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How to Write a Customer Analysis Section for Your Business Plan

Free Customer Analysis Template

Ayush Jalan

• February 12, 2024

A successful business idea equips customers with the tools necessary to help them reach their goals and fulfill their needs—professional or personal. To create such products and services that meet (and exceed) your customers’ expectations, you need to study their personas via customer analysis.

Customer analysis is a vital part of your business plan that helps you identify, define, and understand your customer base. Analyzing your customers is also crucial for creating a successful marketing plan, as it helps you communicate better with your customers.

In this article, you will learn how to conduct a customer analysis section for your business plan paired with a customer analysis example to help you create customer personas to study their personality traits, goals, challenges they face, and more.

What Is Customer Analysis?

Customer analysis is a comprehensive understanding of your customer base. It helps identify and describe your ideal customer. Through this in-depth analysis, you determine their needs, challenges, goals, and other important considerations. Given this info, it then helps you understand how effectively your products cater to them.

It further helps you optimize your strategic marketing process to create targeted advertisements, customize and prioritize specific features during product development, and make adjustments in your current business plan to align with your customer’s ever-changing demands.

How to Write a Customer Analysis Section

Writing a customer analysis includes extensive research and collecting data from various sources. This data consists of qualitative and quantitative aspects which help you write an accurate customer analysis for your business plan.

Writing a customer analysis has four main steps:

Step 1: Identify your customers

The primary step is to identify your potential customers and define their specific characteristics about them. The attained factual information is segmented into the following categories:

• Demographic: Age, gender, income
• Geographic: Location, type of area (Rural, suburban, urban)
• Psychographic: Values, interests, beliefs, personality, lifestyle, social class
• Technographic: Type of technology the buyer is using; tech-savviness
• Behavioral: Habits, frequent actions, buying patterns
• Industry (For B2B): Based on the industry a company belongs to.
• Business size (For B2B): Size of the company

To obtain the above data, a great place to start for established businesses is your customer database. If you aim to expand this information, you can use your existing communication channels to gather further details through surveys.

If you are a startup, conducting an audience analysis  might seem impossible as you don’t have an existing customer base. Fortunately, there are numerous ways through which you can study your potential customers. A few of them are:

• Identifying who would benefit from your product/service
• Analyzing your competitors to understand their target customers
• Using social media to prompt potential buyers to answer questionnaires

Want to create a Customer Persona in Easy Steps?

Generate valuable customer insights in minutes with Free Customer Persona Generator .

Step 2: Define the needs of your Customers

Now that you have identified your customers, the next step is to understand and specify their needs and challenges. This is the step where you need to go hands-on with your research. Getting to know your customers’ needs helps you determine whether or not your product or service hits the mark.

To understand the needs of your customers, you can adopt the following approaches:

1. Engage directly with potential Customers

A very reliable way to get to know your customers is to simply ask them, either in person or on a call. You can reach out to your customers, conduct one-on-one interviews, create focus groups, and invite buyers to test your new products. You can collect an ample amount of data through these techniques.

However, we recommend prioritizing accuracy over the quantity of data.

A technique that can help you get a deeper insight into your customer’s needs and opinions is the five whys technique . While practicing so, be mindful of the way you conduct the interview. It is essential to keep the customers in a comfortable and conversational environment to attain accurate answers.

2. Collect data from your Customer support

Customer support is the place where you can find feedback and criticism given by your customers. Analyzing this data helps you understand the pain points of your customers. You can further elaborate on this data by interacting with the customers who had issues with your products.

3. Run surveys and mention statistics

Talking to your customers helps you get qualitative information that you can use to alter your product or services according to your customers. The next part is to attain quantitative information, in other words, presenting numbers to support the previous data.

Conducting surveys is one of the commonly used methods for quantifying information. You can conduct in-app surveys, post-purchase surveys, or link surveys in email and apps, etc.

The second method is by collecting statistical data to support your conclusions from the interviews. These include stating studies related to customer choices, results from popular surveys, etc.

Step 3: Create a Customer Persona

Now, it’s time you present the information using a customer persona. A customer persona is a representation of a segment of customers with similar traits. Creating customer personas helps you process the data more efficiently.

You can use customer persona templates that are available online. To help get you started, we have created a customer persona example.

