10 Key Value Drivers 6　Marketing and sales strategies　中文

Main Idea

To prosper, you'll need to generate paying customers. Marketing creates awareness of your offerings and sales focuses on your efforts to convince potential customers to actually buy.

Supporting Ideas

This section of your business plan talks about how you'll cut through the background noise and get noticed, and then how you'll convert that interest into revenue.

1．Talk about your sales and marketing objectives

Specify how you will be growing your venture by attracting and serving customers.

• Introduce your in-house marketing evangelist—the person on your management team who will be driving the sales and marketing programs. Mention how this person was recruited, will earn compensation and their level of background experience.
• Specify your marketing objectives—technical, strategic and financial.
• Go into detail about what you anticipate your typical buying cycle will be—and what you plan on doing at each stage to help the process move along.
• Discuss your specific sales techniques—and talk about the critical elements of the customer buying cycle. In many instances, these will be: awareness, interest, evaluation, trial and finally, adoption.
• Profile your ideal customers—and how you can establish relationships with lead users of your product or service.

2．Build your revenue model

Regardless of what else you do right, you need top line revenue from sales to move forward.

• Set your pricing objective—which will need to be consistent with numerous technical, strategic and financial factors.
• Determine anticipated demand—on the strength of examples from other industries and market insights.
• Estimate your actual costs—based on production of your prototype offerings.
• Review your competitors—their cost structure and their anticipated competitive response.
• Establish your pricing methodology—whether there are nonrecurring costs involved, any licensing fees which have to be paid, the potential for follow-on sales, etc.
• Select your first price point—which you can fine-tune and refine over time once you have a better feel for elasticity.
• Keep on reworking your figures—to take into account the constant changes the marketplace will generate and feedback from your lead customers.
• Detail your "revenue event"—when the sale is made and the check clears.
• Know your sales funnel ratios—that is, how many qualified leads you'll need to generate a specified number of follow-up visits and demonstrations, which in turn will produce purchase orders and ultimately revenue events. Be ready to relate these ratios to your sales cycle so you can demonstrate that you have a realistic perspective on what's required rather than idealized notions.