ABSTRACT
A marketing and sales plan identifies the goals, market strategy, and marketing and sales tactics that will be used to discover the market segment best fitting the start-up's technology and application and, subsequently, that will begin creating product awareness and reach other prospects. It gives structure to the start-up's marketing and sales activities and draws attention to goals and allocation of resources in a systematic but flexible way. The development of the plan should be an ongoing effort and is directly related to the customer development process. It begins with the aim of discovering the start-up's customers and obtaining first customer reactions to test hypotheses. Subsequently, it will shift to validation and customer creation, respectively. Attention shifts towards finding several lead customers to include in the actual product development process. The firm's marketing mix is the higher-order concept composed of product, price, place, and promotion decisions. The concept of mix emphasises that the four factors are interdependent and need alignment.
