As you are writing your marketing plan, it can be useful to have a sample marketing plan to use as an example for ideas and strategies. Of course, every business is different, and it is important to make sure you customize your marketing plan for your business. Nevertheless, starting from a sample marketing plan can save some time.

The sample marketing plan below is one that has been used by a number of small to medium businesses in our consulting engagements.

Company Name

STRATEGIC SALES & MARKETING PLAN

Executive Summary

Company/Product Overview

· Describes the company’s business, core products/services, and target customers. This could be an existing business/product, or it could describe a potential business opportunity.

· Should also include a summary of core value proposition, and specific customer pain points that the product/service addresses.

Date business began

Names of founders/management

Number of employees

Location(s) of business

Market Competitive Analysis

Industry description and outlook

· Provides a general overview of the specific niche / vertical industry targeted, particularly any data that is relevant to the customer adoption of the product or service in question.

· Will also include any general highlights and conclusions of any marketing research data you may have collected, or industry/analyst data if any is available – details can be included in the appendix section.

Target market information

· Describes the company’s target market and target customer in more detail (eg, specific roles, demographics, etc)

· Describes the target customers for the product/service under evaluation. This could include current customers as well as future target opportunities.

Evaluation of the competition

· Identifies the main competitors by product or service as well as by market segment;

· Assess the strengths and weaknesses of the competition compared to the current company product/service, making use of graph(s) and/or table(s) to draw out key points

· Describes how important your target market is to your competitors, any other factors that could impact their desire to go after these same target customers,

· Identify any barriers which may hinder the company compared to the competition.

Note: The competitive analysis should include not only like-product competition (other providers of very similar products or services), but also alternate solutions to your customers’ pain points.

Marketing & Sales Strategy

This will define your marketing strategy: How should you go about finding/creating customers? How should you plan to grow the business? What are your distribution or deployment channels? How will you communicate with your customers?

More specifically, this should include information on your pricing and licensing strategy – what is your business model moving forward (ie, single one-time license, licenses by component, software-as-a-service, subscription, etc).

Second will come your sales strategy: what type of sales force (different for different product lines?)? How many salespeople should/do you have? Should you have strategic partners for sales? What should be your sales activities?

Summary

Summary of main conclusions & any recommended next steps

Appendix

References (relevant articles or sites)

Competitor detail information

Any other market research detail information

For more information about how to write a marketing plan, whether you are using this sample marketing plan as your example starting point or not, take a look at our "Writing a Marketing Plan" page.

A Sample Marketing Plan