One of the first things you need to learn about your business is your customer’s buying journey based on the sales funnel. Big businesses like to call this their customer relationship management pipeline. They tend to use a few basic pipeline structures that follow their customer’s buying journey from awareness to delight.

The truth is that no matter what type of business you have, the basic sales funnel is the same and defines the buyer’s journey.

Awareness
Interest
Consideration
Decision
Delight

Map your customer’s potential journey so that you can visualize where you need to place touchpoints. For example:

Awareness – Sync your favorite apps such as Google Sheets, Aweber.com, and other apps using software like Automate.io or Zapier.com to deliver the right content at the right time based on the customer’s behavior.

Interest – Automatically deliver email subscribers content that teaches them about the products and services you offer via your email software as well as your website using auto sequences and conversational chatbots.

Consideration – This is when the buyer really wants what you have to offer, and it’s your sale to lose or gain. You can automate content delivery that asks for the sale, such as delivering a free webinar to them. Using the right software, such as offered by HubSpot Automation and others, you can even let the software generate new one time offers based on their behavior.

Decision – Depending upon the type of business structure you have, whether it’s a course or a physical product or not, you’ll want to help them make the choice to buy by setting up automated discovery call appointments. You can synchronize your website with scheduling software like Acuityscheduling.com to let your customers schedule their own call.

Delight – Finally, you can create a whole new funnel to use during the post-purchase stage in order to elicit customer delight. When you delight your customers, they’re going to make more purchases and recommend others to you. One way to do this is to automate the onboarding of new customers so that they receive enough information to want to stick with you.

People add different steps along the way to each of their funnels based on the path the buyer likes to travel on their buying journey. Each step is a chance to streamline and automate part of the process. To make your customer’s buying journey successful, you’ll hopefully lead them through the entire process past the point they decide to buy your product to include customer delight, loyalty, and advocacy when it’s appropriate.

One reason for burnout is incongruency between the life you want and the life you’re living. Most of that problem is due to a lack of planning.

Many small business owners think that if their business is a home business or a small business that they don’t need a real business plan. After all, they think I am not going to get a business loan, so why do I need to do all that planning?

The truth is if you want to succeed, and you want it to be repeatable, and you want to avoid the potential for burnout, you must develop a business plan. A business plan will help you structure, run, and grow your business realistically and sustainably. Plus, creating a business plan isn’t even hard to do. Let’s learn how to make a one-page business plan for your home business right now.

Your one-page business plan should include the following. However, keep in mind it doesn’t literally have to live on only one page. You should include as much information as you need in your business plan to help you develop a guiding document for your business. If one page works for you, that’s fabulous!

Describe the Problem

You’ll want to write a well thought out description of the problem that your customers have that you can solve along with any relevant data that describes how you can do that to show proof.

Your Product or Service

This is the solution to the problem above, so you’ll want to go through each product or service you offer and describe the solution in terms of how it solves the problem that the customer has. If you have more than one solution, this is the area that might end up taking more than one page. However, going through this can help you with marketing later.

How You Make Money

This is considered your business model. How will you make the money, how much will it cost you to make the money, and what is the price the customer will pay for the solution and how will they pay it?

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Describe Your Customer(s)

Understanding your target market is an essential component of your business plan and your business planning needs. Include a customer avatar through the buying journey. Talk about how many customers there are, and how much you can earn from each customer throughout their customer life cycle.

Describe How You’re Different

It can help to describe how you’re going to differentiate yourself from your competition. This is called your “competitive advantage” in business. It’s how you use your differences to stand out from the competition and create customer loyalty.

Describe Your Team

Even if it’s just you, it helps to write down all the tasks and roles that need to be accomplished to make this business work. However, even if it is just you, it’s not just you due to the technology you can use, such as email marketing software, funnel software, and other automation.

Also, if you plan to outsource anything, write that down too. Maybe the first year you’re doing it all yourself but include financial metrics that trigger outsourcing or major software purchases.

Include Key Financial Metrics

Do you Know your Numbers?

You need to know what your budget is for marketing, software, outsourcing, and so forth. This is often called a Financial Summary in a business plan. You’ll want to include figures for now, and your future as you forecast potential sales. Finally, you’ll want to add what funding you need right now to get started or to move forward with your business.

As you go through this, just focus right now on writing a summary of each section so that you see what needs to be done in one easy to read page. As you move forward, you can add more information to the plan, which may make it grow past the one page, but it will be a helpful exercise to help keep on moving toward your goals.

As you move toward your goals, you’ll be a lot less likely to experience burnout when you’ve set up your business realistically in balance with your entire life. Writing down the business plan helps you see it more clearly and plainly, thus allowing you to really accomplish what you set out to do rather than keeping it as a dream.

Tag: problem solving

What’s Your Customer’s Buying Journey