Do you have a plan for both short-and long-term business goals? How about a comprehensive marketing approach? Or ideas on how to better-connect with existing customers.

 

Consider the following steps to plot a business course for the new year. What we are looking at is a starting point to progress to the next levels of understanding business as a business.

 

• Develop a business mission statement that sets the company role, your business definition, distinctive competence and future indications.

• Create a financial summary that represents the framework of getting from A-Z and the potential pitfalls. This is where you need to be realistic yet optimistic. Painful as it may sound, the truth is paramount.

• Develop a market overview, which is the process of the picture-mapping of the overall market and includes the market structure, market trends, key market segments and the gaps that go in the analysis.

• A SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) is a method from which you analyze the inner-workings of your business by better-understanding your strengths and weaknesses compared to your competitors and further consider the opportunities and threats for each key product or segment.

• A portfolio summary represents the offering of your pictorial summary of the SWOT analysis. This makes it much easier to see at a glance the relative importance of each of the four elements within SWOT.

• Make assumptions regarding the underlying segments critical to the planned marketing objectives and strategies.

• Set marketing objectives that act as the quantitative statements in terms of profit, volume, value and market share, and your path to achievement. 

• Determine marketing strategies that act as a starting point on how the objectives are to be achieved. They often involve the four Ps of marketing—product, price, place and promotion.

• Identify resource requirements and budget, the show-and-tell of the full planning period budget, giving in detail the revenues and associated costs for each year.

 

While these points of value are a mix of both business and marketing plans, they can act as a foundation. The utilization of the referenced steps will enable you to move up the ladder of personal understanding of your business development action steps.

 

Without a connect-the-dots plan, you may have difficulty getting started at all.