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B2B Business Plan Template

MAR.22, 2014

Carving Out Success with a B2B Business Plan

B2B Business plan for starting your own business

Dealing directly with customers is a hassle, right? Well, due to the integration of monetary chains and dependence of businesses on one another for manufacturing as well as services, the B2B businesses are getting high in demand.

If you also want to start a B2B business, you should do a little research, choose the areas in which you want to serve, make a business plan, and launch your startup. For you to understand how to make an accurate business plan, we are providing a B2B e-commerce business plan of a startup namely Networks.

While the business plan for investors developed for Networks can give you a detailed insight into B2B business, you should still consider hiring a professional for the purpose. It is because dealing with businesses involves complexities and strict adherence to principles with the agreements and contracts. A professional can take care of even the smallest details while making business plan B2B correctly.

Executive Summary

2.1 the business.

Networks will be owned by Max Clint. The business will be based in New York City which is considered the hub of businesses. The businesses will provide various services in the B2B niche including outsourcing, HR services, software services, and more. The business activities are expected to go beyond NYC because Clint aims at providing freelance services as well.

2.2 Management of B2B business

B2B business requires adherence to extremely strict standards and therefore, the management of B2B business can be a headache if you don’t follow a proper plan. Before entering the enterprise, you must make a proper B2B SaaS business plan that covers all the management aspects.

To help you, we will document the personnel plan and operational B2B business plan made for Networks. If you are getting a franchise you won’t be the all-in-all decision-making authority, and in that case, you will have to consult business plan for a franchise for an effective management plan.

2.3 Customers of B2B business

The customers as indicated in B2B e-commerce business plan of Networks are as follows:

  • Small Businesses
  • Established Enterprises
  • Business Franchises

2.4 Business Target

The business targets of the Networks are given as follows in this B2B business plan sample:

  • Increase the cost of our services by 3% after 3 years of the launch while retaining the customer base
  • Earning a profit margin of more than $50k per month by the end of the first 6 years

3 Years Profit Forecast - B2B Business Plan Template

Company Summary

3.1 company owner.

Max Clint, the owner of Networks, has worked as a business consultant for more than 5 years. He is known to be an expert in legal business matters and management.

3.2 Why the B2B business is being started

The B2B is started because of Clint’s experience and interest in the field. His qualification, co-curricular activities, and desire for excellence have driven him to start this business. 

3.3 How the B2B business will be started

Step1: Develop Business Plan for B2B sales

The first step to step into this business is to create a B2B business plan template. For that you should explore what is B2B startup and read some B2B business plan examples. In a B2B startup business plan you should include your strategic plan, financial plan, customer segments, and marketing analysis.

Step2: Create the Brand

Since many B2B businesses are already running in the United States. You have to come up with exclusive ideas and expertise to become renowned in the market. To create a brand image, you should have highly specialized employees and success stories.

Step3: Establish Web Presence

In the information age, services are searched for on the web rather than on paper. Therefore, you must ensure that your business comes in the top lists of searches. For that, you would need to hire SEO experts, a graphic designer, and a web developer.

Step4: Develop & Market

The last step is to establish your company’s physical presence and market your venture to reach a maximum number of customers.

Startup Cost - B2B Business Plan Template

Services of B2B business

The service sector of B2B businesses is multi-faceted. Therefore, while developing your B2B SaaS business plan template you should specify which services you plan to provide. You can study many B2B business plan examples for the purpose and explore their B2B marketing strategies examples for each service they provide.

You can also see the services given in this B2B business plan sample. This B2B business plan was created for Networks by professional business plan writers after probing several B2B business plan templates.

  • Doing Outsourced Tasks

Our major service will be doing outsourced tasks such as hiring and training the workforce, maintaining the equipment, and completing some parts of a larger project.

  • Business Consultancy

We will provide legal advice and consultation to businesses that come to deal with other businesses. We will also help writing business plan documents and making due diligence template . Moreover, our consultation will also be educational as we plan to acquaint our partners with the latest trends such as type of due diligence in use.

  • Software Services

We will also provide software services but only in the domain in which multiple businesses are connected via shared database and management software.

  • Freelance Services

We will serve as the middle ground between clients and customers to provide B2B freelance services.

Marketing Analysis of B2B business

Excellent work.

excellent work, competent advice. Alex is very friendly, great communication. 100% I recommend CGS capital. Thank you so much for your hard work!

Your B2B business can end in loss if you fail to attract the community that was supposed to buy from you. To succeed in the purpose, you have to explore the market for which you are making B2B sales business plan. you have to see which services are in demand and how much competition exists for which service. All these details must be included in your marketing plan for B2B business. 

Today, carrying out a market analysis is easier due to the online presence of B2B businesses. You will have to maintain a web presence and thus your marketing plan for B2B business should be devised accordingly.

To gain an insight into marketing plan template B2B, you should visit B2B marketing portals. Some sites even offer free B2B website in usa. Moreover, you can also find free guidance on B2B marketing planning from blogs like this on marketing plan B2B example. 

5.1 Market Trends

The trends for B2B businesses are going great. It is reported that more than 50% of B2B buyers are millennials. The industry is currently estimated at 6.7 trillion dollars. Moreover, 35% of the already-established B2B businesses are expecting a significant rise in online sales in the next years.

The trends provided in this sample B2B marketing plan are general. And while developing your B2B marketing business plan you should study the trends specific to your area.

5.2 Marketing Segmentation

Identifying the groups of target customers help you determine a focused strategy in B2B marketing project to target them. For a B2B company, customers can belong to various niches therefore it will be good to also explore some more business plans such as mobile notary business plan pdf .

In this example B2B marketing plan, the customer segments identified by Networks are given as follows:

Marketing Segmentation - B2B Business Plan Template

5.2.1 Small Businesses & Startups

Our biggest customers will be the small businesses that are especially newly established. New startups find it difficult to undertake all the tasks and recruit a huge workforce. Therefore, they rely on other businesses. In addition, due to a lack of trust in financial stability, they find it difficult to enter into long-term contracts with large enterprises. With our B2B services, they will be able to develop their businesses.

5.2.2 Established Enterprises

The second biggest category of our target customers includes established enterprises. They would require our services to deal with their business partners. Moreover, they will also seek our services to maintain a skilled workforce at all times.

5.2.3 Business Franchises

Business franchises would also need our services to get business plans and to do successful contracts.

5.2.4 Industries

Industries whose inputs and outputs are procured and transferred to enterprises will also need our B2B services to conduct their business affairs.

5.3 Business Target

  • Increase our prices by 3% by the end of the first 6 years
  • Maintain a CSAT score of 95+ from the very first month of our launch
  • Maintain a Customer Retention Rate of more than 80% from the very first year of our launch

5.4 Product Pricing

The rates for our services are a little bit higher than our competitors. However, due to our competitive advantages, we still expect to get more customers than them.

Marketing Strategy of B2B business

While developing marketing strategy in B2B, you must keep in mind that this time you are not dealing with a man in the street, rather you will be dealing with experienced professionals. Therefore, your sales strategy and advertisement techniques should be devised accordingly. In this B2B marketing strategy example, we are providing the sales strategy of the Networks.

Clint spent a whole 3 months devising his strategy in his B2B marketing template. Some parts of his plan are mentioned here in this B2B marketing strategy template.

6.1 Competitive Analysis

  • We are using the latest tech for all our tasks. For instance, we present digital cards to our business partners to leave the impression that at Networks, we are acquainted with all the latest products and trends.
  • We have hired the most competent and talented business experts in the town.
  • We have pursued regular training programs to keep our employees up to date.

6.2 Sales Strategy

For advertisement, the Networks will do the following:

  • Advertising the business on social media and through newspapers and magazines
  • Arranging meetups among the business CEOs and our sales executives to let our competitive aspects known
  • Providing a 40% discount on all our services for the first month of the launch

For more ideas, you can see law firm business plan and judgement recovery business plan.

6.3 Sales Monthly

Sales Monthly - B2B Business Plan Template

6.4 Sales Yearly

Sales Yearly - B2B Business Plan Template

6.5 Sales Forecast

Unit Sales - B2B Business Plan Template

Personnel plan of B2B business

The success of a B2B business depends on the ability of its employees to conduct affairs. To ensure you hire the right people, you should devise a measurable criterion in your business plan for B2B. In your business plan B2B you can assign measurable values to experience, interpersonal skills, and qualifications to make sure the recruitment remains impartial 

In this B2B business plan template the list of staff of Networks along with their salaries is listed below: 

7.1 Company Staff

  • 1 Co-Manager
  • 1 Web Manager
  • 1 Sales Executive
  • 1 Software Manager
  • 3 Business Consultants
  • 1 Legal Advisor
  • 2 Project Managers

7.2 Average Salary of Employees

Financial plan of b2b business.

The B2B business has great prospects in the earning domain. The business pays a lot due to immense opportunities arising out of increased dependency on other businesses for completing a task. The modern world works on the principles of efficiency and for greater efficiency outsourcing a part of one’s business is becoming a must.

Therefore, the business is sustainable as far as finances are concerned. However, to ensure long-term smooth monetary flows, you need a business plan for B2B sales. Since you will be spending a hefty amount on salaries and maintaining a skilled workforce at all times, you need to be careful about the b to b sales strategies. 

In this B2B sales plan template, we are providing the financial plan of Networks. In addition to the profit profile, if you also want to know what is B2B marketing and sales, you can refer to the sections written above.

8.1 Important Assumptions

8.2 break-even analysis.

Break-even Analysis - B2B Business Plan Template

8.3 Projected Profit and Loss

8.3.1 profit monthly.

Profit Monthly - B2B Business Plan Template

8.3.2 Profit Yearly

Profit Yearly - B2B Business Plan Template

8.3.3 Gross Margin Monthly

Gross Margin Monthly - B2B Business Plan Template

8.3.4 Gross Margin Yearly

Gross Margin Yearly - B2B Business Plan Template

8.4 Projected Cash Flow

Projected Cash Flow - B2B Business Plan Template

8.5 Projected Balance Sheet

8.6 business ratios.

  • What is the B2B business plan?

A B2B business plan is a detailed document that explains the major aspects of your business, how you plan to start and run it, and where and how much you intend to spend to ensure long-term sustainability.

To get a better idea of what a B2B business plan template is, you should study some B2B business plan examples. For a generic idea, this B2B business plan sample is also good to go.

  • What are the 4 types of B2B?

The 4 types of B2B markets are: 

  • Institutions 

Download B2B Business Plan Template From Here

OGSCapital’s team has assisted thousands of entrepreneurs with top-rate business plan development, consultancy and analysis. They’ve helped thousands of SME owners secure more than $1.5 billion in funding, and they can do the same for you.

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Sales Plan

How to Create a B2B Sales Plan: Template + Examples

A sales plan is an essential tool for any business, especially in B2B. It provides a roadmap for achieving your sales goals. By clearly outlining your strategies and tactics, a well-crafted sales plan will keep you on track and help you measure your progress along the way.

Creating a sales plan can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. This article lays out a structure for a sales plan. We will extend this article over time.

In this post, we’ll cover

What is a sales plan, what is the sales planning process, what are typical elements of a sales plan, executive summary, key assumptions for this sales plan (examples), target customers and related products / services, business planing, initiatives and measures, required resources, overall outcome of a sales plan, sales plan in one sentence, sales plan examples.

A sales plan is a document that encompasses goals, target customers, and sales strategy aimed at attaining necessary results. It enables a company’s leadership and sales team to plan concrete measures and initiatives to achieve the defined business outcomes as well as predict business-related risks and steps to avoid them.

  • Gather historic sales data
  • Define your objectives including existing business plans
  • Define your assumptions going into sales planning
  • Determine metrics for success
  • Determine current situation
  • Start sales forecasting based on current performance
  • Identify gaps to success metrics and business plan
  • Ideate new initiatives to close gaps
  • Involve stakeholders for feedback
  • Outline action items and determine ressource requirements

A typical sales plan includes the following sections:

  • Key assumptions
  • Revenue Targets, Business Plan
  • Strategies and Tactics (incl. Marketing initiatives)
  • Pricing and Promotions, marketing and sales channels
  • Deadlines and responsibiliites
  • Team structure
  • Market Conditions

Structure of sales strategy / quarterly sales plan

A structured sales plan provides clarity and guidance in a turbulent environment. Based on over 100 projects, we provide you with a suggested structure to map out specific goals, action items, and target dates for progress.

  • What targets will you hit
  • Which measures are you taking
  • Which (incremental) ressources do you need
  • Focus on product A and region B to generate the revenues
  • Keep existing product mix
  • Product improvements / innovation
  • Other departments plans / confirmed actions
  • Customer segments, ABC-analysis
  • Geographical split
  • Market size and penetration today and in future
  • Performance based on previous performance (“bottom-up 1”) potentially: variance analysis of actual results vs. plan of previous timeframe
  • Performance based on realistic & ambitious estimates from managerial experience (“bottom-up 2”)
  • top-down targets from business plan (communicated towards shareholders) (“top-down”)
  • Gap analysis between today “bottom-up 1”, “bottom-up 2” and “top-down”
  • Decision, which plan (named “ sales plan “) will be basis for next timeframe
  • number of resources / seller
  • avg. revenue per deal
  • ramp-up time per seller
  • target achievement per seller
  • product / country / margin mix
  • Employee churn
  • Customer churn
  • As needed: “sales plan” breakdown to quarters, months, weeks and days.
  • As needed: breakdown “sales plan” to teams and individuals incl. 10-20% buffer for every hierachy level
  • Prepare: Development of measures to fill gap to get to “sales plan”

sales plan progressive

  • 3-5 key initiatives to deliver the “sales plan” as outlined above
  • Each initiative is linked to 3-7 specific measures linked to metrics and financial outcomes
  • employee churn
  • customer churn
  • Each measure is linked to one person responsible and has a clear timline
  • Ideally: every initiative can be measured by specific KPIs (to see if progress is made)
  • FTE resources Marketing
  • FTE resources Sales
  • Budgets (team, budget for marketing, new tools or incentives / SPIFFs)
  • IT support for implementation of new sales tools
  • Product management for changes to product / services
  • Customer Success / Account Management
  • Which marketing channels will be used
  • Which sales channels will be used
  • Overview: which team approaches what type of customers through which channel and which product / service offering
  • Planning of all initiatives and tasks for upcoming timeframe incl. responsibilities
  • Financial planning sales / P&L in collaboration with controlling department
  • Overview of all requirements to other departments / companies and shareholders to achieve the plan
  • Outlook for timeframe following the planned timeframe (t+1)
We will achieve an overall goal of 1,3 m€ in net new ARR in Q1/23. For this I need 500 k€ (in budget and headcount, 100 k€ incremental budget required) and the defined support from the organization / shareholders.

Over time, we will link examples of sales plans in this section.

Jens Hutzschenreuter

Jens Hutzschenreuter

Jens is a previous B2B Sales leader (Groupon, ryd), ex-Management Consultant with Boston Consulting Group and is now supporting ~50 B2B sales organizations annually in developing systems, structure and processes to scale an organization up to 250 sellers.

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Top 10 B2B Business Proposal Templates with Samples and Examples

Top 10 B2B Business Proposal Templates with Samples and Examples

Anushka Bansal

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Mark Cuban, an American businessman and investor on Shark Tank once said, “Sales cure all.” If a business sells, it makes money and succeeds, hiding all kinds of aches and pains that tend to beset an enterprise. To set yourself apart from all the fish in the sea you must crack how to write a captivating business proposal.

You may wonder why you need to write a B2B proposal when you have a top-notch website with all of your products/services listed there. While  this is valuable and essential in the age of the Internet, you’ll be losing a lot of clients if you just wait for them to see your page.

You have to take an initiative and establish the relationship by sending them a tailored business proposal which will talk directly to them, and not everyone online. Many of your potential clients might not be aware of  your services. With this in mind, you have to be proactive and present yourself to them.

A well-written business proposal ppt can often mean the difference between winning or losing a prospective client.

Components of a B2B proposal

An effective business proposal is a document that a  B2B or business-facing company uses. The  seller aims to persuade a prospective buyer into buying their goods or services. It provides an overview of the offering company's products, services, or expertise, emphasizing the value it can bring to the receiving company. This document includes an executive summary, problem statement, proposed solution, benefits, scope of work, timeline, and pricing. B2B proposals serve to initiate discussions, negotiate terms, and secure agreements for collaborations, sales, or partnerships between businesses. These  play a crucial role in fostering mutually beneficial relationships and driving growth in the B2B sector.

To help you present a fail-proof business proposal,  SlideTeam experts have developed a content-ready presentation template for you. Introducing our Top 10 B2B Business Proposal Template. The content-ready slides give you the much-needed structure to build your pitch. The 100% customizability feature of the templates provides you with the flexibility to edit your presentations according to your company specifications. 

Checkout the complete deck!

Top 10 B2B Business Proposal Templates with Samples and Examples

Download the complete deck

Here are top 10 B2B Business Proposal Templates from the deck:

Template  1: Cover Letter for B2B Service Proposal

Write a compelling Cover Letter to convey commitment to your clients. Use this ready-made template to set the motion for your proposal. Present your company’s goals and vision for the client. Provide your clients with a list of the skills where your expertise is unparalleled, and help them understand the benefits they can unveil when they hire your company. Use this pre-designed PPT Template as a reference for writing a short and to-the-point letter detailing how you will help the client achieve their goals. Download now!    

Cover Letter for B2B Service Proposal

Download Now!

Template  2: Project Context and Objectives of B2B Services 

Highlight the Project Context by clearly stating the problems  that your B2B services address. Use this PPT template to list  objectives you aim to achieve for your  client. It may include cost savings, improving customer services, etc. With this PPT Template, you can manage the client's expectations well. Download now! 

Project Context and Objectives of B2B Services

Template 3 : Scope of Work for B2B Services

Once the motion of the presentation is set, inform your clients about the benefits for them as their customers. This PPT Template will enable you to list all business benefits, the benefits for your clients may include decreased service support costs, up/cross-selling, lower transaction costs, decrease in  manual work, and generation of new revenue streams. Explain to your clients  the benefits that will enhance customer experiences with your services. The consumers can avail easy purchases, effective planning, faster proceedings, etc. Download now!

