Every product you roll out for your business needs a business plan presentation. We’re going to go over business plan design, presentation and more below, so you know exactly how to formulate your new product business plan.
Defining a Business Plan
Have you ever thought of a new product and jotted a few ideas on things you needed to do to turn your idea into a reality? If so, you’ve already written a basic business plan, or at least the key components. At the core, a business plan is simply a plan for how your product would work and what you have to do to bring your product to life and make it exceed.
A business plan ranges from a single page to several pages. Most businesses can get by with a very lean plan with a few bullet points that focus on your product strategy, tactics you’ll use to develop and sell your product and milestones that’ll help track responsibilities and tasks. It should also include the financial projections you’ll have to apply to your product, like budget, cash flow and expenses.
How to Design a Product Business Plan
Before you present your product business plan, you have to design and write it out first. We’re going to outline everything you need to do to write a concise and strong product business plan that sells. The steps are:
Step One – Research, Research, Research
Analyse and research your product, your target market, and your objective expertise. Ideally, you’ll spend twice as much time on this step than you’ll spend on actually writing the product business plan. Evaluate your product and think about what you want to do with it. You have to know your company inside and out, what your product brings, any competition you may have for it. Also, do not forget the market in which you want to sell it. It’s your job to know everything you can possibly know about the market your product will enter, to build your case on why your product will beat your competition.
Step Two – Determine Your Plan’s Purpose
A product business plan is a written document that describes the product, your marketing and sales strategy, the financial implications and a profit and loss statement. Think of it as a plan or map that helps you avoid bumps in product production. If you want to attract investors for your new product, your plan will have a different purpose. Now you’ll have to write out a business plan that targets your potential investors, so it will be as concise and clear as possible.
Step Three – Create a Product Profile
Your product profile includes your audience, target market, resources, what makes your product unique, and how your product will solve a problem. Use this profile to attract your potential customers, and to describe your product plan as well as your company. This is one of the first written parts of your plan, and having this product profile makes the entire plan come together much more quickly.
Step Four – Document Every Aspect of Your Product
Any potential investors or your company board want to see how your new product is going to generate revenue for your company. Because of this, investors and the board want to know everything possible about the product. To help you with this process, you want to document everything from your cash flow and expenses to any projections you have. Don’t forget any minor details, like the licensing agreements and location strategy.
Step Five – Set Up a Strategic Marketing Plan
A solid product new product business plan / marketing plan will always include an aggressive and strategic element. You’ll want to outline various marketing objectives, such as:
- Product outline
- Defining business plan images relevant to your product and/or product function
- Building and extending the market for your product
- Breaking into new markets with your product
- Boosting sales for your new product, and be specific
- Cross-selling your new product with another
- Entering into a long-term contract with targeted clients
- Raising prices without taking away from sales
- Refining your new product
- Having a content marketing strategy in place to generate interest
- Enhance your product delivery and manufacturing process
Every new product plan should have several goals outlined, along with tactics for hitting these goals with new products. So now focus on the “what” and “why” of your marketing plan for the product’s debut year, followed by the “where”, “who”, “how” and “when”. Now it’s time to allocate a budget for every activity you plan for your new product. Create separate budgets for your out-of-pocket costs and your internal or staff costs.
Step Six – Make Your Product Plan Adaptable for Different Audiences
Your potential product plan will have a varied bunch of readers that range from employees and venture capitalists to bankers or investors. Each type of reader has different interests, and you need to know these interests up front. This way, you can take them into account when you write up your business plan for specific audiences. For example, your staff will be more interested in the plan’s objectives while the investors will be more interested in cash flow statements and balance sheets. Make sure you can easily modify your business plan design and tailor it to your audience.
Step Seven – Explain Why Consumers Need This Product
No matter if you want to share your plan with a customer, investor or team member, plan has to show that you’re dedicated and passionate. You have to show that you care about expanding your business product line, list the problems the product will solve and lay out what makes your product stand out from your competition. Maybe your product helps people do something more efficiently, or maybe it helps speed up a certain process. By explaining what your product can do for your audience, you can create an emotional connection with people who will support your product from the launch date onwards.
