Step Five - Where are you now/where are you going?

Now you need to take a look at some benchmarks for your business and document where you are now and where you want to be. Remember, one of the greatest benefits you’ll get from a written marketing plan is the ability to change and adjust it based on the results you get. So, don’t worry too much about the actual numbers you use for your projections. They should be reasonable and attainable but they’re not set in stone and can be changed later.

How do you judge the success of your business? Income’s probably high on that list. It’s a factor of volume and margin, so those should be two of the benchmarks you want to record. Remember the customer rating system you used in step 4? Is that important to you? It would be to me so I would want to look at the average rating for my top 50 or 100 customers and see if I could improve it. What about your marketing budget? Do you know what your current marketing costs you each year? Chances are to significantly increase your income you need to increase your budget as well. If nothing else you want to monitor it and see how it compares to you sales.

What else? Maybe one of your goals is to work with fewer accounts. Then you’d want a benchmark about the number of high-producing accounts.

Here’s a list of some benchmarks for you to start with. Add whatever others would be important to you. For each of these benchmarks, record where you were at the end of the last fiscal year and where you want to be in one, two and five years.

BENCHMARK
Sales Volume
Commission %
Ave Customer Rating
# of $100K+ Accounts
Marketing Expense

Set Some Goals
Look over your benchmarks and pull out specific attainable goals. Organize your goals around the same time periods as your benchmark projections, 1-year, 2-year and 5-year. Figuring out your 1-year goals is the easiest and may be all you come up with initially, and that’s OK. Some other goals may naturally fall into the 2 or 5-year time frame. For example, getting your CAS or MAS. I’ll say it again, this is your plan and it’s designed to be changed. Your goals may change 6 months down the road. If that happens, you need to take two minutes, pop open the plan and update your goals.

If you’ve been going through this process and especially if you haven’t done this before then I’m guessing the wheels are turning and you’re beginning to think strategically about where you what to with your business and how you can get there. That’s a good thing and the whole point of this exercise!

The next step will bring it all together. You’ll review what specific marketing tools and activities you’re currently using, what others are available and should be considered and how to use those to deliver the message you’ve already created to your ideal customers, which are already identified, too! When you put all this information together the result is powerful and empowering.