Business Plans for Small Businesses

Chapter 3

Market, Customer and Offer

The thinking behind the top half of the page - who you serve, the world they live in and the specific thing you sell them.

The first three fields of the plan - customer, offer and promise - do most of the work. Get those right and the rest of the plan almost writes itself. Get those wrong and no amount of work on the lower fields will rescue the year. They deserve their own chapter.

Market, customer and offer are connected. The market is the world your customer lives in: the trends, the alternatives, the prices they're used to seeing. The customer is the specific person you've chosen to serve inside that world. The offer is the specific thing you've designed for that person. The three move together. A good offer for a poorly chosen customer is wasted. A clear customer with a vague offer attracts nobody.

This chapter shows you how to think about the three together, with worked examples and the questions that keep each one honest.

The full chapter has the three-question test for each, plus the most common ways small businesses get the customer-offer-market triangle wrong.

The market - in one paragraph

You don't need a market report. You need a paragraph that names the alternatives your customer is choosing between, the price band they're used to and the obvious shifts going on. For the plumbing firm: "Local landlords currently use a mix of one-off plumbers, the cheapest cover plan they can find and unreliable referrals. Maintenance budgets are tight, regulation around gas safety is getting stricter and the agents are tired of chasing." That paragraph is more useful than 30 pages of market analysis.

The customer - in one sentence, the second one optional

One sentence is the test. If you can't say who you serve in one sentence, the rest of the plan won't help. The companion eBook Finding Your Best Customer takes this much further, with the practical work of choosing one customer when you could plausibly serve three.

Customer sentence test

Could a stranger picture a real person from your sentence?
Could you name three actual customers who fit it?
Does the sentence rule anyone out?
If a competitor read it, would they know whether they were after the same person?

The offer - in one sentence with a price

An offer is what the customer can buy, not what you can do. "I do website work" isn't an offer. "I build a five-page conversion-ready website for a first-time service business in three weeks for 4,500 pounds" is. Companion eBooks Designing Your First Offer and Pricing for Small Businesses go deeper. For the plan, one sentence with a price band is enough.

The promise - the outcome the offer delivers

The promise is the customer's point of view. The offer is what you do. The promise is what changes for them. "A 90-day go-to-market reset" is the offer. "A clear customer, a clear offer and a working growth map within 90 days" is the promise. Both belong on the page. The offer earns the trust. The promise earns the yes.

Three patterns to avoid

Pattern one: a clear offer with a vague customer. The offer page reads well but nobody recognises themselves in it. Fix: rewrite the customer sentence first.

Pattern two: a clear customer with a vague offer. The customer recognises themselves but isn't sure what to buy. Fix: rewrite the offer with a scope, a timeline and a price band.

Pattern three: a clear customer and a clear offer that don't fit each other. The customer wants something the offer doesn't quite provide. Fix: change one or the other so they line up.

What to do this week

Rewrite your customer sentence, your offer sentence and your promise sentence on a single line each. Read them aloud. Any softness, rewrite. The three sentences together should read like a paragraph that one specific person, somewhere, would think was written for them.

The recurring principle this chapter sits on is make the offer clear. Once those three sentences are sharp, the channels, conversion and retention rows of the plan get much easier to fill. The next chapter, Numbers, Costs and Assumptions, takes the bottom half of the page and gives you the maths.