Customer Persona Example

Customer profile example of an internet service provider:

• About: A lot of customers remain at home and have a minimal and easy-going lifestyle. They need high-speed, interruption-free internet access.
• Demographics: Age is between 30 and 40, has a laid-back lifestyle, lives in suburban areas, and the income range is between $10,000 to $40,000.
• Professional role: Shop owners, employees, freelancers, etc.
• Identifiers/Personality traits: Introverts, like routines, makes schedules prefer online shopping, and stick with the companies they trust.
• Goals: Wants easily available service, and 24×7 customer support, prefers self-service technologies and chatbots over interacting with representatives.
• Challenges: Fluctuating internet connection while working or consuming media. Not enough signal coverage.

Step 4: Explain the product alignment to the Customer’s Needs

You’ve gathered info and created customer personas. The final step is to explain how your product or service caters to the needs of your customers. Here, you specify the solution you offer to your customers to tackle the challenges they face.

Mention the USPs of your product and its features, and they benefit the customer. Here, you also mention how your offerings make your customers’ lives better.

Create Better Solutions with Customer Analysis

Understanding your customers inside out helps you assist them better in solving their problems while also achieving success. Analyze your customers as often as required to stay updated about their ever-changing needs.

This helps you create better offerings to consistently fulfill their expectations. As a result, this builds up loyalty over time with each success.

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About the Author

Ayush is a writer with an academic background in business and marketing. Being a tech-enthusiast, he likes to keep a sharp eye on the latest tech gadgets and innovations. When he's not working, you can find him writing poetry, gaming, playing the ukulele, catching up with friends, and indulging in creative philosophies.

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Crafting the Customer Analysis in Business Plan: A Comprehensive Guide

In today’s competitive business environment, understanding your customers is the key to success. Customer analysis in business plans plays a crucial role in driving business growth and providing a competitive edge.

Imagine unlocking the hidden potential within your customer base, tailoring marketing strategies, and developing products that resonate with their needs and preferences. This comprehensive guide will explore the ins and outs of customer analysis in a business plan and how to leverage it for maximum impact on your business.

Short Summary

• Customer analysis is an essential part of any business plan, allowing businesses to understand their target customers and create tailored products/services.
• It involves identifying a market, assessing demographics & analyzing customer behavior in order to inform marketing strategies.
• Utilizing insights from customer analysis can help optimize marketing campaigns & product offerings for maximum return on investment.

The Essence of Customer Analysis

Customer analysis is an essential element of any business plan, emphasizing the comprehension of target customers, their requirements, and how your product or service fulfills those requirements. By performing customer analysis, businesses can better tailor their products and services to their target audience , ultimately leading to increased sales and a thriving business.

Understanding the needs of your target customers is key to success. Knowing who your customers are

Purpose of Customer Analysis

The primary objective of customer analysis is to recognize potential customers, prioritize customer segments, and provide guidance for marketing and product development strategies. Understanding your customers’ wants, needs, pain points, and objectives is crucial to creating targeted marketing campaigns and product offerings that resonate with them.

By closely monitoring customer feedback and support requests (Voice of Customer analysis), businesses can gain insight into customer pain points and preferences and even discover unexpected uses for their products.

Key Components of Customer Analysis

The essential elements of customer analysis encompass target market identification, demographic analysis, and behavioral analysis. Demographic analysis provides insights into factors such as age, income, and location, which can be used to create targeted marketing strategies.

Behavioral analysis, on the other hand, entails comprehending the customer’s decision-making process for the purchase, including the steps taken, information sources consulted, and who has the authority to make the final decision. By understanding these components, businesses can better cater to their customer’s needs and preferences, ultimately leading to success.

Conducting an Effective Customer Analysis

An effective customer analysis involves a thorough research process that focuses on customer pain points, goals, and insights on what influences their buying decisions. This process begins with identifying your target market, which is crucial in ensuring a successful business.

By analyzing customer demographics and examining customer behavior and purchasing patterns, businesses can tailor their marketing strategies and product offerings to address the specific needs and preferences of their target customers.

Identifying Your Target Market

Identifying your target market is the first step in conducting a comprehensive customer analysis. By precisely defining the target customer your company is serving, you can focus your marketing efforts and resources on the most profitable customer segments.

Small businesses with 10 to 50 employees located in large metropolitan cities on the West Coast can benefit from having a business plan. This plan should provide clear guidance and instructions for the successful execution of tasks, including target market analysis.

With a clear understanding of your target market, you’ll be better equipped to develop a targeted marketing strategy that resonates with your audience and drives sales.

