Information can stimulate the imagination, suggest fresh strategies, or help you recognize great business opportunities. Always keep one ear open for interesting, surprising, or inspiring facts. Subscribe to a diverse range of publications, read interesting blogs, and make a point of talking to people of all sorts, both in your industry and beyond it, to keep you in the flow of new ideas and facts. Also, ask other people for their ideas.

If you liked what-if stories as a child, you’ll love multiple-scenario forecasts.

They start with a straight-line forecast in which you assume that your sales will grow by the same percentage next year as they did last year. Then you make up what-if stories and project their impact on your plan to create a variety of alternative projections.

Consumers are all around you, and they’re shopping for, buying, and using products. Observing consumers, and finding something new and of value from doing so, isn’t hard. And even business-to-business marketers (who sell to other businesses rather than end-consumers) can find plenty of evidence about their customers at a glance. For instance, the number and direction of a company’s trucks on various roads can tell you where its business is heaviest and lightest.

Any and all marketing materials, from advertisements and brochures to Web sites and packages, benefit from the use of a creative brief, a document that lays out the basic purpose and focus of a specific marketing piece and provides some supporting information that gives you grist for your creative mill.

Many countries gather and post extensive data on individuals, households, and businesses, broken down into a variety of categories. In the United States, you can find out how many people earn above a certain amount of money a year and live in a specific city or state – useful if you’re trying to figure out how big the regional market may be for a luxury product. Similarly, you can find out how many businesses operate in your industry and what their sales are in a specific city or state – useful if you’re trying to decide whether that city has a market big enough to warrant you moving into it.

At this stage of preparing your marketing plan, you need to put on your accounting and project management hats. (Perhaps neither hat fits you very well, but try to bear them for a day or two.)

The controls section is the last and shortest section of your plan — but in many ways, it’s the most important because it allows you and others to track performance.

Set up a trend report, a document that gives you a quick indication of a change in buying patterns, a new competitive move or threat, and any other changes that your marketing may need to respond to.

Buildup forecasts are predictions that go from the specific to the general, or from the bottom up. If you have sales reps, ask them to project the next period’s sales for their territories and to justify their projections based on their anticipated changes in the situation.

A carefully crafted executive summary is an essential component of every marketing plan. An executive summary is a one-page plan that conveys essential information about your company’s planned year of programs and activities in a couple hundred well-chosen words or less. If you ever get confused or disoriented in the rough-and-tumble play of sales and marketing, this clear, one-page summary can guide you back to the correct strategic path.