How To Write a Business Plan Part 9 – Your Traction Slide Business Podcast
Summary
Part 9 of How to Write Your Business Plan where we build your Traction Slide.
I give you some ideas of what traction means, and talk about ideas of what types of traction you should aim for to grow your sales.
We’ve covered your elevator pitch, problem, solution, product, market size and business model slides. Now we figure out your business traction
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A full summary of the How to Build Your Traction Slide podcast episode is below
Hello, friends. Welcome to another episode of Build a Business Success Secrets Podcast. I am your host, Brandon C White. And today we are own part nine of our series on how to write a business plan.
Up until this point, we have started out with part 1 with an overview of all the 13 business plan slides.
In Part two we taught you how to build your elevator pitch.
And then in Part three, we talked about the three mistakes you want to avoid when you give and build your elevator pitch.
Part four, we set up the problem that you’re solving.
Part five we gave a solution.
Part six we introduced your product or service that fixes that solution for the customer.
And then part seven we went over your market opportunity and talked about the right way to build that, which is from the bottom up, not the top down.
And then in our last episode in Part eight, we talked about your business model, the different business models that are out there and determining what business model you have.
Now in Part nine were on your traction slide. So let’s not waste another second and get all right we are on your traction slide, and today we want to document what traction we have. And as we talk about what this slide would look like if you are giving it for a sales pitch, if you were using it as your internal roadmap for your team, if you are using it to raise money as your investor pitch, you really wanna have pictures.
So that would be logos. If you had partners, that would be a graph. If you were talking about your conversion rates on your website, whatever that is in, regardless of where you are. If you’re just starting your business, you have some sort of traction.
If you are already have your business than, ideally your biggest traction, his sales and potentially profitability. But at least you have sales growing. I put together a list that I want to talk about just to give you some ideas of thinking about traction.
So obviously number one is we mentioned sales. That’s your biggest traction. Now, if you don’t have any sales, they’re still other ways that you could have traction. So do you have your website up and running? Is it search under optimized and you are getting X number of visitors for these keywords that air driving traffic and converting people.
Or at least they’re staying on your website for some period of time. That’s really good. Traction and organic SEO is a keystone to having your Maher sales and marketing strategy.
Do you have distribution partners in place? These air people that are either re selling or promoting? Do you have a big affiliate network that you talk to X amount of people that are willing to become affiliates? Do you have physical stores that are willing to put your products in there?
If you’re early in your venture, maybe your traction is simply that you have a prototype and you’ve collected feedback on that prototype with X amount of people. Ideally, you at least have minimum minimum of 50 people. Ideally, you have 100 or hundreds so that you have feedback.
Do you have a finished product that’s ready to be sold and you need to raise money because you need to get it manufactured? You have a Kickstarter into go go crowd funding campaign going that exceeded its goal or has ah lot of momentum. You have an email list this is a key key asset for you.
Maybe you have no sales, but you have an email list of 5900 people with an open rate of 30%. If you have that, you’ll be making at least or should be, making at least $5900 a month. If you’re okay at, that’s a huge asset.
So your email list you could have been collecting emails, pretty launch or being prelaunch, or have your company now rolling and you have some sales. But you’re growing your email list and you’re communicating with them. Do you have a strong board that you’ve recruited? That’s a huge asset advisory board. You have a really strong mentor helping you.
You have your business plan complete that having your business plan complete is major traction because you now have a road map to get from what your idea is. And take that idea to a project your project to a product or service and your product or service to a business you’ve raised ext. Amount of money, whether that’s from friends and family from a seed round from venture capitalists, whatever that is, you have key people you’ve recruited key engineers.
If you’re in software, a key designer. If you’re building a product, you have a marquee person in your service business that has a huge role index from past business that you brought on as a partner. You have a famous person promoting your product.
All of these ideas here are types of traction that you can have and what you want to be thinking about. Now, once you have an idea of that, I want you to map your goals. Now everybody talks about this, and it’s almost become sort of cliche like, Oh, you’ve got to set your goal to get there.
But the truth is, if you don’t do that, if we say we’re going out to dinner tonight and we’re going to go to a restaurant and we get in the car when we start driving. But we don’t know what restaurant we’re going to, we’re never going to get to a restaurant or we might get to a restaurant. It might be the wrong restaurant or might not be a restaurant that we wanted to get. Go to it. We might not even like that food, so you’ve gotta have your goal.
So What I want you to do is after you figured out and come up with a list, you can put this in your notebook of the traction that you do have. I want you to think of the positive things. What do you have?
Not what you need to get, but at the moment what you have and then set your goals. And I want you set your goals on a monthly basis. If you’re starting or growing your business, you almost need to do that because in your first few million dollars of sales, things are gonna happen really rapidly.
The market changes as we know, and you’re gonna want to update those goals. So what is your goal that you want to have done in four weeks? Maybe you’re just want. Have your business playing complete. Maybe you want to have an extra $100,000 in sales. Maybe you want to make your first sale your first five sales or you want to have a repeatable process.
Four year sales and marketing strategy, meaning you understand that for every x amount of money you spend and paid ads on Facebook that you get X amount in sales Maybe that’s your goal and you’re going to run a campaign and you’re gonna be very focused to do that.
And then in eight weeks, what is that goal?
And then at the end of the year, what is your goal? And at the end of the year, you really should sit down with your partner or your team or yourself, or get someone to help you to give you feedback. So it’s more than you in a room, and you really want to take a week off of running the business and you want a plan and you want to set your goals for the next year, and you need to set that time aside.
Now you may say to me, Brandon, I can’t afford to take a week off of my business to do that, Okay? But you at least need to take three days. You absolutely need to have some people call it a shutdown meeting, whatever that is.
But you gotta have time where your head is away from being in the business so that you can work on your business. Set those goals and be very, very specific. Be specific as it relates to your sales goals.
What do you wanna have if you want? Who do you want to hire? Who will you need to hire? What are your fundraising goals? Be very, very specific so that every month, every quarter you can come back to that in see your progress and then you have something to measure yourself against her that you can see where you are good or bad.
At least you can measure it. That’s your traction slide. So get those ideas down on paper, set those goals and get ready when we get to the next episode where we are going to talk about your competition and how you set up that slide and how you should think about your competition and one major mistake that I’ve made and I’ve seen tons of entrepreneurs make when they present that slide that I want you to avoid will see you soon.
How was that? Pretty good, right? Get these ideas down on paper so that you conduct humint your traction and where you’re headed.
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