Commercial plan: What to take into account to plan your strategy?

To successfully achieve the objectives that companies set for themselves, it is essential that they develop, previously planned, an adequate commercial plan that is feasible to execute within a certain period. Its importance lies in the fact that it will allow you to design strategies created jointly from the sales and marketing areas, to organize, define and execute the commercial processes that will make your company's business more profitable.

Executive summary

It corresponds to the first stage of the commercial plan and is one of the most important. It contains comprehensive information about the company. This summary should focus on the most specific and vital data, and should not exceed two pages. The priority is to describe the main market that your business is targeting.

Also take into account your sources of financing, your financing, and possible investors, which will allow you to have a record of the budget allocation that you can count on for the commercial activities of the year.

Internal analysis

The internal elements that you must analyze correspond to the SWOT analysis, regarding the strengths and weaknesses that your company has as regards the availability of personal capital resources, assets, product quality, internal and market structure, market perception, among others.

SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats): it is a tool for studying a situation, institution, project, or person, analyzing its internal characteristics (Strengths and Weaknesses) and its external situation (Opportunities and Threats) in a square matrix. Here the objective is to determine the competitive advantages of your company under analysis and the generic strategy that is most convenient based on its characteristics and those of the market in which it is inserted.

Commercial strategy: at this point you must describe the actions that your commercial team will carry out using different tools, such as the Gantt Chart, where you can organize and schedule activities, taking into account, among other things, time variables.

Marketing plan: in the marketing department it is also essential to design a plan. It must have, first of all, the objectives to be achieved in the short and long term. One of them could be to increase the domain authority of your business by generating more content. Also, develop the strategies to implement to attract new customers, that is, what you will do to attract them to meet your objectives, and the planning to carry out the entire plan.

It is very important that you prepare the marketing plan for the following reasons:

• You will obtain a more exhaustive vision of the market sector in which your company is inserted.
• You will know your competitors better.
• It allows you to define a communication strategy, propose actions focused on the objectives of your company and guarantee its coherence with other objectives.
• You'll be able to plan your activities for a year to determine what budget and resources you should allocate to each of them.
• You will be able to anticipate possible unforeseen events that hinder the fulfillment of your objectives.
• You will be able to carry out periodic evaluations of your commercial plan and execute the changes that it needs, as you find possible flaws.

External analysis

Companies could not exist without an environment that surrounds them, therefore, the external analysis allows you to fix the opportunities and threats that the context of your company could manifest. The process to understand those opportunities and threats can be achieved by describing the possible events in the context that could influence your company. For this, an important aspect is that you consider how your company is positioned in the market and also concerning the competition.

Market: According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), more than 436 million companies in the world are at risk of interrupting their activity due to the crisis generated by COVID-19. This figure causes a marked imbalance in positioning between different industrial sectors, since while many business areas were affected, such as tourism and hospitality, cinemas and theaters, musical events, etc., others such as software developers and digital platforms were favored by expanding their market and profits.

Taking these figures into account, your goal should be focused on developing activities that take advantage of the technological boom in digital business management platforms, to adapt to the new business working conditions.

Competition: naturally, depending on the sector to which your company belongs, you must identify your closest competitors and be attentive to the deployment of strategies that they develop within a certain period, and have knowledge of them to overcome them with more effective and intelligent strategies, or at least not to be badly positioned against said competitors.

Forecasts/Innovations

Forecasts are part of the business plan and will help you anticipate opportunities and potential risks, so you can prepare for obstacles that could hinder the progress of your business. Do not postpone them, focus now that there is time to write down those ideas that were going around in your head the last semester and that could mean a "great goal" from midfield to start 2021.

Some of these ideas that you do not want to miss can be, for example, innovations in R&D, which will be a point in favor of the creation of your company's commercial plan. These are made and incorporated by corporations and institutions for the development of new products and services.

For example, if you plan to incorporate a new product during the time that the pandemic lasts, you can opt for new management software for your tasks in the company. Designing a "home office" work plan that minimizes health risks for your employees, but instead maximizes productivity, is among the innovative alternatives that you can implement.

Also, customer satisfaction should be a priority. For this reason, make sure that they have free access to your online store, with detailed products and corresponding payment platforms. Be careful with this because if the conditions for the transfer operations are not right, the client could get scared and not return to your page.

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If you have a physical store, incorporating a device precisely to measure customer satisfaction can be an excellent option to crown the commercial plan, and if the device prevents contact, the better. There are already models with this feature on the market.

You can add more innovations and strategies; this was just an instructional guide for you to plan your commercial plan. Remember that no crisis lasts forever, so here is your chance to have the world in your hands.