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Exhibit 14.9a Advertising schedule.
Exhibit 14.9b Magazine advertisement schedule: Budget for year 1.
Sales Strategy
This section provides the backbone that supports all of the aforementioned endeavors. Specifically, it
illustrates what kind and level of human capital you will devote to the effort. How many salespeople,
customer support personnel, and so on do you need? Will these people be internal to the organization
or outsourced? If they are internal, will there be a designated sales force or will different members of
the company serve in a sales capacity at different times? Again, this section builds credibility if the
entrepreneur demonstrates an understanding of how the business should operate.
Sales and Marketing Forecasts
Gauging the impact of these efforts is difficult. Nonetheless, to build a compelling story, entrepreneurs
need to show projections of revenues well into the future. How do you derive these numbers? There
are two methods: the comparable method and the buildup method. After detailed investigation of the
industry and market, entrepreneurs know the competitive players and have a good understanding of
their history. The comparable method models sales forecasts after what other companies have
achieved, adjusting for age of company, variances in product attributes, support services such as
advertising and promotion, and so on. In essence, the entrepreneur monitors a number of comparable
competitors and then explains why his or her business varies from those models.
In the buildup method, the entrepreneur identifies all the revenue sources and then estimates how
much of that revenue type the company can generate per day, or some other small time period. For
example, The History Shoppe generates revenues from books and artifacts. The entrepreneur would
estimate the average sales price for each category, and then might estimate the number of people to
come through the store on a daily basis and what percentage would purchase each revenue source.