how to assess a business plan

Jane Consulting

Sales Enablement For Small Business

A Complete Guide To Performing A Comprehensive Business Assessment

How to assess your marketing, sales and customer experience in 5 easy steps.

To be able to develop a powerful business strategy, you need to understand what you are working with. Every client engagement at Jane Consulting starts with a business assessment of your revenue team, current processes, metrics and more. We have developed an easy to use guide for you to assess your own business in-house, or you can always contact our team to perform an assessment for you.

A comprehensive business assessment analyzes the following aspects of your business, all of which are described in more detail below:

Define Your Current Marketing, Sales and Customer Experience Landscape
Understand Your Current Metrics
Describe Your Market Positioning And Value Drivers
Review Your Current Strategies For Attracting and Engaging Potential Buyers & Creating a Memorable Buyer’s Experience
Define Your Buyer’s Journey From The Perspective Of The Buyer

1. Define Your Current Marketing, Sales and Customer Experience Landscape

The first step in the business assessment phase is to review and analyze your current landscape. There are three main areas you need to look for this information:

Current Team Members
Documented Processes and Rules
Current Technology Stack

Business Assessment of Your Revenue Team

When analyzing your team, you want to define the roles and primary responsibilities represented. Below is a sample chart we use to document this:

Documenting job roles will allow you to visualize how your team is being leveraged and which roles overlap or which areas you don’t have coverage for. For example, in the sample above, no one is responsible for social media. If your strategy relies on a heavy social media presence, you will either need to add a new team member, divide the work across multiple roles, or re-prioritize someone’s responsibilities to effectively incorporate the new focus.

Once you understand who you have on your team and what their responsibilities look like, then you can do the same for all of the processes and rules you have documented for your teams. Following a similar table, you will document each process name and a description of it. Below are a few examples of processes and rules that you may have:

Content Updates: a process that defines all live site pages should be updated, at a minimum, every 6 months to ensure content is fresh and relevant and contains links to and from new relevant content.
Marketing and Sales SLA : an agreement that states marketing will provide a minimum of 10 marketing-qualified leads per week and sales will respond to each lead within 2 business hours of assignment. A marketing-qualified lead is defined as a lead who is associated with a target account, has viewed at least 10 site pages and submitted a demo request form.
Lead Follow-up: a process that defines all marketing-qualified leads should receive a minimum of 5 sales touch-points over the course of 15 days from first assignment. Ideally, these touch-points should consist of 2 phone calls and 3 emails when a phone number is provided.
Customer Survey: a process that defines all customers should receive a minimum of 3 emails following the receipt of their product requesting a completion of a survey detailing their experience. Additionally, customers who rate all 5’s on their survey should receive another set of emails (minimum of 3) requesting a video testimonial of their experience.

Documenting your processes keeps them top of mind and more likely to be executed. If you or someone on your team has developed a practice that works and can be replicated, then make it an official process. This will allow you to track the processes’ effectiveness, review and improve it on a consistent basis. It will also allow you to coach new and existing team members on how to be successful.

Lastly, document the technology you are using and why you are using it. Again a table works great for this and a sample is provided below:

2. Understand Your Current Metrics

Hopefully, you are currently tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your business and you can gather them here. If you are not, then now is the time to start. KPIs will vary business to business and what you determine as important metrics to track will depend heavily on your buyer’s journey. Some common metrics to track include:

Total Revenue Goals
Existing Business Revenue Goals
New Business Revenue Goals
Number of New Customers
Number of New Contacts or Leads
Number of Web Sessions
Average Number of Sales and Marketing Touch-Points Per Closed Won Deal
Average Days to Close

How To Choose Revenue Goals

When choosing any goal you should use the SMART criteria, but this is especially true when it comes to revenue and individual sales targets. Failure to offer realistic sales goals can lead to a perpetual sense of failure for not only your reps but your entire organization if it is consistently brought up that you are not hitting targets. If you can’t come close to your target then chances are it wasn’t realistic.

To determine your realistic goals calculate your total revenue earned per month for the previous three years. This should show you what you have been able to do historically and what your percent increases are annually. If your data shows that you have only increased sales 3% year over year for the past three years, then a 25% increase in the year to come may be highly unlikely. If you need to push your team to do more than a realistic increase, we suggest a SMART base goal and then a loftier stretch goal that is still attainable but a much heavier push to get there.

How To Choose Your Marketing Goals

The purpose of marketing is to facilitate sales so you need to start with your revenue goals. To develop your goals for website sessions, new contacts and customers it is best to work backward from your new business revenue goals using your average sale size and conversion rates to determine your goal for each of these metrics. For example, if your average sale is $500 and your new business goal for the month is $5,000, then you would need approximately 10 customers to achieve this. Similarly if your contact to customer conversion rate is 10%, then you would need 100 new contacts for the month. Finally, if your website sessions convert to new contacts at 10%, then you would need 1,000 monthly sessions.

Now the above scenario is ideal for new business, but marketing’s function is to facilitate sales as a whole so it must play a role in existing business as well. KPIs for supporting existing business will often be around driving website sessions from specific decision-makers in key accounts.

How to Choose Customer Experience Goals

All the marketing and sales power in the world will mean nothing if the solution you offer does not stand up to customer expectations. As such, you need to strive for a minimum satisfaction score from your customers. The aim for a customer experience goal should always be high, as this means you are putting your product or service into the hands of the right buyer who is primed to glean the most value from it. Now while you aim for 5/5 all day, it doesn’t mean you dismiss tracking the actual scores on a monthly or weekly basis. If scores start dropping unexpectedly, it can signal that action needs to be taken and you will be ahead of the game in making necessary changes.

