Market Planning: Getting it Right

     Part 1

For ISPs in particular, a robust, detailed marketing plan isn't a luxury; it's a requirement.

by Kevin Beauchamp [May 21, 1999]

You've spent months honing the numbers in your business plan, tweaking each paragraph so it spells out perfectly everything your company is about. So—when you hand your crown jewel over to that venture capitalist you've been courting for the past few weeks, what are the first two areas of the plan they'll look over? Probably the two areas you've spent the least amount of time on: Management and Marketing.

It's tragic how many good business plans get stuck with a poor management team, or even worse, a poorly written or poorly thought-out marketing plan. Entrepreneurial-minded engineers are great at making things work; writing that new code that streamlines some archaic process and revolutionizes the way everyone works and plays on the Net. But when it comes to marketing the business, let's face it, most of us couldn't market our way out of wet paper bag.

My experience has been that engineers do not typically make good marketing people—and God knows you don't want me trying to configure your DNS server. Your team should include a good marketing person with some technical knowledge of your industry. Someone with the skills to shwow and tell the world who and what your company is all about. Such people are worth their weight in Microsoft stock to your company.

For ISPs especially, the marketing section of your business plan is perhaps the single most important aspect of your business's operations and the one section your VC is going to be most interested in.

I recount a conversation early in our ISP's start-up phase when we were approaching several VCs. One of them asked me in that authoritative, point-blank, you're-under-our-microscope, tone of voice that all VC's have, "What makes your ISP different from all the others?" I said, "Our marketing." He paused a moment, seemingly unprepared for this response and then said, "Good answer." We then dove into a lengthy discussion of the marketing plan and never really expanded on the numbers or operation areas. The operational plan for our ISP was all of two pages while the marketing plan encompassed more than thirty.

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