Marketing Plan pro 11 Orientation - Tracking progress

%uh once were fully done with whatever we're currently working on be it a topic or a financial table we'll probably want to set that topic to complete this will remove it from the number of paths remaining on the left hand side of the program and let you know when you look at your task list where you've been to you'll see the green mark here indicates that that topic is in progress you're already working on it whereas the checkbox indicates that that option or that section is finished so you know that you are done working on it you can still make changes to the item that are marked complete but it gives you a visual indication of how far you are to completing that plan and as we check more of these off if we check a bunch of them off as complete you'll see that there's a green progress bar that fills up in the task bottom of the task list here to kind of give you a visual indicator of how close you are to complete on the marketing plan itself so that's kind of a nice new feature in version eleven so let me move down to the market analysis table or spreadsheet this is a really simple spreadsheet in the software so it's a good place to start but this will give us a little idea of what to expect that we fill in our financial information so all of the financial tables or spreadsheets include a wizard to walk you through setting up that table and we can just click next task it's going to give us our introduction and then if there are any settings for that table it'll step us through those settings and then it will take us to the spread sheet to fill in our information so the market analysis spreadsheet here is a really simple spreadsheet it just allows us to define our market in numbers of potential customers over the next five years to do that we can go ahead and type in all of our different markets depending on the business you may have different markets i'm just going to use companies here so but we could do large companies medium companies and then small companies i'm just typing in the label that i need and then hitting enter to accept that if i need more markets here i can right click and choose insert row that'll let me insert additional rows if i need fewer rows i can right click and choose delete rows and it'll delete any rows that i don't need the program won't let me delete the very top row you can see delete rows is greyed out here or the very bottom row in that section so just if you need to delete if you have like i have here where i have two or three items but i only need two what i would want to do is move the information in the middle row down and then delete the middle row %uh the program protects the top and bottom row because we use it in the sum formula to calculated total in the table so we can't delete those or it would cause an error i'm going to go ahead and switch to full screen so we can see the table a little bit better and we could go ahead and the enter in our information here the market analysis table has some formulas by default that'll calculate our future years based off of our growth rate in first years potential customers so if i thought i was going to have a really high growth rate in large companies maybe twenty five percent and in my area the number of large companies for my services maybe fifty companies i can go ahead and enter in just those two numbers and the program's going to use that growth rate to calculate my future market for large companies and then i can do the same thing for my medium companies and small companies and let's say we have a large number of small companies but i'm going to have a real slow growth rate there so we could go ahead and fill in our market analysis just as easy as that we can overwrite the formulas in the future years so if i know what my potential companies are going to be over the next or potential customers are going to be over the next five years already because i have done an industry report or something i can manually enter that information here and not use the growth rate if i want to either way works just fine and then the program will calculate your compound annual growth rate based off of your markets and then give you a total of all the different potential customers and a total of your compound annual growth rate at the bottom as i said it's a really simple spreadsheet let me switch back out of the full screen area things to note in the actual spreadsheets themselves are the difference between the blue numbers that i can make a change to so if i wanted to change that twelve fifty i can just type in a new number and hit enter and the black numbers here that i can't make a change to the program's calculating this number based off of the information above it so if i try and make a change to that fourteen hundred in this cell the program's going to tell me that this is a locked cell and i can't change it if i want to make a change to this cell i need to change the data above it and then the program will automatically recalculate that that total for me the other thing to note is that at the bottom of the table there's a little area here that we call row by row help and this row by row help changes depending on what we have selected in the actual spreadsheet that we're working on so if i select the total row it's going to tell me that this row's being calculated automatically to give me a total for my potential customers if i select any of the data entry rows it's gonna tell me that i can fill in this estimate so this is something good to look at if you want to change a number that's a black number but you can't change it because it's a locked cell you want to find out where that data is coming from you can look at the row by row help and it will probably be there i'm going to jump to a little bit more complex spreadsheet to show you the difference there so let me find a good one here the contribution margin table i think will be a good one for that demonstration so we'll go out and click next it'll take us to the spreadsheet again we get instructions at the top of the spreadsheet and then we get the spreadsheet at the bottom i'm going to go to actually i can't go to full screen because i want the row by row help so i'm just going to go ahead and turn off the instructions and the tasks so that we can see the spreadsheet in a little bit more detail here so we'll see at the top of the contribution margin it has an area that it should be bringing sales information in but there's no sales information entered into the plan yet if i try and type in my sales information here it's going to tell me it's a locked row so i can't change that data but i can look at the row by row help at the bottom and it tells me that this row is protected and the data can't be edited figures in this row come from my sales forecast table and i click the sales forecast link to get a definition of sales forecasting if i want to but if i want to change those figures i need to go to the sales forecast table and i cand do that through the task list if i wanted to or through the outline and i'll explain the difference between the two in just a moment or i can just select it from the drop-down list here at the top go to the this gives me a list of all the tables or spreadsheets in the plan i can scroll down and find sales forecast click on it it'll take me to that spreadsheet and i can click next and fill in my sales forecast so just a really good way to find out where to go if you need to change numbers is to look at that row by row help information and see what the program is using to calculate it if it's coming from this spreadsheet it'll tell you what data to change if it's coming from by different spreadsheet it'll tell you where that spreadsheet information is to go to and make changes to it i'm going to go ahead and change or turn our instructions back on and our tasks back on