Analyzing Customer Demographics

Analyzing customer demographics is crucial for tailoring marketing strategies to specific customer groups. By examining your current customer base, you can determine which demographics to focus on for future marketing efforts. Demographic information, such as:

• education levels

A comprehensive view of the messaging that is most likely to appeal to customers and the marketing channels that are most effective in reaching them can be achieved when customers seek multiple bids, as it provides valuable insights into their preferences and decision-making process.

By constructing a marketing strategy around the types of people who have already made a purchase, you can maximize the return on investment of your marketing budget.

Examining Customer Behavior and Purchasing Patterns

Analyzing customer behavior and purchasing patterns can yield valuable insights through customer behavior analysis. By monitoring customer interactions with your products and services, such as website visits, purchases, and customer reviews, you can identify customer needs and preferences and devise strategies to enhance customer retention and loyalty.

Additionally, understanding the drivers of customer decision-making is crucial for creating targeted marketing campaigns and product offerings that resonate with your target audience.

Utilizing Customer Analysis Results

Customer analysis results can be leveraged to enhance marketing strategies, drive product development and innovation, and strengthen customer retention and loyalty. By recognizing customer feedback and customer support requests, businesses can acquire advantageous insights into customer behavior and preferences, which can be utilized to provide direction to marketing and product development strategies.

In this section, we will explore how customer analysis results can be utilized to improve various aspects of your business.

Enhancing Marketing Strategies

Customer analysis results, including customer segmentation analysis, can inform targeted marketing strategies that lead to increased sales and revenue. By leveraging insights from customer demographics and behavior, businesses can create personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with their target audience. For example, a company catering to young professionals may focus its marketing efforts on social media platforms, while a company targeting older adults may prioritize direct mail or email campaigns.

By tailoring marketing strategies based on customer analysis, businesses can optimize their marketing efforts and achieve greater success.

Driving Product Development and Innovation

Insights from customer analysis can guide product development and innovation, ensuring that products and services meet customer needs and preferences. By understanding customer pain points and objectives, businesses can create new products and services that address these needs, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Additionally, existing customer feedback can be utilized to refine existing products and services, making them more appealing to the target audience and driving business growth .

Strengthening Customer Retention and Loyalty

Understanding customer needs and preferences through customer analysis can help businesses improve customer retention and loyalty. By tailoring products and services to the specific needs and preferences of your target audience, you can enhance customer satisfaction and encourage repeat business.

Furthermore, by identifying gaps in the customer experience and optimizing touchpoints, businesses can improve the overall customer journey and nurture long-lasting relationships with their customers.

Tools and Techniques for Customer Analysis

To effectively conduct customer analysis, businesses can employ various tools and techniques, including data collection and analysis, creating buyer personas, and customer journey mapping. These methods enable businesses to gain a deeper understanding of their customers and make informed decisions regarding their products, services, and promotional activities.

In this section, we will explore the different tools and techniques that can be used in customer analysis.

Data Collection and Analysis

Data collection and analysis play a critical role in customer analysis, as they involve gathering information on customer interactions, demographics, and purchasing patterns. Businesses can utilize various methods for data collection, such as surveys, focus groups, and interviews, as well as analytics tools to track customer behavior online.

By analyzing this data through market research, businesses can identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement, ultimately informing their marketing strategies and product development efforts.

Creating Buyer Personas

Creating buyer personas is an essential technique in customer analysis, as it helps businesses visualize their ideal customers and tailor marketing and product development strategies accordingly.

Buyer personas are fictional representations of major customer segments, taking into account factors such as:

• demographics
• professional status
• purchasing habits

By developing accurate and detailed buyer personas, businesses can ensure that their marketing campaigns and product offerings resonate with their target audience, leading to increased sales and customer loyalty.

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is an invaluable tool in customer analysis, as it enables businesses to identify gaps in the customer experience and optimize touchpoints to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. A customer journey map is a visual representation of the stages a customer goes through when interacting with a business, from initial awareness to loyalty.

By understanding the customer journey and identifying areas for improvement, businesses can enhance the overall customer experience and nurture long-lasting relationships with their customers.

Case Study: Successful Customer Analysis in Action

A prime example of successful customer analysis in action is the Buxton case study. Buxton, a leading provider of customer analytics and consulting services, utilized customer analysis techniques to help businesses expand, grow, and market themselves more efficiently. Through a combination of data collection, buyer persona creation, and customer journey mapping, Buxton was able to gain a deep understanding of their client’s customers and develop targeted marketing campaigns that resonated with their audience.