Scope of Work for B2B Services

Template 4 : Plan of Action for B2B Services

Showcase your readiness with this Plan of Action slide. This PPT Template enables you to present the issue summary, suggested recommendation, proposed action, personnel responsible, deadlines, and ways to monitor outcomes in a tabular format. You can plan multiple projects using this table and give you clients a brief about the entire pack of services that you . Download Now!

Plan of Action for B2B Services

Template 5: Key Deliverables for B2B Services

Implementing a project involves multiple actions, it is vital to priortize them and inform your clients about key deliverables. These activities include engaging target contacts, building contacts, etc. With this information you can highlight the value you will add to the company. The PPT Template also records the metrics that are used to measure the outcomes. For instance, team-based decision making is used as a metrics for building relationships, and so on. Download Now!  

Key Deliverables for B2B Services

Template 6: B2B Services Price Packages 

For any business relationship to be sustained, it is vital to maintain transparency and this Slide offers you just that. With this PPT Template, you can break down your pricing plans, and explain the services included in every package. Categorize  your plans in three pricing packages including Standard , Pro, and Advanced. Mention the use  of each package for new business, growing business, and established firms. Download Now!

B2B Services Price Packages

Template 7: About our B2B Services

It is vital for your potential clients to trust you. To ensure this, you must provide them with information about your company. It will help you showcase your experience and areas of expertise. Along with the background, the PPT Template enables you to add information on your company’s core values, vision, and mission. This helps enhance your company’s reputation and credibility. Download now! 

About our B2B Services

Slide 8: Services that the B2B Company Offers  

Ensure that your clients are aware of  services that  your company provides. This PPT Template will enable you to list your offerings like Digital Experience Design and Activation, Account Based Marketing, Campaign Process, Strategy and Design, and Lead Management. Explain the key features of the services that your B2B company offers  with the bullet points provided in the template. Download now!

Services that the B2B Company Offers

Slide 9: Case Study in Services Offered 

This Slide will set you apart from your competitors. It is focused on ensuring that your clients get quicker, better results if they choose to work with your company. You can use this template to highlight a case study in your company's past. This will include the concern addressed to you in the past, the process you followed to help the clients, and the result that was finally achieved. . This case study should be  chosen on factors like the results achieved, the reputation of the past client, and the time taken to achieve the desired results. Download now!

Case Study in Services Offered

Slide 10: Statement of Work and Contract for B2B Services

It is vital to  understand and explain the scope of work your company will be taking care of. This will ensure a smooth flow of work.   Use this presentation template as a reference to draw up a contract with your potential clients. It should include information like services rendered, cooperation, terms of payment, cancellations plan, confidentiality, terms, and termination. This will avoid any  conflict among  parties. Download now!

Statement of Work and Contract for B2B Services

Download Now

LAND CLIENTS WITH IMPRESSIVE PROPOSAL PRESENTATIONS

Make a lasting impression on your potential clients and investors with these  Professional Services Proposals. The presentation must convey credibility, vision, and competence to create a relationship for successful collaborations. You can save time and effort by streamlining this process with our content-ready proposal PPT Templates. You can focus on the content of your proposal, allowing your ideas to shine through, while our professionally designed templates handle the presentation. 

P.S. Click here to check out our other Top 10 Professional Services Proposal Templates

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  • Quarterly Business Review Presentation: All the Essential Slides You Need in Your Deck
  • [Updated 2023] How to Design The Perfect Product Launch Presentation [Best Templates Included]
  • 99% of the Pitches Fail! Find Out What Makes Any Startup a Success

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  • B2B Sales and Marketing

How to Create a Winning B2B Sales Plan [+ Free Template]

  • Last updated December 20, 2022
  • By Jessica Huhn

b2b sales plan template

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Are you ready to be the next rockstar of your company’s sales meeting? Whether you work for a new business or an established one, keep reading to learn everything about how to create a sales plan that brings you more clients. And after that, you can download our free sales plan template and get started making one of your own.

What is a B2B sales plan?

b2b sales plan example

Before diving too deep, it’s helpful to go over a quick sales plan definition. These plans are ways for companies to strategize and set goals for their sales departments.

There are several beneficial reasons to create this type of action plan. One reason is because these plans give your team clear objectives to carry out. Also, the research you perform while creating this type of business plan often uncovers new opportunities for your team. Lastly, these types of plans also allow for performance and goal tracking. This is a great way to find out if your team is growing stronger in their sales skills or if problems need addressing.

Now, let’s go over what you need to include in your company’s sales plan.

What should you include in your strategic sales plan?

SWOT table for b2b sales plan

There are many sections you’ll want to include in this type of action plan for your team. Considering that, it’s helpful to learn more about these important sections. Here is a quick overview of each section of a standard sales plan.

1. Introduction

Typically, the beginning of this plan is where you give a brief introduction of what this plan is going to cover. While it’s usually at the beginning, most people find it easier to create this 2–3 sentence introduction after formulating all other sections of this plan.

2. Sales team structure

This next section provides key information about the structure of your team. This includes roles and responsibilities, as well as how general reporting flows through the entire department. Sales team structures also often include information about new hires, recent promotions, location changes, sales process changes, and other updates to the structure of your team .

3. Market position/industry

market position

Another important part of this kind of plan involves listing information about your position within your industry. To do this, you’re going to need to find and report information about your competition. You might think that this sounds impossible, how can I find information about how well a competitor is doing? Fortunately, digital marketing tools make it easy to research your competition and find out more about traffic totals, brand reach, and other important metrics.

4. Target audience

It’s also a good idea to research your company’s ideal customers while creating this type of business plan. One reason to do this is because the audience a sales team is targeting can change due to lots of factors. By keeping this information updated, you’ll be able to let everyone reading your plan clearly know who your target customers are and why.

5. Challenges

Think of your company’s sales plan as a story. And no good story is complete without challenges for the characters to overcome. With that in mind, this section is where you’ll list the challenges your team faces and how you’ll overcome them. Think hard about this – you don’t want any unexpected surprises catching your team off guard.

6. Sales goals (short/long-term)

It’s also important to include a goals section in this plan. Challenges your team faces, listed in the section above, focus on things that are out of your team’s control . Goals, while still challenging, deal with things that your sales team can control.

Short-term plans measure goals that span from weeks to quarters, while longer-term plans can range from six months to years.

Also, use this section as a quick way to set any goals or key performance indicators for your sales team to achieve. This can include celebrating a certain number of new clients , a growth in total sales over the last period, expansion into new territories, and similar types of information.

7. Plan of action (sales strategy)

No sales plan is complete without a plan of action. Here, you’ll want to list the specific steps your team will use to achieve their individual and group goals. To make sure everyone is on the same page and has a clear direction of the end goal, include lots of data and actionable steps in this section of your sales plan.

8. Finances

Whether it’s a small business or large corporation, every company operates on some type of budget. Considering that, it’s essential to include financial information in your company’s sales plan. You’ll want to present accurate sales budget information including what’s available and how you plan on allocating this budget across your department. This is also a great opportunity to list sales totals and revenue targets compared to previous weeks/months/quarters/years. Also, make sure you use this section to list other types of financial goals your team is going after.

You don’t need to overthink your plan’s summary. Much like the introduction, use the summary as a way to frame a nice 2–3 sentence wrap-up that focuses on the future of your sales team.

5 steps to create a winning B2B sales action plan

Now, it’s time to learn a few tips on how to best write one of these plans. By using these tips, you’ll have plenty of information to include in your company’s sales plan.

1. Have realistic goals

It would be nice to impress your boss with a lofty goal that would make any sales manager raise their eyebrows. But struggling to meet nearly impossible goals isn’t going to end up pleasing anyone. Instead, make sure your goals are realistic, based on previous sales information and accurate forecasting.

For help with creating goals, use the SMART system , which stands for:

Smart Goals

Using this system can help ensure your sales team are creating goals that are challenging yet achievable. Also, by digging deeper into proposed goals with the SMART system, you can easily remove those that aren’t worth pursuing.

2. Back up what you’re saying with data

While creating this type of plan, it’s easy to make general statements about upcoming goals. However, without data, it’s hard to back up anything you’re saying. Essentially, this creates a plan that might look great and read well but has nothing concrete to back up the statements it makes.

3. Research your company’s target audience

Every company has its own type of target audience. You might even have multiple target audiences. To make it easier to reach this audience, take the time to find out more about their specific needs. Performing this type of research can also help you uncover lots of prospecting opportunities with possible new customers.

4. Involve all sales employees during the sales plan creation process

What group of people know the most about the challenges and opportunities your sales department faces? Your sales team. As you prepare this type of plan, make sure to get your sales team’s opinion and thoughts. Chances are, you’ll gain valuable insights and have a much stronger presentation with your whole sales team behind you.

5. Take a closer look at your competitors

If you’re like most people, you don’t want to dwell on your company’s competition. However, this is necessary if you want to create a strong plan that succeeds in the market. You can gain lots of valuable insight by looking at competitor data. Of course, no competitor is going to give you the keys to their kingdom. Instead, find the information you need by using digital marketing tools and programs to get the upper hand.

You’ll want to look for publicly available information about your competitors including:

  • Social media : Utilize social listening to take a close look at your competitors’ followers, shares, likes, and similar engagement metrics.
  • SEO results : With the help of a few marketing automation tools , you can learn more about the online presence of your company’s competition.
  • Competitor news: While looking over this type of information, look for anything else your brand’s sales team can capitalize on.

Download our exclusive, free sales plan template

If you don’t want to create a plan from scratch, we completely understand. Most salespeople find themselves dealing with lots of things to take care of and simply don’t have time to sit down to create a lengthy sales plan.

No need to worry, we’ve got you covered with our downloadable sales plan template, just click the image below to download it. This template includes everything we’ve covered above in a clean layout. Feel free to make it your own, and share this page with other colleagues you feel would benefit from this template.

sales plan template

To wrap things up, sales plans are great ways to take a closer look inside of your sales department. With these clear steps and the right relevant data, you’ll be able to create an effective sales plan that gives everyone on your team a clear picture of the road that lies ahead.

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Highly Effective Business Plan Template For B2B Startups

Author Julie Williams

Julie Williams

  • September 14, 2022

Business Plan Template

Why Should You Download This Template?

  • You can think about every single step of your business.
  • Identify the right opportunities and deal with challenges.
  • Get an overview of your business and understand your target market
  • Plan your startup's future and make a roadmap for its success.
  • Get a structured way to organize your business ideas and goals.
  • Help entrepreneurs find weaknesses in their upcoming product or service ideas.

What is a Business Plan Template? 

A business plan template is the secret behind starting a successful B2B company. It serves several purposes if you plan to create a startup. A well-planned business plan will help you convince investors or lenders to finance your business. Startup business plan templates act as a step-by-step guide to building your startup and get concrete examples when approaching something for the first time.

It is a customized document that outlines how a company can achieve its objectives, such as gaining funding, obtaining a particular market share, or growing revenue. This template includes crucial elements that allow the startup founders to start with a solid foundation rather than from scratch. 

Take a Sneak Peek

Top-Business Plan Templates For Startup

What our Business Plan Template Includes

Business-Leaders

Business Leaders

Here, we will discuss the startup’s essential or primary decision-makers or business owners such as the CEO, COO, Vice President, President, and Managers.

Executive-summary

Executive Summary

 This will include information on the company, its products or services, mission statement and pricing details. You also have an option to add your management team’s roles and responsibilities, a business strategy and objectives.

Market-analysis

Market Analysis

It will help you analyze the target section of your target market, help you research the estimated market size, and find the target location. You will be able to understand the market in which your company will compete, find data on target market segments and keep up with industry trends.

Opportunities

Opportunities

Customer-Problems-Companies-solutions

Customer Problems & Companies Solutions

The customer analysis section will help you identify your target customer, understand the needs of your B2B clients and show how your products can solve their pain points.

Competition-analysis

Competition Analysis

SWOT-Analysis

SWOT Analysis

The strategic planning and management analysis technique identify your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to your business competition or project planning.

Marketing-and-Sales-Plan

Marketing and Sales Plan

Operation-Plan

Operation Plan

The operational plan will discuss the internal strategies to build your business. It will outline employee’s needs, milestones, and processes.

Financial-Plan

Financial Plan

This part of the business plan will allow you to make financial projections based on a fixed budget. It includes templates for three key financial statements: An income statement, a balance sheet, and a cash-flow statement. 

Accomplishments

Accomplishments

In this section, you can add the accomplishments you expect your business to achieve, evidence of how your business is improving, and other strategies it can incorporate to grow better.

Metrics

Why is a Business Plan Important? 

  • Importance of your business plan is that it helps you test the viability of business ideas.
  • A business plan will create an effective strategy for your startup's growth.
  • To evaluate competitors in the target market and find your audience.
  • Help you get investments from venture capital, a bank, or personal investors.
  • Creating a business plan will determine which new employees are needed to assist with the daily tasks.
  • Plan for every phase of your business or scale an existing business to the next level.
  • Identify the pain points of customers and make personalized marketing plans.
  • Hire and build partnerships, which is very necessary for the early stages of your business.
  • Set marketing goals, strategies, and tactics you can implement in your multi-channel campaigns.
  • You can also scoop out the necessary steps you should take and adjust your investment of time and money accordingly.

How Will This Template be Beneficial For Your Business?

Best Business-Plan Templates 2022

The template will come with instructions written in a manner that is easy to follow, so all you have to do is fill in the blanks. You can adjust the template to suit your needs and don’t have to build an outline from scratch. 

You can navigate through daunting business jargon and create an effective plan. This free business plan template will benefit you in securing investors, designing an effective growth strategy, and understanding your startup’s future financial needs.

You can write a template with these simple steps:

  • Write the executive summary of your business idea
  • Add a company overview
  • Provide the problem and solution 
  • Identify the target market
  • Research your competition
  • Describe your product or service offerings
  • Outline your marketing tactics

Yes, this template is free. You only need to sign in and download the template. We promise that you won’t get a better free business plan templates for B2B startups.

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Julie Williams

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How to create a b2b business development strategy

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Posted on: March 23, 2023

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Category: Business growth

In this blog

What is B2B business development?

Hiring a business development representative, hiring a b2b business development service, why does your company need business development, the basis for b2b business development, creating a b2b business development strategy, game-changing business development, how to create a b2b business development strategy.

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What B2B business development is, why you need it, and how to create a biz dev strategy that works for your business.

Business development is a key part of growing a company and making it successful. It might not grab the headlines like the superstars in finance, sales or HR, but every company engages in business development even if they don’t know it.

Despite being a core part of company growth, definitions of business development can often feel too broad. By covering such a wide range of responsibilities, description of this key aspect of business can feel wishy-washy.

B2B business development responsibilities sit between marketing and sales, which means “biz dev” departments are less common than these two ever-presents. And that means the two teams often share the responsibilities that the dedicated growth department would otherwise handle.

How should you tackle this problem? Even if you don’t have the budget to install a dedicated team, a good strategy can increase sales. 71% of fast-growing companies have a business plan. So, welcome to our seven step B2B business development plan. 

Business development is the process of finding and developing opportunities that directly lead to new sales. The department has a laser focus on increasing growth and boosting revenue. That process can include identifying and nurturing prospects, building brand awareness, finding new partnerships and growing markets.

The goals of B2B business development sit between marketing and sales. In companies with all three functions, a lead may pass from marketing, to business development, and finally to sales, before becoming a customer.

Business development (BD) teams may nurture and qualify leads generated by marketing. Alternatively, they may be responsible for sourcing a separate stream of leads via cold calling , social selling, or email prospecting. They can also work on partnerships and networking. Once the leads are qualified and ready for the sales process, the BD team will pass them on to the sales team to close.

Growing your business: should you hire or outsource?

If you are hoping to level up your business development game, hiring a Business Development Representative (BDR) or Sales Development Representative (SDR) is one option. For many, the better solution is to bring on board a biz dev agency.

A Business Development Representative is hired to take a lead on sales prospecting . They may spend their days finding suitable prospects, and sourcing their email or phone number, before contacting the person. Networking events can be fruitful, and using LinkedIn to try and reach relevant people is increasingly common.

Their role focuses on generating leads, qualifying prospects, and setting up initial meetings for the sales teams to close deals. It can be an effective way to take care of prospecting, but it is a lot of work for one person to do. Using a dedicated B2B business development platform may help lighten their workload.

For many looking to grow revenue, bringing a B2B business development agency is the first step to growing this function. The right business development service will help improve your outbound lead generation by adding the expertise and experience of an agency, without the long-term commitment of a new hire.

An agency will deliver a similar output as a BDR, but they tend to specialise – like email prospecting, telemarketing, or social media. Working with a business development service can also provide access to a wider network of prospects and potential partners. They will have experience working with a variety of industries and can use their data to identify new opportunities for your business.

Bringing in an external business development team can free up internal teams to focus on important tasks, such as sales, product development or customer retention. With a dedicated team of experts handling your outbound lead generation, you can focus on other aspects that will grow the business.

B2B business development can make your teams more efficient. Sales spend less time prospecting, nurturing, qualifying, and selling to poor-quality leads. Marketing leads can be nurtured by dedicated BDRs. Helping to bridge the gap, BD teams can assist with sales and marketing alignment .

BD teams help install long-term business growth plans and can assist in regularly auditing the sales cycle to ensure it’s the best it can be.

There are lots of different ways of developing business growth, but the main areas to focus on will be covered by these five pillars.

  • Building brand awareness and reputation
  • Finding and scaling new markets
  • Qualifying and nurturing marketing leads
  • Outbound sales prospecting to deliver sales-ready leads
  • Implementing a strategy that coverts marketing, BD, and sales

Here’s a template for a B2B business development strategy although exactly what yours includes will depend on your particular situation. 

Infographic showing an example of a B2B business development plan

  • Outline your B2B business development plan

Setting clear responsibilities and business development goals is the first step to creating a successful demand generation machine. What are you trying to achieve? What are your long-term KPIs? 

Once you know what you want to do, you need clearly define which team is responsible for each part of the process.

  • Research, research, research

There’s no effective business development strategy without proper research. You need to know the market inside out, from your competitors to everything about your potential clients.

