads is a great way to ensure you’re maximizing the traffic visitors you’re receiving from search engines. 

Lead nurturing 

Lead nurturing is the process of developing relations with prospects to move them to the sales funnel . Unlike demand or lead generation, lead nurturing is focused on getting to know your prospects and tailoring your marketing and sales communication according to their needs and preferences. Here are the types of lead nurturing campaigns you can use: 

• Educational content: Use education content to set up promotions in the future. This means describing the problem in greater detail. Perhaps answer common questions or misconceptions in your industry. 
• Promotional content: Advertise your product by finding creative ways like customer testimonials, case studies, brand stories, etc. 
• Product/Demo offer: If a prospect has already signed up for a free trial, they might be interested in delving deeper into the full functionalities of the product or service. 

Developing a Sales Strategy

Without a sales strategy in place, your sales teams will make decisions based on what’s in front of them. Not because they’re careless but rather unaware of the company’s long-term goals. Creating processes for sales and making data-driven decisions will help to improve your sales and increase your conversion rates. The last thing you want is to accumulate a lot of leads only to let them slip through the cracks with a poor sales strategy. 

Proactive outreach to inbound leads 

Relying sole on outbound sales strategies isn’t sustainable for a company. It takes a lot of investment in the form of prospecting tools, contact lists, hiring more reps, and promoting a “churn and burn” environment. 

Inbound marketing allows you to build lasting relationships with prospects and converts them when they are ready to purchase. 

Inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound leads and coverts 10x more effective when executed properly. 

Fortunately, outbound tactics can still be done in an inbound way to complement your marketing team’s inbound efforts. 

When prospects subscribe to your email list, you can simply have a sales rep reach out. This can help speed up the process and shorten the lifecycle. 

Here are scenarios when a salesperson can reach out to inbound leads: 

• A prospect submits a form to learn more information about a product or service. 
• A prospect has recently attended an event such as a virtual webinar, training, or even a live event.
• A prospect has recently purchased from you, and a sales rep can help to push a complimentary product.

The key is to be proactive and reach out promptly. When a prospect interacts with your brand by submitting contact forms, attending your training, or even having already made a purchase, they are hot leads begging to be closed. 

The longer you wait, the more likely they’ll look elsewhere or simply change their mind about purchasing in front of you. Most businesses are scared to reach out to leads in fear of “bombarding” them. However, it’s ironic that the opposite is true. They become less responsive if you wait longer. 

Many of the current studies and data compiled point to the importance of timeliness and how delayed responses can impact your results: 

• It takes B2B sales departments 42 hours to respond to new leads, and 38% never respond. Additionally, it takes 4.3 days of back-and-forth communication before the first call happens. 
• Companies are 7x more likely to have meaningful conversations with decisions made when they are contacted within an hour of submitting a query. 

Companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly 7 times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision-makers as firms that try to contact prospects even an hour later. Yet only 37% of companies respond to queries within an hour. Source: HubSpot

Moreover, if leads are already in your lead nurturing funnel, your sales reps can start contacting them when they’re about halfway through the funnel. Businesses should meet their buyers where they are within the sales process . If the buyer has already gone through 57% of your sales process, there’s a good chance they are already educated, warmed up, and ready to talk. 

One study even found that 35 to 50% of sales will go to the vendor that reaches out first. It pays to reach out to your prospects first before your competitors do. 

Create a warm pitch 

The warm pitch is contacting prospective customers when they are already familiar with your brand. There are different channels you can use to pitch your prospects, such as through email, text, social messaging like LinkedIn, or even calling them. 

The most important factor in the success of your warm pitch is to focus on the actual prospect, not your personal agenda. If the thought of:

• Closing more deals 
• Hitting your sales quota
• Beating another rep on the sales leaderboard

enters your mind, it’s likely you’re warm pitch will reflect that. 

You could come off as desperate, pushy, and arrogant, which decreases your odds of a sale. Instead, focus on the prospect and how you can help them. 

Furthermore, it’s important to refer to your ideal customer profiles to help you craft your pitch.

Every pitch should consist of an:

• Introduction:  Mention something that you like about their business or something relatable you’ve found out about them 
• Hook: State the problem they might be facing
• Value and Solution : State your solution and the benefits or results they’ll receive from your product or service 
• CTA: Deliver a clear call to action 

For a warm pitch, the CTA generally involves hopping on a sales call. However, the call to action might also be to refer you to a decision-maker in the company, click on a link, start a free trial, etc. 

If you’re unsure what problem your prospect is facing, you can use the warm pitch to clarify what the problem is and tailor your offering to meet their needs. 

Here’s an example of a 1,2,3 warm pitch: 

This pitch works incredibly well because it’s easy to respond to and shows that you probably understand the problems that they face. Not to mention, you are telling them you’ll send something to fix that. 

Once you send them the lead magnet or something quick to help their problem, you can then pitch the idea of hopping on a sales call. 

Sales calls 

Just like with the warm pitch, it’s important to focus on the customer and get clear on the problems they’re facing with their business. Rather than diving straight into your product and the features, it’s vital to leave that until the end. 

Think of a doctor who diagnoses a problem before prescribing a solution. Here’s an outline of how you can conduct your sales calls:

• Meet – build rapport 
• Probe – ask the right questions 
• Prescribe – tell them about your solution 
• Close – ask for their sale and get paid right away 

Here’s a quick guide on how to go about each phase of the sales call. 

“I see that that you’re working towards [goal] , but are currently facing [challenges] , is that right?”

The idea is to build rapport and get them to do the talking. Let them explain to you their situation in their own words. Make sure to truly listen and get a sense of how they’re feeling. 

You can segue into the probe by saying, 

“I’m not sure if I can help or if you’d be a good fit for us. But to see if I may help you, would you might if I ask you some questions?” 

Ask the following questions to get them to describe their problem. Also, these questions will help them understand the cost of not getting the problem fixed immediately. 

• Why is it important to get [problem] solved? 
• What is the cost of not having [goal] ?
• If you did ultimately achieve [goal] , what would that mean to you? 
• What are the roadblocks that are preventing you from getting [goal] ? 

Then transition from the probe to prescribe. 

“So, what you’re looking for is ___ [repeat back what the prospect has told you in the probe stage] ”

“Based on what you’re telling me, here’s what I recommend [your offer] ”

Talk about your solution, but only in terms of what the prospect has told you they want. Make sure to describe the benefits of your product that they told you were important to them. Prove to your prospect that you are the person to help them get to their desired result. 

Here you can mention your company’s features, accolades, or unique value proposition to prove that you’re credible to help them. 

Close: 

Now ask them, “how does that sound to you?” 

When they respond, “is there anything that would keep you from going ahead with this [offer]?” 

At that point, you can handle all objections before you close. 

Once you’ve handled the objections, you can tell them the price and get to sending the invoice or taking their credit card info to charge them on the phone. 

The idea of this sales framework is to get clear on your prospect’s problems and aspirations. Then help them see that you have the solution that can bridge the gap between their current situation and the ideal situation. 

Sales results 

You can’t improve if you aren’t measuring your results. Decisions should be driven by concrete data so that you aren’t relying solely on intuition. 

Sales metrics are data points that represent your sales team’s performance. They can the conversion rates, progress towards goals, and other metrics that identify strategic issues. 

When it comes to your sales team, there are several types of sales metrics: 

Conversion metrics

Conversion metrics determine how effective your sales strategies are. If your reps are struggling to close hot leads, it can be a sign that you need more in-depth sales training. 

Here are some examples of conversion metrics to track: 

• Percentage of opportunities lose
• Percentage of opportunities won 
• Average number of won opportunities for each sales rep 
• Average number of lost opportunities for each sales rep

Sales team productivity 

It’s vital to measure how productive your sales reps are. For example, are your reps focused on selling, or are they busy with administrative tasks? 

Follow these metrics to see how productive your sales reps are: 

• Average time spent on manual data entry
• Percentage of time spent on selling activities 
• Percentage of marketing collateral used by sales reps 
• Average times a high-quality lead is followed up with 
• Percentage of high-quality leads followed up with 
• Average number of sales tools used 

Email warm pitch metrics 

As your team is reaching out to inbound leads, it’s important to measure the results. Is your sales team struggling to book sales calls? Look for data points such as open rate, response rate, engagement rate, and percentage of prospects who move onto the sales call. 

Sales hiring metrics 

Many organizations overlook the sales hiring process. HR managers typically feel pressured to fill the sales roles quickly, leading to settling for mediocre candidates. Here are some hiring metrics to look at: 

• Time spent recruiting 
• Average time spent hiring 
• Average cost to replace a sales position 
• Average turnover rate 

Read next: The 3 Types of Sales and Marketing Analytics that Will Help You Grow

Align sales and marketing 

Aligning your sales and marketing teams means sharing data so that both parties have access to any lead that enters the funnel. By cross-sharing data, each team can utilize the data points to help in their daily roles.  

For instance, the marketing team can run through sales notes to learn more information about the buyer persona, common challenges, etc. As a result, they can generate content, lead magnets, and other marketing collateral to attract higher-quality leads. 

Additionally, the marketing team can lead score each prospect and categorize each by certain lead types (hot, warm, or cold lead) and whether they are sales-ready or not.

To achieve this alignment, you’d want to integrate your CRM with your marketing automation suite . The marketing automation tool needs to be able to lead score and segment leads effectively. Conversely, CRM software is required to track the sales process of each lead. 

Fortunately, Encharge offers a robust HubSpot CRM integration along with other CRM integrations allowing you to easily cross-share data. The Encharge integration supports a two-way sync of contact and company data. That means that when a contact field in Encharge is updated, it will automatically sync with your CRM, so sales will have the latest up-to-date contact information, as well as a full view of the marketing journey of the lead.

Apart from contact data, Encharge syncs email marketing activity – email opens, clicks, and replies. That way, sales reps can find which marketing messages your leads are interacting with and be more prepared when following up and selling to them.

Last but not least, you can automate sales processes in your CRM by using flows. The example below automates the whole CRM deal creation process based on the stage of the lead in the customer journey – when they book a demo call, and when they become a customer.

You can learn more about our HubSpot integration here . The end result is better sales and marking alignment. 

Further Reading

• 12 Sales and Marketing Strategy Examples from Real Companies
• Understanding the Difference Between Sales and Marketing
• The Last Guide to Marketing and Sales Automation You’ll Need
• 15 Ways Marketing and Sales Work Together to Drive Growth
• The 8 Critical Elements of Sales and Marketing Operations
• 10 Steps to Create a Sales and Marketing Business Plan [Templates included]

Your turn – develop your strategy and execute it

Running a thriving online business requires a robust sales and marketing strategy. There’s no “winging” it when it comes to business practices. 

Creating thorough processes that align both teams together helps to create synergy in your company. 

Take advantage of Encharge to level up your business and convert more customers! Sign up for a free 14-day trial today! 

Meet your new marketing automation platform

“encharge helped us visually redesign our onboarding flow resulting in a 10% increase in our trial activation rate .".

How To Use AI To Predict User Engagement in Marketing (Guide 2024)

Imagine if your marketing could read minds. Every campaign, blog, and email would feel just right to your audience. That’s

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Featured Reads

• Marketing |
• How to create a winning marketing plan, ...

How to create a winning marketing plan, with 3 examples from world-class teams

A marketing plan helps leaders clearly visualize marketing strategies across channels, so they can ensure every campaign drives pipeline and revenue. In this article you’ll learn eight steps to create a winning marketing plan that brings business-critical goals to life, with examples from word-class teams.

To be successful as a marketer, you have to deliver the pipeline and the revenue.”

In other words—they need a well-crafted marketing plan.

Level up your marketing plan to drive revenue in 2024

Learn how to create the right marketing plan to hit your revenue targets in 2024. Hear best practices from marketing experts, including how to confidently set and hit business goals, socialize marketing plans, and move faster with clearer resourcing.

7 steps to build a comprehensive marketing plan

How do you build the right marketing plan to hit your revenue goals? Follow these eight steps for success:

1. Define your plan

First you need to define each specific component of your plan to ensure stakeholders are aligned on goals, deliverables, resources, and more. Ironing out these details early on ensures your plan supports the right business objectives, and that you have sufficient resources and time to get the job done. 

Get started by asking yourself the following questions: 

What resources do I need? 

What is the vision?

What is the value?

What is the goal?

Who is my audience?

What are my channels?

What is the timeline?