How to Present a New Product Business Plan
Once you write out your new product business plan, it’s time to decide how you want to present it. Business plan presentation is key to getting your product off to a strong start and to generating interest. Take a look at how to present a business plan in seven steps.
1. Get Referrals and Leads
If you have outside investors that can help with your plan, you need their phone numbers, names and addresses. Initiating a client referral program can significantly enhance your networking efforts, encouraging existing contacts to connect you with potential leads.
Start networking, and talk to people you know who can help launch your new product. Ask your people you know for referrals, and make sure to get in touch with the people who you get referrals for. You can also consider buying leads using innovative platforms to grow your business.
And if you are catering to B2B, make sure you are selecting B2B data providers that provide the best solutions for your needs. Lead411, Zoominfo, and Apollo.io are three of the best on the market.
2. Research Your Target
Learn as much as you possibly can about the industries your product will end up in, how much money you or other people will invest in the manufacturing process, and any other requirements. Look in venture capital directories and get an idea of where to present your product.
3. Make a Sales Pitch
Mail or email an introductory letter to your target audience that lets them know what plan you’d like to send to them. Sending an introductory letter is your way of subtly asking the audience if they’d be interested in reading your product business plan. In this introductory letter, you should explain why you’ve picked this person and what your product offers. You also want to explain what you’re looking for from the person like a loan, investor or a long-term supplier relationship. If you have a referral, you want to include who referred you in the start of the letter. Better never underestimate how powerful a referral can be.
Finally, you might want to include the terms under which you present your product plan. You might mention that you’re not sending your plan out to any other investor, or you may disclose that you’re contacting multiple investors. You should let the recipient know whether the communication is confidential or if they can pass it on to someone else. If you plan to include a non-disclosure agreement, you should send it between the introductory letter and your actual business plan.
If they don’t reply within a week, send a short follow-up email, and send a third around two weeks later. If they still don’t respond, look to other sources of investment.
4. Try Face to Face Meetings
Despite the fact that we’re in the midst of a digital age, you should try to meet up face to face. This is especially true if you want to actively seek investors because it’ll be hard to convince them to commit to investing in your products simply through email or texting. Skype may be a viable option, but an in-person meeting is still the best shot you have to make a major financial commitment. If they want you to communicate exclusively via electronic means, follow their lead.
5. Be Prepared to Counter Objections
You may think that your business plan answers every question your audience has, but you haven’t. You have to go into everything prepared to counter objections like assumptions about your product and your potential competitors. Have members of your team, co-workers and friends play the devil’s advocate and throw every possible direction they can think of at you and ask the tough questions. In turn, you’ll have your answers ready with it comes up for real.
6. Lock in Those Commitments
The new product business plan can help you get money for the product development. You won’t get investments in your product unless you ask for them. Once you’ve gone through all of the potential objections, be ready to offer one final concession. It could be something like an ownership percentage for your product or a board seat. Offer this as your last concession and close your deal.
7. Keep Time in Mind
When it comes to pitching your presentation, keep time in mind. You want a more formal pitch presentation for your investors. Cover all of the elements we outlined earlier. Ideally, your entire pitch deck template should last 20 minutes at the very most, and you should have a slideshow that highlights your business plan. Keep it to 10 slides or less with a host, of business plan images and diagrams to get your point across. Increase audience engagement with top-notch presentation slides.
How Billdu Can Help With Your Product Business Plan
Billdu is a user-friendly cloud platform that helps you organise your business’ finances all in one convenient place. You can seamlessly track how your company is doing, and pull invoices or expenses quickly and easily when you need them for the product business plan writing and presenting stages.
Our platform also gives you a great idea on how feasible it is for your business to launch a new product. If you find that your business doesn’t have the cash flow to support everything that comes with setting up your business plan, it won’t look good to your potential investors. However, using Billdu, you’ll know this before you draw up your business plan. It’s an essential tool for helping keep your business on track, and you can generate different types of reports to use in your business plan based on everything Billdu has to offer.
Try Billdu Today!
Are you ready to see how Billdu can help you enhance your business plan and give you all of the information you need to write and present a successful product business plan? If so, you’re in luck! Click the button belowe to try Billdu for free today.
