A marketing plan is full of meaning. It gives a purpose and a destination for your venture. It provides you with several major benefits. Let's review them.

     Goal Setting: Your marketing plan allows you to set goals and benchmarks. You want to feel confident that you have your plan in order; you know where you are headed and how you are getting there. Take the example of a signing. You get a call to go to a signing, but have no idea where the street address is. You do a search on your favorite map online and find your destination. Get in your car and off you go to do your signing. (You searched, you conquered, You Signed). Now let's put this in context of the over all picture of your company. Set goals and deadlines for those goals and follow them through. If, each month, you meet your goals, in marketing, income and growth, your year end goals will have been met. If, one month, you don't meet those goals you have the following month to make up the difference and catch up. If you do this each and every month, at the end of the year you will have met your mark.

     Chart to success: We all know that plans are imperfect things. How can you possibly know what's going to happen 12 months or five years from now? Developing marketing is like going to a psychic. If we knew what is going to happen in a month from now or a year from now, would we not be better off playing the lottery? Or going to the races? Putting together a marketing plan can seem like the biggest waste of time I can think of. (Actually waiting for EDOCS is but that is beside the point). But a well thought out plan all laying out the year no matter how inaccurate it may be is better than no plan at all.

     Company operational instructions: I have never been in the military, so those of you who have will know the truths to this better than I do. I was watching a movie one night and the main actor was holding a Bazooka (rocket launcher). On the launcher it said Point this end at enemy -->. Now, I don't know if they really say that or not but my point is almost everything we buy comes with instructions. Your marketing plan is the instructions to the full operation of your company. I imagine once you have taken a few lessons on using a rocket launcher, you become familiar with it and away you go. If running a business was that simple we would all be multi billionaires with no worries in the world. Unfortunately, running a business is harder and more complex than the instructions of putting together a model car.  

     Captured thinking: Your marketing plan is the lifeline of your company. We have all had the instance of driving down the road and coming up with an ingenious idea that would get us ahead or a company that you have been meaning to sign up with or something you want to say to someone. By the time we get out of the car, we have already forgotten our thought and moved on to the 1000th thought that came to us. It's human nature to forget. A quick thought: When I was in a library in school, I read a poster that said:

"The more I read,
the more I know.
The more I know
the more I forget
the more I forget
The less I know
so why bother"

     The point is that if it is written down with a timetable, we have something to follow and refer to. Would you want your banker to try to keep track of your money in his head and calculate the interest in the same manner? No. I didn't think so.

     Top-level reflection: In the daily rat race of our competitive industry, it's hard to turn your attention to the big picture, especially those parts that aren't directly related to the daily operations. You need to take time periodically to really think about your business--whether it's providing you and your family with what you want, whether there are some innovative thoughts you can add, whether you're getting all you can out of your signings and your share of the market. Writing your marketing plan is the best time to do this high-level thinking. If you are the type of person that comes up with great ideas while driving or fishing or anywhere else other than in an office environment, then take a little hand held recorder and record your marketing thoughts while you are doing those extra curricular activities. Take time out and reflect your thoughts and record them. You may be the type of person that gets ideas from other people. I am not meaning you steal the ideas but something a person says, may spark an idea. If you are that type of person then go see the person that brings out the best in you. Trust me, when you get going on something, the thoughts will just start pouring out.

     Once you have been in business for several years, and you have developed several marketing plans, you can sit back and review them. You will see how your business has grown in reference to those plans. What successes and what failures you have had, and what changes you have made. You will also notice that year after year your plan gets closer and closer to your target mark.