For example, imagine you’re creating an annual marketing plan to improve customer adoption and retention in the next fiscal year. Here’s how you could go through the questions above to ensure you’re ready to move forward with your plan: 

I will need support from the content team, web team, and email team to create targeted content for existing customers. One person on each team will need to be dedicated full-time to this initiative. To achieve this, the marketing team will need an additional $100K in budget and one new headcount. 

What is the vision?  

To create a positive experience for existing customers, address new customer needs, and encourage them to upgrade. We’ll do this by serving them how-to content, new feature updates, information about deals and pricing, and troubleshooting guides. 

According to the Sales Benchmark Index (SBI) , CEOs and go-to-market leaders report that more than 60% of their net-new revenue will come from existing customers in 2023. By retaining and building on the customers we have, we can maintain revenue growth over time. 

To decrease the customer churn rate from 30% to 10%, and increase upgrades from 20% to 30% in the next fiscal year. 

All existing customers. 

The main channel will be email. Supporting marketing channels include the website, blog, YouTube, and social media. 

The first half of the next fiscal year. 

One of the most important things to do as you create your marketing strategy is to identify your target audience . As with all marketing, you need to know who you’re marketing to. If you’re having a hard time determining who exactly your target audience is, try the bullseye targeting framework . The bullseye makes it easy for you to determine who your target audience is by industry, geography, company size, psychographics, demographics, and more.

2. Identify key metrics for success 

Now it’s time to define what key marketing metrics you’ll use to measure success. Your key metrics will help you measure and track the performance of your marketing activities. They’ll also help you understand how your efforts tie back to larger business goals. 

Once you establish key metrics, use a goal-setting framework—like objectives and key results (OKRs) or SMART goals —to fully flush out your marketing objectives. This ensures your targets are as specific as possible, with no ambiguity about what should be accomplished by when. 

Example: If a goal of your marketing plan is to increase email subscriptions and you follow the SMART goal framework (ensuring your objective is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) your goal might look like this: Increase email subscription rate from 10% to 20% in H1 . 

3. Research your competition 

It’s easy to get caught up in your company’s world, but there’s a lot of value in understanding your competitors . Knowing how they market themselves will help you find opportunities to make your company stand out and capture more market share.

Make sure you’re not duplicating your competitors’ efforts. If you discover a competitor has already executed your idea, then it might be time to go back to the drawing board and brainstorm new ways to differentiate yourself.  By looking at your competitors, you might be surprised at the type of inspiration and opportunities you’ll find.

To stay ahead of market trends, conduct a SWOT analysis for your marketing plan. A SWOT analysis helps you improve your plan by identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 

Example: If your competitor launches a social media campaign identical to what you had planned, go back to the drawing board and see how you can build off their campaign. Ask yourself: How can we differentiate our campaign while still getting our message across? What are the weaknesses of their campaign that we can capitalize on? What angles did they not approach?

4. Integrate your marketing efforts

Here’s where the fun comes in. Let’s dive into the different components that go into building a successful marketing plan. You’ll want to make sure your marketing plan includes multiple supporting activities that all add up into a powerful marketing machine. Some marketing plan components include: 

Lead generation

Social media

Product marketing

Public relations

Analyst relations

Customer marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Conversational marketing

Knowing where your consumer base spends the most time is significant for nailing this step. You need to have a solid understanding of your target audience before integrating your marketing efforts. 

Example: If your target audience is executives that spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, focus your social media strategy around placing branded content on LinkedIn. 

5. Differentiate with creative content

Forty-nine percent of marketers say visual images are hugely important to their content strategy. In other words, a clear brand and creative strategy is an essential component to every marketing plan. As you craft your own creative strategy, here are some tips to keep in mind: 

Speak to your audience: When defining your creative strategy, think about your audience—what you want them to feel, think, and do when they see your marketing. Will your audience find your creative work relevant? If your audience can’t relate to your creative work, they won’t feel connected to the story you’re trying to tell. 

Think outside the box: Find innovative ways to engage your audience, whether through video, animations, or interactive graphics. Know what screens your creative work will live on, whether desktop, mobile, or tablet, and make sure they display beautifully and load quickly across every type of device. 

Tie everything back to CTAs: It’s easy to get caught up in the creative process, so it’s important to never lose sight of your ultimate goal: Get your audience to take action. Always find the best way to display strong Calls to Action (CTAs) in your creative work. We live in a visual world—make sure your creative content counts.

Streamline creative production:   Once you’ve established a strong creative strategy, the next step is to bring your strategy to life in the production stage. It’s vital to set up a strong framework for your creative production process to eliminate any unnecessary back and forth and potential bottlenecks. Consider establishing creative request forms , streamlining feedback and approval processes, and taking advantage of integrations that might make your designers’ lives easier.

Example: If your brand is fun and approachable, make sure that shows in your creative efforts. Create designs and CTAs that spark joy, offer entertainment, and alleviate the pressure in choosing a partner.

6. Operationalize your marketing plan

Turn your plan into action by making goals, deliverables, and timelines clear for every stakeholder—so teams stay accountable for getting work done. The best way to do this is by centralizing all the details of your marketing plan in one platform , so teams can access the information they need and connect campaign work back to company goals.  

With the right work management tool , you can: 

Set goals for every marketing activity, and connect campaign work to overarching marketing and business objectives so teams focus on revenue-driving projects. 

Centralize deliverables for your entire marketing plan in one project or portfolio .

Mark major milestones and visualize your plan as a timeline, Gantt chart, calendar, list, or Kanban board—without doing any extra work. 

Quickly loop in stakeholders with status updates so they’re always up to date on progress. This is extremely important if you have a global team to ensure efforts aren’t being duplicated. 

Use automations to seamlessly hand off work between teams, streamlining processes like content creation and reviews. 

Create dashboards to report on work and make sure projects are properly staffed , so campaigns stay on track. 

With everything housed in one spot, you can easily visualize the status of your entire marketing plan and keep work on track. Building an effective marketing plan is one thing, but how you operationalize it can be your secret to standout marketing.

Example: If your strategy focuses on increasing page views, connect all campaign work to an overarching OKR—like “we will double page views as measured by the amount of organic traffic on our blog.” By making that goal visible to all stakeholders, you help teams prioritize the right work. 

See marketing planning in action

With Asana, marketing teams can connect work, standardize processes, and automate workflows—all in one place.

7. Measure performance

Nearly three in four CMOs use revenue growth to measure success, so it’s no surprise that measuring performance is necessary. You established your key metrics in step two, and now it’s time to track and report on them in step eight.

Periodically measure your marketing efforts to find areas of improvement so you can optimize in real-time. There are always lessons to be learned when looking at data. You can discover trends, detect which marketing initiatives performed well, and course-correct what isn’t performing well. And when your plan is complete, you can apply these learnings to your next initiative for improved results. 

Example: Say you discover that long-form content is consistently bringing in 400% more page views than short-form content. As a result, you’ll want to focus on producing more long-form content in your next marketing plan.

Marketing plan examples from world-class teams

The best brands in the world bring their marketing plans to life every day. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out these examples from successful marketing teams.

Autodesk grows site traffic 30% three years in a row

When the Autodesk team launched Redshift, it was initially a small business blog. The editorial team executed a successful marketing plan to expand it into a premier owned-media site, making it a destination for stories and videos about the future of making. 

The team scaled content production to support seven additional languages. By standardizing their content production workflow and centralizing all content conversations in one place, the editorial team now publishes 2X more content monthly. Read the case study to learn more about how Autodesk runs a well-oiled content machine.

Sony Music boosts creative production capacity by 4X

In recent years the music industry has gone through a pivotal transition—shifting from album sales to a streaming business model. For marketing and creative teams at Sony Music, that meant adopting an “always on” campaign plan. 

The team successfully executed this campaign plan by centralizing creative production and approvals in one project. By standardizing processes, the team reduced campaign production time by 75%. Read the case study to learn more about how Sony Music successfully scaled their creative production process.

Trinny London perfects new customer acquisition 

In consumer industries, social media is crucial for building a community of people who feel an affinity with the brand—and Trinny London is no exception. As such, it was imperative that Trinny London’s ad spend was targeted to the correct audience. Using a work management tool, Trinny London was able to nail the process of creating, testing, and implementing ads on multiple social channels.

With the help of a centralized tool, Trinny London improved its ad spend and drove more likes and subscriptions on its YouTube page. Read the case study to learn more about how Trinny London capitalized on paid advertising and social media. 

Turn your marketing plan into marketing success 

A great marketing plan promotes clarity and accountability across teams—so every stakeholder knows what they’re responsible for, by when. Reading this article is the first step to achieving better team alignment, so you can ensure every marketing campaign contributes to your company’s bottom line. 

Use a free marketing plan template to get started

Once you’ve created your marketing strategy and are ready to operationalize your marketing plan, get started with one of our marketing templates . 

Our marketing templates can help you manage and track every aspect of your marketing plan, from creative requests to approval workflows. Centralize your entire marketing plan in one place, customize the roadmap, assign tasks, and build a timeline or calendar. 

Once you’ve operationalized your entire marketing plan with one of our templates, share it with your stakeholders so everyone can work together in the same tool. Your entire team will feel connected to the marketing plan, know what to prioritize, and see how their work contributes to your project objectives . Choose the best marketing template for your team:

Marketing project plan template

Marketing campaign plan template

Product marketing launch template

Editorial calendar template

Agency collaboration template

Creative requests template

Event planning template

GTM strategy template

Still have questions? We have answers. 

What is a marketing plan.

A marketing plan is a detailed roadmap that outlines the different strategies your team will use to achieve organizational objectives. Rather than focusing solely on the end goal, a marketing plan maps every step you need to reach your destination—whether that’s driving pipeline for sales, nurturing your existing customer base, or something in-between. 

As a marketing leader, you know there’s never a shortage of great campaign and project ideas. A marketing plan gives you a framework to effectively prioritize work that aligns to overarching business goals—and then get that work done. Some elements of marketing plans include:

Current business plan

Mission statement  

Business goals

Target customers  

Competitive analysis 

Current marketing mix

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Marketing budget  

What is the purpose of a marketing plan?

The purpose of a marketing plan is to grow your company’s consumer base and strengthen your brand, while aligning with your organization’s mission and vision . The plan should analyze the competitive landscape and industry trends, offer actionable insights to help you gain a competitive advantage, and document each step of your strategy—so you can see how your campaigns work together to drive overarching business goals. 

What is the difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy? 

A marketing plan contains many marketing strategies across different channels. In that way, marketing strategies contribute to your overall marketing plan, working together to reach your company’s overarching business goals.

For example, imagine you’re about to launch a new software product and the goal of your marketing plan is to drive downloads. Your marketing plan could include marketing strategies like creating top-of-funnel blog content and launching a social media campaign. 

What are different types of marketing plans? 

Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, what your timeline is, or which facet of marketing you’re driving, you’ll need to create a different type of marketing plan. Some different types of marketing plans include, but aren’t limited to:

General marketing plan: A general marketing plan is typically an annual or quarterly marketing plan that details the overarching marketing strategies for the period. This type of marketing plan outlines marketing goals, the company’s mission, buyer personas, unique selling propositions, and more. A general marketing plan lays the foundation for other, more specific marketing plans that an organization may employ. 

Product launch marketing plan: A product launch marketing plan is a step-by-step plan for marketing a new product or expanding into a new market. It helps you build awareness and interest by targeting the right audience, with the right messaging, in the right timeframe—so potential customers are ready to buy your new offering right away. Nailing your product launch marketing plan can reinforce your overall brand and fast-track sales. For a step-by-step framework to organize all the moving pieces of a launch, check out our product marketing launch template .

Paid marketing plan: This plan includes all the paid strategies in your marketing plan, like pay-per-click, paid social media advertising, native advertising, and display advertising. It’s especially important to do audience research prior to launching your paid marketing plan to ensure you’re maximizing ROI. Consult with content strategists to ensure your ads align with your buyer personas so you know you’re showing ads to the right people. 

Content marketing plan: A content marketing plan outlines the different content strategies and campaigns you’ll use to promote your product or service. When putting together a content marketing plan, start by identifying your audience. Then use market research tools to get the best insights into what topics your target audience is most interested in.

SEO marketing plan: Your SEO marketing plan should work directly alongside your content marketing plan as you chart content that’s designed to rank in search results. While your content marketing plan should include all types of content, your SEO marketing plan will cover the top-of-funnel content that drives new users to your site. Planning search engine-friendly content is only one step in your SEO marketing plan. You’ll also need to include link-building and technical aspects in order to ensure your site and content are as optimized as possible.

