How Can a Business Plan be Helpful When it's Quickly Outdated?

In today's breakneck fast-paced business world, the only answer to outdated business planning is Business Plan Monitoring. This process begins with identifying the performance metrics for the business. By regularly monitoring the performance metrics, the business owners can identify negative or positive anomalies, correct problems, capitalize on opportunities and keep the business plan current.

To illustrate this process at work, let us look at the sales conversion metric. The business plan called for a 10% close rate on all qualified leads generated by the company. This assumption was the basis of the revenue targets in the financial section of the plan. After 3 months of operation, the company is only at a 7% close rate. This will impact the forecasts for the year. The business owners seeing this trend can go back to their market and sales strategy to see what is going wrong... read more