Mapping your total addressable market can be a great place to start. Our market mapper tool nails your target audience and makes B2B outreach easier.

b2b business plan template net

  • Generate leads

A successful business development plan will include various marketing strategies that you can use to reach potential clients. At the core of this will be outbound marketing.

Email prospecting

Email prospecting is a great way to reach your target market. Our research found that 77% of B2B marketing decision-makers wanted to hear from suppliers via email – the most popular channel by far.

Without the specialist software and expertise of an agency, prospecting can be time-consuming and inefficient. Sopro takes care of prospecting for you , leaving you the time and resources to focus on developing your business. 

Cold calling

The advantage of cold calling is you have direct conversations with potential clients, letting you build relationships. This can be a key part of a BDR’s role.

However, it takes eight attempts to get through to a prospect on average, and it is reported that only 1% of cold calls lead to appointments. 

Networking and trade events

Events also have the advantage of being face-to-face, facilitating relationship building and a good old-fashioned handshake. 

As many as 81% of B2B event attendees are decision-makers and have buying authority, so the appeal is clear. They tend to be a valuable addition to yoru strategy, rather than the core of it.

Social selling

70% of sales reps use LinkedIn as part of their role. The network allows you to reach a wide audience, using specific targeting to find your ideal customers.

Manual LinkedIn outreach can be very labour-intensive. It works well for small businesses that don’t need many leads, but it doesn’t scale. Success rates can be low too, as InMail messages can feel spammy.

Supported by inbound marketing methods:

  • Social media marketing
  • Content marketing
  • Email newsletters

Note for most companies, these inbound channels will be managed by the marketing team.

  • Lead scoring

The leads generated will go to your sales reps, and they’ll be work on closing those deals. But some of those might not be ready to convert, so how can you needle out the good ones? Lead scoring rates leads based on their likeness to buy, ensuring you’re never wasting resources on leads that won’t convert.

  • Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with potential customers by providing them with relevant content and engaging with them. Why is it important in your business development process? 

Lead nurturing demonstrates value at the right time and builds brand recall, developing a better chance of converting leads into customers.

  • Close deals and make sales!

You’ve got your leads lined up now your sales team can close some deals! To close a deal, it’s important to clearly communicate the value of your product or service, address any objections or concerns, and establish a sense of urgency.

b2b business plan template net

  • Get them coming back for more… 

Say it with us: “Customer retention is key for a successful business”. You want to be seen as the brand that’s fantastic no matter where your clients are in the sales cycle.

That means your customer service needs to be astounding from start to finish. This isn’t just about keeping clients, but about getting them to buy from you again and again. A happy client is a client for life!

We take a more in-depth look at all these points and more in our complete guide to B2B sales strategies . 

Sopro brings sales prospecting to a whole new level. We offer a fully-managed B2B business development service that drives new sales enquiries from your ideal customers, and a sales engagement platform packed with cutting-edge features to optimise your outreach and nurture your leads.

Sopro combines a cutting-edge platform, world-class data, and unrivalled prospecting experience so you can concentrate on what’s really important – closing deals and growing your business.

Book a demo to find out more. 

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How to Create a B2B Sales Plan (a GTM Guide)

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For sales managers, planning for the future can feel quite different from stomping out fires in the present. Efficiently structuring your market opportunities and deploying your sales team to match is how sales leaders translate high-level strategy into execution in the field.

Sales planning is complex, especially in B2B. Complexity creates opportunities. The more that sales organizations can organize their customers and prospects and then empower their sales team to effectively deliver on those opportunities, the more successful they’ll be at beating the competition.

Read on to learn what sales planning is, how to optimize it in B2B, and what best practices develop a successful sales planning process.

What is Sales Planning?

Sales Planning is how a sales organization slices up the market and aligns its sales team to fit. Sales planning is the crucial link that connects high-level strategy—goals, markets, products—with execution in the field.

By optimizing its sales planning, a sales organization can make sure that it pairs the right salespeople with the right accounts and that it groups accounts most efficiently. It can ensure that the way it organizes customers and prospects remains in sync with the company’s overall sales goals. Good sales planning also puts a company’s salespeople in the best position to succeed.

Sales planning comprises the key building blocks of a sales strategy: sales quota planning, territory planning, account segmentation and scoring, and sales capacity planning. By optimizing these and connecting them to one another, a sales organization can increase the productivity of its sales force, reduce attrition and, ideally, raise its bottom line.

What’s the difference between Sales Planning and a Sales Plan?

A sales plan is something a sales leader (or a team of sales leaders) make once, or maybe once a year; sales planning is an ongoing activity. In this way, companies who shift from making a sales plan to doing sales planning year-round are able to stay more flexible and can more quickly adapt to market or other business changes.

The transition from making a sales plan to doing sales planning becomes more important the more a sales team grows and a company’s sales strategy matures. As the sales strategy integrates more and more moving pieces—which can be people, products, territories, customers, markets, currencies, geographies, or any other element—it’s critical that sales leadership be able to address changes as they happen.

Rather than seeing a sales plan as an inflexible framework that to be rigidly adhered to at all moments, sales leaders should view sales planning as an evolving set of modifiable guidelines that help a sales organization best fulfill its goals. Taking this approach helps a sales team to figure out the best way to address its key priorities, even if those priorities change.

4 Steps to Create a Sales Plan in B2B

Sales planning generally includes those aspects of the sales strategy that deal with organizing prospects and coordinating the sales team, including account segmentation and scoring, sales quota planning, territory planning, and sales capacity planning.

Account Segmentation and Scoring

Account segmentation and scoring is how sales organizations classify and group their opportunities. Doing both effectively helps sales teams understand which markets, products, and customers they should target to best grow their business, which opportunities are ripe for cross-selling or upselling, and how the company’s salespeople are best deployed.

Both account segmentation and account scoring exert a downstream influence in the sales organization, helping determine how that organization plans its territories and quotas, how it makes its forecasts, and how it interacts with other parts of the organization, including marketing and HR.

The key steps for evaluating sales opportunities

There are three key steps for developing an initial understanding of sales opportunities:

Define account segments

A good segmentation strategy begins with knowing which attributes are most important to your company’s success, and which allow you to most efficiently group accounts by sales strategy. Accounts can be grouped by any number of criteria: industry, revenue, prior-year sales, employee headcount, wallet share, tenure, and more. Any of these may correlate with your product offerings (perhaps you have different products for different-sized companies, or companies in different industries), or with the salespeople in your company (perhaps your salespeople are better equipped to sell to companies in the same industry, even if those companies have different sizes. Perhaps the opposite is true.).

You can additionally segment accounts based on whether they are active or pipeline accounts that require further nurturing. Classifying accounts in this way can help you forecast revenues for the quarter or year.

Assess account potential

Sales managers are often lured by the rush of chasing after new business—but it’s often easier, faster, and cheaper to sell to an existing customer than to get a foot in the door with a new account. Take a look at prior-year sales and identify key active accounts with large expansion opportunity. Then calculate the potential ROI of devoting different resources to existing accounts versus potential new ones.

Collaborate with front-line salespeople but incorporate actual data

Make prioritizing and ranking accounts a collaborative process between sales leaders and front-line salespeople, like field managers and sales reps. Front-line teams work with your customers daily and often have valuable insights that can help calculate account growth potential versus exhausted accounts.

At the same time, make sure that you have data to reinforce whatever hunches your sales people might have. In this way, account segmentation can be a bi-directional process: front-line salespeople can give you insights into how to read your data, and data can help front-line salespeople better prioritize their activities.

Sales Quota Planning

Did you know that 50 percent of organizations create five to ten iterations of their sales quota plans before rolling those quotas out to the field? Here are some tips for setting more effective sales quotas.

Weigh past performance against future opportunity

Many organizations set their sales quotas based on the historical performance of individual sales reps, but that can unintentionally discourage collaboration or penalize your best salespeople. Instead of simply upping last year’s quotas, take a closer look at the overall market opportunity and make sure your quotas are encouraging the behaviors that best fit the unique drivers in your market.

Use technology to monitor and measure the results

The key for setting better quotas is to use the right technology to evaluate effectiveness. “The right technology” means technology designed to do this sort of work.

For example, you’re probably using a CRM to monitor data for leaders and sales teams and to keep track of leads, calendars events, meetings, and deadlines. But this kind of technology doesn’t collect the information you need to design good quotas. Nor can it consolidate, reorganize, and track data in the forms you need.

Instead, you need technology that can collect and analyze sales data automatically, and that can supply this data when you need it.

Strike the right balance

Setting sales quotas is all about balance. Sales quotas need to meet the needs of your sales reps, your sales managers, and your company as a whole, while also syncing with your company’s overall business strategy. With a more transparent process, you’ll get sales reps buy-in to their sales quotas, which leads to their working harder toward reaching and exceeding those goals because they believe in the process and understand the decisions that produced those quotas.

Create a consistent process

A recent Anaplan survey found that 38 percent of companies suffer from a “lack of effective processes” when setting quotas. At many companies, the process changes yearly. For example, different sales reps might be assigned higher or lower quotas based on their past performance. When these kinds of variables are arbitrary, reps tend to ignore them. To keep both your field and leadership happy, determine a consistent process and stick to year after year.

Territory Planning

A recent article in Harvard Business Review found that by optimizing their sales territories, sales organizations can increase sales by two-to-seven percent without changing anything else about their strategy and without allocating resources any differently. Indeed, it’s crucial to evolve your territory and quota strategy to keep up as business priorities and objectives change.

Here are three tips for taking the guesswork out of territory planning and integrating your territory planning into your overall enterprise performance management strategy:

Use a data-driven approach

Territory and quota planning needs to be part of your team’s overall sales forecasting and sales analytics processes. Your organization likely has a massive amount of sales data. Look for ways to use this data to gain insights into where the biggest opportunities lie and how those opportunities are spread across your sales territories. Locate territories that show signs of growth and assign reps whose strengths best align with these opportunities. Make sure that your territory assignments and sales quotas are based on real data and solid trends, not just wishful thinking.

Listen to front-line sales managers and reps

As with quota-planning, creating sales territories should be a collaborative process. Instead of handing down the latest territory assignments from the top, work with sales managers and sales reps to get the latest intelligence from the front lines. Which territories are seen as particularly promising, and which ones are the backwaters that no one wants to work and why? Sales people are hyper-aware of opportunities, so take advantage of their insights and intuition to build a stronger sales performance management program.

Make a “living” plan

In the business of sales, you often have to improvise and respond to unforeseen circumstances. A territory plan should be similarly flexible. Be willing to modify your territory plans based on shifts in the economy, changing business priorities, or headcount changes.

Like “sales planning” versus “a sales plan,” territory plans shouldn’t be fixed entities; they should evolve with your sales strategy.

It’s for this reason that cloud-based sales planning tools are crucial for maintaining your territory plans. They’re far more flexible than any other solutions. Massive spreadsheets and legacy systems do not offer flexibility or visibility into scenario-based planning. With a cloud-based tool that gives a view into the whole sales organization, sales leaders can foresee the affects a change in territory or account strategy will have and can focus their teams on the most profitable accounts and regions.

With the right data-driven approach, enhanced collaboration, and the ability to do scenario-based planning, territory and quota plans can better align with overall revenue projections, as well as your organization’s big-picture business strategy.

Sales Capacity Planning

Having the right number of sales people deployed in all of the sales territories and assigned quota targets is critical to capturing all market opportunities and meeting revenue targets.

Sales Capacity Planning allows Sales and HR professionals to plan, model, and optimize the sales capacity and resource requirements, ensuring that the sales organization has complete coverage in all territories, eliminating the risk of unassigned quotas.

Top-down vs. bottom-up capacity planning

  • Top-down Sales Capacity Planning: Take the goal and build a model that lists your current team and their quotas, and then add the “to be hired” assets to get enough quota coverage to hit the goal.
  • Bottom-up Sales Capacity Planning: Look at your past performance, new information pertinent to the coming year, and your rate limiting factors, and build a model that will predict how much you can do.

Three steps to successful capacity planning

  • Align sales capacity and resource requirements with territory and quota plans. Ensure that the sales team is leveraging every opportunity to meet revenue and quota targets.
  • Connect sales capacity plans with HR hiring and recruitment plans. Make sure HR is recruiting and hiring the right number of sales reps at the right time for sales onboarding and training.
  • Quickly identify sales capacity and resource gaps. Understand the impact of covering all sales territories and attaining quota targets.

How should you prepare for the Sales Planning process?

According to SiriusDecisions, preparation should begin at least 30 days before sales leadership gets together. To prepare, stakeholders should assemble the previous year’s sales and productivity data: customer counts, channel information, revenue by product, revenue by geography or business units, overall profits, costs, and anything else that can help with the processes described above. It’s key that sales leadership validate the data to ensure that it’s trustworthy.

Once sales leaders have collected data, they should comb through it to locate problem areas. Observing data in different time dimensions (yearly, quarterly, monthly) can help isolate trends, and potential areas of future success.

Before sales planning meetings, trends and conclusions drawn from the data should be packaged in a reader-friendly format and distributed to all stakeholders with enough time for decision-makers to internalize the results.

What are some best practices for Sales Planning?

Making sales planning easier can sometimes be a matter of adopting best practices and maintaining them as goals change. For example:

  • Cross-organization collaboration

Because sales planning is about aligning the nuts and bolts of a sales strategy to corporate goals and objectives, sales planning needs to be viewed as a collaborative and interactive process. Planning meetings should involve stakeholders from across the organization. Be sure to include:

  • Sales: CSO, Sales Operations, Sales Enablement
  • Marketing: CMO, Marketing Operations
  • Product: Head of Product, Product Marketing
  • Gain a clear line of sight

To gain a competitive edge, sales leaders need to maintain clear line of sight into the behaviors of their sales reps and the reasons for those behaviors. In many companies, for example, sales reps find that too much of their time is spent on administrative tasks. OpenSymmetry states that that 65 percent of sales leaders report that spending too much time on non-selling activities is a top business issue for sales in the coming year. On the other hand, when companies invest in best-in-class sales performance management solutions, they experience 25 percent lower turnover rates, 36 percent shorter sales cycles, and seven percent more sales reps making their quota.

  • Use metrics that matter

The sales organization’s ability to collect valid data over multiple years is critical to sales planning. Advanced technology can help extract nuggets of insight from vast amounts of data.

  • Integrate your tools

Tools add efficiency to the sales planning process and make everything more accurate—but only if they are part of an integrated tool kit. To be done right, sales planning requires data from marketing, finance, workforce, and whatever business intelligence tools your organization uses. By adopting better tools, you can calculate territories and quotas much more quickly.

  • Retain top talent

According to the BMS Quarterly Sales Index, 56 percent of sales leaders report that retaining good performers will be a big problem for them in the coming year. Adding to the problem is the fact that different companies lose talent for different reasons, which makes it hard to develop a universal solution. Because of this, many sales leaders simply increase salaries, hoping that this will retain the best people. Although this may work in the short term, retaining talent in the long term requires sales leaders to create a culture in which salespeople are able to do their best work.

What is the future of Sales Planning?

As sales organizations develop their sales planning, the more successful ones will adopt the practices described above: turning the yearly sales plan into ongoing sales planning; coordinating stakeholders from across the organization; adopting advanced technology to automate sales planning processes; using modeling capabilities to plan out new territory and quota scenarios.

As the sales world continues to develop, companies who can plan most effectively will be those who continue to beat their competitors. We encourage you to learn more about how sales planning software can help you meet these goals.

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Free B2B marketing plan template (+ tips and best practices)

Free B2B marketing plan template (+ tips and best practices)

Before we get started, here is the free B2B marketing plan template you're looking for, which you do not need to fill out a form to get. Really, it's yours:

You need to make a copy of the document to use it .

Now, let's dig into a few details you need to know before you get started building out your rockstar marketing plan for your B2B company.

A marketing plan is more than content

I think when people get started with content marketing , they think their content strategy is the entirety of their strategy. While a content strategy is, indeed, a large piece of the proverbial marketing pie, it is not actually the entire pie.

Mmm, pie. Now I'm hungry. Is it Thanksgiving, yet?  🦃

Your company's marketing plan should encompass so much more beyond your content — although your content is very important:

  • Email marketing campaigns and newsletters
  • Social media marketing
  • Paid media and social advertising
  • Events (virtual and in-person)

That's why you need to have a marketing plan, scoped out on an annual basis, with regular updates (as necessary). But your marketing plan isn't just a means to delineate what your campaigns are. It's so much more than that.

What is the purpose of a marketing plan?

The best marketing plans, no matter what industry you're in, all accomplish the same three things (based on a defined period of time):

  • They provide a clear overview of what goals your marketing efforts will achieve over a specific period of time, across the entire company.
  • Each objective has measurable, specific goals that correspond to your company's overall mission and purpose, with defined milestone points at each stage (activation, acquisition, and expansion).
  • For every objective, at every stage, you see how each element of your marketing (social, content, email, etc.) all come together holistically to help you achieve your goals. 

Why is this B2B marketing plan template based on account-based marketing?

The free B2B marketing plan template above is based on the principles of account-based marketing . Account-based marketing takes the traditional B2B sales and marketing funnel and turns it on its head by going after “qualified” leads rather than letting them filter themselves. 

Whereas inbound marketing starts with organic lead generation, account-based marketing starts by identifying and targeting key decision-makers within accounts which have the potential to bring the biggest revenue to your business. 

That being said, we do not view the principles of ABM and inbound or content marketing to be mutually exclusive. In fact, create content that answers the most pressing questions of your ideal buyers (as you would in a content marketing strategy), is still critical to the success of your B2B marketing plan.

With an ABM approach, however, your content will simply be more targeted to what is called your ideal buyer profile . As a note, you need to create your ideal buyer profile first before you get started. And no, it is not the same as a buyer persona.

(It's an efficient exercise though, so don't panic.)

How do you create a B2B marketing plan with an ABM approach?

The best ABM-based B2B marketing plans have their efforts broken out into three specific stages :

  • Acquisition This stage is for bringing net-new accounts into your pipeline. Most companies focus a lot of their efforts in this stage.
  • Acceleration Once you have engaged accounts in your pipeline. You are either keeping them engaged or potentially reviving what was previously a dead deal. Techniques, such as personalization, is really helpful here. 
  • Expansion Expansion is all about retaining, upselling, and expanding relationships and service agreements with your existing customer base. Like the old saying goes, it's easier to win business from existing clients than to attract new ones.