Social media marketing plan: This plan will highlight the marketing strategies you plan to accomplish on social media. Like in any general or digital marketing plan , your social media strategy should identify your ideal customer base and determine how they engage on different social media platforms. From there, you can cater your social media content to your target audience.  

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How to make a business plan

Table of Contents

How to make a good business plan: step-by-step guide.

A business plan is a strategic roadmap used to navigate the challenging journey of entrepreneurship. It's the foundation upon which you build a successful business.

A well-crafted business plan can help you define your vision, clarify your goals, and identify potential problems before they arise.

But where do you start? How do you create a business plan that sets you up for success?

This article will explore the step-by-step process of creating a comprehensive business plan.

What is a business plan?

A business plan is a formal document that outlines a business's objectives, strategies, and operational procedures. It typically includes the following information about a company:

Products or services

Target market

Competitors

Marketing and sales strategies

Financial plan

Management team

A business plan serves as a roadmap for a company's success and provides a blueprint for its growth and development. It helps entrepreneurs and business owners organize their ideas, evaluate the feasibility, and identify potential challenges and opportunities.

As well as serving as a guide for business owners, a business plan can attract investors and secure funding. It demonstrates the company's understanding of the market, its ability to generate revenue and profits, and its strategy for managing risks and achieving success.

Business plan vs. business model canvas

A business plan may seem similar to a business model canvas, but each document serves a different purpose.

A business model canvas is a high-level overview that helps entrepreneurs and business owners quickly test and iterate their ideas. It is often a one-page document that briefly outlines the following:

Key partnerships

Key activities

Key propositions

Customer relationships

Customer segments

Key resources

Cost structure

Revenue streams

On the other hand, a Business Plan Template provides a more in-depth analysis of a company's strategy and operations. It is typically a lengthy document and requires significant time and effort to develop.

A business model shouldn’t replace a business plan, and vice versa. Business owners should lay the foundations and visually capture the most important information with a Business Model Canvas Template . Because this is a fast and efficient way to communicate a business idea, a business model canvas is a good starting point before developing a more comprehensive business plan.

A business plan can aim to secure funding from investors or lenders, while a business model canvas communicates a business idea to potential customers or partners.

Why is a business plan important?

A business plan is crucial for any entrepreneur or business owner wanting to increase their chances of success.

Here are some of the many benefits of having a thorough business plan.

Helps to define the business goals and objectives

A business plan encourages you to think critically about your goals and objectives. Doing so lets you clearly understand what you want to achieve and how you plan to get there.

A well-defined set of goals, objectives, and key results also provides a sense of direction and purpose, which helps keep business owners focused and motivated.

Guides decision-making

A business plan requires you to consider different scenarios and potential problems that may arise in your business. This awareness allows you to devise strategies to deal with these issues and avoid pitfalls.

With a clear plan, entrepreneurs can make informed decisions aligning with their overall business goals and objectives. This helps reduce the risk of making costly mistakes and ensures they make decisions with long-term success in mind.

Attracts investors and secures funding

Investors and lenders often require a business plan before considering investing in your business. A document that outlines the company's goals, objectives, and financial forecasts can help instill confidence in potential investors and lenders.

A well-written business plan demonstrates that you have thoroughly thought through your business idea and have a solid plan for success.

Identifies potential challenges and risks

A business plan requires entrepreneurs to consider potential challenges and risks that could impact their business. For example:

Is there enough demand for my product or service?

Will I have enough capital to start my business?

Is the market oversaturated with too many competitors?

What will happen if my marketing strategy is ineffective?

By identifying these potential challenges, entrepreneurs can develop strategies to mitigate risks and overcome challenges. This can reduce the likelihood of costly mistakes and ensure the business is well-positioned to take on any challenges.

Provides a basis for measuring success

A business plan serves as a framework for measuring success by providing clear goals and financial projections . Entrepreneurs can regularly refer to the original business plan as a benchmark to measure progress. By comparing the current business position to initial forecasts, business owners can answer questions such as:

Are we where we want to be at this point?

Did we achieve our goals?

If not, why not, and what do we need to do?

After assessing whether the business is meeting its objectives or falling short, business owners can adjust their strategies as needed.

How to make a business plan step by step

The steps below will guide you through the process of creating a business plan and what key components you need to include.

1. Create an executive summary

Start with a brief overview of your entire plan. The executive summary should cover your business plan's main points and key takeaways.

Keep your executive summary concise and clear with the Executive Summary Template . The simple design helps readers understand the crux of your business plan without reading the entire document.

2. Write your company description

Provide a detailed explanation of your company. Include information on what your company does, the mission statement, and your vision for the future.

Provide additional background information on the history of your company, the founders, and any notable achievements or milestones.

3. Conduct a market analysis

Conduct an in-depth analysis of your industry, competitors, and target market. This is best done with a SWOT analysis to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Next, identify your target market's needs, demographics, and behaviors.

Use the Competitive Analysis Template to brainstorm answers to simple questions like:

What does the current market look like?

Who are your competitors?

What are they offering?

What will give you a competitive advantage?

Who is your target market?

What are they looking for and why?

How will your product or service satisfy a need?

These questions should give you valuable insights into the current market and where your business stands.

4. Describe your products and services

Provide detailed information about your products and services. This includes pricing information, product features, and any unique selling points.

Use the Product/Market Fit Template to explain how your products meet the needs of your target market. Describe what sets them apart from the competition.

5. Design a marketing and sales strategy

Outline how you plan to promote and sell your products. Your marketing strategy and sales strategy should include information about your:

Pricing strategy

Advertising and promotional tactics

Sales channels

The Go to Market Strategy Template is a great way to visually map how you plan to launch your product or service in a new or existing market.

6. Determine budget and financial projections

Document detailed information on your business’ finances. Describe the current financial position of the company and how you expect the finances to play out.

Some details to include in this section are:

Startup costs

Revenue projections

Profit and loss statement

Funding you have received or plan to receive

Strategy for raising funds

7. Set the organization and management structure

Define how your company is structured and who will be responsible for each aspect of the business. Use the Business Organizational Chart Template to visually map the company’s teams, roles, and hierarchy.

As well as the organization and management structure, discuss the legal structure of your business. Clarify whether your business is a corporation, partnership, sole proprietorship, or LLC.

8. Make an action plan

At this point in your business plan, you’ve described what you’re aiming for. But how are you going to get there? The Action Plan Template describes the following steps to move your business plan forward. Outline the next steps you plan to take to bring your business plan to fruition.

Types of business plans

Several types of business plans cater to different purposes and stages of a company's lifecycle. Here are some of the most common types of business plans.

Startup business plan

A startup business plan is typically an entrepreneur's first business plan. This document helps entrepreneurs articulate their business idea when starting a new business.

Not sure how to make a business plan for a startup? It’s pretty similar to a regular business plan, except the primary purpose of a startup business plan is to convince investors to provide funding for the business. A startup business plan also outlines the potential target market, product/service offering, marketing plan, and financial projections.

Strategic business plan

A strategic business plan is a long-term plan that outlines a company's overall strategy, objectives, and tactics. This type of strategic plan focuses on the big picture and helps business owners set goals and priorities and measure progress.

The primary purpose of a strategic business plan is to provide direction and guidance to the company's management team and stakeholders. The plan typically covers a period of three to five years.

Operational business plan

An operational business plan is a detailed document that outlines the day-to-day operations of a business. It focuses on the specific activities and processes required to run the business, such as:

Organizational structure

Staffing plan

Production plan

Quality control

Inventory management

Supply chain

The primary purpose of an operational business plan is to ensure that the business runs efficiently and effectively. It helps business owners manage their resources, track their performance, and identify areas for improvement.

Growth-business plan

A growth-business plan is a strategic plan that outlines how a company plans to expand its business. It helps business owners identify new market opportunities and increase revenue and profitability. The primary purpose of a growth-business plan is to provide a roadmap for the company's expansion and growth.

The 3 Horizons of Growth Template is a great tool to identify new areas of growth. This framework categorizes growth opportunities into three categories: Horizon 1 (core business), Horizon 2 (emerging business), and Horizon 3 (potential business).

One-page business plan

A one-page business plan is a condensed version of a full business plan that focuses on the most critical aspects of a business. It’s a great tool for entrepreneurs who want to quickly communicate their business idea to potential investors, partners, or employees.

A one-page business plan typically includes sections such as business concept, value proposition, revenue streams, and cost structure.

Best practices for how to make a good business plan

Here are some additional tips for creating a business plan:

Use a template

A template can help you organize your thoughts and effectively communicate your business ideas and strategies. Starting with a template can also save you time and effort when formatting your plan.

Miro’s extensive library of customizable templates includes all the necessary sections for a comprehensive business plan. With our templates, you can confidently present your business plans to stakeholders and investors.

Be practical

Avoid overestimating revenue projections or underestimating expenses. Your business plan should be grounded in practical realities like your budget, resources, and capabilities.

Be specific

Provide as much detail as possible in your business plan. A specific plan is easier to execute because it provides clear guidance on what needs to be done and how. Without specific details, your plan may be too broad or vague, making it difficult to know where to start or how to measure success.

Be thorough with your research

Conduct thorough research to fully understand the market, your competitors, and your target audience . By conducting thorough research, you can identify potential risks and challenges your business may face and develop strategies to mitigate them.

Get input from others

It can be easy to become overly focused on your vision and ideas, leading to tunnel vision and a lack of objectivity. By seeking input from others, you can identify potential opportunities you may have overlooked.

Review and revise regularly

A business plan is a living document. You should update it regularly to reflect market, industry, and business changes. Set aside time for regular reviews and revisions to ensure your plan remains relevant and effective.

Create a winning business plan to chart your path to success

Starting or growing a business can be challenging, but it doesn't have to be. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting, a well-written business plan can make or break your business’ success.

The purpose of a business plan is more than just to secure funding and attract investors. It also serves as a roadmap for achieving your business goals and realizing your vision. With the right mindset, tools, and strategies, you can develop a visually appealing, persuasive business plan.

Ready to make an effective business plan that works for you? Check out our library of ready-made strategy and planning templates and chart your path to success.

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10 Free Sales Plan Templates for an Effective Sales Strategy

Praburam Srinivasan

Growth Marketing Manager

February 15, 2024

Every sales team wants to win more leads and close more deals. But how do you make that happen? With a solid sales plan, of course! 

A sales plan gives your team a way to focus on your goals while taking only the necessary steps to get there. It has everything you need to win, which means it’s often a comprehensive guide—and that takes time.

And we’re guessing you’re already pressed for time. ⏲️

Fortunately, creating a plan doesn’t have to be complicated—with the right template, you can simplify the process.

That’s why we’re sharing this list of the best sales plan templates. Not only are these sales strategy templates absolutely free but they’ll also save you time so you can start closing those deals faster. ⚡

What Is a Sales Plan and Why Create One?

1. clickup sales plan template, 2. clickup sales and marketing plan template, 3. clickup sales strategy guide template, 4. clickup sales pipeline template, 5. clickup sales kpi template, 6. clickup b2b sales strategy template, 7. clickup sales calls template, 8. word sales plan template by business news daily, 9. word sales plan template by templatelab, 10. excel sales plan template by spreadsheet.com.

A sales plan is your roadmap for how to make sales effectively. Think of it in the same way that a business plan guides the strategy for your company or a marketing plan sets out how you’ll find, reach, and serve your ideal customers. 

A good sales plan sets out your sales goals , objectives, and sales activities. It considers your target audience, brand, products, services, and needs—and covers which sales tactics and strategies you’ll use to close deals, as well as which metrics you’ll use to measure success. 

Your sales plan is a practical plan that outlines who’s responsible for what, the resources you’ll need, and the overall goals you’re working toward. Without one, your sales team will feel lost and struggle to connect with your customer base.

With a strategic sales plan, though, the sales manager and the entire team will know exactly what you’re trying to achieve and the steps needed to get there. 📚

How to choose the best sales plan template

There are so many different sales plan templates out there. Some are designed for specific niche audiences, while others are more generic and easier to customize. How do you know which is the right template for you?

When you’re thinking about using a sales plan template, consider the following: 

• Ease of use: Is the template easy to use? Will everyone in the team structure and sales planning process be able to understand it fully?
• Customization: Can I personalize the template to match my sales goals?

• Collaboration: Can my sales team work on this template together?
• Integrations: When I create a sales plan, can I integrate this template with other aspects of my sales pipeline or workflow, like task management?
• Artificial intelligence: Can I use a built-in AI writing tool or copywriting tool to help me complete the template? Are there automation features that speed up the process?
• Platform: Which sales app is this template for? Do I have it already, or should I invest in it? What’s the pricing like?

