[As published in the December issue of The Stuckey Report]
The next to last step in creating your marketing plan is critical – determining your sales and marketing goals. Yes, you can’t create a marketing plan without setting some goals. Why is this important? More on that in a second.
But first understand that this assumes you want your business to turn a profit. And not just breaking even, but actually earning a real profit. You want a business that has cash flow.
You need to know how much revenue you need to bring in the door to achieve that. And once you know that, be able to measure and quantify progress. How many new customers? How many contracts signed? How many units sold?
And then you need to know your closing rate. For example, you should know that you sell five units for every twenty prospects you approach. If you need to sell 50 units to turn a profit – then you need to market to 200 prospects.
The problem most businesses get into is that they don’t market to enough potential customers. Using the example above, too many small business people only reach out to 75 to 100 prospects, when they need to talk to 200. That’s why so many businesses fail. And once you know that magic number, you can create a marketing plan to achieve just that…
Todd Schnick is the president of the Intrepid Group LLC, a small business marketing firm. You can find his website and marketing blog at www.intrepid-llc.com!