Sales and Marketing Strategy

Subsection of: Creating an Effective Business Plan

Adapted from content excerpted from the American Express® OPEN Small Business Network

In previous sections, you’ve been asked to define your product, positioning, pricing, target customer, market, and competition. Now you need to wrap up all those assumptions into a cogent sales and marketing strategy. Think of this statement as an action plan for how you will get customers to buy your products. It will support the tactics you describe later on in this section.

Your strategy may be only a few sentences in length, or it can be a couple of paragraphs. Important elements for a sales and marketing strategy include who you are targeting with your initial push and what customers you have designated for follow-up phases. Other elements of a sales and marketing strategy are:

How will you find your prospects, and once you find them, how you plan to educate them about your product. For instance, if you are using direct mail, you might want to talk about what kinds of mailing lists you plan to purchase.
What features of your product or service you emphasize to get customers to notice your product.
Any sort of innovative marketing or sales techniques you will employ. For example, you may sell your product by mail order when your competitors use only traditional retail channels. Or you may be the first in your industry to offer leasing.
Will you focus your efforts locally, regionally, nationally or internationally? Do you plan to extend your efforts beyond your initial region? Why?

To Sales and Marketing

FAQ’s	Introductory Elements	Business Description	The Market
Development & Production	Sales & Marketing	Management	Financials

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