- When it comes to achieving your business goals,
planning is everything.
But it's really hard to stare on a blank screen
and start typing out a roadmap to success.
What's up? Jamal, and welcome back to the channel.
In this video, I'm gonna help you break through
business writer's block
with the best free tools and templates you can use right now
to guide you through every step
of the business planning process.
As always, and this probably comes as a surprise to no one,
the download links for these helpful documents
can be found in the video description below.
And while you're down there,
don't forget to subscribe to the channel
and ring the notification bell.
Like this.
(mimics bell ringing) You know what I'm saying?
Little... (mimics bell ringing)
That's what you're gonna do.
You know why you're gonna do that?
Because we're adding new videos
with useful tools all the time.
Madness.
When it comes to business planning,
many leaders find it difficult
to balance the immediate needs of everyday operations
with the benefits
that come from long-term organizational planning.
Even if you know that planning
will make things run more smoothly in the long run,
there's always fires to put out along the way.
That's why we've developed a series of templates
to make your planning process as painless as possible.
It all starts with your business plan,
which is the central document
that defines your whole enterprise
and will be used to guide you further down the road
when preparing more specific documents,
like your marketing plan and sales plan.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
You know what I'm saying?
We gotta go baby steps, one step at a time.
The business plan includes everything
about your organization at an executive level.
This includes fundamentals,
like your company's missions and vision,
its core values, and its organizational structure.
There's also competitive analysis
so you can develop an informed view
of what is happening in your market,
as well as tools for planning your overall profit and loss,
funding requirements
and other preliminary financial considerations.
And I know what you're thinking to yourself.
"Geez, Jamal, that sounds like a lot of stuff to do
in a single day."
Luckily, your business plan doesn't need to be done
in a single day,
but HubSpot's Business Planning Template,
which is available as a word file, a PDF,
or a Google document
is designed to help you systematically build
your business plan with maximum efficiency.
So, Bob the Builder, why don't you move on over?
You know what I'm saying?
We got some more efficient builders in the house these days.
You know what I'm saying?
Even if your business is already up and running,
it's a good idea to create a business plan
as it becomes a necessary tool
when you're ready to scale up to the next level.
Like I said, the hours you put into your planning now
will save you days or weeks
of combined effort down the road.
Now, because your business plan is all encompassing,
creating it can include generating secondary documents
that become part of your overall business planning system.
One of those documents is your buyer persona,
which we'll see referenced time and time again
throughout the planning process.
HubSpot defines buyer personas
as semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer
based on market research and real data
about your existing customers.
That data can include customer demographics like age,
income, location, and gender identity.
You can also include biographical information
like behavior, goals and challenges, personality traits,
and preferred modes of communication.
Think you guys already know for me, it's my DMs,
and they have not been slid into.
Maybe I'm not making it clear enough,
but I wanna hear from you, please.
Our free Buyer Persona Kit comes with an eBook
to help guide you through the process of building a persona.
It also includes templates that you can use
to build specific personas for general shoppers,
B2B customers, and tech buyers.
So no matter what business you're in,
you probably wanna jump down to the description section
and grab the Buyer Persona Kit right away.
I'll wait.
I'm impatient.
I recommend checking back with your business plan
about once a year to evaluate and update as needed.
Many top leaders find themselves
revisiting their core plans regularly
to check in and make sure assumptions
that were made previously still hold true.
Seriously, can you imagine not checking in
about the assumptions that you held in, like, 1995?
Like, "Oh, I bet my space will be a fad."
Actually, that was true, yeah.
You were right about that. Good job.
(upbeat music)
- Our software is the worst.
- Have you heard of HubSpot?
See, most CRMs are a cobble together mess,
but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous.
- I think I love our new CRM.
- Our software is the best.
- HubSpot. Grow better.
- Now, moving on to the next phase of planning.
And so I'm gonna begin working on more functional documents,
starting with your marketing plan.
When you download our free Marketing Plan Template,
you'll immediately notice
that some of the info you need to enter
is duplicate from the work you did for your business plan.
And that's not a little bamboozling trick
that we're trying to pull on you.
But instead, these repeats are functional
since you'll probably end up sharing
the marketing plan with colleagues
who don't need knowledge of the business plan
to do their jobs.
But there is some big picture background info they'll need
to execute the task ahead.
The point is that once you've completed
your top-level documents,
working on other documents becomes easier.
As you work your way down the Marketing Plan Template,
you'll see things gradually get more detailed and granular.
This is the best path we found
to take you from the big picture ideas,
through strategic ideation, and eventually executable tasks.
To see an example of each step,
let's take a look at the sample marketing plan
included in the template
for an imaginary agency called San Diegency.
Someone should hop on that
if that's not a thing already.
It starts with the top of lot line
of the company and the team
before moving onto a SWOT analysis of the business,
a breakdown of the various initiatives,
and an outline of the target audience.
Spoiler alert.
These are all things that you probably already have
in your business plan.
Next, you'll start establishing your functional plan
beginning with your overall marketing strategy,
then drilling down to document the process you'll use,
the budget required,
and the technology you'll need to procure
to make the marketing vision a reality.
As soon as you finish with your marketing plan,
you can jump right into the next steps
with our free Social Media Calendar Template.
This will allow you to schedule
your day-to-day marketing activities well in advance.
So once it's time to initiate your campaign,
you can do so without additional distractions.
And there you go, not one,
but two actionable documents
that can help drive your business
in the direction you want it to go.
But I'm not done.
In fact, I'm just getting started.
You probably already noticed
that there are two more download links
in the description that we haven't talked about yet.
One is the free HubSpot Sales Plan Template.
This works in much the same way as the marketing plan,
except the final output is used to direct your sales team
instead of your marketing team.
The final free template we have for your business planning
are the Customer Journey Templates.
Unlike the other documents,
tracking your customer journey
doesn't fit into the waterfall approach
of starting with business plan and user personas
and moving into marketing and sales planning.
Your customer journeys are support documents
that help contextualize how your activities
help move the customer through various milestones.
These can be applied to building out your fixed processes
like the sales funnel on your website
or the customer service experience.
It can also apply directly
to your sales and marketing initiatives.
I recommend downloading it now
and checking out the various templates that we have.
If you wanna learn more about any of the sales
and marketing strategies discussed in this video,
you already know what to do.
Subscribe, if you haven't already,
and you'll get new videos covering these topics
several times a week.
How do we do it?
We break our necks out here for this kind of content.
Our channel has a lot of related videos already up,
including our ultimate guide
to creating a sales process that is updated
to include the latest work-from-home techniques.
Check that video out because if you don't,
I will cry and my business will fail
and it'll be on you.
Now, if you'll excuse me to finish my customer journey map,
I figured it'd be good for me to go walk a mile
in one of my customer's shoes.
And I know what you're thinking,
"Jamal those are just your shoes
'cause they're fly as hell."
And to that I say you're absolutely right.
My business is probably gonna fail.
But even if it does,
I'll see you next time.
And we'll make things run...
(Jamal mumbling)
Start...
(Jamal mumbling)