Asking yourself these questions will help you figure out what your needs are, so you can then choose a template to match. 

10 Sales Plan Templates to Help You Close Your Next Deal

Now that you have a better idea of what you’re looking for, let’s explore what’s out there. Take a look at our hand-picked selection of the best sales plan templates available today for Microsoft Word and sales enablement tools like ClickUp.

Smart sales teams use a sales plan to map out their route to success. The best sales teams use the Sales Plan Template by ClickUp to simplify the process and ensure they don’t leave anything out.

This template is designed with all the structure you need to create a comprehensive sales plan that can drive results. Use this template to set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) business goals; plan strategies and tactics; and organize all your sales ideas in one place.

The list-style template is split into sections that cover the executive summary all the way through to specific tactics and strategies. Beneath this, you can arrange tasks and subtasks, and see the progress at a glance. View task titles, deadlines, who’s responsible, approval status, and a visual progress bar.

Use this template if you want to consolidate all your sales tasks and initiatives in one area. Add your sales tasks and tactics, then tag team members so you can see what’s happening and hold everyone accountable. ✅

While sales and marketing teams often work independently, sometimes it’s useful to collaborate on shared goals. With the Sales and Marketing Plan Template by ClickUp , you can organize and run your sales and marketing operations from one location.

Our collaborative template makes it easy to set sales and marketing goals and objectives, visualize your tasks, work together on sales and marketing campaigns, and track your results in real-time. View the status of your sales and marketing projects, adjust your plans, and monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs)—all from one view.

This sales and marketing plan template allows you to split your tasks into sections. The examples in the template include revenue goals, competitive analysis, and action items, but you can customize these to match your needs exactly.

View tasks beneath these categories to see at a glance whether there are any roadblocks when a task is due, and who is responsible for it.

Add this template to your collection if you want to work more collaboratively with your marketing team—especially on preparing assets for sales calls or outreach programs. 📞

Before you can plan your sales tactics, you first need to decide what your overall goals are. The Sales Strategy Guide Template by ClickUp is your go-to resource for determining your approach.

This sales process template explains the benefits of having a well-defined approach and gives you a central place to create, review, and store your own. Everyone on your team can then access your sales strategy guide to help them understand what to do when prospecting and closing deals.

Our sales goals and strategy guide template is presented in a document format. Some sections and headings allow you to split your guide into different areas, making it easier to read and understand.

Use the prompts to fill out your own strategy guide details like your target market, sales strategies, and how you’ll monitor progress.

Use this sales strategy guide template to create a resource for your team. Make it the only destination for everything your sales reps need to know to execute an effective sales plan. 📝

Sales strategies are a must-have for any great sales team, but beyond that, you need a way to record and monitor specific tasks or initiatives. That’s where the Sales Pipeline Template by ClickUp comes in handy whether you need a visual into sales forecasting or your specific sales goals.

This sales pipeline template gives you one place to store all your daily sales-related tasks. With this template, it’s easy to work toward your sales goals, track leads, map out each step of the sales process, and organize all your tasks in one place.

You can view a task’s title, assignee, status, due date, complexity level, start date, and department—or customize the experience with your own custom fields. 

With ClickUp’s Sales KPI Template , you and your team can create and manage goals surrounding your sales initiatives. See instantly what’s in progress and when it’s due, alongside the task’s impact level.

This allows you to identify high-priority tasks to focus on and to react quickly if it looks like there’s a roadblock.

This sales KPI template includes:

• Custom Statuses: Create tasks with custom statuses such as Open and Complete to keep track of the progress of each KPI
• Custom Fields: Utilize 15 different custom attributes such as Upsell Attempts, Value of Quotes, Product Cost, No of Quotes by Unit, Repeat Sales Revenue, to save vital KPI information and easily visualize performance data
• Custom Views: Open 4 different views in different ClickUp configurations, such as the Weekly Report, Monthly Report, Revenue Board per Month, and Getting Started Guide so that all the information is easy to access and organized
• Project Management: Improve KPI tracking with tagging, dependency warnings, emails, and more

This template gives you a simple way to see which tasks are complete or in progress, so you can monitor the progress of your project and crush your sales KPIs. 📈

While there’s not a huge difference in the way we market to business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) customers these days, it’s still useful to have specific templates for niche needs. If you’re driving sales in the B2B space, you need the B2B Sales Strategy Template by ClickUp .

Like our first sales plan template, this one gives you space to communicate your sales objectives and revenue targets, but it also introduces other areas—like market research, stakeholder analysis, customer relationships, buyer persona, and customer pain points. 

This document-style template is highly customizable so you can make it match your brand style and sales approach. Fill in each section and use the supplied prompts to complete your B2B sales strategy document even faster. 

Add this template to your collection if you’re working in B2B sales and want to approach your process in a more organized way. Use the template to build a strong sales strategy, then share it with the rest of your sales team so they know how to execute against your sales and company goals. 🎯

ClickUp’s Sales Calls Template is designed to streamline the sales process, from tracking contacts and calls to managing sales opportunities.

The template includes custom statuses for creating unique workflows, ensuring that every call and client interaction is accounted for. It also provides an easy-to-use Sales CRM to manage and track leads, visualize sales opportunities in the sales funnel, and keep all contacts organized.

With additional features like the Sales Phone Calls SOP Template, sales professionals can empower their teams to make every call count and close more deals. ClickUp’s Sales Calls Template is a versatile solution for sales teams, aiding in everything from daily calls to long-term sales forecasting.

We’re big advocates of using ClickUp as the go-to place to store everything about your sales workflow, but if you’re limited to using Microsoft Word or Google Docs, then this template is a great option.

This sales business plan template has sections for your executive summary, mission statement, target customers, sales targets, benchmarks, and more. Each section has useful prompts to guide you on completing your new sales plan.

Use this template if you’re tied to using Microsoft Word and want a comprehensive guide on how to create your own sales plan or sales strategy. 📄

If you want a free sales plan template or want to choose from a variety of options, this collection of Word templates by TemplateLab is a good place to do that.

There’s a wide range of options available including sales process plans, lead generation plans, sales action plans, and sales report templates . Each template works with Microsoft Word, and you can customize the look and feel to match your brand or your sales goals.

Use this resource if you prefer to see a range of templates on one page, or if you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for until you see it. You can easily set your sales goals and the action steps needed to achieve them. 📃

Successful sales strategies need to be integrated with other teams—like your marketing department—to ensure your sales objectives are clear and possibly align with the overall marketing strategy too. Choose your specific sales goals, set revenue targets, and describe everything in detail with these Word sales planning and sales process templates.

The Excel Sales Plan Template by Spreadsheet.com is a comprehensive and user-friendly tool designed to assist businesses in developing effective sales strategies and managing their sales activities.

T his template is crafted with the aim of providing a structured framework for sales planning, enabling organizations to set clear objectives, track performance, and optimize their sales processes.

Reach Sales Goals With Free Sales Plan Templates

A strategic sales plan makes it easier to achieve your goals. Give your team the guidance and support they need with the help of a well-crafted free sales plan template.

If you’re considering making even more improvements in how you work, try ClickUp for free . We don’t just have incredible sales process templates: Our range of features and AI tools for sales make it easy for you to optimize and run your entire sales funnel and CRM system from one place. ✨

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Original text

The sales and marketing section of your business plan is especially crucial because it determines how you’ll plan on generating profit and describes how you intend to create exposure to best sell your product. It’s in this area of your business plan that you’ll hone the key elements of your marketing strategy. The actual implementation of your sales and marketing initiatives actually occurs before you launch, when you’ve set your go-to-market date so strategize the components of your sales and marketing plan early on.

Here’s a quick guide on what your key sales and marketing considerations should be:

This section should contain the following elements and should be no more than four pages.

Unique Value Proposition

Pricing strategy.

• Sales/Distribution Plan

Marketing Plan

Your unique value proposition is the market need you’re planning to solve. Think of it as your secret ingredient – your “special sauce.” This may be a combination of factors including customer service, technology, a twist on a product or service, etc. Create the case for why your product deserves to have a sustainable business built around it.

Determine your pricing scheme. First, check what your competition is charging. This should give you an indication of what customers are willing to spend. Then, determine how you can add value. Until you get your product out there, it’s hard to know for sure how much your added benefit is worth in the customer’s mind. The keyword here is “reasonable.” You can charge any price you want to, but for every product or service, there’s a limit to how much the consumer is willing to pay.

Remember, even if you’re trying to be the lowest-cost provider, give a higher perceived value to your ideal customer to stand apart from the competition. Competitors can slash their prices to meet or beat yours, so be very careful if you decide to compete on cost.

Sales & Distribution Plan

This section describes how you intend to get your product to customers and how you’ll measure the effectiveness of those methods. For example, once you figure out where you’ll be selling your product – online, at a retail outlet, door-to-door – determine the type of sales team you’ll need and how you’ll compensate them.

In terms of distribution, think about how you’ll actually get the product or service into the hands of the customer. Ultimately, you’ll want to sell your product or service in as many ways that make sense for your company: online, at a retail outlet, via house parties or mail order, or through other companies. Initially, however, focus on selling through just one of these channels so you can build your business before comfortably extending to others.

You’re going to need customers to buy your product. How do you plan to get them? There are many free or low-cost strategies such as referrals, word-of-mouth, public relations, and marketing partners to help cross-promote or sell your product, so I would avoid any expensive print, TV, or radio advertising campaigns at these early stages.

Create your strategy for attracting customers. Before you start actually executing your marketing strategy, however, think about “branding.” This is the look and feel of your business, what customers experience when interacting with it, from the fonts, colors, and text of the website and your business cards to the overall image you portray in the product itself. This branding will be reflected in the execution of your marketing strategy.

Describe how you want customers to experience your product or service. Take a look at products or companies that you really like, and think about why you like them. What makes you feel good about them? Do these characteristics permeate all aspects of the product, from website to packaging to letterhead?

After you document the marketing plan activities, calculate the costs that you expect to incur. For example, if referrals are part of the strategy, then calculate how much you’re willing to pay a referral partner for each new customer they bring your way. Will it be $1, $20, $50, or more? Let’s say, for example, you expect a referral partner to refer 100 clients to you, and each of those referred clients spends $10, giving you a total of $1,000. You’ve agreed to pay this partner $1 for each referral, so you’ll spend $100 on referrals for your marketing strategy. In this example, your cost of acquisition – the cost you pay for each new customer – is $1. You’ll need to know this number, especially when you draft your financial plan.

Business Plan Template for a Startup Business To increase your odds of a successful business startup, download this step-by-step business plan template you can use to plan for your new business.

Every Business Deserves Planning Don’t make the common mistake of dismissing the value of planning. Every well-run business needs to manage strategy, metrics and essential business numbers.

Copyright © 2024 SCORE Association, SCORE.org

Funded, in part, through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.

How to present your sales and marketing strategy in your business plan?

The marketing and sales section forms the cornerstone of any business plan. It details your approach to reach and sell to your target audience. Whilst some entrepreneurs believe that this section should predominantly be about advertising, it covers a lot more than that.

Without adequate knowledge of the information required, writing this section can be challenging. This guide covers that aspect and also talks about the overall objective of this section and how long it should be amongst other things.

After reading our guide, you’ll be well on your way to drafting a comprehensive strategy section that can help you secure financing from lenders and investors.

Ready? Let’s get started!

In this guide:

• What is the objective of the marketing and sales strategy of your business plan?

What information should I include in the marketing and sales strategy section of my business plan?

• How long should the marketing and sales strategy of your business plan be?
• Example of a marketing and sales strategy section in a business plan

What tools can you use to write your business plan?

What is the objective of the marketing and sales strategy section in your business plan.

The sales and marketing section follows both the market analysis and the pricing subsections. Its main objective is to communicate to readers that you have a well-defined go-to-market strategy that will help you reach and sell to your target customers. 

A compelling sales and marketing section can help you convey how you plan to capture your target market’s attention and generate sales as well as build competence with investors and lenders. 

When writing this section, you need to show that you plan on using effective distribution and communication channels.  

• Distribution channels are what you use to sell your goods or services. Online or physical stores, or door-to-door sales, for example.
• Communication channels are what you use to promote your brand to target customers. This can include ads or flyers for example.

Need a convincing business plan?

The Business Plan Shop makes it easy to create a financial forecast to assess the potential profitability of your projects, and write a business plan that’ll wow investors.

We have discussed that your business plan's marketing and sales section should be well-structured and presentable. 

