10 Tools and Templates To Help Your Business Grow [Free Downloads]

When it comes to achieving your business goals, planning is everything. But it's really hard to stare at a blank screen and start typing out a roadmap to success. What's up? It's Jamal, and welcome back to the channel. In this video, I'm gonna help you break through business writer's block with the best free tools and templates you can use right now to guide you through every step of the business planning process. As always, and this probably comes as a surprise to no one, the download links for these helpful documents can be found in the video description below. And while you're down there, don't forget to subscribe to the channel and ring the notification bell like this. You know what I'm saying? Little ding. That's what you're going to do. And you know why you're going to do that? Because we're adding new videos with useful tools all the time. Madness. When it comes to business planning, many leaders find it difficult to balance the immediate needs of everyday operations with the benefits that come from long term organizational planning. Even if you know that planning will make things run more smoothly in the long run, there's always fires to put out along the way. That's why we've developed a series of templates to make your planning process as painless as possible. It all starts with your business plan, which is the central document that defines your whole enterprise and will be used to guide you further down the road when preparing more specific documents like your marketing plan and sales plan. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. You know what I'm saying? We gotta go baby steps, one step at a time. The business plan includes everything about your organization at an executive level. This includes fundamentals like your company's missions and vision, its core values, and its organizational structure. There's also competitive analysis so you can develop an informed view of what is happening in your market, as well as tools for planning your overall profit and loss, funding requirements, and other preliminary financial considerations. And I know what you're thinking to yourself, geez, Jamal, that sounds like a lot of stuff to do in a single day. Luckily, your business plan doesn't need to be done in a single day. But HubSpot's business planning template, which is available as a Word file, a PDF, or a Google document, is designed to help you systematically build your business plan with maximum efficiency. So, Bob the Builder, why don't you move on over, you know what I'm saying? We got some more efficient builders in the house these days, you know what I'm saying? Even if your business is already up and running, it's a good idea to create a business plan as it becomes a necessary tool when you're ready to scale up to the next level. Like I said, the hours you put into planning now will save you days or weeks of combined effort down the road. Now, because your business plan is all encompassing, creating it can include generating secondary documents that become part of your overall business planning system. One of those documents is your buyer Persona, which you'll see referenced time and time again throughout the planning process. HubSpot defines buyer Personas as semi fictional representations of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. That data can include customer demographics like age, income, location and gender identity. You can also include biographical information like behavior, goals and challenges, personality traits, and preferred modes of communication. I think you guys already know for me it's my DMs and they have not been slid into. Maybe I'm not making it clear enough, but I want to hear from you. Please. Our free Buyer Persona Kit comes with an ebook to help guide you through the process of building a Persona. It also includes templates that you can use to build specific Personas for general shoppers, B2B customers, and tech buyers. So no matter what business you're in, you probably want to jump down to the description section and grab the Buyer Persona Kit right away. I'll wait. I'm impatient. I recommend checking back with your business plan about once a year to evaluate an update as needed. Many top leaders find themselves revisiting their core plans regularly to check in and make sure assumptions that were made previously still hold true. Seriously, can you imagine not checking in about the assumptions that you held in like 1995? You know, like, oh, I bet MySpace will be a fad. Actually that was true. Yeah, you were right about that. Good job.

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HubSpot grow better. Now moving on to the next phase of planning, it's time to begin working on more functional documents, starting with your marketing plan. When you download our free marketing plan template, you'll immediately notice that some of the info you need to enter is duplicate from the work you did for your business plan. And it's not a little bamboozling trick that were trying to pull on you, but instead these repeats are functional since you'll probably end up sharing the marketing plan with colleagues who don't need knowledge of the business plan to do their jobs, but there is some big picture background info they'll need to execute the tasks ahead. The point is that once you've completed your top level documents, working on other documents becomes easier. As you work your way down the marketing plan template, you'll see things gradually get more detailed and granular. This is the best path we found to take you from the big picture ideas through strategic ideation and eventually executable tasks. To see an example of each step, let's take a look at the sample marketing plan included in the template for an imaginary agency called San Dagency. Someone should hop on that if that's not a thing already. It starts with a top level outline of the company and the team before moving on to a SWOT analysis of the business, a breakdown of the various initiatives, and an outline of the target audience. Spoiler alert. These are all things that you probably already have in your business plan. Next, you'll start establishing your functional plan, beginning with your overall marketing strategy, then drilling down to document the process. You'll use the budget required and the technology you'll need to procure to make the marketing vision a reality. As soon as you finish with your marketing plan, you can jump right into the next steps with our free Social Media Calendar template. This will allow you to schedule your day to day marketing activities well in advance. So once it's time to initiate your campaign and you can do so without additional distractions. And there you go. Not one, but two actionable documents that can help drive your business in the direction you want it to go. But I'm not done. In fact, I'm just getting started. You probably already noticed that there are two more download links in the description that we haven't talked about yet. One is the free HubSpot sales plan template. This works in much the same way as the marketing plan, except the final output is used to direct your sales team instead of your marketing team. The final free template we have for your business planning is are the Customer journey templates. Unlike the other documents, tracking your customer journey doesn't fit into the waterfall approach of starting with business plan and user Personas and moving into marketing and sales planning. Your Customer Journeys are support documents that help contextualize how your activities help move the customer through various milestones. These can be applied to building out your fixed processes like the sales funnel on your website or the customer service experience. It can also apply directly to your sales and marketing initiatives. I recommend downloading it now and checking out the various templates that we have. If you want to learn more about any of the sales and marketing strategies discussed in this video, you already know what to do. Subscribe if you haven't already, and you'll get new videos covering these topics several times a week. How do we do it? We're breaking our necks out here for this kind of content. Our channel has a lot of related videos already up, including our ultimate guide to creating a sales process that is updated to include the latest work from home techniques. Check that video out, because if you don't, I will cry and my business will fail. And it'll be on you. Now, if you'll excuse me to finish my customer journey map. I figured it'd be good for me to go walk a mile in one of my customer shoes. And I know what you're thinking, Jamal. Those are just your shoes because they're fly as hell. And to that I say, you're absolutely right. My business is probably gonna fail. But even if it does, I'll see you next time. We'll make things run. Start tying. Ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta Two twos.