As a result, their current customers experienced increased sales, customer loyalty, and overall business growth and success.

In conclusion, customer analysis is a powerful tool that can drive business growth and success by helping companies understand their target customers, tailor their marketing strategies, and develop products and services that meet customer needs and preferences.

By utilizing tools and techniques such as data collection and analysis, buyer persona creation, and customer journey mapping, businesses can gain valuable insights into their customers and make informed decisions that lead to increased sales, customer loyalty, and overall business success. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to unlock your business’s full potential – start conducting customer analysis today and reap the rewards.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a customer analysis in a business plan.

A customer analysis is an essential part of a business plan, which identifies target customers and outlines how a product or service meets their needs.

It helps businesses understand their customers better, so they can create marketing strategies that are tailored to their target audience. It also helps them identify potential opportunities and threats in the market.

By understanding their customers, businesses can better serve their customers.

What is an example of customer analysis?

Customer analysis involves understanding consumers’ behaviors through observation and measurement of analytics, analyzing brand recognition and awareness, understanding how customers feel about the competition, and testing different customer acquisition approaches.

This process helps businesses better understand their target audience and develop strategies to reach them. It also helps to identify potential opportunities for growth and improvement. By understanding customer behavior, businesses can create more effective marketing campaigns and better serve their customers.

What should be included in a customer analysis?

A customer analysis should include details on the customer’s demographics, professional status, purchasing habits, values and goals, influences, and challenges. It should also assess their buying patterns, product usage history, spending habits, loyalty metrics, and more to gain an understanding of their wants, needs, pain points, and objectives.

What is the primary objective of customer analysis?

The primary objective of customer analysis is to recognize potential customers, prioritize customer segments, and inform marketing and product development strategies.

By understanding customer needs and preferences, businesses can create targeted marketing campaigns and product offerings that are tailored to the needs of their target audience. This helps to ensure that the company is reaching the right people.

How can customer analysis help improve marketing strategies?

Customer analysis provides valuable insights into customer’s needs and preferences, enabling businesses to create tailored marketing strategies that drive sales. It is an essential tool for effective marketing.

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How to Conduct An Effective Customer Analysis in 8 Steps

Effective customer analysis is the key to business success.

Understanding customers’ unique needs and expectations allow companies to better meet these needs. From marketing campaigns to onboarding programs, catering your product experiences to your customers improves satisfaction and retention rates.

Let’s take a closer look at what customer analysis is, its benefits, and how to get started.

• Customer analysis is the act of researching and analyzing customers to gather a complete profile of them and their behavior.
• Customer analysis is important because it helps you create a personalized marketing strategy , reduces churn and increases retention , helps you make smarter product improvements , and helps you identify your most valuable customers (your target market).
• To get started with customer analysis, start by structuring your existing customer base. Organize your customers into customer segments that share common characteristics.
• Then, collect direct customer feedback with in-app surveys . You can use CES , CSAT , and NPS surveys across the entire customer journey.
• Gather insights about your customers from internal teams. Every department likely has unique insights into customers based on their interactions with them. Share customer insights across departments so you don’t miss out on critical information.
• Leverage product analytics to do a customer behavior analysis and get a better understanding of how customers interact with your product.
• Perform social listening on social media and review sites to see an unfiltered look at what customers are saying about your brand.
• After completing your customer analysis, create user personas based on real customer traits. Buyer personas are great to turn to when planning your marketing campaigns or when you want to make product improvements.
• Build a customer journey map to make sure you’re hitting all the touchpoints and understanding how customers engage with your brand at every moment.
• The two top customer analysis tools of our choice are Semrush and Userpilot.
• With Userpilot , you can analyze customer behavior, run surveys, and create customer segments. Then you can build in-app product experiences to improve customer loyalty and satisfaction.
• With Semrush, you can see what marketing channels your website visitors come from (so you can prioritize the best channels). You can then build segments and create user personas.

What is customer analysis?

Customer analysis is the research you do to understand your target market and your customer base. Analyzing customers helps you build more in-depth and accurate customer profiles so you can meet their needs better.

Why is customer analysis important?

Here are the four main reasons why customer analysis is essential:

Create a personalized marketing strategy

Customer analysis helps you optimize your marketing campaigns .

You can then build a more informed marketing plan that engages customers in their preferred channel, with an impactful message, at the right time.