That's why each section of the B2B marketing plan template is broken out into those three phases, based on the specific service/product objectives you outline in the beginning of your plan. That way you see how, at each interaction phase, you are targeting your marketing efforts to meet your goals. 

What are the benefits of an ABM approach to B2B marketing?

In addition to going after qualified leads right at the start, instead of having them self-select and identify their fit for your products and services, there are four key benefits to an ABM approach to B2B marketing:

  • It personalizes the experience for your buyers , because your marketing campaigns are less broad. Instead, they're more targeted and focused on the specific needs and pain points of your ideal buyers.
  • You build trust and long-term relationships by networking with people within accounts and transforming them into advocates — a big deal since a 5% increase can lead to an increase in profits of up to 95% .
  • It shortens and streamlines the sales process because you're already dealing with more qualified leads that require less nurturing. Your sales team will also waste less time with bad-fit prospects, because they won't be targeted in the first place.
  • You'll align your sales and marketing teams because ABM is, simply put, a business growth strategy that holistically aligns your sales and marketing teams around the same goals and objectives. 

How to make your B2B marketing plan a winner

As the marketing leader at your company, creating a winning marketing plan is a unique challenge. When done right, your people will love you for helping to grow the business with a clear strategy.

When done incorrectly, however, you can find yourself in a very lonely place, with a big document and nothing much else to show for it.

So, how do you avoid the latter? 

  • Do not write your marketing plan on your own. Talk to leadership, sales, and different segments of your business. Leadership will help you align on what your goals and objectives should be. Sales will help you with the finer details of your plan — realistic goal-setting, ideal buyer profiles, etc. Anyone you list as a stakeholder should be someone who gives feedback.
  • Take your time to create your marketing plan. A great marketing plan isn't written overnight by candlelight. It takes time, requires lots of collaboration, and is too important to be rushed. Instead, make it a four- to six-week initiative, with a clear delivery date. Then, have specific milestones, such as a first draft for leadership review, a draft for cross-department collaboration, and so on.
  • Be as thorough as possible the first time you write it. From experience, I know how writing massive, 20+ page documents can feel tedious and draining — even if you're totally bought in on the outcome. Don't cut corners. For example, you may be tempted to say, "Oh, I'll note exactly what happens in this nurturing sequence when it comes time to do it." Don't do that. Do it now.

Again, yes, it is a ton of work. But trust me when I say you'll thank yourself for all of the effort you put into it. Instead of scrambling at each stage — "What should this workflow include? What social media campaigns do we need to run? Crap, did we even think about paid media?" — you'll simply be ready to execute

On top of that, you'll know already that your logic is sound and vetted by other teams, including your leadership. Which means, more buy-in for the work you're doing.

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The Ultimate Guide to B2B Marketing in 2023 [+ New Data]

Discover a variety of B2B marketing strategies you can use to reach and resonate with your business audience

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business owner learning about b2b marketing

Updated: 05/04/23

Published: 05/04/23

Effective B2B marketing is difficult to get right. Between creative demands, budget limits, and channel decisions, marketers have a lot to juggle when developing their marketing strategy.

The biggest determinant of effective marketing, however, is your audience .

If you’re not properly targeting your buyer persona , your promotions and advertisements will likely fall on deaf ears. You might as well not be marketing at all.

→ Download Now: Free Product Marketing Kit [Free Templates]

Where target audiences vary the most, though, is between individual consumers and businesses . Some companies serve individual shoppers, while others cater to companies and organizations.

Marketing to businesses is very different from marketing to individual consumers. That’s why an entirely different marketing method — B2B marketing — exists, and that’s why we built this guide.

By the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of B2B marketing, the most effective B2B marketing strategies, and how you can tap into and convert your business audience. Plus, the trends you can expect in the B2B space in 2023, according to new research plus expert tips.

What is B2B Marketing?

B2b vs b2c marketing, b2b marketing strategies.

B2B Marketing Trends to Watch

B2B Marketing Examples

What is b2b.

B2B stands for “business-to-business,” which refers to a business model where businesses sell products and services to other companies as opposed to consumers.

If you’re a new marketer in the B2B space, or a small B2B business owner learning the ropes, B2B marketing can seem new and strange, but not to worry — you’ll soon learn it’s not so different from typical consumer marketing, and we’ll go over everything you need to know so you can create an effective B2B marketing strategy.

B2B (business-to-business) marketing refers to any marketing strategy or content that is geared towards a business or organization. Companies that sell products or services to other businesses or organizations (vs. consumers) typically use B2B marketing strategies.

The purpose of B2B marketing is to make other businesses familiar with your brand name, the value of your product or service, and convert them into customers.

HubSpot is an example of a company that engages in B2B marketing. HubSpot’s customers are other businesses, not individual consumers. Therefore, all of our marketing efforts can be classified as B2B.

HubSpot uses the information you provide to us to contact you about our relevant content, products, and services. HubSpot will share the information you provide to us with the following partners, who will use your information for similar purposes: Search Engine Journal, Litmus, Rock Content. You can unsubscribe from communications from HubSpot at any time. For more information, check out HubSpot's Privacy Policy . To unsubscribe from Search Engine Journal's communications, see Search Engine Journal's Privacy Policy . To unsubscribe from Litmus's communications, see Litmus's Privacy Policy . To unsubscribe from Rock Content's communications, see Rock Content's Privacy Policy .

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The State of Marketing in 2024

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B2B and B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing are very different. B2B and B2C marketing differ in their respective strategies and applications, as well as in their audiences and how they communicate with them .

B2B marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individuals who are making purchases on behalf of, or for, their organization (rather than for themselves), thus making the organization the customer.

Here are a few examples of B2B companies:

A coworking space that leases office spaces to remote teams and freelancers (like Spaces )

An on-demand order fulfillment, warehousing, and screen printing service (like Printful )

A marketing software company that sells social media management tools, lead generation software, and other marketing tools to businesses and organizations (like HubSpot !)

B2C marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individual consumers who are making purchases on behalf of, or for, themselves, thus making the individual the customer. Here are a few examples of B2C companies:

An e-commerce company that sells office supplies to remote or self-employed individuals (like Poppin )

A store that sells t-shirts and other clothing and accessories (like Target )

A music platform that sells streaming subscriptions (like Spotify )

Take a look at this chart comparing B2B and B2C customers.

As much as they differ, though, B2B and B2C also intersect in many ways. While Poppin sells office supplies to remote or self-employed individuals, they also design corporate office spaces and branded supplies.

On the flip side, Printful not only offers order fulfillment and warehousing to businesses; they also fill e-commerce printing orders for individuals.

As distinct as the B2B and B2C marketing audiences can be, B2B marketers can always learn from B2C campaigns , too.

As I said above, marketing depends on its audience. While B2B and B2C marketing vary, not every piece of B2B marketing material is alike, either.

In this section, we’ll talk about various B2B marketing strategies you can implement to reach your specific business audience. Some of these strategies are preparatory, such as identifying your audience, while others are ready to be executed, such as creating a B2B website. Let’s get started.

1. Understand the B2B buyer’s journey.

Before we dive into actual strategies you can implement, it’s important to understand the B2B buyer’s journey . This piece of information will help you create and implement marketing strategies that meet prospects at every stage of their purchase process.

Because of the higher price point of B2B products, B2B sales cycles tend to be a lot longer than B2C cycles. Nurturing these prospects via marketing takes a similarly long time, too, and you must use specific tactics at every stage to drive them toward a purchase decision or a demo request.

In other words: B2B marketing is not as easy as setting up ads on Instagram and hoping for clicks. (We wish! That can work, however, in conjunction with other strategies.)

b2b marketing strategy: buyer's journey

The B2B buyer’s journey is divided into three stages:

Awareness Stage: The prospect has become aware of a problem and begins educating themselves.

Consideration Stage: The prospect researches solutions for their new problem.

Decision Stage: The prospect is ready to make a purchase or formally begin a buying process.

After understanding the buyer’s journey, take this opportunity to create a customer journey map for your company — or, if you’re a new marketer at a B2B company, asking for one for reference.

A customer journey map is a customized version of the buyer’s journey that shows how your brand interacts with prospects during each phase. When you have that information, you can understand which marketing strategies, such as content marketing, will be most effective at each stage.

2. Identify your target market and target audience.

Now that you have a strong understanding of the buyer’s journey, it’s time to begin understanding who you’re marketing to specifically. Who is taking the buyer’s journey and purchasing your products? You get to decide — and it all begins by identifying who they are.

First up, define your target market . For B2B companies, we first recommend identifying your target companies with firmographic data such as:

  • Company size, i.e small, medium, or enterprise
  • Company region or location, i.e North America, South America, Africa, or specific countries and regions
  • Company industry, i.e healthcare, fintech, or SaaS
  • Number of employees

Then, define your target audience — that is, the specific human prospect who is looking for your brand’s products or services. Remember, you’re not marketing to other companies, you’re marketing to people who work at that company.

You can use demographic and psychographic data to identify individual prospects you’ll be marketing to. This may include their:

  • Education level

This information will help you create buyer personas and customer profiles , which in turn will help you understand how they make purchase decisions and which marketing channels they’re more likely to use.

For instance, if you’re targeting an entry-level employee, ages 22-26, at a small business in North America, you can likely use social media to reach them effectively.

3. Choose your marketing mix (or the 4 Ps of marketing).

Now that you’re armed with your buyer’s firmographic, demographic, and psychographic information, it’s time to start building a B2B marketing strategy that’s tailored specifically to them. Start by defining your marketing mix, or the 4 Ps of marketing :

  • Product: What product you sell
  • Price: How much the product costs
  • Place: Where the product is sold
  • Promotion: Where customers will find out about the product

Defining your 4 Ps is an excellent precursor to creating a more extensive marketing strategy. It marries all of the information you’ve recently found about your potential customers with the information you already know about your own product.

That will empower you to create a more effective strategy than if you jumped right into tactics and execution.

Featured Resource: Marketing Mix Templates

b2b marketing strategy: marketing mix templates

Click here to download the templates for free .

4. Create a B2B marketing plan and a marketing strategy.

Once you’ve defined your marketing mix, you can dive in even more deeply by creating a marketing plan and a marketing strategy . A marketing strategy marries market conditions with your company’s goals, and a marketing plan provides an actionable roadmap with specific channels and metrics.

What’s most important is outlining your own company’s summary and target markets, then deciding where you’ll promote your company. The thing is, it’s all too easy to choose specific strategies, like social media marketing and content marketing, without a strategic approach. That can easily lead to overspending in the wrong areas.

To create a marketing plan and strategy, we recommend starting with a template.

Featured Resource: Free Marketing Plan Template

b2b marketing strategy: marketing plan template

Click here to download HubSpot's free Marketing Plan Template.

Using this template, you’ll be able to compile all the information you need to choose the right B2B marketing channels for your company. You’ll be able to lay out your:

  • Business Summary and Initiatives
  • Target Market
  • Market Strategy
  • Marketing Channels
  • Marketing Technology

In this list, we could have easily shared specific marketing tasks you can do, such as creating online content or publishing short videos. And while these things will likely be a worthy use of your time, it’s more important to spend your time strategizing to minimize marketing costs and increase your ROI .

Strategizing is the core of your B2B marketing strategy — not implementing specific tactics such as blogging or SEO. Those will come later once you have defined the big picture.

5. Cover all of your B2B marketing bases, such as launching a website.

It’s time to dive into the more tactical aspects of your B2B marketing strategy by ensuring all of your marketing bases are covered. But we don’t want to dive too deeply yet; this is about nailing down the basics. The “basics” will vary per industry; for instance, in a more traditional vertical, you might rely less on your website and more on industry events.

That said, you want to ensure your B2B company has covered most of the following things (click on each one for a checklist to run through):

  • Launching a website
  • Creating and maintaining your social media profiles
  • Starting an email marketing newsletter
  • Signing up for industry events and conferences

No matter which B2B industry you’re in, and regardless of your audience type and age, these things will likely benefit you. Later, we’ll cover specific types of B2B marketing that you can integrate under each of these strategies. But here’s a good introduction:

  • Strategies for your website: Content marketing , blogging , SEO
  • Strategies for your social media profiles: Social media marketing , paid social media , short form video marketing
  • Strategies for your email marketing newsletter: Email marketing , lead nurturing
  • Strategies for industry events and conferences: Event marketing , trade show marketing

6. Run a competitive analysis.

To choose your specific marketing strategies even more strategically, carry out a competitive analysis .

Scope out the market and see which businesses are marketing to your target audience. Learn what they’re currently doing — do they have a website? A presence on a specific social media platform, such as LinkedIn? Things to be on the lookout for when inspecting competitors are:

  • Competitor product offerings
  • Competitor sales tactics and results
  • Competitor marketing content and social media presence

Featured Resource: 10 Competitive Analysis Templates

b2b marketing strategy: competitive analysis templates

Download Now

Getting a general overview of these items can help you recognize your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats — otherwise known as a SWOT analysis . Once you understand where they stand, you can better compete with them and choose the best channels.

If none of your competitors are on Instagram, for instance, then Instagram marketing may not be a good strategy to pursue (or, at least, you should test it out first before investing too many resources in it).

7. Determine your brand positioning.

Next, define your brand positioning in the market. This statement is the who, when, why, and how of your brand identity — or the way your brand is perceived through the eyes of the customer.

This will help you cultivate a consistent brand image, regardless of the marketing channels and tactics you use.

Devise a brand positioning statement that your team and prospective customers can believe in, and you’ll be ready for the next step.

Featured Resource: Positioning Statement Templates

b2b marketing strategy: create a positioning statement

Download for Free Now

8. Explore marketing channels to use.

By now, you’ve likely run across the different types of marketing channels your competitors use successfully, and the channels they haven’t taken advantage of. You’ve also likely gotten an idea of what you want to do based on your big-picture strategizing so far.

With the previous steps completed, you’re ready to diversify your B2B marketing portfolio and reach the businesses you need to. Depending on your customer segments and competitor analysis, you can now explore channels, strategies, and tools to optimize your leads and customer funnels.

Next up, let’s look at the types of B2B marketing you can implement now that you’ve created your overall strategy.

Types of B2B Marketing

The following categories are B2B marketing channels bound to connect you to your target audience.

B2B Email Marketing

Email marketing is a tried and true method of reaching both individual consumers and business customers. Most B2B marketers use email — are you one of them? You should be. Emails lead to engagement, which turns subscribers into leads … and then customers.

Download our guide to optimizing email marketing for conversions and learn how to grow your email list, ensure deliverability, and increase engagement .

Unlike B2C customers who respond best to emotions and entertainment, B2B customers look for logic and positive ROI. Essentially, they’re asking themselves, How can your business help my business grow? Because of this, your email marketing must consistently resonate with your business customers and focus on things that matter to them — like time, money, and resources.

Email marketing is also a powerful vehicle for sharing your brand’s content. Many B2B companies use email newsletters as part of their content marketing program, and the B2B marketers we’ve spoken to say these newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success.

With the constant barrage of emails flooding our inboxes today, it’s more important than ever to create and send out effective marketing emails. To help you create emails that stand out, you can use HubSpot's AI Email Writer .

B2B Email Marketing Best Practices

Write enticing subject lines . Think about your email subject lines as a Netflix trailer — if you can’t hook your audience with a two-minute clip (or, in this case, a few dozen characters), don’t expect them to open and watch (or read) the whole thing. We recommend spending almost as much time on your email subject lines as you do on the emails themselves.

Stick to one call-to-action (CTA) per email . If you think the number of emails you receive is a lot, take a look at the CTAs in those emails … some are packed with two, three, and sometimes up to 10 different CTAs. Don’t make this mistake, which can leave your recipients’ heads spinning, asking “What should I click on first?” and ultimately clicking on nothing. With one CTA per email, you allow your audience to focus on your email content and ultimately one action … a welcome reprieve from today’s frequent decision-making and analysis paralysis.

Segment your email to reach the most relevant audience . Not every email you send will be appropriate for everyone on your list. Your subscribers may be at different stages of the buyer’s journey or be seeking different solutions. That’s where email list segmentation comes into play. Not only does this help you relate to your audience better, but it gives your emails that personal feel that says “Hey, I’m listening and I know what you’d like to see.” Consumers prefer email quality over quantity anytime.

Make sure your email designs are responsive . Most email users access their inbox on their phones, and emails that don’t show up correctly on mobile devices are often deleted. Ouch. Don’t let your email be one of those.

Don’t be afraid of the cold email . As uncomfortable as it is, the right email can convert new customers — like these cold sales email templates , which will help you get your leads’ attention.

👉🏼 HubSpot Tip : You can’t send marketing emails without any recipients — these people make up your lists. There are plenty of easy ways to grow your email list . Begin with opt-in forms on your website homepage, About page, and blog. Check out HubSpot’s Free Form Builder tool to get started.

B2B Digital Marketing

Every business, whether B2B or B2C, should have a digital presence — which is comprised of paid ads, search engine optimization, a website, and any other place your B2B company is active online. Let’s walk through a handful of tactics that can strengthen your B2B digital marketing strategy.

1. Define your target audience.

A strong B2B digital marketing strategy starts with defining your target audience, or buyer persona . This demographic and psychographic information will inform almost every other marketing activity thereafter, ensuring your content and digital material is absorbed by the right eyes and ears (and that no resources go to waste on your end).

2. Create your website.

Secondly, digital marketing can’t quite function without an informative, engaging website. Most buyers visit a website before making a purchase. Moreover, since the typical B2B sales cycle often involves many key players (such as gatekeepers, decision makers , and other folks who have to buy into a purchase), websites are easy, straightforward ways for influencers to share information about your product or service.

For inspiration on how the best B2B websites are built to impress, check out this video:

3. Optimize your digital presence.

Your website needs to be more than informative and engaging, though … it needs to be discoverable. You can do this with on-page SEO and technical SEO tactics. These include everything from image alt-text and meta descriptions (what your visitors can see) to structured data and site speed (what your visitors can’t see). Off-page SEO is also at play here, which refers to external linking strategies and social sharing — SEO tactics that take place off your website.

