Unfortunately, some entrepreneurs choose to forego developing business plans when they’re launching a business.

This is understandable as entrepreneurs are often creative big-picture thinkers who want to begin making money chasing leads, creating opportunities, and building connections.

While the above activities are important, if you don’t have a business plan, every opportunity, lead, or connection can look like a good one at the time. Pursuing them all can lead to wasted time and resources and ultimately, hinder the long-term success of your business.

However, even if a business plan does get written, it’s often ineffective at producing results because:

• The plan isn’t actionable – the plan is a collection of market research, statistics, and information on competitors, but this knowledge doesn’t lead to concrete steps the owner needs to take to achieve their business goals.
• The plan is vague – there may be a lot of business jargon and fancy charts, but ultimately the plan doesn’t outline how strategies will be implemented.
• The plan is poorly researched – for a plan to be meaningful and inform decisions, real research must occur. This means talking to potential customers and reading research reports – a Google search won’t cut it.
• It’s missing a financial section – it’s important to develop sales targets and cash projections to set realistic expectations about your revenue and expenses.

The key to developing an actionable business plan is to treat it as a living document that’s part pragmatic projection and part sales tool.

Here are five key tips to help you develop a business plan you’ll follow.

1. Start small and informally

Don’t treat your business plan as a chore that must be completed as soon as possible. Adopting this mindset will increase your chances of feeling overwhelmed and you’ll rush to get it done, making the plan less useful.

Instead, reframe how you think about business planning – ask yourself, what can I learn from the business planning process?

Over the course of a week, set aside 1-2 hours a day to think about your:

• Business idea and model;
• Target audience;
• Goals and objectives; and,
• Marketing strategies and tactics

Treating business planning as an iterative process right from the beginning helps you see the business plan for what it should be: an evolving document you’ll continue to come back to and build on.

You may want to try to get your entire business plan onto one page to start to keep things simple. Check out the business model canvas to help get you started.

2. Set SMART goals

Your business goals are a key element of your business plan as they’ll impact all other areas of your document. Furthermore, they’ll inform and drive your day-to-day tasks.

If your goals are poorly defined, then they won’t be purposeful, and you’ll have a difficult time developing and implementing the right strategies to achieve them.

To create purposeful goals, you must draft your goals to be specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and timebound – SMART; an example of a SMART goal is:

“I will obtain 50 new clients [measurable] in the consumer discretionary category [relevant] this fiscal year [timebound] by employing a multipronged marketing strategy [actionable] consisting of traditional and digital tactics.” [specific]

SMART goals can guide the rest of your business planning by giving you something tangible to work toward.

3. Strike the right balance between strategy and tactics

It’s easy to get hung up on researching your ideal customer, their journey, and the marketing strategies you’ll use to engage them.

While you may correctly identify a social media strategy as the most effective way to engage your audience, you’ll need to dig much deeper into the operational details regarding how to execute the strategy to be successful.

For example, in the case above, you’ll need to setup a website, understand digital analytics tools as well as search engine optimization to execute your strategy. By unpacking the day-to-day work underlying your strategies, operational activities will begin to naturally emerge.

These work plans will be task-driven and identify the things you need to do to accomplish your goals and objectives.

4. Throw out the idea of the perfect business plan

You’re never going to be fully informed about your market, target audience, and competitors as business landscapes are constantly changing and evolving.

This means your business plan will be built on assumptions; assumptions are things we presume to be true at a point in time.

Over time, your assumptions will change as you learn new information about your customers and the market your business operates in.

It’s important to identify the key assumptions that your business plan relies on and review them on a regular basis to confirm if they are or are no longer assumptions.

For example, when you first start your business, you might assume that a segment of your target audience prefers your flagship product. However, through online sales and ongoing customer surveys, you discover they prefer a different one. This new information alters your assumptions and impacts how you market to your customers in the future.

Ultimately, assumptions can solve the dilemma about how to manage change over time and help reduce the stress of the unknown.

5. Build a roadmap

Your business plan should not only provide you with an overview of your business in the short and long-term, but it should also lay out exactly how you’ll get from one stage to the next. For example, how will you move from the initial start-up and growth stage to the expansion stage?

In other words, your business plan should function as a roadmap for your business and be as specific as possible. Ideally, it should identify key milestones, set major targets, and outline the key steps you need to take to meet these important deadlines and goals.

Takeaway

Successful business planning is about adopting a continuous learning mindset and coming back to your plan on a regular basis to check your progress and update your assumptions. Following the above five tips will help you work more efficiently and effectively, stay motivated, and reduce stress.

Interested in starting a career with Canada Financial? Join us at our next Carrer Webinar.

For new financial advisors, cultivating clients is top of mind.

Many advisors start building their businesses by reaching out to their personal contacts and networks to let them know they’ve launched an exciting new career.

While some advisors simply pick up the phone and start calling, there is a better way to effectively engage with your prospects.

Instead of “winging it”, a better approach is to put a framework in place to increase your chances of sales success.

The framework I’m referring to is called a “sales cadence”.

A sales cadence is a sequential order of different outreach methods that salespeople can follow to meaningfully connect with prospects and increase their chances of closing a sale.

It’s an intentional approach to sales.

I’ve used many sales tools over the years including detailed buyer personas, expert-crafted call scripts, clever marketing email templates, competitive intelligence, and sales playbooks hundreds of pages long.  By far, a sales cadence framework produced the best results for me.

Here’s how you can begin to create your sales cadence:

1. Develop a plan
   • Determine your target prospect and the number of touchpoints you’d like to have with them
   • Choose which value propositions you’d like to convey at each touchpoint
   • Identify any levers of influence you’ll employ at each step in your sales funnel (e.g., statistics or social proof)
2. Decide how you’ll engage your prospects
   • Outline the channels through which you’ll engage your prospects (for example, you might start out with an email introduction and follow up with a LinkedIn invite)
   • Be thoughtful about the channel used for each touchpoint (for example, if your prospect isn’t active on social platforms, it’s probably not a good place to start a conversation)
3. Establish your purpose
   • At every touchpoint, you should have a clear purpose to move your prospect down your funnel – know exactly what you’re trying to achieve with every email, phone call, or social comment
   • Ensure each call-to-action is aligned with your purpose at each touchpoint
4. Space out your engagements
   • Timing is everything – space out your touchpoints and think about how you’d react to your methods if you were your prospect
   • You want to stay fresh in your prospects’ minds but don’t annoy them!

Here’s an example of a sales cadence that’s worked wonders for me:

In the above example, notice how I’ve used various channels and spaced out my touchpoints. Ideally, at some point prior to day 21, I convert the prospect to a client.

By using a sales cadence, you’ll increase your productivity because you’ll be focused on completing the sales activity and not on what to say – in fact, you’ll have determined exactly what you want to say before you engage your prospect.

Furthermore, by having a clear, defined sales cadence you’ll reduce any anxiety you might have and build your confidence.

As you develop and implement your own sales cadence, you’ll likely refine the order of your steps and actions based on feedback from prospects and clients. (For example, you might find that an introductory call is more effective than an ice-breaker email and leads to a 10% bump in sales).

At every touch point, you should record the outcome of your actions to ensure you’re gathering data. Over time, data turns into information which can lead to improvements in your sales cadence. If you have access to a CRM, use it! If not, you’ll need to find another tool that works for you.

The top companies have been effectively using the above methods for years to gain an edge against their competition – take a page out of their playbook and put the sales cadence framework to work for you.

*Make sure you follow CASL and DNCL regulatory guidelines.

Interested in starting a career with Canada Financial? Join us at our next Carrer Webinar.