Marketing Plan Vs Sales Plan

[ezest]

Hi,

I am suppose to draft Marketing Plan and Sales Plan for organisations' Annual Business plan. Can anyone explain difference between these two and what should they cover?

Regards,

[peterjhale]

Hi Ezest

Welcome aboard and I hope you get your site sorted on seo-guy

Marketing is all about identifying and satisfying customer needs so you'll need to go through the process and you'll end up with a marketing plan. Have a look at www.teneric.co.uk/bptemplate.html for business plans and www.teneric.co.uk/marketing-plan-template.html for marketing plans.

As my background and beliefs are in marketing you'll see that they are almost identical and the marketing plan was written by CIM !

As for a sales plan this will be where you detail the sales you're going to get by product/ service and the sales channels/ staff that operate those (along with a bunch of stats/ ROI etc)

Maybe I'll add a sales plan one day

[peterjhale]

hello

I've added a sales plan to our site

http://www.teneric.co.uk/sales-plan.html

Peter

[theplanner]

yep - marketing and sales - how different are they !

Marketing is about identifying and satisfying customer needs (ie: find the need in the market and develop a service/ product that will satisfy those needs - develop benefit related communications)

Sales - hmmm ? I suppose it's about sales channels yeh ?

[BIZAL]

Yeeks

some strange advice here.

Marketing: Objective how you will let the market know you have a benefit/ solution that will help them in some way. Remember facts are better hearsay!!! i.e. best , greatest , it will save you money etc are out unless you can prove it!!!

Remember to focus in on the TMUP and maximum CPL ( cost per lead) and how you will achieve it. i.e. if your profit is say £20.00 per deal and it costs £10.00 to generate each lead there is no point. but if cost say only 50pence and you are closing 1:3 it is clearly worth it.


Sales: How you plan to convert the interest in to sales. Include comfort factor statements length of sales cycle etc.

Also include costs for sales people etc.

[peterjhale]

Originally Posted by BIZAL

Yeeks

some strange advice here.

Marketing: Objective how you will let the market know you have a benefit/ solution that will help them in some way.

I have to disagree with you here.

This is putting the cart before the horse (yes, promotion is part of the marketing mix so you need to communicate, and communicate benefits rather than features)

BUT

The identifying of customer needs comes first (then you can satisfy them with your product or service that you develop specifically to satisfy that need)

Then tell them about it !

Hard work all round!

[BIZAL]

I am suppose to draft Marketing Plan and Sales Plan for organisations' Annual Business plan. Can anyone explain difference between these two and what should they cover

So you have a product/ service because it states above that it is for an annual business plan, which implies that the business has been going at least a couple of years.

Hence PeterJhale I find your comments confusing, because if the company exists and has been running for a few years they obviously built it because they know there is a requirement and hence I took the question to be

Can anyone explain difference between these two and what should they cover

If I have misread your comments I am sorry.