4. Run PPC campaigns.

Finally, round out your digital presence with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising , which allows you to get your content and brand in front of new audiences via search engines and other advertising platforms. I recommend maximizing your PPC investment by advertising more than your specific products or services — such as your brand personality, blog or social media content, or company tagline.

The best way to see an ROI from your paid ads is by 1) incorporating your buyer persona data and 2) boosting content that they can relate to. For example, it’s highly unlikely a brand new consumer who’s never heard of you is searching for your exact product.

They may be searching for a location-based solution or product feature. To reach the greatest number of potential customers, pay to target relevant categories within your brand vs. promoting your product or services.

B2B Content Marketing

We’ve talked about how B2B customers are focused on expertise, driven by logic, and desire to be educated. What better marketing tool to satisfy these priorities than B2B content marketing ?

Whereas a traditional PR marketing strategy interrupts a consumer’s day-to-day with promotional material, a content marketing strategy adds valuable information and informs the consumer — which is precisely what B2B customers are looking for. Not to mention that content marketing supports SEO efforts, which involves anticipating what your audience is searching for , helping them discover your website and content … and potentially converting them to customers.

It's important to note, content marketing is most effective when you align your content to various stages of the buyer's journey. As Jonathan Franchell, CEO and Founder of Ironpaper . points out: "Effective content in the awareness phase educates the buyer on their pain points."

"A frequent mistake B2B organizations make is educating the buyer on their own company, product, or service. The buyer isn't ready for that; they are just beginning to understand their problem."

Franchell adds, "Additionally, B2B companies should test content. Run a test on an incentive and vary the type of content - use a webinar, an ebook, or a video. Understand what format of content attracts the right types of buyers and measure it down to an individual human level."

Business decision makers prefer to get information from an article than an ad. Knowing this, I’d say you should be putting the same (if not more) resources into your content marketing than your traditional advertising strategy.

Because the B2B buyer’s journey is slightly different than the B2C buyer’s journey (which has shorter sales cycles and fewer decision makers involved), the content you create for your B2B content marketing strategy may vary more than the content you’ve seen as a consumer yourself, as illustrated in the below graphic.

b2b-marketing-content-for-the-buyers-journey-graphic

Before you start creating content, though, I recommend creating a business blog . (Don’t worry, growing your blog readership is easier than you think.) Your blog will house all the content you create and serve as a home base for readers to visit and subscribe to.

B2B Social Media Marketing

Believe it or not, B2B buyers and C-Suite executives can and do use social media when making a purchase. That’s right — social media marketing isn’t just for brands targeting individual consumers.

Many B2B companies struggle with social media marketing, though. It can be harder to use social media to connect with business customers, especially because (as we mentioned above) there’s typically a lengthier sales cycle and longer chain of command.

Honestly, B2B social media marketing might not be where you convert the greatest number of leads, and that’s OK. It likely comes into play near the beginning of your customers’ buyer’s journeys.

Social media is a powerful tool for building brand awareness, giving your company an online personality, and humanizing your business — all very powerful factors when it comes to marketing and connecting with potential customers. Like email marketing, social media is also a highly effective channel for sharing your content and enhancing your brand expertise, the latter of which we know B2B customers appreciate.

Overwhelmed by social media? Spend more time connecting with your followers with our time-saving suite of social tools.

While your social media accounts might not convert as frequently as your content or email marketing, they’re just as important. In this case, followers are just as valuable — you never know when they might convert to leads or customers.

👉🏼 HubSpot Tip : Content shared by employee advocates can generate more engagement than content shared by brands. So, involve your employees in your B2B social media marketing strategy. Encourage them to create their own social media channels and share about life at your company. Create a culture account ( like our @HubSpotLife Instagram ) to show what’s going on at work, not just what you’re selling. You never know — this might attract strong talent, too.

B2B Marketing Trends to Watch in 2023 [New Data]

HubSpot's Blog team conducted research to determine the challenges, opportunities, and initiatives that most B2B marketers are focusing on in 2023.

Let's dive in.

1. Generating leads and traffic is the top challenge for marketers.

Top of mind for everyone this coming year is generating more traffic. Marketers surveyed in our 2023 Industry Trends Report cited generating leads and traffic as the top challenge they face, followed by hiring talent and pivoting their marketing strategy to round out the top three answers.

With changes on the horizon and a potential recession looming, it's no surprise 17% of marketers are concerned with pivoting their marketing strategy. Throw in increased competition, and budget constraints and it's safe to say marketers have their work cut out for them in 2023.

2. Marketers anticipate struggling to keep up with trends in 2023.

Marketing trends move fast, so it’s not surprising that marketers we surveyed cited keeping up with trends as a top concern heading into 2023.

Facing increased competition, leveraging CRM systems, and having to pivot marketing strategy rounded out the top five concerns on the horizon for marketers.

3. Social media marketers report 'creating engaging content' will be their number one challenge in 2023.

22% of social media marketers marked "creating engaging content" as the number one challenge they believe they'll face in 2023.

With nearly all businesses utilizing social media vying for customer attention, competition is stiff. Businesses have had to evaluate what makes them stand out above the crowd and how they can better engage and target prospects. To make their best efforts shine, marketers have been utilizing a variety of formats, which we'll dive into next.

4. Marketers leverage video the most.

When it comes to marketing formats, video is the preferred choice with 50% of marketers making it their go-to option. Images came in a close second with 47% of marketers utilizing this format.

Video also provided the most ROI when compared to other formats like images, blog posts, podcasts, and case studies.

It’s popularity isn’t expected to wane anytime soon. Video is expected to grow among new users in 2023 with 1 in 3 planning to leverage this format next year.

5. Influencer marketing was the trend leveraged most this year.

As a result of the pandemic, we've seen an immense shift in how consumers' shop, with the majority now shopping online — and, in particular, purchasing products directly on social media .

It makes sense, then, that B2B marketers want to ensure their products or services are showing up on social channels with influencer partnerships.

Influencer marketing is projected to become a $13.8 billion dollar industry by the end of this year, and it's showing no signs of slowing down.

Most B2B marketers — 71% — planned on investing more in influencer marketing this year, and likely was a wise choice as this avenue will continue to grow in 2023.

However, you'll want to ensure you choose partnerships wisely. While it can be tempting to find influencers with massive audiences, many businesses have seen more success with micro-influencers, so be sure to do your research to determine which influencers have the most authentic connections with your desired audience.

6. Facebook leads in ROI, but other platforms are gaining popularity.

Our 2023 Trends Report found that not only was Facebook the most widely used marketing platform, but also provided marketers the most ROI . Out of the marketers surveyed, 18% stated they plan to invest in Facebook the most, followed by TikTok and YouTube tied with 16%.

While Facebook provides the most ROI, investment in other platforms is on the rise. YouTube is expected to see the most growth in 2023 with marketers with 91% of those using it planning to increase their investment.

Measuring ROI can be easier for some activities compared to others. For instance, it's easy enough to track a social media advertising campaign's ROI if you're tracking sales made from an ad placed on Facebook. Sales is a tangible outcome, and Facebook's Ad Manager enables you to easily track ROI from your efforts.

However, other activities can be more difficult to track. Analyzing which pieces of social or blog content resulted in sales, for instance, can be a more arduous and convoluted process.

To combat this challenge, take a look at How to Calculate ROI in Marketing [Free Excel Templates].

Additionally, consider A/B testing various marketing activities and tracking ROI to determine which platforms traditionally have the biggest ROI for your business. For instance, most marketers find the highest ROI from Facebook — but this could vary for your brand or business needs.

7. The number one goal for marketers in 2023 is increasing revenue.

Understanding your big-picture goals is imperative for creating an effective marketing strategy for 2023 — so it's likely helpful to know what other B2B marketers' plan to focus on next year. .

Looking ahead, B2B marketers’ top priority is to increase revenue and sales, knocking increasing brand awareness down to the third spot from last year.

Top marketing goals:

  • Increase revenue
  • Improve customer experience
  • Increase brand awareness
  • Increase engagement
  • Improve brand loyalty

Roughly half of B2B marketers reported that 'increasing brand awareness' was their number one goal in 2022.

Brand awareness is critical for fostering trust, long-term loyalty, and brand equity. It makes sense, then, that so many marketers feel it's critical for long-term success.

Additionally, Chief Evangelist at Terminus Sangram Vajre says he predicts that data collection will become a major priority for brands.

As he puts it, "The quality of our campaigns and initiatives will increasingly rely on our CRM, CDP, and 3rd-party sources to help create stylized, targeted, and convertible marketing initiatives. And since CMOs are increasingly held to ROI numbers, we have to up our game."

To consider how you might manage your data in a more efficient, sustainable way, take a look at Everything You Need to Know About Data Management .

Additionally, if you're unsure how you can continue tracking your audience without using third-party cookies, read 7 Marketing Alternatives to Tracking Cookies .

8. This year marketers stopped leveraging podcasts and audio content, while others stopped implementing VR and AR.

As important as it is to learn what marketers plan to do , it's equally vital to learn what they plan not to do. This can help you identify your own guardrails, and ensure you're sticking to the most efficient marketing strategies, rather than wasting time and resources on all of them.

HubSpot's Blog Research found 25% of marketers plan to stop leveraging podcasts and audio content ; followed closely by 23% who plan to stop leveraging VR and AR .

This doesn't mean these activities are inefficient, but it does suggest that some survey respondents found the time, effort, and resources required for each of these efforts wasn't worth it. Ultimately, it depends on your audiences' preferences.

If your audience doesn't enjoy consuming business content on podcast or audio formats, then re-consider investing in these initiatives.

However, audio content isn't going anywhere — so if you haven't already, you might consider testing various audio formats in 2023 to see how they perform with your audience. If you're unsure how to get started, take a look at Everything You Need to Know About Starting a Podcast or Clubhouse vs. Podcasts: Which Should Marketers Use? [Data + Expert Tips] .

9. Philanthropy is best when it's genuine.

Carla Andre-Brown, a Content Marketer at Mailbird told me, "Brand-building activities will look to work with social and environmental causes in a format that is ongoing and builds recognition for both parties. Marketers will need to be especially mindful of the way they present their company, to avoid being accused of having poor intentions."

"For instance," Andre-Brown continues, "a company using the Pride theme each summer without having policies that protect LGBTQ2IA+ employees is called 'Rainbow washing'. To ensure this work is well-received and has an impact, marketers should listen to their communities' suggestions and look for sustainable changes that everyone can benefit from."

A B2B marketing approach that works for one business may not work for another, but that’s not to say we can’t learn something from the pros. Here are eight B2B marketing examples of businesses who did it right.

1. Social Media Marketing: Adobe

TikTok can seem like a difficult platform to stand out as a B2B brand, but some companies have managed to attract thousands — if not millions — of viewers to their videos through high-quality content and an understanding of the app.

Take software company Adobe, which has 262.3K followers and 2 million likes on its TikTok account .

When Adobe first joined the app, the company's second video got over 2 million views. The video asked its audience, Who is a creative TikToker we should know about?, which encouraged high audience engagement.

Adobe succeeds on the app because it creates engaging content specifically catered for TikTok's audience. All Adobe's videos are short, entertaining, and easily digestible.

Take the following example, which has over 370K views and highlights how user @emilesam used Adobe's After Effects edit to create a fighting sequence against himself.

@adobe May the force be with @emilesam in his #AfterEffects edit. ✨ #Adobe #foryoupage #fyp #foryoup ♬ original sound - Adobe

The brand does a good job highlighting its products in a fun, non-promotional way. Both consumers and businesses can see a clear connection between using Adobe's products and finding success on TikTok — which makes this a great example of B2B marketing.

2. Content Marketing: Shopify

Ecommerce company Shopify produces many different types of content resources, such as a blog, business courses, and community events. But one content avenue that helps the brand stand out is its podcast , aptly titled Shopify Masters: The ecommerce business and marketing podcast for ambitious entrepreneurs.

The podcast focuses on inspiration stories from entrepreneurs, and offers practical tips for starting an online business on Shopify. Episode topics range from "Disrupting the Soda Industry with a Healthy Spin" to "How Masks For Dogs Landed a Deal on Shark Tank".

Offering so much valuable, interesting content for free is a fantastic example of effective B2B marketing, which should always provide value before it tries to extract it.

3. Digital Marketing: Mailchimp

Mailchimp's homepage is easy to navigate, clean, and focuses entirely on its customers' pain points.

Consider, for instance, the first large text you see when you click on the page: "Get down to business and grow sales". The smaller text below it reads, "Engage your customers and boost your business with Mailchimp's advanced, yet easy-to-use marketing platform."

The language focuses on the customer, and how Mailchimp can help the customer reach their goal: To grow their businesses.

Additionally, the website offers a banner at the top of the page that enables customers to choose in which language they'd prefer to view the website. Even the company's Products navigation menu includes how the product can "Get Your Business Online" and "Market Your Business".

mailchimps homepage as an example of good b2b marketing

Ultimately, the company demonstrates how much they value each of their customers by tailoring each piece of content towards its customers' unique challenges.

4. Client Testimonials: Venngage

Venngage took its positive client testimonials and sprinkled them throughout its website. This social proof lets prospects know that you have a track record of reliability, and have delighted previous customers beyond expectation. Not only that, but sharing testimonials can have a big impact on potential consumers in the Consideration and Decision stages .

After all, 98% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses, which is up from 81% in 2019, so using client feedback is a great tool to attract new ones.

venngage client testimonial b2b marketing

Image Source

5. B2B SEO: TravelPerk, Google

A B2B buyer spends 27% of the time in the purchase journey independently researching online, potentially using at least one search engine during the online research. It’s worth the time and money to invest in making sure other businesses can find you with ease.

TravelPerk displays a diverse range of paid search and SEO. An impressive SEO strategy is its use of topic clusters and sub-topics for reaching its target audience. TravelPerk ensures that search engine pages like “business travel expenses” have a paid ad leading to its website, or high-ranking blog content providing information travelers are looking for.

6. Inside Influence Marketing: IBM, Influencer and Employee Advocacy Program

IBM Systems business group has seen the growing importance of employee voice and the rise of employee influencers as a strategy in B2B marketing.

In the words of Ryan Bares , Global Social Programs Lead, he states, “In the B2B marketing world, we’ve all come to understand that buyers trust individual voices more than formal marketing and advertising messages, so finding ways to optimize influence internally is becoming a key area of focus.”

b2b-marketing_6

Leveraging employees in your company that have an affinity for the industry, vast knowledge of trending topics and your brand, could be key in building new relationships in the industry.

7. B2B Referral Program: Blackbaud, Blackbaud Champions

Blackbaud offers an incredible B2B referral program that incentivizes current customers to become product advocates — Blackbaud Champions. Champions are encouraged to share their insight into how the implementation process works, what it’s like to work with the team, and how Blackbaud solutions have helped you advance their mission.

“When you share your experiences and expertise and help us spread the word about our products and services, we’ll reward you with benefits only available to Champions. By providing your feedback, participating in activities like reference calls and case studies, and sharing educational content and events on social media, you’ll earn Reward Points in the Blackbaud Champions Hub which you can redeem from the Champions Rewards”

These points are what Champions strive to redeem, as they include incentives like discounts, complimentary passes, gift cards and VIP experiences, and more.

b2b marketing examples: blackbaud

Referral programs are a great way to kindle customer loyalty and have advocates spread the word about your business through the network.

Invest in B2B Marketing and Reach Your Business Customers

Marketing isn’t effective unless you keep your audience in mind, and no other audience is as fickle and critical as business customers. Your marketing should communicate how your business can help theirs, and if it doesn’t, you can redirect your B2B marketing strategies to reach them.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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ASP B2B Technology Business Plan

Start your own asp b2b technology business plan

Discover Productions

Executive summary executive summary is a brief introduction to your business plan. it describes your business, the problem that it solves, your target market, and financial highlights.">.

Discover Productions, Inc. (Discover Productions) is a Business-to-Business (B2B) technology consulting company supplying turn-key computing solutions based upon the latest technology and utilizing Web-based applications. Utilizing state-of-the-art software and hardware in their 24×7 computing facility, Discover Productions also offers e-commerce solutions, Web hosting, Web development, remote help desk support, customer training, and systems support. Looking further into the future, the company plans to develop their own B2B Web-based applications. The company’s first product is expected to be released in June 2000.

Discover Productions is a Cleveland, Ohio based company, whose mission is to provide businesses with the technology they need to compete in a Web-based world. By utilizing state-of-the-art equipment and providing the necessary technical expertise, Discover Productions brings to the market a fresh perspective on B2B Technology Consulting.

Services Plan

  • Turn-key B2B Computing Solutions. The company is currently providing small to mid-sized businesses with Web-based computing solutions utilizing state-of-the-art technology.
  • Hosting Services. The company is developing hosting services to ASP companies and generate $200,000 plus in revenue.
  • Internet Sales.  We currently generate more than $300,000 in Internet sales from hosting, e-commerce, and Web development for small to mid-sized businesses.
  • Computing Solutions. We will increase our computing sales revenue from computer sales, service, and support to more than $450,000.
  • Web-based Applications . Develop, market, and sell our own Web-based B2B applications.

Marketing The company’s marketing strategy rests on the belief that its products and services represent a value-added approach to interpreting, qualifying, and understanding the complexities of the computer industry and technology markets. To implement this strategy, the company intends to place paid advertising banners on strategic websites in the computer fields and to utilize search engine portal and general media advertising.

Management Discover Productions has a world-class management team with direct knowledge of the industry, extensive research experience, and a unique perspective that B2B technology needs. Its team includes Mr. Edward Jones, CEO, and Mr. Jacob Manuel, CIO.

Financials The company is seeking first round funding in the amount of $914,900 for staffing purposes, purchasing software and hardware computing equipment, office costs, and other Internet related costs. The company is also seeking second round funding in the amount of $3 million for developing B2B Web-based applications, and their Educational Application Software. Projected revenues for 2000 to 2002 are $1 million, $16 million, and $45 million, respectively.

1.1 Mission

The mission of Discover Productions is to provide businesses with turn-key computing solutions based upon the latest technology utilizing Web-based applications and providing superior customer support and training to take a company’s infrastructure into the future and beyond.