When writing this section, all businesses should provide a rationale for their distribution and communication channels by elaborating on the following factors: 

Here, you need to talk about why you think your chosen channels will help you reach your target market. 

For example:

• Younger audiences might be more receptive to messaging and marketing initiative on social media, while other demographics might prefer traditional media like TV or radio.
• Selling through national retailers might give you immediate scale - though being at a lower margin than through a network of owned stores

The best channels for your business will depend on the type of products or services you sell and the tarket customer segments you identified in your market analysis.

Cost and margin

In this section, you need to emphasize why the channels you have chosen will be cost-effective and share details pertaining to the budget allocation. 

For example, cold calling small businesses might be a cheaper way of selling your services than using advertising.

Competition 

To address this factor, you need to provide details about how and why your chosen channels will help you gain a competitive advantage.

A competitive advantage refers to a unique attribute, quality, or strategy that allows your business to outperform its competitors and achieve superior performance in its industry or market. It's what sets your company apart and gives it a strong position in the marketplace. 

For example, a hybrid network of owned and franchised stores might enable you to quickly achieve national coverage and greater brand recognition than your competitors.

Implementation 

Here, you need to provide details about who (from your sales and marketing team) will be responsible for actioning these channels and a timeline pertaining to key goals and objectives for each.  

Key performance indicators (KPIs) 

Lastly, you also need to provide details about the KPIs you will use to measure the effectiveness of the distribution and communication channels. 

For distribution channels, this could include:

• Gross profit margin
• Return on investment

For communication channels, this could include:

• Brand recognition
• Number of website or in-store visitors

It’s important to understand that the factors stated above (reach, cost, competition, implementation and KPIs) may be applicable to all industries. However, the details used for each factor must be tailored to the industry and customer profiles targeted by your own business. 

With that understanding, let’s look at what information should be included in this section for different industries. 

Agriculture

Agricultural businesses usually sell either to farmers (equipment, services, etc.), to consumers (food) and retailers (food, raw materials, equipment, etc.), or to food manufacturers.

With that in mind, your marketing plan should ideally provide details about how you plan to communicate in order to reach these customers. For example, you might decide to invest in a couple bilboards with directions to your farm if you sale directly to consumers.

As for the sales strategy, you need to discuss your approach to distribution and inventory management (especially for fresh produce). For example, selling to food manufacturers might give you a greater scale at the cost of a lower margin and a dependency on a small number of customers.

Construction

Construction businesses usually sell either to households or other construction businesses and builders (subcontractors).

Your marketing strategy might include actions such as highlighting past projects to showcase customer satisfaction on your website and brochures, to attend industry events to promote your know-how, or to invest in a branded fleet of vehicles.

When providing details about your sales strategy, you need to explain how you'll bid on projects, provide estimates, and effectively manage client expectations. 

Hospitality

The hospitality industry is one that’s heavily based on customer demand around your location(s) and meeting patrons' expectations to generate positive word of mouth.

Your marketing plan might revolve around using local advertising and food bloggers to increase awareness, and a loyalty program to increase repeat visits.  

Your sales strategy might be centered around: leveraging online booking platforms to fill the restaurant outside of peak hours, marketplaces to drive takeaway sales, and staff training to promote higher margin items on your menu.

Manufacturing

For manufacturers, your marketing and sales section will depend on whether you plan to manufacture your own products or produce them for other brands. It’s important to understand that both these are entirely different target customers with varying requirements. 

If you plan on manufacturing for other brands, you need to showcase your manufacturing capabilities, quality standards, and ability to fulfill orders. You can also provide details about your production process and ability to meet tight deadlines. 

If you plan to manufacture your own products, you must detail how you plan to attract competent distributors or set up your own distribution network. To do this, you can provide details about the uniqueness of your product and how it adds value to the end customer. 

The sales and marketing plans of retailers will most likely revolve around customer acquisition, repeat purchases, and enhancing the shopping experience. You could provide details about visual merchandising, store layout, online presence, and loyalty programs.

You could also mention store locations, pricing strategies, and promotions.

The way services are marketed and sold vary greatly depending on the type of service, the type of customers (businesses vs. consumers), the contract duration and the price point (which will influence the length of the sales cycle).

The sales and marketing plan of a hairdresser might be close to the one put in place by a retailer or other types of high street businesses.

Inversely the sales and marketing plan of a high end business consulting firm might include lead generation efforts through content marketing, networking, cold calling, and targeted advertising.

How long should the sales and marketing plan of your business plan be?

The ideal length for the sales and marketing plan depends upon several factors, such as the reader's familiarity with the industry you operate in and the size of your business.

The sales and marketing section of a grocery shop may not require much information as foot trafic around the location will be the primary lever. 

However, a business-to-business (B2B) company that provides software for human resources might be more complex and require further details.

In general, one or two paragraphs per action planned or lever mobilised is enough, though a complex industry or larger business may require to communicate more information. However, you can use visuals and graphics to help reduce the length and make complex concepts easier to understand.

Example of a sales and marketing section in a business plan 

Below is an example of how the sales and marketing section of your business plan might look like.

This example was taken from one of  our business plan templates .

In this part, we will review three solutions for writing a professional business plan:

• Using Word and Excel
• Hiring a consultant to write your business plan
• Utilizing an online business plan software

Create your business plan using Word and Excel

Creating a business plan using Word and Excel is old fashion, error prone, and (very) time consuming.

First of all, using Excel to create your financial forecast is only feasible if you have a degree in accounting and experience in financial modelling, because lenders are unlikely to trust the accuracy of your financial forecast otherwise.

Secondly, using Word means starting from scratch and formatting the document yourself once written - a process that is quite tedious. There are also no instructions or examples to guide you through each section making the overall process much longer than it needs to be.

Thirdly, for a business plan to be really useful it needs to be tracked against the company's actual financial performance and regularly updated which is a very manual process if you are using Excel.

Hire a consultant to write your business plan

This is a good option if you have the budget for it - from experience you need to budget at least £1.5k ($2.0k) for a complete business plan, more if you need to make changes after the initial version (which happens frequently after the initial meetings with lenders).

Consultants are experienced in writing business plans and most of them adept at creating financial forecasts without errors. Furthermore, hiring a consultant can save you time and allow you to focus on the day-to-day operations of your business.

Use an online business plan software for your business plan

Another alternative is to use online business plan software .

There are several advantages to using specialized software:

• You are guided through the writing process by detailed instructions and examples for each part of the plan
• You can be inspired by already written business plan templates
• You can easily make your financial forecast by letting the software take care of the financial calculations for you without errors
• You get a professional document, formatted and ready to be sent to your bank
• The software will enable you to easily track your actual financial performance against your forecast and update your forecast as time goes by

If you're interested in using this type of solution, you can try our software for free by signing up here .

Also on The Business Plan Shop

• How to do a market analysis for a business plan
• 7 tips for writing an effective business plan
• What is a one-page business plan
• Business plan vs business model

Do you know anyone struggling to craft the marketing and sales part of their business plan? Share this article and help them out. 

Founder & CEO at The Business Plan Shop Ltd

Guillaume Le Brouster is a seasoned entrepreneur and financier.

Guillaume has been an entrepreneur for more than a decade and has first-hand experience of starting, running, and growing a successful business.

Prior to being a business owner, Guillaume worked in investment banking and private equity, where he spent most of his time creating complex financial forecasts, writing business plans, and analysing financial statements to make financing and investment decisions.

Guillaume holds a Master's Degree in Finance from ESCP Business School and a Bachelor of Science in Business & Management from Paris Dauphine University.

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Business Plan Section 6: Sales and Marketing

Learn about the points to address in the sales and marketing section of your business plan, plus key aspects for a successful sales strategy.

Remember all that research and hard work you put into the Market Analysis section of your business plan? You learned all about your company, your customers, and your competition. This is where it will all pay off: sales and marketing!

In this section of the plan, you’re actually going to spell out how you’ll market your idea, along with the specifics of how you’ll get business. Sales and marketing are what will grow your business and help you achieve success.

As always, keep your audience in mind. If your business plan is meant for your eyes only, or as an internal document for your staff, you won’t have to be as detailed or specific as you should if it’s intended for a lender or potential investors. In the latter case, you’ll want to demonstrate a very well-planned strategy that will give them confidence in your proposal and make them more likely to want to fund your business.

Sales and marketing strategies will vary by industry, and your strategy will be individually tailored to your company, but there are general guidelines that cover most businesses. Because your marketing plan will lead to sales, let’s start there.

4 Things Your Marketing Plan Must Cover

Many marketing textbooks refer to the “four Ps” of marketing, which is an easy way to remember what’s involved in a solid plan.

Explain in detail the product(s) or service(s) you’re offering, particularly how they are different from or better than what’s already available. What benefits do they provide to your potential customers? What ways is your product or service unique? What makes doing business with you preferable to dealing with someone else? All of these things will help make up your marketing message.

Talk about how you’ll portray the company and what kind of image you’ll present, especially how it will help connect you to your potential customers. Include a picture of your logo and anything that might carry your image, such as vans, trucks, or uniforms. Show screenshots of your website, photos of your store, pictures of your packaging, and anything else that conveys your company’s brand.

Once you’ve gotten the customers in the door (or online), you have to deliver on what you’ve sold them. Marketing isn’t just about promising, it’s also following through and delivering what you said you would.

You may find it helpful to outline exactly how a transaction with your business would take place. Also touch on return policies and customer service. You may not immediately think of these as “marketing” issues, but think back to the last time you had difficulty with a company and told five friends you’d never do business with them again, or you saw someone complain about a company on Facebook or Twitter. Cover your bases before you get caught short in a situation you hadn’t planned for.

It’s important to talk about where you’ll be located and how you’ll get your products and services to your customers. If you’re planning an online business, will you also have a brick and mortar store? What percentage of sales do you project will come from each?

If your business involves manufacturing or distribution of a product, discuss shipping and labeling requirements, and how you’ll meet them. What are your delivery terms and costs? Are you using distributors, and will you charge separately for shipping or build that into the product price?

How you decide to price your product or service is key to how much you’ll sell and how much profit you can make. Again, the Market Analysis work you did will come in very handy in helping you to price your product competitively while still turning a worthwhile profit.

By now, you should have a solid understanding of what your expenses will be, so you know how much you need to make to break even. Of course, if you have startup expenses (and who doesn’t?), you will need to factor those in, as well, understanding that your profit margin will grow when they’re paid off.

Discuss how you’ve arrived at the prices you have, where they fit in with what the competition is doing, and what kind of volume you’ll need to do to be profitable.

You can have the best idea in the world, but if no one knows about it, it won’t sell. So, how are you going to reach your target audience and turn them into customers? Will you advertise? Which media? How often? And how will you split up the budget?

Keep in mind that some forms of traditional and digital advertising cost money, such as buying radio or print ads, or advertising through Google. Some, such as social media or public relations can be handled in-house by a staff member (or outsourced for a fee). And others can be quite variable in cost, such as printing brochures, flyers, catalogs, etc.

How much business do you think you’ll get from each campaign? Will you give coupons, discounts, or offer other incentives to get people to try you out?

Describe how you’ll know whether or not your marketing strategy is effective, such as how many coupons are redeemed or how much of an increase in web or store traffic you expect. You’ll need to project what kind of a return on your advertising investment you anticipate to figure out how much you should be spending.

The Fifth P: People

Some marketing experts think a fifth “P” should be added to the four we’ve already discussed: people. We touched on it under customer service, but a big part of marketing is the level of service you’re able to offer to your customers, and your people are the ones responsible for that.

Your restaurant might serve the best food in town, but your servers can have an even greater impact on the dining experience. You can discuss it here or in the next section, sales, but do make sure to talk about the people who will deal with your customers and handle your customer service, what kind of training they’ll get, and how you’ll measure their effectiveness.

Now that you have your marketing plan together, you need to close the sale and make it pay off. Marketing will help you get customers in the door, to your website, or on the phone, but the best marketing in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t make the sale. That brings us to the next step of the plan, your sales strategy.

What to include in your sales plan:

How much product will you sell or how many contracts will you close over the first month, six months, and year? Be specific, understanding what your cash flow needs to be to keep the lights on and your employees paid. Keep the numbers realistic, however, even though you may want to impress potential funders.

How will you make the sale, and who will do it? Are you selling a product directly to users through a website? Will you bring your merchandise to retailers for them to sell? Are you doing the selling yourself or will you have a sales force? If you have salespeople, will they be paid a straight salary or commission? If you have a service business, where will you get your leads, and how will you follow up? Perhaps you’ll offer an incentive program to current customers for referrals. Describe the sales effort in your plan.

