Business Planning: You are launching a product, and cheering for it to be a bestseller usually doesn’t work. There are so many offers on the market that your product may go unnoticed by your target audience.
Based on this, commercial planning arises, aiming to optimize companies’ sales results. Thus, the planning of each company will be different, as it considers the particularities of each sector, product, and public. In short, commercial planning is an organization and optimization tool based on a detailed study of what a company must do to achieve its sales goals.
Importance Of Business Planning
Most people confuse business planning with company strategic planning, which can end up demeaning business planning. The fundamental importance of this planning is the correct targeting of your sales team. Through this planning, you can measure your results according to the established goals.
After all, in the commercial planning essential information will be included, such as development, new business management opportunities, and actions created. In addition, it can be necessary to attract new investors and partners.
Five Tips For Effective Business Planning
Now that you understand what business planning is and how important it is for companies, we brought you five killer tips for developing your planning in the best way. Come on?
Know Your Business
First, you need to know the business, the market in which you operate, and your company’s target audience; after all, all the information you can gather will be significant to developing and applying your planning. The suggestion is to use the SWOT matrix to organize all the information.
The SWOT matrix is a tool widely used in the strategic planning of several businesses, where their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are listed. With this, you will have a clear and systemic view of your company, quickly identifying and analyzing which points to focus on and creating goals to be achieved.
Set Your Goals
After diagnosing your company’s situation with the SWOT matrix, it’s time to define the objectives you want to achieve with the planning, considering all the information gathered.
Our tip here is the following: set achievable goals; that is, it’s no use having a goal of increasing your revenue by 200% in a week. Your goals need to be consistent. Otherwise, your team could come under pressure and end up frustrated.
Define Strategies
At this point, you will detail how you intend to achieve the objectives proposed in the previous step. Straightforward tools can help you with this task, such as 5W2H.
This tool is widely used to record in an organized and planned way how actions will be carried out, as well as by whom, when, where, why, how, how much it will cost the company. It can be done in a spreadsheet, which is very simple to update.
Define Indicators
You will only know if your planning is giving the expected results if you have tools that will help you analyze if what was planned is being executed and what results are being obtained with each action. With this, you will know if the strategies are working, and if not, you will have time to make changes and achieve your planning goals.
Distribute The Tasks
Planning is critical, but getting your hands dirty is also part of success. To successfully execute the planning, it is necessary to choose the professionals involved. Direct the tasks to be performed according to the skills of each employee. If something is not going as expected, make substitutions or switch activities. The important thing here is that all tasks run smoothly and as expected.
Most Common Mistakes In Business Planning
Knowing the most common mistakes is as essential for your business planning to be effective as knowing the best tips and where to start. With that in mind, we separate the three biggest mistakes made in business planning.
Devalue The Current Situation Of Your Business
One of the biggest mistakes in business is to set up a whole commercial plan without trying to understand the actual situation of the company and the market in which it is inserted. Without a correct understanding of the company’s entire environment, it isn’t easy to get the planning right and will hardly bring positive results.
You Are Not Engaging Your Employees
Companies’ greatest asset is people, which is why they need always to be engaged in their roles. One way to captivate your employees is to involve them in planning. Whenever possible, make clear the position of each one so that the goals are achieved, so everyone works hard to make everything work out!
Not Following The Indicators
Regardless of the size, following the indicators is essential to know if the planning is on the right track. For this, it is necessary to have a management system that can provide complete reports for safe and effective monitoring of the objectives proposed in the planning.
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