1.2 Keys to Success

  • Strong technical experience
  • Effective management leadership
  • High quality service and support

Asp b2b technology business plan, executive summary chart image

See why 1.2 million entrepreneurs have written their business plans with LivePlan

Company summary company overview ) is an overview of the most important points about your company—your history, management team, location, mission statement and legal structure.">.

Founded in 1979, Discover Productions began in November 1992 to provide a new innovative role in the ASP technology market. The company began marketing turn-key Web-based Internet computing solutions to businesses entering the fast paced ever-changing World Wide Web.

Discover Productions is a privately held Ohio C-Corporation, with principal offices located in Cleveland, Ohio. This facility of 10,000 square feet serves as an administration and development facility. It includes two development offices, a conference room, a computer center, and a reception area. This new facility was opened in November 1999 and helps to provide customers with state-of-the-art networks and backup facilities. With the additional funding, the company plans to open a marketing and sales office in Cleveland, Ohio, and begin developing new Web-based applications.

2.1 Company History

Discover Productions provides its customers with the necessary tools to maximize their company efficiency and increase their profitability.  These include Web-based technologies such as e-commerce, Web development, a co-location computing facility, software integration, disaster recovery, and other Web applications that are critical to a customer’s business. Discover Productions also provides remote support in maintaining networks and software for customers as needed.

In today’s growing business, companies need computer and Internet service to increase growth, Discover Productions works with companies providing turn-key computing solutions for their office environment and Internet access. Management of Web services and a customer’s office computing environment can be done remotely from the Discover Productions head office allowing a cost effective solution for small to mid-size companies who need computing management.

Asp b2b technology business plan, company summary chart image

Products and Services

Discover Productions is developing its own B2B Web-based applications with their first product expected to be release in June 2000 and additional products to follow every six to eight months.

3.1 Product and Service Description

The following is a list of products and services offered by Discover Productions.

  • Web applications.  Discover Productions provides Web applications development for both internal and external customer websites that need dynamic site and business process flow automation.
  • E-commerce solutions . Utilizing a combination of Discover Productions’ Web design services and Goldwin’s e-commerce software the company is able to provide quality e-commerce solutions. Discover Productions offers a selection of products that allow customers to build an online store or add catalogs and shopping cart functions to a pre-existing site.
  • Web hosting solutions. Discover Productions provides Web hosting solutions for customers needing high availability servers. Discover Productions offers cost effective solutions and competitive pricing to grow a customer’s presence on the Web. From its Basic Hosting Plan to its Gold Star Plan, Discover Productions offers reliable technology and customer support utilizing high speed networks and 24×7 servers.
  • Co-location. Discover Productions provides co-location of Internet servers for customers needing high speed Internet access but wanting to manage their own equipment.
  • Web design services. Discover Productions provides Web design services for customers seeking to establish a Web presence. Discover Productions can design and develop a company’s Web presence in order for them to be competitive in today’s industry, as well as helping them to automate their business process flow. Discover Productions offers cost effective solutions and competitive pricing by offering Web development packages from a basic site plan to a full company site. Discover Productions can provide a quote based upon development of internal or external Web applications.
  • Disaster recovery solutions. Utilizing its in-house backup methodology, Discover Productions provides disaster recovery solutions.
  • Network design solutions. Discover Productions uses its in-house expertise to provide network design solutions.
  • Computing design solutions (Unix and NT).   Discover Productions uses its in-house expertise to provide computing design solutions for NT, Windows 2000 and Unix.
  • Equipment service. Discover Productions provides equipment service by reselling a 24×7 strategic alliance partner’s services.
  • Software and hardware. Discover Productions sells computer software and hardware using public and private e-commerce solutions.

3.2 Future Products and Services

Discover Productions plans on developing its own B2B Web-based applications this year. Utilizing a strong think-tank development team, the company will release smaller products every 6 to 8 months with their first product to launch in June, 2000. Discover Productions’ main product offering will be a complete line of educational Web-based programs and will release in 2001. These programs will feature the latest in XML, Web, and multi-media technology. The educational learning programs will utilize the latest in artificial intelligence and neural network programming to be marketed to home, educational institutes, government, and commercial sectors.

Key components of Discover Productions’s initial product development strategy can be summarized as follows.

  • Employee/Employer Web E-portal. This Web-based application will target strategic industries to bring employees and employers together. Current sites target only the technology market whereas Discover Productions will market to blue-collar industries. The release date for their first site is June 1, 2000, and will target the Waste Industry with the Oil Industry to follow next. Additional market targets will be released every six months.
  • CPA/Business E-portal. Although several accounting packages exist today both Web and computer based, no application is currently bringing together the accountant and small to mid-sized business. Discover Productions plans on bringing to market a Web-based accounting application that will simultaneously bring together both the customer and their accountant/CPA with all the information being available to both parties through the secure Discover Productions computing facility. Discover Productions will target strategic alliances with companies such as Intuit, PeachTree, and Solomon, makers of current accounting packages.
  • Educational E-portal. Today’s educational programs, although full of rich multi-media and loads of information, still teach to students in the same manner that has been utilized for years. The biggest failing of education programs today is that they teach the same information the exact same way to every student. Discover Productions realizes that every student is different, and their new suite of educational applications will be designed utilizing state-of-the-art artificial intelligence driven neural network programming. This will allow the Educational Program to modify itself to teach to each student based upon each student’s comprehension and ability. The software will be marketed with Educational Modules that can be downloaded or accessed via the Internet directly from the Discover Productions hosting facility. Companies can also design their own Educational Modules and have their own corporate e-portal by purchasing the core AI program and development kit. This revolutionary new concept in education can be marketed to all industries, companies, schools, and institutes. Discover Productions plans on marketing this product to company training programs initially, and then marketing to schools and institutes.
  • R&D, Think Tank. Discover Productions utilizes a think tank model in their approach to developing products. Utilizing the latest in state-of-the-art technology, development groups are organized to discuss and develop new products. Staff are encouraged and rewarded for bringing to the table new and innovative product ideas. Revenue is generated from these new ideas as well as companies contracting services for the use of the Discover Productions think tank.

Market Analysis Summary how to do a market analysis for your business plan.">

Business-to-Consumer e-commerce Estimates for the amount of online spending by consumers in 1998 range from $7 billion to $13 billion, with at least 25% occurring during the Christmas shopping season. Forrester Research, an information technology research firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, believes that online spending will hit $108 billion in 2003.

B2B e-commerce Although there are very few pure B2B e-commerce firms, this segment dwarfs the business to consumer sector.  Forrester believes that this market, which totaled $43 billion in 1998, should rise to $1.3 trillion by 2003.

The Internet As of year-end 1998, almost 160 million users accessed the Internet regularly, up from approximately 101 million at the end of 1997, according to IDC. Clearly, the Internet is in an exceptional growth phase. This growth has pushed the capacity of existing networking infrastructure to its limits, resulting in frustration by Internet users.

Still, consumers have found the Internet to be a useful tool in the research and purchase of goods and services. Corporations have found that while the Internet is challenging traditional business models, it also offers significant advantages to companies that fully embrace the medium.

Exceptional growth By any measure, the Internet is one of the fastest-growing commercial phenomena ever witnessed by society. Host computers, or servers, have exploded from 3.2 million in 1994 to roughly 56.2 million as of July, 1999. During the same time period, the number of websites roared to more than 5 million from only approximately 3,000.

A key factor in the recent growth of the Internet is the popularity of the sub-$1,000 PC. Rapidly falling component prices have allowed PC manufacturers to pass cost savings on to their customers, resulting in a more attractively priced product. Computers sold at or below the $1,000 level have appealed to first-time PC users and lower income families. Because of the more affordable prices, PC penetration in the United States is now approximately 50%, according to Dataquest, a market research firm based in San Jose, California.

As a result of the Internet’s historical roots in the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as the rising penetration of PCs, the United States accounts for more than half of the world’s total Internet users. The European market, by contrast, has been held back by the high cost of Internet access. Consumers are typically billed twice in these markets, once by the ISP and once by the phone company. However, the forces of telecommunications deregulation in Europe finally appear to be having an effect, as several phone companies have recently eliminated access fees and now bill only on a per-minute basis. Such moves should eventually increase the penetration of the Internet in Europe.

In the United States, less than one-third of the population is connected, leaving plenty of room for growth. In 1996, people asked colleagues and friends if they had an electronic mail address. In 1997, people were asked what their electronic mail address was. When consumers today are asked why they purchased a personal computer, the most common answer is to connect to the Internet to get their email.

The explosive growth of the Internet, as a tool for global communications, has enabled millions of people to interact electronically. International Data Corporation, or IDC, estimates that there were 142 million Web users worldwide at the end of 1998, and expect this number will grow to approximately 502 million by the end of the year 2003. Rapid acceptance of the Internet as a communications platform by both businesses and consumers has created the foundation for significant growth in B2B and business-to-consumer e-commerce. IDC estimates that worldwide commerce over the Internet will increase from approximately $50 billion in 1998 to $1.3 trillion in the year 2003.

The Small Business Administration estimates that more than 98% of all businesses in the United States have fewer than 100 employees. These businesses often lack the size and financial resources to create economies of scale. In particular, these organizations typically do not maintain dedicated procurement departments and often do not achieve significant purchasing leverage. The Internet can provide small businesses and consumers with a number of advantages when making purchases, including:

  • Convenience
  • Wider selection of products and services
  • Competitive pricing

Small businesses are taking advantage of the opportunities the Internet affords. IDC estimates that the number of small businesses engaged in e-commerce will increase 47.1% annually, from 400,000 at the end of 1998 to almost 2.8 million at the end of the year 2003, signaling the broad adoption of the Internet by these small enterprises.

The widespread adoption of the Internet as a purchasing vehicle has created a wealth of opportunities for businesses that offer products and services to small businesses and consumers. Simultaneously, it has given both small businesses and consumers a wider variety of products from which to choose at competitive prices.

4.1 Market Segmentation

The company’s target customers are as follows:

  • Small to Mid-size Businesses (50-500 employees)
  • Businesses that are consolidating operations or merging
  • Military and government agencies
  • Others (accounting, medical, insurance, waste industry, associations, real estate, and new crafts market)

Asp b2b technology business plan, market analysis summary chart image

4.2 Target Market Segment Strategy

  • Small to Mid-size Businesses. All business of 50 to 500 employees are ideal regardless of industry. They purchase website, E-commerce, data networks, computers, and Web services such as Discover Productions provides. New feeder business within the semi-conductor, insurance, accounting, medical, and manufacturing industries are prime targets. 
  • Consolidations and Mergers. They look for outsourcing and new ways for implementing Web-based applications, intranet hosting and development, e-portals, e-markets and support to grow their business while cutting cost. Golf Smith, Nevada Bob, and Dyer Electronics purchases products/services such as Discover Productions provides.
  • Military and government agencies.  The company sells to government contractors, and government agencies such as the Advanced Research Program Agency (ARPA), Airforce, Navy, Army and other such agencies.
  • Others. The company also sells to accounting, medical, insurance, waste industry, associations, real estate, and new crafts market.

4.3 Market Trends

Identifiable market sectors. Forrester Research estimates that there are approximately 70 identifiable vertical market sectors (i.e., manufacturing, banking, insurance, stock-brokerage, pharmaceutical, engineering, etc.) in the commercial business world today.

High growth in e-commerce. Forrester also reports that B2B e-commerce will be a $1.3 trillion market by the year 2003 (Red Herring, December 1999). This will surpass the business-to-consumer market by five to seven times.

E-commerce market value. IDC, another market intelligence firm, predicts the market to be $633 billion by the year 2001. IDC also believes that the largest portion of business’s new technology investments will be devoted to studies and implementations of e-commerce B2B initiatives. Compounded growth between the years 2001 and 2003 is expected to be 35%. IDC claims that those entrepreneurs that set their banner in to e-commerce sectors will be the ones that reap the greatest profits and growth from the year 2001 and beyond.

Internet services market. Gartner calls B2B e-commerce, “the new millennium’s killer application.” The Internet services market will grow at a cumulative annual growth rate of 60% through the year 2003. IDC also claims that revenue in the worldwide Internet services market grew 71% in 1998 and is expected to grow at a cumulative annual growth rate of 60% through the year 2003 with revenues for Internet services approaching $80 billion.

IDC predicts that of the estimated 7.1 million small businesses in the United States, the percentage connected to the Internet will grow from about 40% in 1996 to about 70% in the year 2000. IDC estimates the number of users in the U.S. accessing the World Wide Web will increase from approximately 63 million at the end of 1998 to 177 million by the end of the year 2003.

Cahners indicates that “At least 50% of networking hardware revenue in the first half of 1999 came from small to mid-size companies.”

4.3.1 Forrester Research

Recent research conducted by Forrester research has shown that B2B will be $2.7 trillion by the year 2004. 

The research shows that e-marketplaces will be responsible for 53% of all online business trade. Research also shows that more companies are moving to make purchases and sales on the Internet and are looking to build deeper relationships with business partners. This research has also shown:

The B2B arena is reshaping e-marketplaces. The initial wave of B2B e-commerce has been dominated by extranets that automate off-line processes between partners. However, the Internet is now moving to a new business venue, e-marketplaces, where the dynamic many-to-many interactions will supplant stagnant one-to-one relationships. These new trading arenas will flourish because:

  • Industry inefficiencies run rampant. In today’s business environment, comparing offerings across suppliers requires multiple phone calls to various suppliers or enlisting the costly support of a broker. Time-consuming practices like these are easy targets for the Internet–where purchasing agents can gain instant access to comparisons of many different products.
  • E-marketplace vendors will lower technology barriers. Someone had to build the first e-marketplace, but now the technology landscape is maturing. Today, B2B entrepreneurs can acquire sophisticated marketplace software from firms like Tradex, Ariba, and Commerce One or entirely offload the building of their websites to a lengthening list of experienced e-commerce integrators like Vision Systems or Software Solutions Pakistan.
  • Venture funding is shifting to business trade. High-profile B2B players like VerticalNet–whose market cap currently exceeds $4 billion–have caught the investor community’s attention. The result? Many venture capitalists are placing bigger bets on their business trade portfolio. CMGI, for instance, just announced its plans to raise $1 billion to invest in B2B firms.

E-marketplaces will face a changing business environment. As more and more companies compete in the B2B market, there are going to be companies that will either have to sell or simply go out of business due to:

  • Virgin markets disappearing. While most existing e-marketplaces are launched in a world devoid of serious competition, such as the printing business, these uncharted opportunities will quickly fade away. And even though there are a lot of untapped new markets, they will not be for long and soon everyone will want a piece of the pie.
  • Feature-function races escalate. Functionality is not a big issue currently. Many websites simply put together a transaction processing engine and issue a few press releases and declare they have a B2B website. But as these websites face stiff competition, basic service offerings won’t be good enough. Firms will need to pump big bucks into expanding their online and offline capabilities just to satisfy the requirements of increasingly demanding participants.

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.’s e-marketplace report

4.4 Service Business Analysis

Discover Productions is part of the Web hosting industry.

4.4.1 Main Competitors

Specifically, competitors include Onramp, Saper Media Group, and Labnet which are detailed as follows:

  • Onramp, Cleveland, Ohio.  Onramp is a publicly traded company that was founded in 1994. It is considered an industry leader in the field of Web page design. Onramp is a provider of products/services that help businesses with their websites and hosting.
  • Saper Media Group, Cleveland, Ohio.  Saper Media Group is a publicly traded company that was founded in 1995. It is considered an industry leader in the field of websites. SMG is a provider of products/services that put businesses on the Web. The company’s products/services include website design and maintenance, graphic design, and application programming.
  • Labnet, Cleveland, Ohio.  Labnet is a publicly traded company that was founded in 1995. It is considered an industry leader in the field of Web page design. Labnet is a provider of products/services that creates websites and hosting. The company’s products/services include Web page design, website hosting, database services, and CGI programming.

4.4.2 Positioning Statement

Discover Productions believes that to stay ahead of its competitors it has to define its vision; to be a B2B Web-based turn-key solutions provider, developing new and innovative Web-based applications and become an ally to its clients in this diverse field. The company offers various benefits including:

  • Lead with the best products and services in the industry.

The solutions provided by Discover Productions require serious technical knowledge and experience to develop.  Many competitors only sell a single boxed product versus a custom solution. The company also offers incentive packages as well as finders fees for any employees who bring in new business.

Discover Productions keeps a close watch on the technological advances that take place in the industry so that it can effectively implement its solutions. The company sends representatives to regional and national seminars and offers training programs for its staff. All this is done to ensure Discover Productions becomes the leading provider of industry solutions. Discover Productions believes in passing cost savings on to its customers. As such, the company purchases from Tech-Data which offers 30-day net terms and overnight shipping.

Strategy and Implementation Summary

Strategic Alliances The company plans to rapidly develop marketing alliances with industry leaders and pursue new sales of turnkey computing solutions, systems support, Web hosting, e-commerce, Web development, and Web-based applications. The market strategy is to capitalize on Discover Productions’s innovative, information technology applications by expanding into new market areas.

Marketing The company will run advertising banners on various websites that are visited by its target markets. The company anticipates that it will use several different forms of promotion to attract clients to its services. These promotions will include discounted packaged deals that are all inclusive. Customers will purchase the company’s education materials, license the company’s software, and join the chat room for “one low introductory price.”

Sales The sales process involves several steps which include relationship building, customer requirements/needs, product presentation, demo, closure and implementation. This approach is used because with our technical products and services it is more effective than competitors’ single product approach.

5.1 Competitive Edge

  • One-stop shopping for companies needing complete “from the ground up” Web-based applications and business solutions. Discover Productions delivers the most comprehensive, cost-effective information available.
  • Provide comprehensive, cost-effective Web development, hosting, e-commerce and Internet computing solutions that deliver results.
  • New innovative B2B Web-based applications that target and capture untapped industries bringing businesses together over the Internet, and expanding the learning potential of everyone with their own line of educational products.

5.2 Marketing Strategy

The company’s marketing strategy rests on the belief that its products and services represent a value-added approach to interpreting, qualifying, and understanding the complexities of the computer industry and technology markets. To implement this strategy, the company intends to place paid advertising banners on strategic websites in the computer fields and to utilize search engine portal and general media advertising. Through these approaches, customers of the company will attain access to the company through its websites, where they will in turn access the company’s advertiser driver browser, which the company expects will expose the customer the company’s proprietary products and services, as well as to links with other online firms with which the company has strategic alliances and advertising relationships. 