If you offer different product lines or services, you may need a separate strategy for each. Similarly, if you’re selling to different segments of the market, you shouldn’t rely on the same approach to sell everyone. Selling at a craft fair is quite different than setting up a website or offering your product through ebay.com or etsy.com.

Detail whichever approaches you’ve decided on and spell out how you’ll proceed, including any sales quotas you may have established.

Get specific about the numbers you’re looking to achieve over a specific time period. Not only will investors want to see that, it’s an important way for you to know if you’re meeting your targets so you can make any necessary adjustments along the way.

Once you’ve established yourself, how will you continue to expand? This covers both your internal growth as a company, such as how you’ll increase your staff, and how you’ll grow beyond your current boundaries, such as buying another business or setting up franchises, if that’s applicable. Will you grow by offering a wider range of products and services? Perhaps you’ll expand by offering your current goods to a wider audience.

Perhaps more than any other section of your business plan, the Sales and Marketing section will act as your playbook for the actual running of your company , so think it through very carefully and use it!

Next Article: Business Plan Section 7 – Financial Information

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Free Marketing Plan Examples: Real-World Samples & Templates

By Joe Weller | April 27, 2024

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A  marketing plan  is a comprehensive document that outlines a company’s marketing strategy and tactics, and ensures that its marketing goals align with its overall objectives. Effective marketing plans include detailed analysis of the market along with roadmaps for upcoming campaigns. Inside this article, you’ll find the  elements of a marketing plan , 10 real-world examples of marketing plans with commentary from experienced marketing professionals, free marketing plan templates and samples , and a  chart to help you determine which template suits your needs .

Marketing Plan Elements

Typical marketing plans begin with an executive summary and include audience demographics, company objectives, situational analysis of the business, and marketing strategies and tactics. Market research and analysis provide campaign direction, and the budget and timeline offer practical parameters. A marketing plan can provide an overview of all strategies and campaigns to be executed in a certain time frame, or it can focus on a specific product, channel, or strategy. The level of detail and the sections included might vary, depending on the organization’s needs. The nine main elements of a marketing plan are:  

Executive Summary and Mission Statement:  A concise, high-level summary conveys the purpose of your marketing plan, introduces key strategies and research insights, and highlights the most important takeaways for stakeholders. For example, an executive summary might outline your brand’s identity, its place within the competitive landscape, and the major opportunities that upcoming marketing campaigns will target. Longer plans might include a separate mission statement or vision statement to align marketing efforts with your company’s larger goals. Discover more  examples of executive summaries with templates to help you write one effectively.  

Situational Analysis:  One of the most crucial elements of your marketing plan, a situational analysis is an assessment of the internal and external factors affecting a business’s performance. It should include research-based insights into market trends and dynamics, customer demographics and pain points, and internal resources.  A strong situational analysis often includes a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, which provides a foundation for an effective marketing strategy. Learn more about  how to perform a SWOT analysis .  

Competitive Analysis:  Understanding the competition is key to developing a compelling marketing plan. This analysis should consider recent marketing campaigns from similar brands to identify successful ways to reach a shared target audience. Being aware of the competitive landscape can also help your business develop a unique selling proposition and stand out in the market. The competitive analysis might be included in the larger situational analysis, or it might be a stand-alone section. For example, a marketing plan could include data on how competitors rank on keywords, or it could evaluate the performance of competitors’ recent social media campaigns. One common framework for understanding market dynamics is a Porter’s five forces analysis, which identifies the forces that contribute to industry rivals. Learn how to evaluate the competitive landscape with  free industry analysis templates .  

Target Audience: In order to implement marketing strategies that engage consumers and drive conversions, businesses need to know who their audience is, what they want, and how they behave. A marketing plan should define a specific, segmented target audience with demographic, geographical, psychographic, and behavioral data.  This section often includes customer profiles or buyer personas — fictionalized representations of ideal customers or audience segments — which help marketers typify consumer behaviors. These profiles should include media habits and most-used platforms to ensure that your marketing plan selects the right channels for each campaign. Learn how to analyze your target market with  free customer profile templates .  

Goals and Objectives:  Marketing plans typically include both long-term goals, which provide broad direction for the company’s marketing strategy, and short-term objectives, which focus on more immediate tactics and campaigns. Goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) and include corresponding key performance indicators (KPIs).  The goals and objectives in a marketing plan often focus on conversions, market share, brand awareness, or engagement. Clearly defined goals ensure strategically aligned marketing initiatives with measurable results. Take a look at  real-world examples of SMART goals for more insights.  

Marketing Strategy:  This section of a marketing plan details the business’s unique value proposition and the channels that will communicate it. A robust marketing strategy addresses the touchpoints in a consumer’s buying cycle and breaks down the 4 Ps (product, price, place, promotion) of the marketing mix. Channels might include digital marketing, advertisements, social media, and influencer partnerships. To develop an overarching marketing strategy, consider using a  marketing strategy template . To learn more about the 4 Ps, read this  product marketing guide .  

Tactics and Action Plan:  A marketing plan is not an abstract strategy document, but a concrete roadmap for executing specific campaigns with specific tactics. Your plan should detail the messaging for each campaign and the corresponding methods for communication — such as email newsletters, social content, targeted ads, and public relations.  This section provides KPIs and actionable steps such as resource allocation, deliverables, and distribution plans. It might also include the expected outcome for each campaign. To plan individual campaigns, consider using a  marketing project plan template .  

Budget:  Marketing expenses might include the cost of advertising, content creation, website maintenance, or promotional materials; no marketing plan is complete without a budget that breaks down the costs of such initiatives. A clear, comprehensive budget ensures that marketing efforts are financially feasible and resources can be allocated for maximum impact. The budget also enables the marketing team to track the return on investment (ROI) of each campaign. To create a comprehensive budget, try our  free marketing budget templates .    

Timeline:  Finally, a marketing plan includes a clear schedule for implementing its initiatives and tactics. This timeline details the start and end dates of each campaign, deadlines for deliverables, and key events or milestones. It keeps the marketing team aligned and initiatives on track, ensuring that marketing objectives can be achieved within the set time frame. Organize dates and deadlines with the help of a  marketing timeline template .  

Marketing Plan Examples

Real-world marketing plans show how businesses utilize effective planning documents. These 10 examples from various industries exhibit unique strengths and weaknesses. With insightful commentary from marketing experts, these plans offer practical takeaways any marketer can use.  

Delmarva and the Ground for Change This  in-depth marketing plan for a documentary produced by the USDA Northeast Climate Hub includes audience profiles, competitive analysis, and a distribution plan. Along with a detailed breakdown of its digital marketing strategy, it considers how different tactics will affect the viewer’s content journey.   

John Dinsmore , a marketing consultant and professor at Wright State University, praises this plan for its attractive design and thoughtful, thorough content: “They do a nice job of extrapolating on who the target market is and tying their tactics to achieving specific goals.”  He appreciates the inclusion of a SWOT analysis, but feels it could be done more effectively. “‘Opportunities’ is not a place for business ideas. It’s a place to identify external, positive trends that can help your initiative. In this context, an opportunity could be ‘Rising concern for and awareness of climate issues.’ Similarly, ‘threats’ is not a place to list things that are difficult. It’s for negative external trends such as ‘Increased skepticism over ability to combat climate change.’” 

Dekker Fraser , former Global Marketing Manager at Sony PlayStation, adds that this plan includes a strong focus on collaborations with media and influencers: “Many marketing plans place too much emphasis on target customers and not enough on target collaborators.”  

Minnesota Tourism This  marketing plan by Explore Minnesota , the state’s Department of Tourism, showcases Minnesota’s beauty with vivid imagery. It uses a variety of demographic information to identify priority audience segments and includes well-designed infographics that analyze audience and competition. As a result, the campaigns are clearly targeted at specific audiences and objectives. 

John Rarrick , Head of Marketing at Movius Corp., admires the strength of the message behind the strategy. “This plan has a very well-developed ‘why,’” he says. “You’ll see that often when the plan is to repair or save something that has undergone a time of great loss — such as a loss of revenue or reputation. The audience personas, goals, tactics, and budget are all detailed and measurable.” 

Gold Coast Transit District  

A  short, high-level marketing plan for Gold Coast Transit highlights key campaigns and includes the most important details, such as timelines, budgets, and tactics. It begins with a bulleted overview of the most important takeaways and takes into account general marketing efforts that don’t fit under a specific campaign umbrella. Fraser notes that this plan includes year-round marketing initiatives, with an effective “emphasis on strong offers, such as youth-free fares.” However, he points out that its brand awareness goals could be more specific. “Instead, use context-specific awareness goals such as ‘When commuting to work, residents first think of Gold Coast Transit’ or ‘When coming home from the library at night, I think of taking the bus,’” he says. “In other words, peg awareness to specific category-entry points.”  

University of Arizona College of Engineering This  marketing, branding, and communications plan for the University of Arizona College of Engineering sets out a long-term vision, high-level goals, and strategies for achieving these goals. It has a section for methodology — including promotional videos and email newsletters — and segments its audience to align with its strategies. This plan “demonstrates a clearly defined audience,” according to Rarrick. That said, not every section of the plan includes the same level of specificity. “The KPIs are vague,” he adds. “I would expect to see something more measurable, rather than ‘increase’ or ‘improve.’” 

Timberland Regional Library This  library's two-year marketing plan sets initiatives in motion with a clear schedule for action. It includes both promotional and production calendars for effective planning, which is especially important for campaigns pegged to external events.  Dinsmore cites this plan’s “professional and elegant graphic design” as a strength. It also offers a roadmap for tackling several marketing campaigns on different timelines. However, he suggests that the plan needs more measurable goals and defined strategies. “There’s no overarching strategy that ties all of these tactics and initiatives together,” he says. “It’s just a laundry list of dates and actions.” 

Safe Haven Family Shelter Nonprofit organizations need creative marketing strategies to reach their targets and use funds efficiently. With specific objectives and actionable steps, this  marketing plan for Safe Haven Family Shelter delineates high-level goals and details the path to achieving them. It identifies the roles and responsibilities of individual team members to ensure alignment. Rarrick commends this plan for its “clearly defined audience and very clearly defined goals.” The plan showcases the differences between strategic business goals and measurable marketing objectives.  

Visit Myrtle Beach This  destination marketing plan by the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Chamber of Commerce  incorporates detailed information about target markets, audience personas, and key behaviors. It includes an infographic that illuminates the touchpoints in a traveler’s journey and shows the marketing team how each tactic contributes to conversions.  Overall, Dinsmore praises this plan as a “very smart and thoughtful presentation.” It outlines a distinct media mix for each target audience, defines its objectives clearly, and ties these objectives to success metrics. He continues, “I want to thank the Myrtle Beach folks for planning to measure their efforts. Measurement is often anathema to marketing people, but if you’re not measuring, you don’t know how to improve.”  With so much information to cover, the plan would benefit from an executive summary to introduce key takeaways. “The bigger the scope, the harder it is to make everything feel connected, and that’s a bit of an issue with this plan,” Dinsmore adds.  

Tropical Avocados This  example of a no-frills plan was commissioned by the nonprofit Improving Economies for Stronger Communities (IESC) to help brand and launch tropical avocados in the U.S. market. It shows the importance of making branding decisions backed by market and consumer research. A detailed SWOT analysis and competitive analysis provide essential insights that enable the company to determine the best unique selling proposition.  A key strength of this plan is its detailed research into its audience. Fraser cites its “excellent identification of consumer objections — e.g., concern over how natural the avocado size is — and consumer behavior.” As a result, the brand can adopt effective messaging in its marketing campaigns. As with USDA Northeast Climate Hub’s Delmarva and the Ground for Change documentary, “target collaborators — e.g., food writers, organizations, and chefs — are included in the target audience. Collaborators are often more critical to the marketing plan than the consumers themselves,” Fraser adds.  

Rochelle Community Hospital This  case study of Rochelle Community Hospital in Rochelle, Illinois, shows how a targeted marketing plan can be used to achieve significant results. The report by Legato Healthcare Marketing showcases the importance of reevaluating an existing marketing strategy — in this case, shifting the emphasis from print to digital. External marketing agencies often have more tools at their disposal, particularly if the business has not had a strong digital presence. With targeted ads and website updates, the agency employed tactics with direct metrics in order to track its impact.   