Reduce churn and increase customer retention

Customers churn because products don’t fulfill their expectations.

By understanding their challenges and pain points better, you can tailor your product, training, and experiences to their specific needs and retain them .

Make smarter product improvements

Customer analysis helps you make more informed product decisions. You’ll be able to create new features or make product improvements that will give customers the most value.

Take a look at your product analytics to see how current customers are using the product – are they using certain features more or less?

Observing customer behavior will help you determine what features customers find most useful and what areas may need improvement to increase usage.

I dentify your most valuable customers

With customer analysis, you can pinpoint exactly who your superstar customers are.

This will help determine which market segments to prioritize and how much effort to put into each one. Look at the type of people who have spent the most or stayed with you the longest – these are the ones with the highest customer lifetime value . Do they represent a certain demographic?

Focus on keeping those customers happy and acquiring more like them. They’re an ideal customer and catering to them will lead to faster productivity growth.

How to conduct a customer analysis

Try these nine strategies to conduct a customer analysis:

Structure your existing customer base

You should start the customer analysis process by identifying your potential customers and defining their specific characteristics.

The customer database is a great place for established businesses to begin gathering the above data. Most likely, you already have plenty of data, but you might need to structure it to make sense of it.

To do this, you need to divide your customer database into groups based on similar characteristics. This process of dividing up data is called segmentation .

There are lots of categories you can use to segment customers , including:

• Demographic (age, education, gender, etc.)
• Geographic location (countries, cities, urban or rural areas)
• Behavioral profile (how they interact with your product)
• Company size
• Psychographic (their challenges, goals, values, interests, etc.)

By understanding customer preferences through careful segmentation, companies can deliver targeted experiences, increase conversion rates and retain more customers in the long run.

Identify the needs of your customers

Through customer analysis, you can figure out what pain points you’re solving. Customers turn to your brand because they have a goal and they see you as the potential solution.

Doing this will help you to better understand how to create a post-purchase experience that promotes loyalty.

Collect direct customer feedback with in-app surveys

In-app surveys are one of the most commonly used and effective methods of collecting quantitative and qualitative data from your customers.

You can use different types of surveys at different touchpoints, such as customer effort score (CES), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and net promoter score (NPS) surveys.

Surveys that use both quantitative and qualitative methods give the most well-rounded insights. For example, you collect quantitative data with an NPS survey that asks customers to score how likely they are to recommend your product to a friend or colleague.

After collecting their response, you can trigger a follow-up open-ended question to get more context around their answer.

Invite your customers to one-on-one interviews

An interview can be a great way to empathize with your users as it provides insight into their values, perceptions, and experiences. In these discussions, you are free to ask specific questions while remaining open to participants’ viewpoints.

The advantages of interviews over other methods are they less time than some other user research methods and it’s easier to ask follow-up questions for more detail and accuracy.

You can invite your users to an interview using different in-app messages, such as slideouts.

Make sure to practice gratitude and incentivize them with a small reward , like a gift card.

Gather insights about your customers from internal teams

Businesses often have different departments, each with a different perspective on their customers’ needs . The insights you can gain about your customers from your internal teams can be extremely beneficial for developing a comprehensive view of them.

While sales teams may have a better understanding of customer needs, marketing teams may understand how customers respond to different content or visual stimuli. Meanwhile, Account Management and Customer Success teams may understand the customer’s day-to-day needs even better.

By leveraging all the available insights from across multiple departments, companies can capture a deeper understanding of their target audience and develop better strategies and provide quality experiences that generate growth.

Leverage product analytics

Lean into product usage data to understand customer behavior.

You can get insights into data such as:

• What features do customers use the most and the least
• Which paths do users take and how they navigate inside your product
• What links or call-to-actions users clicked
• What in-app messages have they already been exposed to

How do you collect product usage data ? One way is to use a product analytics tool to tag your UI patterns to see how customers interact with them.

Perform social listening

Keep an eye on public sources – customers often share their honest opinions about your brand on social media and review sites.

Social media: People tend to post on social media (unfiltered) when they have a strong opinion about something, good or bad. Monitor your tagged and untagged mentions on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Reddit to keep tabs on what people really think.

Review sites: Keep an eye on software review sites, like G2 and Capterra, to see what customer sentiment is like for your brand. Are the reviews overwhelmingly positive or not? What are common complaints? What do people appreciate the most about your product or service?

Social listening gives you a level of honest feedback that you wouldn’t be able to gather otherwise.