Discover Productions’ marketing plan is developed in order to support the company’s corporate goals and strategies. It is developed from knowledge gained from industry analysis, competitive intelligence, and what is known about customers and clients. It should be noted that every reasonable effort has been taken to develop the marketing plan from data and analysis. It is possible that some of the data could be interpreted in different ways, which could invariably lead others to arrive at different conclusions about how to approach the marketplace and promote the business.

The specific marketing goals for the company are:

  • Increase Discover Productions brand awareness.
  • Develop new clients and markets.
  • Develop strategic alliances (via marketing).
  • Build Discover Productions co-brands and partners.
  • Increase advertising revenues.
  • Increase traffic to Discover Productions.
  • Expand existing clients and markets.
  • Develop marketing presentation materials.
  • Identify opportunities for new products and services.
  • Enhance Discover Productions offerings.
  • Enhance public relations efforts.

5.2.1 Marketing Programs

The delivery channel for Discover Productions’s marketing strategy is based on an integrated marketing model which utilizes a mix of communications media. The marketing programs are designed to increase brand recognition and attract new customers. They are diverse and include a range of marketing communications.

The Internet.  The Internet will be the primary marketing tool. Site development will include: 

  • Use of state-of-the-art graphics.
  • Easy access to pages within the site.
  • A menu that includes easy enrollment for membership or product purchases.
  • Use of state-of-the-art execution platform for trading.
  • Easy payment methods and secure online transaction processor. 

The company will also advertise on various strategic sites on the Internet including:

  • Submitting URL for each page of the site to search engines.
  • Banner ads on select search portals.

The website.   Discover Productions currently has two websites and has received several inquiries from them. An additional site will be added to provide an online catalog and quote system. Plans are underway to upgrade the website with additional marketing material, as this is expected to be one of the company’s primary marketing channels.

Print media.  Inserts and/or ads in weekly and daily newspapers will be considered as the budget allows.

Broadcast media.  Radio, television, and cable advertising will be considered as the budget allows.

Email.  The company will use demographic profiles to send messages to potential members and to:

  • Provide a newsletter to all active accounts.
  • Provide thank you notifications to all visitors, along with advantages that go with being a member.

Promotions. The company will use various promotion channels to reach its target markets.

  • Secure space at online trading expos.
  • Secure space at business expos in West Palm Beach and Boca Raton.
  • Presentations at various Chambers of Commerce gatherings. 
  • Newsletters.
  • Special membership promotions.
  • Browsing site for free.

5.3 Sales Strategy

Discover Productions uses a direct sales force, relationship selling, subcontractors, direct marketing, and Internet marketing to reach its markets.  These channels are most appropriate because they utilize the quickest path and time to the market place, reduced capital requirements, fast access to established distribution channels, and best of processes for relationship building. Sales and distribution are made by/through strategic alliances and partners with Fortune 500 companies.

5.3.1 Sales Forecast

Positioning and company image. The idea is to communicate to the investor community, the company’s unique combination of capabilities, products, competencies, and investor relations programs. Management believes that its corporate image is distinguished from other ASP firms. Discover Productions’s business model is designed to utilize its cumulative management experience in computer solutions, Web hosting, Internet sales, e-commerce solutions, new Web-based products, and technical & marketing experience to create an unbeatable marketing and sales strategy, consisting of these components: 

  • Corporate image (and image enhancement).
  • Marketing propositions.
  • Solid advertising programs.

Asp b2b technology business plan, strategy and implementation summary chart image

Management Summary management summary will include information about who's on your team and why they're the right people for the job, as well as your future hiring plans.">

The following topics discuss the management organization within Discover Productions.

6.1 Organizational Structure

Discover Productions’s organizational structure is illustrated below.

President/CEO, Edward Jones

Vice-President/CIO, Jacob Manuel

  • Technical Support Manager (To Be Determined)
  • Research/Product Manager (To Be Determined)
  • Web Application Manager (To Be Determined)

Vice-President/Marketing (To Be Determined)

  • Sales Manager (To Be Determined)
  • Strategic Alliance Manager (To Be Determined)
  • Business Development Manager, Jennifer L.Jones
  • Advertising Manager (To Be Determined)

CFO, (To Be Determined)

  • Accounts Manager (To Be Determined)
  • Human Resources Manager (To Be Determined)

6.2 Quality Assurance Program

Quality excellence is the foundation for the management of our business and the keystone of the company’s goal for customer satisfaction.  It is, therefore, company policy to:

  • Consistently provide services that meet the quality expectations of our customers.
  • Actively pursue improving quality through programs that enable each employee to do his or her job right the first time.

The Discover Productions Quality Assurance Program consists of new employee orientation on the Quality Assurance Plan, in-house training programs for all employees, and a formal certification training program.  Quality Assurance checks are done on an ongoing basis, and on completed jobs to ensure quality workmanship to the company’s customers.

At Discover Productions, the customer comes first. Putting the customer first involves learning about the customer’s ever-changing needs and meeting their expectations for lasting quality.

The company strives to prevent problems by anticipating them. Prevention can be achieved through planning and can avoid the time and costs associated with rework.

Quality happens through people and it is the people that make the Discover Productions business successful. Within an environment that stimulates self-motivation and creativity, employees can take ownership of the processes that make our business, and therefore our clients’ businesses, succeed.

6.3 Personnel Plan

Senior Management Team

Discover Productions’ management is highly experienced and qualified.  It’s key management team includes: Mr. Edward Jones as President/CEO and Mr. Jacob Manuel, CIO.

Other key personnel at Discover Productions include:

  • Ms. Michelle Jackson, who is in charge of new business development.
  • Mrs. Dana Beck, who has specialization in Web database programming. 
  • Mr. Michael Taylor, who is a database programmer. 
  • Ms. Mary Joseph, who is in charge of Web page design.

Financial Plan investor-ready personnel plan .">

The company is seeking first round funding in the amount of $914,900 for staffing purposes, purchasing software and hardware computing equipment, office costs, and other Internet related costs. The company is also seeking second round funding in the amount of $3 million for developing B2B Web-based applications, and their educational application software.

The following sections outline the financial plan for Discover Productions.

7.1 Projected Profit and Loss

Discover Productions’ estimated income statements for FY2000-2002 are outlined below.

Asp b2b technology business plan, financial plan chart image

7.2 Projected Cash Flow

The table below provides the company’s projected cash flow for FY2000-2002.

Asp b2b technology business plan, financial plan chart image

7.3 Balance Sheet

The projected Balance Sheet is shown below.

7.4 Business Ratios

The following table contains important business ratios for the consulting industry, as determined by the Standard Industry Classification (SIC) Index code 8748.

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10 B2B Marketing Plan Examples To Help You Stay Organized

Jesse Seilhan

Jesse Seilhan

10 B2B Marketing Plan Examples To Help You Stay Organized

As complicated as B2B marketing can be—it’s easy to get caught up in different B2B marketing strategies, channels, campaigns, and tactics. Having a plan is the best way to keep things secure and structured.

Whether your plan is meticulous, loose, or a combination of both, having that plan will keep you focused. Depending upon what market you are targeting, you will need a different mix of strategies and channels addressed in your marketing plan.

b2b marketing plans example

For B2B marketers, creating marketing plans is part of your job description. Your marketing plan dictates how your business runs as it helps develop content, timelines, etc. Developing content requires an understanding of your market’s demand.

Market demand informs what content customers want to read—and this is informed by what questions (or keywords) they are typing into the search engines.

When you provide the content your customers are looking for, your business is more likely to grow.

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10 B2B Marketing Plan Examples to Inspire You

Of course, knowing where to start with your marketing plan can be a challenge. To help you find direction, we’ve rounded up ten marketing plan examples to help you stay organized.

#1: Brilliant B2B Digital Marketing E-book by Smart Insights

Image of strong B2B digital marketing e-book.

When looking for B2B marketing plans, a great place to start is with actually building the outline of the plan before deciding what tactics, strategies, and KPIs to fill it with.

Enter Rene Power and his Brilliant B2B digital marketing e-book . You’ll find the critical questions you need to ask yourself and your company to understand your current position in the field.

Are you targeting the right keywords? Is your website built for the future?

Sometimes you need to start there before you can employ that killer email marketing strategy or clever viral campaign.

#2: Building an Email Marketing Strategy by Bronto

Developed by e-mail marketing consultant, Tamara Gielen , this plan is all about using email for marketing advantages. It focuses on creating a comprehensive plan that uses emails as primary market outreach .

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Email marketing utilizes customer outreach as a way to create focused content as well as grow your customer base. Perfect for marketers and market executives, this plan is strategic yet straightforward.

It’s important to remember that different types of outreach follow different best practices. For instance, you wouldn’t send the same copy in an email as you would a LinkedIn message. For email outreach, however, we’ve done an extensive amount of testing on how to increase response rates and closed/won opportunities.

For actionable tips on how to increase your response rate in your email outreach, you can read this post we wrote on how we improved our email response rates in our link building outreach campaigns.

Screenshot of article that helps enhance B2B marketing strategies.

#3: The Four Step Marketing Plan for Ideal Campaigns

SJWeaver keeps it simple with their Four Step Marketing Plan for Ideal Campaigns. However, there is actually complexity under the hood, so we’ll break it down into easy-to-swallow steps:

  • Step 1 : The Unique Selling Propositions/Points
  • Step 2 : The Platforms and Offers
  • Step 3 : The Marketing Arsenal
  • Step 4 : Marketing Automation

And if you’re more of a visual learner, they’ve compiled some solid videos that break down each step into more detail:

Screenshot of video content that can enhance your B2B marketing strategies.

While not purely focused on B2B, this marketing plan is great for anyone struggling to define their unique selling propositions or creating the automation needed to support their marketing.

#4: Brainrider’s B2B Content Marketing Strategy Template

Detailed and easy to understand, this plan runs through B2B marketing basics. This tool provides a framework or “skeleton”  for marketers to use as a template for their plans.

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The plan runs through prioritizing objectives and articulating your business goals to customers. It also focuses on targeting your audience and finally creating content for them.

In short, this is another highly-customizable B2B marketing plan. As long as you’ve got the framework, there’s no limit to what strategies you can test out, and start making a difference for your clients!

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#5: The Complete Guide to B2B Marketing

When Salesforce decides to throw their hat into the ring, people listen. Their Complete Guide to B2B Marketing is a great piece for beginning marketers and expert executors alike, and it includes beneficial checklists and actionable worksheets to incorporate with your team.

Below, you will find an example of a “Call-to-Action Checklist,” which is helpful for marketers to ensure that landing pages and blog content leave an impact and encourage their viewers to take action… every time.

Screenshot of Salesforce CTA checklist to enhance B2B marketing strategies.

B2B marketing strategies sometimes focus too narrowly on one aspect of the funnel without taking a holistic approach to your entire philosophy behind your marketing. This marketing plan helps you understand models that marketers need to make a great plan, tests theories in a real way and then enables you to learn and grow from those same exercises.

It’s a must-read for all B2B marketers and should become a roadmap for those losing their way in the digital world!

#6: Business-to-Business Marketing Summary by SAGE

The digital marketing template focuses mainly on the top internet marketing strategies .

The plan teaches readers to build a framework, communicate better, and also teaches many other skills that lead to successful B2B marketing. The most significant advantage of this sample plan is that it is widely comprehensive.

Different marketing strategy situations are explored. The most successful strategies are identified.

In short, this B2B marketing plan example hits all the right spots and won’t leave you confused.

#7: B2B Marketing Segmentation by Circle Research

Compiled and created by Circle Research , this plan is more of a “how to” that focuses on B2B market segmentation. It looks at case studies and different marketing plan approaches to inform and build new plans.

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The plan also breaks down segmentation.  You’ll find the following included:

  • Outlines the different approaches to segmentation in B2B environments.
  • Provides a step-by-step guide to adopting each approach.
  • Looks at how to effectively implement and action a segmentation model.
  • Offers links to B2B segmentation case studies.

The overall template offers an interesting look at B2B marketing plans through a different lens. Marketers can benefit from this slightly elevated approach after taking the time to dive in.

#8: Single Statement Templates from CMI

Single statement marketing plans are an actual thing. They may sound minimalist, but they are a solid way to stay focused.

Developed by Content Marketing Institute , single statement plans refer to creating an objective by establishing a single, active, mission statement for your campaign. The statement will be one that hits all the points and goals of your company. It should include  what you do, who you help, and why you help them .

Content Marketing Institute offers useful examples and templates for this plan. In a sort of “ad-lib” set up, marketers can fill in the blanks and create a statement that acts as a starting point for a marketing plan.

See an example of this below:

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#9: The Why.Who.How Workbook from CMI

This is another big find from Content Marketing Institute. Audience-focused B2B marketing plans  use your audience demographic to fuel content. The idea is to build a target audience with in-depth customer profiles. They should be focused to the point that each ICP (ideal customer profile) has a name, a job title, key concern, personality, interests, and age.

Example of B2B marketing plan to reach targeted demographic easier.

You can also give them a funnel position, the type of B2B needs they have, and what they care about in terms of metrics. The more your customer develops a well-rounded persona, the more you can take action to serve them better. This template is part of a larger whole, but it is a great starting point.

#10: The Essential Data-Driven Content Strategy from CMI

The last entry from Content Marketing Institute to discuss are  data-driven B2B marketing plans . Looking at your data is essential to craft your marketing plan and conquer your goals. Craft the plan backward by looking at the results of previous plans:

  • Take the data you have compiled and study it.
  • See what worked and what did not.
  • See what B2B customers responded to, and what fell flat.
  • See who your content reached, and where you could reach a bit more.

Data-driven B2B marketing plans are a way of fixing past mistakes to make stronger decisions moving forward. Reverse engineering your campaigns  from where your previous strategies have converted users is a great way to start your strategy off on the right foot.

These 10 B2B marketing plan examples should help you come up with plans of your own. The success of your business hinges on how well you market it and its services. By studying these plans, you can stay organized, find focus, and begin creating plans that work. If you want to know how we develop marketing plans backed by financial modeling, we’d love to get on a call.  Schedule a call  today to find out how our proven Customer Generation approach will bring your tech company results.

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Free Business Plan Templates in Excel

By Joe Weller | September 27, 2020

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In this article, we’ve rounded up an extensive list of free business plan templates and samples for organizations of all sizes. You can download all of the plans in Excel. 

Included on this page, you’ll find business plan templates in Excel , business plan checklists in Excel , business plan financial templates in Excel , and more.

Business Plan Templates in Excel

These Excel business plan templates are designed to guide you through each step of a well-rounded strategy that supports your marketing, sales, financial, and operational goals.

Business Plan Template in Excel

Business Plan Template

This Excel business plan template has all the traditional components of a standard business plan, with each section divided into tabs. This template includes space to provide the executive summary, target audience characteristics, product or service offering details, marketing strategies, and more. The plan also offers built-in formulas to complete calculations for sales forecasting, financial statements, and key business ratios.

Download Business Plan Template

Excel | Smartsheet

One-Page Business Plan in Excel

b2b business plan template net

To check the feasibility of your business concept, use this single-page business plan template. The template allows you to jot down the core details related to your idea. This template also includes room for you to provide concise information about what you do, how you do it, why you do it, who your idea serves, your competitive advantage, your marketing strategies, and your success factors. At the bottom of this one-page plan, you’ll find a table to conduct a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis. Find more downloadable single-page plans and examples at “ One-Page Business Plan Templates with a Quick How-To Guide .”

Download One-Page Business Plan

Excel | Word | PDF | Smartsheet

Sample 30-60-90-Day Business Plan for Startup in Excel

Sample 30 60 90 Day Business Plan for Startup Template

This 90-day business plan is designed for startup companies to develop a 90-day action plan. This template gives you room to outline the following: main goals and deliverables for each 30-day increment; key business activities; task ownership; and deadlines. This template also includes a built-in Gantt chart that adjusts as you enter dates. Visit “ 30-60-90-Day Business Plan Templates and Samples ” to download more free plans.

Download 30-60-90-Day Business Plan for Startup

For more free business plans in a wider variety of formats, visit “ Simple Business Plan Templates .”

Business Plan Checklists in Excel

These business plan checklists are useful for freelancers, entrepreneurs, and business owners who want to organize and track the progress of key business activities.

Business Planning Checklist with Timeline in Excel

Business Planning Checklist with Timeline

Use this checklist to keep your business planning efforts on track. This template enables you to add tasks according to each phase of your plan, assign an owner to each task, and enter the respective start and end dates. The checklist also enables you to create and color-code a visual timeline when you highlight the start and end dates for each task.

Download Business Planning Checklist with Timeline Template

Business Plan Checklist with SWOT Analysis in Excel

Business Planning Checklist with SWOT Analysis

Use this business plan checklist to develop and organize your strategic plan. Add the name of the business activity, along with its status, due date, and pertinent notes. This template also includes a separate tab with a SWOT analysis matrix, so you can evaluate and prioritize your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Download Business Plan Checklist with SWOT Analysis - Excel

Business Startup Checklist in Excel

b2b business plan template net

This checklist template is ideal for startup organizations. It allows you to list and categorize key tasks that you need to complete, including items related to research, strategic relationships, finance, development, and more. Check off each task upon completion to ensure you haven’t missed or overlooked any important business activities. Find additional resources by visiting “ Free Startup Plan, Budget & Cost Templates .”

‌Download Business Startup Checklist Template

Business Plan Financial Templates in Excel

Use these customizable templates to develop your organization’s financial plan.

Business Startup Costs Template in Excel

b2b business plan template net

Use this template to estimate and track your startup and operational costs. This template gives you room to list line items for both funding and expenses; you can automatically calculate totals using the built-in formulas. To avoid overspending, compare budgeted amounts against actual amounts to determine where you can cut costs or find additional funding.

Download Business Startup Costs Template

Small-Business Budget Template in Excel

b2b business plan template net

This simple business budget template is designed with small businesses in mind. The template helps you track the income and expenses that you accrue on a monthly and yearly basis. To log your cash balances and transactions for a given time frame, use the tab for cash flow recording.

