Revise Description of Customers
Revisit the draft description of your customers written in Step 19. Consider whether the profile of your customer has changed because of what you’ve learned from surveying your market.
What you’re striving for is to describe at least your primary and secondary customers. Don’t get too bogged down with detail. At the same time, don’t make it so light that you can’t have confidence in the sales forecast. Your confidence level is one way for you to measure how realistic your figures are. If your forecast makes you nervous, imagine what it would do for a banker!
Yes, this can be difficult. If it were easy, everyone would own a business and more business owners would have written business plans.
Action
If you have set up a working copy of your business plan using the Shell™, this information will be entered under section 3 “Marketing” under the heading 3.3 “Profile of the Customers.”In this step you will be revising the draft description of your customers you created in Step 19 and reworked in Step 20, and again in Step 28. You will be be finalizing your customer profile in your business plan in Step 38.
- Beginning with the description of your customers, and using relevant information learned to date, rewrite the description of your customers. Do this only if you feel it necessary. Your first draft might be just fine.