Create user and buyer personas

Once you have defined your target audience and identified the types of customers you wish to target, it’s time to start thinking about customer personas . Personas are fictionalized representations of your average customers, gathered and analyzed from all available data points.

Personas should contain enough details to represent the demographic you’re targeting, such as age, gender, occupation, income, location, and interests. Additionally, consider how your customers usually interact with your company and how they prefer to be contacted – e.g., by email or social media.

It is then possible to conduct more research on each persona – such as finding out what makes them tick, and what content they are most likely to engage with – to provide more innovative campaigns that target each segment directly.

Consider creating more than one buyer persona, as different customers will buy your products for different reasons.

Here’s an example of a user persona we created at Userpilot:

• UX Designer
• B2B SaaS with 11-50 employees
• Has found product-market fit
• They’re looking to automate onboarding

Team collaboration:

• Part of UI/UX team
• Collaborates with Product Marketing Manager
• Collaborates with UI designers and developers

Jobs to be done:

• User research to identify the needs of who they are designing for
• Prototyping and user testing to improve UX before launching
• Continuously iterate on solutions to make the product easy to use

Pains/challenges:

• Tapping into feedback collected by other departments, such as Marketing
• Identifying friction points in the user journey due to a lack of product analytics insights
• Hard to document and analyze qualitative data from surveys

Gains of using a Product Growth Platform:

• Build microsurveys to identify users’ needs and share the same data with multiple departments, using one platform only
• Goal tracking at each stage of the journey to help identify drop-off points in the journey
• Tag NPS surveys responses to easily identify patterns of what’s blocking the users from achieving their goals

A solid buyer persona profile can help the entire team better connect with customers and build a better product.

Build a customer journey map

Essentially, a journey map shows all the touchpoints and interactions that a customer must go through to reach their goal.

Considering that customers behave differently at each stage of the buyer’s journey, a customer journey map can help connect the dots and uncover the factors that determine whether their experience is positive.

Every persona should have its own customer journey map. The map will help you identify how to attract, engage, convert, and upsell specific personas and segments based on their challenges, questions, preferred platforms, and types of content.

Best tools for customer analysis

Here are the top two customer analysis tools to help you easily gather data and act on it:

Userpilot is a product growth platform that helps you improve product engagement and retain more customers.

They have multiple high-value features like event tracking, feature tagging, in-app flow builders, and more. As for customer analysis, with Userpilot you can run in-app surveys, track product behavior, tag UI elements, and create user segments based on customer data.

Then, you can put your insights into action by creating in-app product experiences that help boost your growth metrics.

Create contextual customer experiences using UI patterns, such as modals, tooltips, and banners.

Semrush is an all-in-one SEO, content marketing, competitor research, and social media marketing platform.

It’s an excellent tool for customer analysis since it shows you what channels your website visitors come from. Semrush is also as a template for categorizing your data to create user personas .

Also, Semrush Brand Monitoring can help you keep track of all mentions of your brand and product or service in real-time.

Customer analysis helps you increase profits, get more for your marketing efforts, and connect with your target customers.

Want to get started with customer analysis? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can do customer segmentation analysis and build in-app product experiences, code-free.

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Resource Library

Introduction to customer analysis.

A customer analysis (or customer profile) is a critical section of a company’s business plan or marketing plan. It identifies target customers, ascertains the needs of these customers, and then specifies how the product satisfies these needs.

Customer analysis can be broken down into a behavioral profile (why your product matches a customer’s lifestyle) and a demographic profile (describing a customer’s demographic attributes).

A customer profile is a simple tool that can help business better understand current and potential customers, so they can increase sales and grow their business. Customer profiles are a collection of information about customers that help determine why people buy or don’t buy a product. Customer profiles can also help develop targeted marketing plans and help ensure that products meet the needs of their intended audience.

Behavioral Analysis (Customer Buying Criteria)

A behavioral analysis of customers (or psychographic profile) seeks to identify and weigh the relative importance of factors consumers use to choose one product over another. These factors, sometimes called buying criteria, are key to understanding the reasons that customers choose to buy your product (or service) versus the products offered by your competitors. The four major criteria that customers use to distinguish competing products are: price, quality, convenience andprestige.