Visit Concord This  example from the Concord Tourism Improvement District marketing plan is concise and includes streamlined insights on the audience and market. It details each marketing channel with specific tactics and measurable KPIs.  The overall strategy, according to Fraser, offers “an excellent emphasis on social proof and word-of-mouth marketing,” as well as a “good balance of awareness and activation marketing.” In order to improve, he suggests, “the plan should factor in the following critical quantitative factors to help drive the media strategy: reach, frequency, and the total-addressable market.” 

Marketing Plan Templates

Using a template takes the guesswork out of organizing a marketing plan document. These customizable templates include essential elements and options for specific industries or marketing channels, and they range from one-page plans to comprehensive, presentation-ready reports.

Microsoft Word Simple Marketing Plan Template

Download the Simple Marketing Plan Example Template for Microsoft Word Download the Blank Simple Marketing Plan Template for Microsoft Word

This example of a simple, customizable plan focuses on key strategies and prioritizes readability. This one-page marketing plan template includes space to summarize marketing strategy and overarching business objectives, along with an action plan to highlight responsibilities and deadlines.

Microsoft Word Annual Marketing Plan Template

Download the Annual Marketing Plan Example Template for Microsoft Word Download the Blank Annual Marketing Plan Template for Microsoft Word  

This comprehensive marketing plan template includes a number of key sections — such as goals, target market, marketing channels, and performance standards — that can be customized to suit a variety of businesses. In the situational analysis, you can find space for both a 5C (company, collaborators, customers, competitors, climate) analysis and a SWOT analysis. The blank template begins with a table of contents, a business summary, and a mission statement to allow for easy readability. The sample focuses on marketing strategies for one fiscal year, but you can modify this plan for any time period. 

Microsoft Word Small Business Marketing Plan Template

Download the Small Business Marketing Plan Example Template for Microsoft Word Download the Blank Small Business Marketing Plan Template for Microsoft Word

A strong marketing plan is essential for small businesses looking to stand out from larger competitors. This small business marketing plan template provides an outline for a detailed marketing strategy, including a unique selling proposition, the 4Ps marketing mix, and marketing channels. It builds its strategy on situational analysis and identification of the business’s core capabilities. Find  more marketing plan templates  for different industries.

Microsoft Word Nonprofit Marketing Plan Template

Download the Nonprofit Marketing Plan Example Template for Microsoft Word Download the Blank Nonprofit Marketing Plan Template for Microsoft Word

This example marketing plan for a nonprofit incorporates information on the funding climate into its situational analysis, as well as a detailed organizational summary. With sections for short- and long-term goals, marketing strategies and channels, and stakeholder profiles, the template is comprehensive and customizable. Find  more nonprofit marketing plan templates here .

Excel Product Marketing Plan Template

Download the Product Marketing Plan Example Template for Excel Download the Blank Product Marketing Plan Template for Excel

When integrating a new product into existing marketing strategies, it’s important to take into account all the elements of the marketing mix. This product marketing plan template is organized by product, price, place, promotion, process, people, and physical evidence. In these sections, you can find space to consider market research, consumer behaviors, and marketing channels.

Excel Social Media Marketing Plan Template

Download the Social Media Marketing Plan Example Template for Excel Download the Blank Social Media Marketing Plan Template for Excel

For planning specific campaigns, this social media marketing action plan template begins with the campaign goal, highlights important promo dates, and separates actions by platform. It’s useful for executing targeted social media campaigns within a larger marketing strategy. Find  more marketing action plan templates here .

Excel Digital Marketing Plan Template

Download the Digital Marketing Plan Example Template for Excel Download the Blank Digital Marketing Plan Template for Excel

Focusing on digital marketing channels is an effective way to organize strategies into a streamlined and actionable plan. This strategic digital marketing template highlights important audience behaviors and access channels to ensure messaging reaches consumers. Customizable for a variety of digital marketing projects, the template includes space for keywords, goals, and tasks. Find  more digital marketing plan templates here .

Which Marketing Plan Format Is Right for You?

To choose the right marketing plan format for your needs, consider the plan’s role in your marketing strategy. Do you need a comprehensive plan to provide an overview of tactics that will take place over a long period of time? Or are you looking for a plan to focus on specific channels, campaigns, or product launches? 

Each template in this article offers space to detail market research, strategies, and access channels. The longer plans include more sections for in-depth situational analysis and audience demographics, while the shorter plans focus on the marketing mix and action plan. This chart highlights the key elements of each marketing plan:  

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From Positioning to Action: A Guide to Building a Strategic Marketing Plan

Onpoint blog.

Director of Account Management & Sr. Account Strategist

April 30, 2024

Brand positioning serves as the foundation for your commercial efforts, allowing you to distill your value to your target market and build brand advocates. In our blog about the power of brand positioning , we discussed how to build a strong brand. Once you’ve accomplished this, how can you take the next steps to use that brand to guide your business decisions and grow your reach? Strategic marketing is the key.  

What Is the Goal of Strategic Marketing?  

If you’ve done the work to create strong brand positioning, you know who your target market is and what you want them to know. Strategic marketing translates that into a tailored, actionable plan to deliver that message to the right people, at the right time, through the most effective channel. There is no silver bullet or single channel that will allow you to accomplish this. To grow your reach and fill your pipeline, you need an integrated plan that considers both long- and short-term goals: a strategic marketing action plan, or as we refer to it at SCORR, a Strat MAP.  

A successful marketing strategy is:  

• Specific : You need to understand what the company’s business goals are and what marketing is responsible for achieving; from there you can build marketing goals, objectives, and strategies that ladder up to business goals 
• Measurable : If you haven’t defined what success looks like in objective terms, you won’t know when/if you’ve achieved it or if you need to adjust your approach; to do this, identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your specific goals  
• Tip : Make sure your teams are using the same language (e.g., sales and marketing have the same definition of what a marketing qualified lead is)
• Scalable : Consider both short-term and long-term objectives. For example, many private equity or VC-backed organizations need to scale significantly on a three- to five-year timeline. In this case, you simultaneously strategize for converting demand to reach quarter goals and creating awareness to build the pipeline required to meet future goals 

For examples of goals and metrics that drive value, check out SCORR’s client results .  

Building the Foundation of Your Strategic Plan 

The first step to planning ahead is looking back. Start with what you learned from the previous year: what tactics performed well, and which didn’t meet your expectations? This helps you determine where you are most likely to maximize your ROI. Also consider what channels you may have saturated and what channels you have more white space to continue to grow in. 

From there, here are three questions you need to answer to build out the content for your marketing plan: 

1. What kinds of content will communicate your message? 

Content can be everything from long-form articles to videos to social media, and different kinds of content have different purposes. The content you release should work together to deliver information to your audience at different points in their sales journey, and each piece should be aligned with your overall goals and strategy. You should also think about any content you already have available, or which can be easily repurposed, to determine the pieces you will need to create.  

2. Which channels will bring this message to your audience? 

You know from your brand positioning who your audience is and what they care about. You can use this information to determine which channels will deliver your message to these individuals. Consider how they gather information, what trade publications they read, what events they attend, etc. Remember to think through how you will reach both decision-makers and influencers involved in the buying decision of your solution. A robust plan will cover trade media, events, digital, and public relations, and will tailor your content and message to each channel to best influence your target audience at the most strategic time.  

3. Is your content aligned across functional teams?  

Collaborate with your organization’s product/operational and sales leaders to ensure your content and promotional schedule. Make sure you know what advancements, adaptations, or new launches are on the horizon. This helps set your sales team up for success with content that accurately reflects the most up-to-date information and benefits.  

Putting Your Plan Into Action 

At this point, you have outlined your objectives and which tactics will help you achieve them. The next step is laying that out over a timeline that specifies exactly when and how you will distribute your content. And most importantly, what you expect to achieve by strategy (via KPIs) and in what time frame.  

Part of your responsibility as a marketing leader is to effectively share your plan with internal stakeholders and ensure each team understands their role and the reasoning behind the plan as it relates to their department. Make sure your sales team knows how you will support them in the coming year, your product team knows how you plan to promote upcoming launches, and your finance team knows why you are investing in the tactics you have selected. Building this understanding of why the channels/tactics in your plan were chosen — and why others weren’t — keeps everyone on the same page.  

Next, you’ll need to allocate your resources to execute your strategic plan. Resourcing is all about the specifics of how you will deliver on your plan most effectively. Make sure the thought leaders you are promoting are ready and able to dedicate time to content development. Consider which parts of the plan you will have in-house resources execute and which it may make sense to outsource to an agency.  

Monitoring and Adjusting Strategies 

Gathering data is critical to strategic decision-making. You’ve already done the work to determine the metrics you will use to measure your success, so now you need to monitor those metrics efficiently and use that information to adjust as necessary.  

Set a cadence to share marketing data with internal stakeholders. During these meetings, the goal is to articulate what the data you have collected mean and how you will adjust your plan accordingly. Your stakeholders need to know if you are on track with, behind, or ahead of the plan, and how this impacts marketing activities. Depending on the metrics, you may need to shift, increase, or decrease your investment.  

In addition, have a plan to collect and analyze market feedback and consumer behavior. Collaboration between your business development and marketing teams is essential to enabling this effort. You can also follow key publications/editors and conduct ongoing client satisfaction and lost opportunity surveys to keep a pulse on your clients and the larger competitive landscape. This information allows you to identify opportunities and address potential challenges.  

Throughout the process of monitoring your results, be flexible. If your business strategy is changing, your marketing NEEDS to change. The purpose of a strategic marketing plan isn’t to have one strict approach, but instead, to guide your path and keep your marketing plan aligned with business goals. However, keep in mind that any changes you make need to be backed by data and strategy. This means knowing how long you need to run a program to measure its success, so you don’t cut it prematurely — and making sure your teams know this as well. Remember that once your internal team feels like you’re repeating your message, your market is likely just starting to understand it.

Ready to Build Your Marketing Plan?  

In today’s dynamic market, using strategy and data to guide your efforts helps you stay competitive. When done well, your strategic marketing plan enables sustainable growth. If you’re ready to put your messaging into practice, build awareness, and drive ROI, a strategic marketing plan is the place to start.  

For more information on marketing strategy, explore our resources or contact us to build a personalized plan .

About the Author

As the Director of Account Management & Sr. Account Strategist at SCORR, Tess is a consummate team player, contributing her expertise and attention to detail at every stage of ideation and execution. Earning her Executive MBA while working at a senior level, Tess is undeniably tenacious, which translates into carefully considered strategies and long-lasting relationships for her clients. With a dynamic portfolio of clients across the life sciences spectrum, Tess is seasoned in guiding companies through everything from corporate branding initiatives to targeted strategies to ensure clients maximize ROI.

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What is a Marketing Plan?

What is a marketing plan template, use workamajig’s free marketing plan templates, how to write a marketing plan that works, build & execute your marketing plan with workamajig, browse more blogs.

As the famous Benjamin Franklin quote says, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” This rings especially true in highly competitive industries, and even more so with the rise of social media and the vast array of options for selling products and services.

It can be easy to get lost among all the options available, which means you need a framework for quickly and successfully launching and supporting your brand, product, or service in the market.

This is where a marketing plan comes in.

A marketing plan outlines a company’s overall marketing strategy, including the research and data that support it. Key information that comprise a marketing plan include:

• Company information : highlighting its relevance to the strategy in place
• Company, market, and competitor research: isolating and informing high-value marketing opportunities
• Concrete marketing plans: outlining goals, activities, and resources for enabling success

Marketing plans are typically laid out over a year but can change depending on the team’s objectives—the more frequently you need to create one, the more valuable it becomes to do it efficiently. This is where a marketing plan template comes in handy.

A marketing plan template is a tool used to build a comprehensive marketing strategy. It mainly eliminates the manual work of identifying and structuring the key information we outlined above. This allows you to focus on the actual task of building your marketing strategy, from setting goals and conducting research to identifying activities and resources essential to your campaigns. Our template is designed to cover these essentials while also leaving room for you to tailor content and sections to your specific needs.

Why Are These Important?

Alignment and efficiency are the overarching themes when creating a marketing plan and building an easy marketing plan template. For starters, a marketing plan helps establish a clear set of goals and objectives, which allows teams to optimize their efforts toward the same outcome. It also qualifies as an effective risk management tool when done right by clearly outlining stakeholders and their responsibilities for minimal overlap, as well as budget allocations and projections to ensure that planned activities are equipped to succeed.

When you create a marketing template, you achieve even more efficiency. This allows for more seamless creation of new marketing plans to fit new requirements and continuous learning from using and evaluating an established format.