Download Small-Business Budget Template - Excel

Startup Financial Statement Projections Template

Startup Financial Projections Template

This financial statement projections template includes a detailed profit and loss statement (or income statement), a balance sheet with business ratios, and a cash flow statement to analyze your company’s current and future financial position. This template also comes with built-in formulas, so you can calculate totals as you enter values and customize your statement to fit the needs of your business.

‌ Download Startup Financial Statement Projections Template

For additional templates to help you produce a sound financial plan, visit “ Free Financial Templates for a Business Plan .”

Business Plan Marketing and Sales Templates in Excel

Use these downloadable templates to support and reinforce the marketing and sales objectives in your business plan.

Sales Forecast Template in Excel

b2b business plan template net

This sales forecast template allows you to view the projected sales of your products or services at both individual and combined levels over a 12-month period. You can organize this template by department, product group, customer type, and other helpful categories. The template has built-in formulas to calculate monthly and yearly sales totals. For additional resources to project sales, visit “ Free Sales Forecasting Templates .”

Download Sales Forecast Template

Marketing Budget Plan in Excel

Marketing-Budget-Plan-Template

This marketing budget plan template helps you organize and plan your campaign costs for key marketing activities, such as market research, advertising, content marketing , and public relations. Enter the projected quantity and cost under each campaign category; the built-in formulas enable you to calculate projected subtotals automatically. This template also includes a graph that auto-populates as you enter values, so you can see where your marketing dollars are going.

Download Marketing Budget Plan Template

Other Business Plans in Excel

Use these business plan templates to conduct analyses and develop a plan of action that aligns your strategy with your main business objectives.

Business Action Plan Template in Excel

b2b business plan template net

Use this basic action plan template to develop a roadmap for reaching your goals. Add a description of each action item, assign the responsible party, and list the required resources, potential hazards, key dates, and desired outcome. You can use this template to develop an action plan for marketing, sales, program development, and more. 

Download Business Action Plan Template

Business Plan Rubric in Excel

b2b business plan template net

Once you complete your business plan, use this rubric template to score each section to ensure you include all the essential information. You can customize this rubric to fit the needs of your organization and provide insight into the areas of your plan where you want to delve more deeply or remove unnecessary details. By following these steps, you can make certain that your final business plan is clear, concise, and thorough.

Download Simple Business Plan Rubric

Competitive Analysis Template in Excel

b2b business plan template net

This template enables you to analyze the competitive landscape and industry for your business. By providing details related to your company and competitors, you can assess and compare all key areas, including the target market, marketing strategies, product or service offerings, distribution channels, and more.

Download Competitive Analysis Template

Excel  | Smartsheet

For additional free templates for all aspects of your business, visit “ Free Business Templates for Organizations of All Sizes .”

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When teams have clarity into the work getting done, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time.  Try Smartsheet for free, today.

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B2B Marketing Plan

Your B2B Marketing Plan for 2024 (incl. Template)

16 february 2024 by jessie taylor.

There's plenty of resources out there for creating B2C and D2C marketing plans, but B2B companies seem to get left high and dry.

B2B companies, especially those in SaaS and tech like Leadfeeder , face different challenges and have different goals. You have to consider how your target audience and industry impact what marketing strategies are effective for your business.

So, we're going to share the process we're using to design our 2024 marketing plan. I hope this step-by-step guide (and marketing plan template!) will help you start the new year off right.

Note: Leadfeeder is the lead generation tool you've been dreaming of. Sign up for a free trial and start finding hidden, high-quality leads today.

Why do you need to create an updated B2B marketing plan?

Marketing is always evolving.

The strategies and tools you used this year might not help you get ahead next year. Even if the core tenets of marketing are the same (think lead generation , SEO, paid ads, and content marketing), the strategies and martech tools you use to implement a successful strategy may have.

When you think back, COVID-19 completely changed how many companies worked, who they hired, what goals they focused on, and even their revenue.

Covid economic activity chart

As a B2B company, it's crucial to be ready to adapt to whatever is going on in the world.

For example, with Leadfeeder by Dealfront, we use IP addresses to identify the companies visiting your site . During the pandemic, we had to change the way we track companies to make sure we were still accurate.

Other companies have changed the platforms they use, the ads they create, even the type of content they publish.

It's not a whole new world, but things have definitely changed.

To be successful, your 2024 marketing plan needs to match the new reality. Here's a five-step guide to get it right.

5 steps to create an updated B2B marketing plan 

B2B companies struggle to generate more leads, find effective marketing strategies and improve conversion rates . A well-planned marketing strategy can help you overcome those challenges.

Not sure where to start with your 2024 B2B marketing plan? This five-step guide will get you started. 

1. Examine your past marketing success and failures

Before you set goals for next year, consider what worked last year. Did your email marketing strategy kill it? Was your new lead generation tool a flop? Are paid ads spending more than they're bringing in?

You can also use tools like Leadfeeder (and obviously Google Analytics) to see what content your website visitors spent time-consuming vs. quickly bounced from. Hotjar could be another neat element to bring in to literally see where people hung out on the site.

I'm going to be honest — this step can be lengthy, but it's crucial to avoid wasting time and resources on strategies that don't work.

Review each segment of your marketing strategies and answer these questions:

What was the goal of this strategy?

Did we meet those goals? Why or why not?

What tools did we use? Did they meet our needs?

What can we improve? (Or, should we scrap this strategy entirely?)

2. Pay attention to new and changing marketing trends in 2024

No one can predict the future, but paying attention to the current marketing landscape is crucial to designing an effective 2024 marketing plan.

Here are a few trends our team is paying attention to this coming year:

Automation : Automation is taking over the marketing world. While we don't suggest turning your entire marketing strategy over to the robots, there are areas it can help, such as marketing automation tools , automated bidding for paid ads, and automated integrations that push data from one tool to another.

Machine learning and AI : This is an exciting field that just keeps growing. Machine learning and AI allow algorithms to analyze a set of data or rules and use it to understand unrelated data. AI helps B2B companies understand our customers better, personalize our marketing, predict changes in the industry, and inform content creation.

Personalization : There's been a permanent shift towards personalized marketing efforts. More than half of all consumers say they will keep buying from a company that offers a personalized experience. Consider adding it to your marketing plan.

Segment stat graphic

More (and better) content : B2B buyers read an average of 13 pieces of content before they decide to buy, so creating engaging content should still be a key part of your 2024 marketing plan.

SEO is still the reigning champ : Nope, SEO is not dead. In fact, Google is getting smarter and smarter. Pay attention to new SEO trends like natural language processing and passage ranking .

3. Review your buyer personas 

A good marketing plan is designed to move a specific customer through the buyer's journey. Do you know who your customers are?

At Leadfeeder, we actually have two main buyer personas — sales and marketing teams. We've found that most of our top customers derived from the marketing side, so we've adjusted our content and marketing strategies to focus on them.

And it's made a huge difference. We wouldn't have realized the shift if we hadn't taken the time to review our buyer personas and make sure we were targeting the right market.

4. Consider new marketing tools

There's a ton of marketing tools out there. (That might be an understatement.)

It's overwhelming, I know. Rather than trying all the new tools out there, take a look at your biggest challenges of the last year.

Where did you fall short? What took up most of your time? Where do you want to improve?

Then look for marketing and sales tools that specifically target those tasks.

For example, if finding leads is a problem, Leadfeeder can help. Using a small bit of code, we track who visits your site and show you how to reach out to them. It only takes a few minutes to set up and we have an awesome free trial .

Here's a peek at our dashboard, where you can see new leads, filter them by location, industry, etc., and view contact information:

Leadfeeder home page

Other tools we love include Pipedrive , a sales CRM and pipeline management tool, and Mailchimp, a killer email automation platform — we have an integration with both of these tools .

The point is to find marketing tools that solve problems for you, not just ones that pay for the most ads on LinkedIn.

5. Outline short and long-term goals

Now it's time to lay out some goals. What do you want to accomplish in the next year? Does that goal align with the overall business goals of your c-suite? It's important to outline both short and long-term goals to keep yourself on track.

For example, your long-term goal might be to increase lead generation by 24 percent in the coming year, while your first-quarter goal might be to implement a new lead gen tool and increase leads by 15 percent.

Having both goals creates a framework to reach that larger goal.

We like to use the SMART framework for goal setting to ensure goals are clear and trackable.

SMART goals guide from Leadfeeder

B2B marketing plan template

After following the steps above, you should have most of the information needed to create your 2024 B2B marketing plan.

This checklist will help you create a usable document:

Leadfeeder B2B marketing plan template

Success starts with a strong marketing plan

Creating a winning B2B marketing plan for 2024 is the key to growing your business in the new year. Yes, it can be time-consuming. But, investing the time now will ensure your team is ready to hit the ground running in January.

Note: Is lead generation part of your 2024 marketing plan? See how Leadfeeder can help you uncover hidden leads and turn them into customers. Sign up for your free 14-day trial today .

Jessie Taylor

Jessie works in Content Marketing and Social Media for 6+ years and creates authentic, brand-led content that helps turn target audience into customers.

Now that you're here

Leadfeeder is a tool that shows you companies that visit your website. Leadfeeder generates new leads, offers insight on your customers and can help you increase your marketing ROI.

If you liked this blog post, you'll probably love Leadfeeder, too.

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7+ SAMPLE B2B Sales Plan in PDF

B2b sales plan, 7+ sample b2b sales plan,  a b2b sales, benefits of a b2b sales plan, tips in developing a b2b sales, how to have a successful b2b sales plan, is commission considered a bonus, what is the definition of a commission rate, why is sales the best career option.

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What is  a b2b sales, share this post on your network, you may also like these articles, 27+ sample individual learning plan in pdf | ms word | google docs | apple pages.

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With the advent of digital technologies, many educators and various institutions are practicing innovation in teaching and facilitating independent learning through asynchronous communication and intelligent systems. The limitless resources…

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Create a form in Word that users can complete or print

In Word, you can create a form that others can fill out and save or print.  To do this, you will start with baseline content in a document, potentially via a form template.  Then you can add content controls for elements such as check boxes, text boxes, date pickers, and drop-down lists. Optionally, these content controls can be linked to database information.  Following are the recommended action steps in sequence.  

Show the Developer tab

In Word, be sure you have the Developer tab displayed in the ribbon.  (See how here:  Show the developer tab .)

Open a template or a blank document on which to base the form

You can start with a template or just start from scratch with a blank document.

Start with a form template

Go to File > New .

In the  Search for online templates  field, type  Forms or the kind of form you want. Then press Enter .

In the displayed results, right-click any item, then select  Create. 

Start with a blank document 

Select Blank document .

Add content to the form

Go to the  Developer  tab Controls section where you can choose controls to add to your document or form. Hover over any icon therein to see what control type it represents. The various control types are described below. You can set properties on a control once it has been inserted.

To delete a content control, right-click it, then select Remove content control  in the pop-up menu. 

Note:  You can print a form that was created via content controls. However, the boxes around the content controls will not print.

Insert a text control

The rich text content control enables users to format text (e.g., bold, italic) and type multiple paragraphs. To limit these capabilities, use the plain text content control . 

Click or tap where you want to insert the control.

Rich text control button

To learn about setting specific properties on these controls, see Set or change properties for content controls .

Insert a picture control

A picture control is most often used for templates, but you can also add a picture control to a form.

Picture control button

Insert a building block control

Use a building block control  when you want users to choose a specific block of text. These are helpful when you need to add different boilerplate text depending on the document's specific purpose. You can create rich text content controls for each version of the boilerplate text, and then use a building block control as the container for the rich text content controls.

building block gallery control

Select Developer and content controls for the building block.

Developer tab showing content controls

Insert a combo box or a drop-down list

In a combo box, users can select from a list of choices that you provide or they can type in their own information. In a drop-down list, users can only select from the list of choices.

combo box button

Select the content control, and then select Properties .

To create a list of choices, select Add under Drop-Down List Properties .

Type a choice in Display Name , such as Yes , No , or Maybe .

Repeat this step until all of the choices are in the drop-down list.

Fill in any other properties that you want.

Note:  If you select the Contents cannot be edited check box, users won’t be able to click a choice.

Insert a date picker

Click or tap where you want to insert the date picker control.

Date picker button

Insert a check box

Click or tap where you want to insert the check box control.

Check box button

Use the legacy form controls

Legacy form controls are for compatibility with older versions of Word and consist of legacy form and Active X controls.

Click or tap where you want to insert a legacy control.

Legacy control button

Select the Legacy Form control or Active X Control that you want to include.

Set or change properties for content controls

Each content control has properties that you can set or change. For example, the Date Picker control offers options for the format you want to use to display the date.

Select the content control that you want to change.

Go to Developer > Properties .

Controls Properties  button

Change the properties that you want.

Add protection to a form

If you want to limit how much others can edit or format a form, use the Restrict Editing command:

Open the form that you want to lock or protect.

Select Developer > Restrict Editing .

Restrict editing button

After selecting restrictions, select Yes, Start Enforcing Protection .

Restrict editing panel

Advanced Tip:

If you want to protect only parts of the document, separate the document into sections and only protect the sections you want.

To do this, choose Select Sections in the Restrict Editing panel. For more info on sections, see Insert a section break .

Sections selector on Resrict sections panel

If the developer tab isn't displayed in the ribbon, see Show the Developer tab .

Open a template or use a blank document

To create a form in Word that others can fill out, start with a template or document and add content controls. Content controls include things like check boxes, text boxes, and drop-down lists. If you’re familiar with databases, these content controls can even be linked to data.

Go to File > New from Template .

New from template option

In Search, type form .

Double-click the template you want to use.

Select File > Save As , and pick a location to save the form.

In Save As , type a file name and then select Save .

Start with a blank document

Go to File > New Document .

New document option

Go to File > Save As .

Go to Developer , and then choose the controls that you want to add to the document or form. To remove a content control, select the control and press Delete. You can set Options on controls once inserted. From Options, you can add entry and exit macros to run when users interact with the controls, as well as list items for combo boxes, .

Adding content controls to your form

In the document, click or tap where you want to add a content control.

On Developer , select Text Box , Check Box , or Combo Box .

Developer tab with content controls

To set specific properties for the control, select Options , and set .

Repeat steps 1 through 3 for each control that you want to add.

Set options

Options let you set common settings, as well as control specific settings. Select a control and then select Options to set up or make changes.

Set common properties.

Select Macro to Run on lets you choose a recorded or custom macro to run on Entry or Exit from the field.

Bookmark Set a unique name or bookmark for each control.

Calculate on exit This forces Word to run or refresh any calculations, such as total price when the user exits the field.

Add Help Text Give hints or instructions for each field.

OK Saves settings and exits the panel.

Cancel Forgets changes and exits the panel.

Set specific properties for a Text box

Type Select form Regular text, Number, Date, Current Date, Current Time, or Calculation.

Default text sets optional instructional text that's displayed in the text box before the user types in the field. Set Text box enabled to allow the user to enter text into the field.

Maximum length sets the length of text that a user can enter. The default is Unlimited .

Text format can set whether text automatically formats to Uppercase , Lowercase , First capital, or Title case .

Text box enabled Lets the user enter text into a field. If there is default text, user text replaces it.

Set specific properties for a Check box .

Default Value Choose between Not checked or checked as default.

Checkbox size Set a size Exactly or Auto to change size as needed.

Check box enabled Lets the user check or clear the text box.

Set specific properties for a Combo box

Drop-down item Type in strings for the list box items. Press + or Enter to add an item to the list.

Items in drop-down list Shows your current list. Select an item and use the up or down arrows to change the order, Press - to remove a selected item.

Drop-down enabled Lets the user open the combo box and make selections.

Protect the form

Go to Developer > Protect Form .

Protect form button on the Developer tab

Note:  To unprotect the form and continue editing, select Protect Form again.

Save and close the form.

Test the form (optional)

If you want, you can test the form before you distribute it.

Protect the form.

Reopen the form, fill it out as the user would, and then save a copy.

Creating fillable forms isn’t available in Word for the web.

You can create the form with the desktop version of Word with the instructions in Create a fillable form .

When you save the document and reopen it in Word for the web, you’ll see the changes you made.

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Plan Templates

3+ b2b marketing plan templates.

While there are some businesses that cater to what it is that their customers want, there are those that cater to the wants and needs of other businesses. These types of businesses are the ones which provided the resource that other businesses need in order for them to provide their services. You may also see free plan templates .

b2b business plan template net

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Sample B2B Marketing Plan in DOC

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B2B Marketing Plan Guide

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Example of B2B Marketing Plan

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What Does B2B Mean?

How to create your b2b marketing plan, 1. figure out what kind of goals you want to achieve, 2. figure out who your target audience is going to be, 3. come up with your marketing strategies, 4. know your competition, more in plan templates, bbq housewarming party invitation template, free blank invitation template, bbq party invitation flyer template, 4th of july bbq party invitation template, australia day bbq invitation template, fall wedding engagement bbq invitation template, corporate bbq invitation template, awesome bbq party invitation template, memorial day bbq invitation template, bbq birthday celebration invitation template.

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    #4: Brainrider's B2B Content Marketing Strategy Template. Detailed and easy to understand, this plan runs through B2B marketing basics. This tool provides a framework or "skeleton" for marketers to use as a template for their plans. The plan runs through prioritizing objectives and articulating your business goals to customers.

  13. Write your business plan

    Executive summary. Briefly tell your reader what your company is and why it will be successful. Include your mission statement, your product or service, and basic information about your company's leadership team, employees, and location. You should also include financial information and high-level growth plans if you plan to ask for financing.

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  15. Your B2B Marketing Plan for 2024 (incl. Template)

    16 February 2024 by Jessie Taylor There's plenty of resources out there for creating B2C and D2C marketing plans, but B2B companies seem to get left high and dry. B2B companies, especially those in SaaS and tech like Leadfeeder, face different challenges and have different goals.

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  18. Create a form in Word that users can complete or print

    In Word, you can create a form that others can fill out and save or print. To do this, you will start with baseline content in a document, potentially via a form template. Then you can add content controls for elements such as check boxes, text boxes, date pickers, and drop-down lists. Optionally, these content controls can be linked to ...

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