Get started with business development templates.
Discover how to build your business strategy with a business development template.
Starting a business can feel daunting. You don’t even necessarily know what you don’t know yet. What’s your unique value offering? What’s your profit structure? Who runs the business? How will you market your goods or services? How will you grow your business? What will your business proposals look like? The list goes on, and it can seem endless.
Business development and growth plans help you highlight your mission and strategy and think through everything needed to get your enterprise up and running. Think of it as a blueprint for you to get your business going, as well as a guide for your partners and investors.
Learn how to create a business development and business growth plan template that reflects your unique company and goals.
What is a business development plan template?
A business development plan template helps you reach your business goals. It’s a document that is formatted to be flexible so that you can include different goals as your business grows. In your template, you’ll include specific steps to reach the goals that you set. You can even assign these tasks to different team members to provide accountability. You can set long, short, or start-up goals on your business development template.
How to build a better business growth plan.
Your business plan should reflect the business you want to run. Luckily, you’ll have many pre-existing templates to start working from. Make sure your business development plan and growth template include some of these essentials:
Situation analysis. Your situation analysis should be a comprehensive study of the business environment, economy, industry, and competitive landscape. This shows investors that you understand the market you’re entering and demonstrates the need your business will fill.
Business goals. Outline your broad business goals. If you have a hard time sorting out your goals, try the SMART goals technique: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Having detailed goals and a plan to achieve them helps set you up for success.
Marketing plan. How will you promote your business? It’s a good idea to have a general framework and plan for marketing your product or service.
Key performance indicators. Highlight how you will evaluate your business’s performance. What metrics will you use to quantify performance and report on progress?
How to write a business development plan.
To write your business growth plan, begin by determining what your goals are. The goals you set should be both challenging and within reach. As a team, it’s your job to set goals that are motivating. You may be focusing on larger or smaller goals, but they should further your mission as a business and help you grow. Taking the time to set good goals is essential.
To make sure that your goals are realistic, take some time with your team to figure out what achieving your goals might look like. Ask yourselves: What changes will you need to make to meet this goal? Then, broadly outline the path to success.
With your goals and plans in mind, explore pre-made templates to find a simple business development plan template that looks like it will meet your needs and help your business stay organized. It should be something that your whole team will be able to understand and work with easily.
Using your new template, take another look at the basic plans you’ve made to meet your goals. Your template can help you make your plans as specific as possible. The more specific your plans, the more likely you are to reach your goals. As you break your plan down into tasks, assign those tasks to different team members.
Here are the general steps you can follow to use a business growth plan template:
- Determine goals.
- Outline the basic path to achieving your goals.
- Find an effective template.
- Flesh out specifics in plans.
Using your business development plan template will help keep your team accountable and focused on achieving your goals.
Start and grow your business.
Explore business development plan templates, business growth templates, and other
PDF capabilities for your business. As the creator of the world’s most shareable document format, Adobe can equip you with the tools and support you need to help your business grow.
Adobe Acrobat can connect your team remotely and allow you to work with clients using forms and e-signature capabilities. It can help you keep your records organized so that nothing slips through the cracks and tax season is less stressful.
Through Acrobat online services, you can enjoy flexible solutions that allow you to convert files like Excel documents to PDF, insert or delete pages from PDF files, protect your PDFs with passwords, and more.