The difference between a marketing plan and an effective one is subtle yet critical to your success. A basic marketing plan template should be:

•   Simple: by following a straightforward approach, using terms and a structure that’s easy to digest, both for the one creating it as well as those reading it,
• Interesting: with expertly designed layouts or formats that synergize well with the outline/structure and
• Versatile: allowing you to freely and easily add, remove, or rearrange sections and information to make sense of your strategy.

Below, we’ve created two free marketing plan templates that are designed around the above principles.

The Google Slides template is designed for more flexible layouts and more images.

The Google Docs template offers a more straightforward approach.

To begin using either template, click the matching link above and select File > Make a copy.

While you’re free to start populating the template however you like, there are ways to optimize this activity further. Below, we’ve reorganized the various sections in our template so you can populate them in an order that makes sense; these are grouped into five phases: Introduction, Research, two Strategy phases, and Polish. By following this section like a step-by-step guide, you would prioritize sections that inform other parts of the document so that you can complete each part almost in one go.

Introduction

First, fill in your Title Page before navigating to the Company Overview. This is like the ‘About Us’ section of a website and will help stakeholders learn about your business by filling in the following:

• Your Company Name
• Where your company is located (Headquarters)
• Your market category and a summary of the products or services you provide (Category, Products & Services)
• Your Mission Statement

It’s important to create a mission statement if you don’t have one yet—this gives both you and your audience a vivid impression of what your company is about and what it’s trying to achieve, which would be an important piece to understanding why your whole marketing plan can be expected to work. Your goal here is to write a mission statement that is clear and easy to understand.

An option to include information about your team or other specific individuals within the company is included. This would make sense if a specific group of individuals in your company is involved; the alternative implies that the plan may involve efforts from across the entire organization.

After wrapping up your introductory sections, it’s time to collect data to inform your marketing strategy. In this phase, we’ll be looking at your company, your customers, and your competitors and using that to identify your ideal client.

Start with the SWOT Analysis. This stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Here is a quick rundown and some guide questions for identifying each section:

• Strengths refer to internal advantages that your company might have over your competition. For example, do you have a strong brand reputation? Do you have a tried-and-tested pipeline and track record for launching successful marketing campaigns? Do you have a sizable budget? How about highly skilled employees?
• Weaknesses outline the opposite—these are factors that might put you at a disadvantage against competitors. These are often related to either a limited budget or a lack of skills or experience.
• Opportunities serve to highlight external factors that you might be able to use to your advantage. Consider this: are there relevant changes to market trends or consumer behavior? Have new market segments emerged? Are there new business models you can utilize in your strategy?
• Threats, on the other hand, are external factors that could negatively affect your business. Look into the following: Have new competitors emerged, or have existing competitors experienced substantial growth or change? Has the economy taken a turn for the worse? Are your customers’ preferences seemingly changing? Are there notable changes in technology or the environment to worry about?

Next, move to Customer Analysis. This is the process of evaluating and understanding different aspects of your consumer base, including their preferences and habits. This is fundamental to your overall strategy, as customer satisfaction almost always directly correlates to greater returns. A customer analysis is mainly broken down into demographics, which relate to their biological, educational, professional, and marital information, and psychographics, which relate to their behaviors, thought processes, and preferences. This also includes exploring various external factors that might influence their purchasing decisions, such as events and the offerings of competitors.

Once that’s finished, navigate to your Competitor Analysis section. This is the process of analyzing competitors who offer similar products or services or operate within the same industry or market as your company. This includes inspecting their overall strategy, including branding, operations, and promotion, identifying strengths and what resonates with their market or yours, and looking into areas where they might be lacking. This helps inform opportunities for your plan to stand out and succeed.

Finally, you can jump back to the Buyer Persona. A buyer persona is a detailed description of your target audience or customer built on the market research you conducted above; this includes existing data on your customers—this would include demographic information, motivations, and behavior, among other details. This helps businesses build a deeper understanding of their audience and is used to anchor marketing, sales, communication, and product development strategies to satisfy a given persona’s needs and preferences. Creating an effective buyer persona now will help build strategy for meaningful engagement.

Strategy-Building (Part 1)

Completing the previous sections should result in a clear picture of your position in the market. You can now use that to build the marketing plan's meat thoroughly. For starters, you will want to find the Goals section—our guide on SMART goals has everything we believe you will need to fill in this part of the plan.

Next, we will be tackling the Marketing Mix in two parts.

Product. In this section, discuss the products and/or services you intend to release or market as part of this strategy. This means outlining various features, design elements, or variants that will be available to customers.

Pricing. This is where you’ll be outlining amounts—how much will each of the products you included previously cost? When determining these, it’s critical that you consider your buyer persona, as well as competitor pricing and any promotions or discounts that might be part of your strategy. This will further increase your products’ perceived value among customers, especially your target market. Tables are a great formatting tool here; you can also link to an external spreadsheet, where you have more room to create a detailed pricing scheme.

Place. This section discusses how you would make products or services available to customers. It includes the method by which sales are generated (e.g., retail, online, direct), as well as strategies for storing, housing, and distributing inventory. Your main consideration here is making sure that your products and services are as convenient and efficient to access as possible in order to sufficiently meet customer demand.

The second part of the marketing mix covers both the Promotion and Marketing Channels sections. This is done so you can cross-reference between the two sections, ensuring that they are updated to synergize with one another.

The Promotion section primarily focuses on how you will help customers understand the value of your products and services, including tools and techniques for providing support across the customer journey (before, during, and after a sale.) A critical consideration here is ensuring the methods align with your goals while respecting your brand identity.

Marketing Channels then focus on the what or where of your promotion plan, which is typically broken down into traditional, digital, retail, and event marketing channels. Building this section relies heaviest on your buyer persona and the specific products and services you’re looking to promote—understanding where you can best reach your existing market or attract new eyes is important here.

Working on these sections first allows you to transition seamlessly to your Unique Value Proposition. Use this section to talk about how or why your products/services are a better choice than the competition. Your customer and competitor analysis would feed a lot of information here.

Strategy-Building (Part 2)

The second phase of your strategy will move between the template's Performance Management and Budget sections.

Under Performance Management , it’s time to identify your Key Metrics. Also known as key performance indicators (KPI) are quantifiable measures that determine your campaign or strategy’s progress or success. To assist with this, look back at your Goals section to see what factors can be represented by numbers and data—for some of these, you may need to derive them from computations of other factors. Common key metrics include total conversions, conversion rate, click-through rate, and social media engagements.

At this point, you can freely work on two sections simultaneously: Monitoring & Evaluation Methods and  Projected Expenses.

Monitoring & Evaluation Methods answers the question of how you will collect the metrics listed. Include relevant tools and data collection methods to be used here.

Projected Expenses refer to an itemized list of unique costs required to execute the strategy. This includes hardware and software needs, resources needed to run online or in-person events and promotions, travel and other logistics, and even compensation for in-house or outsourced manpower. A table is a great way to format information here.

Once all of that is ready, you can begin working on Projected Returns . In this section, you want to outline how this strategy is expected to generate value beyond just the immediate sale of whatever products or services are being offered and how much each of these sources is expected to contribute. From here, you can define your expected return on investment (ROI) by subtracting the total earnings from the costs in your Projected Expenses section.

You will notice that only one section remains—jump back to the early part of the template to work on your Executive Summary. This section combines all of the sections into a big-picture pitch. Your highest priorities here are summarizing your Goals, Marketing Mix, Unique Value Proposition, and Projected Returns sections.

Now that you’ve filled in all template sections double-check everything for errors or omissions.

A marketing plan serves as the blueprint for your success over time. A marketing plan template ensures that you can quickly and expertly craft a strategy while allowing for continuous improvement.

With Workamajig, the premier agency management software , you have an all-in-one solution for planning, organizing, and delegating these efforts and easily transitioning between the phases of every project. Easily adjust your schedule or modify task requirements and assignees to ensure efficiency, and use native reporting tools to measure your progress and identify and address roadblocks along the way.

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How Does AI Impact Business Strategy, Revenue, and Growth?

A rtificial intelligence is reshaping the landscape of business strategy and revenue generation. As AI technology advances, it offers businesses unprecedented opportunities to innovate, streamline operations, and drive significant financial growth. However, it's not enough to blindly integrate AI tools without a plan. To make the best use of AI, follow these guidelines to enhance your company's strategic initiatives and expand revenue streams.

1. Embed AI Across All Business Processes

To fully capitalize on AI's potential, businesses must integrate it across all aspects of their operations. AI enhances productivity by automating routine tasks, analyzing large datasets quickly, and optimizing processes, which were previously time-consuming and prone to human error. For instance, AI-driven supply chain management systems can predict inventory needs and optimize logistics, leading to reduced overhead costs and improved service delivery.

Research by BCG found that "fully embedded AI is one of the key attributes shared by future-built companies that excel across financial and nonfinancial measures," emphasizing the importance of strategy-led AI integration. This holistic approach not only streamlines operations but also embeds AI deeply within the organizational culture, making its implementation seamless and more effective.

2. Foster Innovation and Competitive Advantage

AI is a powerful catalyst for innovation. It enables the development of new products and services while enhancing the capabilities of existing ones, through several processes. "AI can improve innovation by generating new ideas, evaluating new ideas, conducting analysis, improving the decision-making process, providing faster prototyping, assessing risks, and more," explains Indre Kulakauskaite for the Hype Innovation Blog . "With adequate data analysis, artificial intelligence can pinpoint which new ideas will be successful and which ideas still need more work." This means new products can be designed and launched in less time, and with a higher success rate.

3. Enhance Decision-Making with Data-Driven Insights

One of the most significant impacts of AI is its ability to transform decision-making processes. With AI, businesses can harness data-driven insights to make more informed strategic decisions. "AI's predictive capabilities allow businesses to accurately anticipate market trends, consumer behavior, and potential risks," writes Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio, senior research fellow at Harvard Law School. This foresight is invaluable in fast-paced sectors where understanding market dynamics can greatly influence the strategic direction and success of a company.

4. Cultivate a Robust AI-Fueled Culture

Creating an AI-driven company goes beyond technology integration; it requires cultivating a culture that embraces AI at its core. This includes training employees, adjusting roles to support AI initiatives, and developing the right governance structures. "Getting the roles, responsibilities, and culture right is just as important as perfecting the algorithms," highlights a recent study from BCG . Organizations that prioritize a supportive culture for AI adoption are better positioned to leverage AI effectively and sustainably.

5. Utilize AI for Revenue Growth, Not Just Cost Cutting

While AI is often heralded for its ability to cut costs, its real value lies in its potential to generate new revenue streams. High-performing AI adopters focus on using the technology to create new business units, enhance core business offerings, and increase the value of current AI applications. A McKinsey survey revealed that "high performers are using the technology principally to create new business ideas and new sources of revenue" rather than merely for cost reduction.

6. Implement AI-Driven Sales and Marketing Strategies

AI's applications in sales and marketing are transforming how businesses interact with customers and personalize their marketing efforts. AI tools enable more precise customer segmentation, improved customer service, and more effective sales strategies. "Analyzing past deal performance can predict more accurate win rates and time-to-close based on deal size, customer engagement levels, qualification criteria, and other characteristics that AI may even help identify," suggests Ray Makela, general manager of SRG.

Additionally, AI-driven analytics can optimize pricing strategies by analyzing diverse data sets to determine the ideal pricing for every product in different markets, a strategy known to potentially increase operating profits by up to 9% with just a 1% price increase. 

7. Strategic Forecasting and Market Adaptation

AI's predictive power is also a critical asset in strategic forecasting and market adaptation. Businesses can use AI to predict changes in market conditions or consumer behavior, allowing them to adapt their strategies proactively. For instance, in anticipation of increased hurricane activity, one building materials company in Florida used AI to adjust its inventory distribution, ensuring sufficient stock was available to meet the spike in demand following natural disasters.

AI is no longer a futuristic concept but a practical tool that is reshaping business strategies and revenue models across industries. By embedding AI across business processes, fostering innovation, enhancing decision-making, and embracing a culture supportive of AI, companies can not only increase their operational efficiencies but also open new avenues for revenue generation. As AI technology continues to evolve, the businesses that will thrive are those that recognize its potential and integrate it thoughtfully and comprehensively into their strategic planning.

Hype Innovation Blog

Forbes Leadership

Association for Talent Development

Dan Nicholson is the author of " Rigging the Game: How to Achieve Financial Certainty, Navigate Risk and Make Money on Your Own Terms," deemed a best-seller by USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. In addition to founding the award-winning accounting and financial consulting firm Nth Degree CPAs, Dan has created and run multiple small businesses, including Certainty U and the Certified Certainty Advisor program.

This article was originally published in Certainty News .