Additionally, customer experience KPIs related to the number of surveys completed and written or video testimonials received and shared with marketing and sales should also be tracked to ensure you are sharing timely and relevant reviews with your target buyers.

3. Describe Your Market Positioning And Value Drivers

This is a qualitative statement of what you solve and the value you present to your ideal buyers. If you can’t describe your marketing positioning and value proposition in a few concise sentences then you should work on that.

At Jane Consulting, our value proposition is to help small B2B business owners align their marketing, sales and customer experience efforts to the single goal of growing their revenue. We work best with small business leaders who need low-cost, tactical solutions to stay on track of their business goals and deliver delightful experiences for their customers. Solutions provided offer a mix of short and long-term tactics that can be spearheaded in-house, through the Jane Team or through additional consultants so that all of your business’ resources are maximized for effectiveness.

This statement, by describing what we are, also describes what we are not. We are not ideal for:

Large businesses and large budgets because they have internal teams that can provide what we are offering and who are closer to the heart of the business.
Chief Marketing Officers or Sales Leaders because we need someone who oversees the steps of the entire buyer’s journey and can execute on our recommendations. If we only have buy-in from marketing then we are fighting to gain the trust and buy-in from sales and the customer experience team or they never buy-in and the initiatives do not produce value.
Leaders who want a quick fix to traffic or lead conversions because our solutions are designed for long-term sustainable revenue growth and that takes work.

To develop your statement, start with building a list of what you do really well and what or who you do no provide value for. Then, begin narrowing it down into a statement that describes exactly who you are and what you do.

4. Review Your Current Strategies For Attracting and Engaging Potential Buyers & Creating a Memorable Buyer’s Experience

For this section, review and understand what is currently being done and take note of it. This will give you an idea of what is currently happening and where the gaps are.

Below is an example of taking notes on this section:

Regularly posting on a blog and posts are a great length and well-formatted.
Content varies from news-type stories and company events or initiatives but does not seem to consistently address buyer concerns or facilitate movement through a lifecycle
Does not seem to have a formal linking structure across posts and to specific target pages
Posting is sporadic on LinkedIn, twitter and Facebook
Same exact post is shared across all platforms at the same time
Database wide monthly email newsletter is sent
No segmented emails are sent in addition
No use of automated lead nurturing campaigns
Google Adwords are used but messaging is geared primarily to purchasing immediately. Segmentation is based on purchase keywords. No ads are running for the buyer’s awareness and consideration stages.
Not leveraging subscribers notifications , bing ads or social media ads.
Attending 1-2 large conferences per year that are more for brand awareness than targeting ideal buyers
Sporadically attending local networking and industry events that are geared to ideal buyer
Not hosting or speaking at any events

You simply want an awareness of what has been done. If you move through these steps in the order provided you may start having strategic ideas of what can be done better and certainly take note of them so you can easily reference them when it comes time to build your plan for empowering your revenue team!

5. Define Your Buyer’s Journey From The Perspective Of The Buyer

Do you like to role play? I hope so because that will help lead you to a deeper understanding of what your buyer needs and more importantly why they need it. If you don’t have an ideal buyer profile, this guide can help you create one.

You already determined who would be best served by your solution, so start channeling that person and the challenges he/she faces on a daily basis. Below is an example using Jane Consulting’s ideal buyer.

As a small business owner, I am constantly battling how my time and my team’s time should be spent. Every day I am on LinkedIn and exposed to new tactics that worked for fellow leaders and I feel like I need to be doing them too and I am tempted to shift focus and I constantly second guess if what I am doing is actually moving the needle. I know there is importance in marketing but I also need sales now and my sales team is not finding value in the leads or the collateral that marketing provides. I push new tactics on marketing and push for more sales but nothing seems to be working.

These are the challenges our buyers are faced with. These are the challenges that will prompt a leader to recognize they need help. This is the beginning of the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey. The buyer in the example above is understanding there is a problem that needs solving but he or she is not fully aware of what that precise problem is.

Next, document what you provide to help your buyer through this stage. In this example, it could be:

Content around why your teams don’t get along, why you don’t need to incorporate every marketing and sales trend, reassurance that providing the best for your customers will provide you the revenue you need and making decisions with your customers top of mind will provide success.
Providing online tools for free to determine if we are operating from a sales enablement perspective.

After the buyer is aware of a problem, the next stage is to consider solutions. In this scenario, the small business owner can realistically set a path forward completely in-house or enlist the help of a consultant or agency.

Similarly to the awareness stage, document what you are providing a buyer during this stage. For us, we:

Outline how to asses your current marketing, sales and customer experience in this guide you are reading and how to turn that into a strategic plan to empower growth!
Provide a free assessment for first time clients

At this point, hopefully your buyer has decided on using your solution but that doesn’t mean you just stop adding more value to their experience. Someone who has decided on your solution still needs you to guide them on utilizing it properly so they gain the most and you gain a loyal fan. At this stage in the example, we offer:

Semi-annual check-ins and discussion on how everything is working and suggestions for even further improvement.
Video breakdowns of new tactics and when and how you should apply them to your business.

By this point, you should have a good idea of how you provide value to your buyer throughout the buying journey and you probably have some more ideas of how you can create a better experience for your customer.

What Happens After Your Business Assessment?

Now that you have a thorough look at how your business is currently performing and delivering value to your ideal buyer. It is time to analyze these results in light of your buyer’s journey and revenue goals and then develop a strategic plan to grow your business.