In consumer transactions, price and quality tend to be the dominant factors. However with business-to-business (B2B) transactions (also called industrial marketing), service issues such as reliability, payment terms, and delivery schedule become much more important. The sales transaction in an industrial marketing scenario also differs from consumer marketing in that the purchase decision is typically made by a group of people instead of one person, and the selling process can be much more complex (including stages such as: request for bid, proposal preparation and contract negotiations).

By identifying customer needs through market research and analysis, companies can develop a clear and concise value proposition which reflects the tangible benefits that customers can expect from the company’s products. And once the primary buying criteria have been identified, marketing efforts can influence the customer’s perception of the product along the four main dimensions (price, quality, convenience and prestige), relative to the competition’s product.  

Behavioral Analysis (Purchase Process and Patterns)

Occasionally, customer behavior analysis requires a more in-depth understanding of the actual decision-making process of the customer purchase. This may be especially true in an industrial marketing scenario. Examples of purchase process questions to be answered here include:

* What steps are involved in the decision-making process? * What sources of information are sought? * What is a timeline for a purchase (e.g., impulse vs. extended decision-making)? * Will the customer consult others in their organization/family before making a decision? * Who has the authority to make the final decision? * Will the customer seek multiple bids? * Will the product/service require significant modifications?

Behavior profiles can also focus on actions, such as: which types of items were purchased, how frequently items are purchased, the average transaction value, or which items were purchased in conjunction with other items. To understand the buying habits and patterns of your customers, answer the following questions:

* Reason/occasion for purchase? * Number of times they’ll purchase? * Timetable of purchase, every week, month, quarter, etc.? * Amount of product/service purchased? * How long to make a decision to purchase? * Where does the customer purchase and/or use the product/service?

Customer Demographics

 The second major component in customer analysis is identifying target market segments that are predisposed to preferring your products over those of your competitors. A market segment is a sub-set of a market made up of people or organizations with one or more characteristics that cause them to demand similar product and/or services based on qualities of those products such as price or function. A marketing program aimed at individual segments needs to understand and capitalize on the group’s differences and use them strategically in all advertising campaigns. 

Gender, age, ethnicity, geography and income are all market-segmenting criteria based on demographics.  

Typical questions to ask when determining the demographics of the target market include: * What is the age range of the customer who wants my product or service?  * Which gender would be most interested in this product or service?  * What is the income level of my potential customers?  * What level of education do they have?  * What is their marital or family status: Are they married, single, divorced? Do they have kids, grandkids? * What are the hobbies of my target customers?

The target market segments are specified by demographic factors: age, income, education, ethnicity, geography, etc. Then by having a well defined set of demographic factors, marketing will be able to identify the best channels to reach these specific demographic segments. 

Customer Analysis Example

Customer Analysis References

Market Analysis {U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) Website’s content on Marketing Analysis} http://www.sba.gov/content/market-analysis

“Analyzing Customers in Your Business Plan” 2011 {Growthink, Inc.} http://www.growthink.com/businessplan/help-center/analyzing-customers-your-business-plan

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Simple Business Plan Template for Startups, Small Businesses & Entrepreneurs

Customer analysis, why your customer analysis is important.

In this section, you will describe your target customers and their core needs. It is important since readers want to be sure you 1) precisely know who your target customers are and what they want, and 2) your strategy (products/services, promotions strategy, etc.) aligns with your customers’ preferences.

What to Include

The Customer Analysis section has two sub-sections: Target Customers and Customer Needs.

Target Customers

In the Target Customers section of your plan, you should provide a profile of your target customers.

For instance, how old are they? Are they married? Where do they live/work?

Below are several demographic (e.g., age) and psychographic (e.g., values) variables you can use to describe your target customers. Some are for B2C (business to consumer) and others are for B2B (business to business) companies:

• Marital Status
• Family size
• Values/Beliefs
• Activities Engaged In
• Business Size

Customer Needs

Here you will profile the needs of your target customers. Do they care most about speed? Price? Comfort?

Below are several reasons why customers might want or need your products and/or services:

• Reliability
• Customer service
• Convenience
• Ease of use

Identify which of these (or other) reasons are relevant and then explain them further. For example, you can discuss that customers dislike the fact that getting gasoline takes so long (driving to the station and waiting on line) and how your solution saves them time.

BUSINESS PLAN TEMPLATE OUTLINE

• Business Plan Template Home
• 1. Executive Summary
• 2. Company Overview
• 3. Industry Analysis
• 4. Customer Analysis
• 5. Competitive Analysis
• 6. Marketing Plan
• 7. Operations Plan
• 8. Management Team
• 9. