Chapter 7: What You Sell

For the standard plan, this is where you tell your reader about your products or services, or both. This step in the process is much more important for plans going to external readers — like banks and investors — than for internal plans. In all cases, though, it is a good place to focus thoughts about what you sell and why people buy from you.

This part of the plan is mainly description. Sometimes it will include tables that provide more details, such as a bill of materials or detailed price lists. More frequently, however, this section is mainly text. It normally appears as Chapter 3.0 in the plan, after the company description, but before the market analysis.

Start with an Overview

Every section in a business plan should have an opening paragraph that describes the rest of the section. These summary paragraphs can also be used quite effectively in summary memos and loan application support documents. Readers may frequently skip the details, but only when they have an effective summary. It should be a clear and concise single paragraph that can be merged into the executive summary page. For this section, what do you sell, and to whom?

Add Detail as Needed

The previous topic was the summary, so in this topic, you need to provide more detail. List and describe the products or services you sell. Cover the main points, including what the product or service is, how much it costs, what sorts of customers make purchases, and why. You might not want or need to include every product or service in the list, but at least consider the main sales lines.

It is always a good idea to think in terms of customer needs and customer benefits as you define your product offerings, rather than thinking of your side of the equation — how much the product or service costs, and how you deliver it to the customer.

As you list and describe your sales lines, you may run into one of the serendipitous benefits of good business planning, which is generating new ideas. Describe your product offerings in terms of customer types and customer needs, and you'll often discover new needs and new kinds of customers to cover. This is the way ideas are generated

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