MARKETING AND REVENUE GENERATION PLANS

1. Marketing Plan

The key to successful marketing is the intelligent use of imperfect data to try to understand the motivations of current and potential customers. Who are they, what do they buy, why do they buy it and, most importantly, why do they buy from their current source?

These are all-important questions that need to be thoroughly researched and investigated. While Sales has a key role in developing answers, the pulling together of a marketing plan really needs to be done by the CEO. The elements that need to be contained in the marketing plan are:

• Products and services
• Markets
• Customers
• Key differentiating points
• Prospects
• Strategies
• New Approaches
• New Markets
• Whether or not, where and when to advertise
• The role of telemarketing
• The role of direct mail
• E mail marketing
• Lists and databases
• Collateral materials
• Target customer profiles

2. Revenue Generation Plan

An audacious sales goal needs to be set. This should be done by reference not only to past performance but also to how competitors appear to be growing. This latter part is difficult, but growth is one of the things that competitors like to talk about, and there are a number of subtle ways in which it can be done.

Edge and its seasoned team will examine the resource and compensation issues, and will investigate ways in which more can be sold to existing customers, gather all the information necessary to produce a plan and recommend programs to find new customers. In conjunction with the management team, it develops new programs and services and drives their implementation.

A written plan needs to be developed to give Sales a road map, support and criteria to measure them.

Once the goal has been set, a thorough examination needs to be made of the following areas:

• Sales resources needed
• Additional product lines
• New or additional services that can be provided
• Pricing strategies
• Lead generation strategies
• Sales compensation

Budgets need to be set and a marketing plan developed. The whole process is time consuming and requires a high level of "buy-in" from the people responsible.