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.

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.

Referring to model plans can help you as you develop your marketing plan. Unfortunately, most companies don’t release their plans – they rightly view them as trade secrets. Fortunately, a few authors have compiled plans or portions of them, so you can find some good published materials to work from.

The main purpose of the management section of your marketing plan is simply to make sure that enough warm bodies are in the right places at the right times to get the work done. This section summarizes the main activities that you and your marketing team must perform in order to implement your marketing program.

A good plan is nothing without details, and a good marketing plan is no different. After outlining your marketing program (which I walk you through in the preceding section), you need to explain the details of how you plan to use each component in your program.

A marketing program is the combination of marketing activities you use to influence a targeted group of customers to purchase a specific product, product line, or service. Usually you find it useful to include tactics in all five of the marketing Ps: product, price, placement, promotions, and people (refer to Figure 3-1 for a helpful example).

You can move people and businesses only so far with a marketing program. If you plan to get employers to give their employees every other Friday off so those employees can attend special workshops your firm sponsors, well, I hope you have a backup plan.

Don’t make your ambitions greater than the resources you have available to pull them off. If you’re currently the tenth-largest competitor, don’t write a plan to become the number one largest by the end of the year.

After you have a handle on your current situation and also have one or a few marketing strategies in mind to help you succeed, you need to think about what objectives (such as brand building or sales growth) are realistic and appropriate for you at this time.

If your marketing activities are consistent and clearly of one kind, you can go with a single plan. But what if you sell services (like consulting or repair) and also products? You may find that you need to work up one plan for selling products (perhaps this plan aims at finding new customers) and another plan for convincing product buyers to also use your services. If your plan seems too complicated, simply divide and conquer! Then total everything up to get the big picture for your overall projection and budget.