Build your marketing section with real numbers from trade journals, industry reports, or original research. Two techniques: canvassing (visiting competitors to record prices) and interviews with similar business owners. Be honest about the data even if it doesn't fully support your case, then explain how your niche strategy addresses any weakness.
All right, going into our marketing and sales section of our business plan, this is probably the biggest section, most meatiest section, meaning it's going to have a lot of info. It's probably going to take up a lot of pages. One of the biggest things that we're going to be looking at in this section is research. That's what people want to see here. So what you want to do is provide as much hard data as possible. Real numbers, real research. And in kind of typical academic paper fashion, you want to cite your research. So what that means is be sure to talk about, let's just say real numbers, real stuff. Where. Where did you find these numbers? If a source tell us what it is, like a journal or something like that. So if you're using like a trade journal and they say, you know, x amount of revenue in this field, you know, can be expected or something like that, then tell us what journal you got that out of. Don't try to pull anything over on this section because people will see through it. So don't try to say, I can expect, you know, half a million in revenue in the first year. People are going to say, or especially an investor that going to say, why? Where did you get that number? How do you expect that? So if you got that number from a journal or something like that, tell us what journal. If you found that number yourself, tell us how. Tell us how you got that number. And a very good way to do that is canvassing interviews with those two things. What we can learn is. So canvassing basically means in my pizza joint, what I could do is go around to all the other pizza joints and look at what their prices are. Right. This is very easy data for me to collect. All I have to do is go in there and buy a slice of pizza. You know, like, I like pizza. So that's just fine with me. That's canvassing, walking around and figuring out what you can figure out just based on available information. So I'm going to keep a chart of every. The cost of every slice of pizza, and that's going to give me some good information about that I'm going to need. In this section, interviews would be like, can you talk to the owner of a similar business? In my case, it might be the owner of another pizza joint in another neighborhood. That might be tricky if they think you're gonna take up some of their revenue. If you're gonna steal some customers from them, it might not work great because they might be not willing to talk to you. But another thing I could do is I could talk to other businesses in my neighborhood to get some useful information that I'm not going to be directly competing with. In fact, I might be helping. If there is a bar that doesn't serve food just down the street from where I want to open my pizza shop, that's great. They might be real happy that a pizza by the slice place is opening up a couple doors down. So I could go talk to that bar. I could get some good information because they're going to want to help me, they're going to want my business in their neighborhood. So non competing businesses are probably willing to talk to you. So you might be able to get some data that way. So for this whole section, this goes true for the whole business plan, but it's especially important in the marketing and sales section of our business plan. Make sure your research is real. Don't try to pull a fast one. Don't fluff numbers. Give real numbers. Even if they don't support you, even if the numbers don't give you the exact thing you want them to say, you can always leave off that data if you have to. But better is to say these numbers don't show exactly a huge potential for growth in this market. However, my niche will, you know. So in my case, I might say the market for pizza by the slice in my neighborhood is not huge. However, the market for health food in my neighborhood is, is. And that's evident by, you know, I talk to someone who runs a gym in my neighborhood and he says revenue is going through the roof. So that gives me another round of data that is useful to me because the, if a gym is doing really well, that might tell me that my neighborhood has a lot of health conscious people and good health food might be welcomed in my neighborhood. Stands to. Stands for reason. So with your research, be sure that if you got it from somewhere else, tell us where you got it and if you got it yourself, tell us how you got it. Cool. Okay, let's go into the swat. Not special weapons, not the military SWAT, like SWAT team, but the swot. Let's do that in a new video.
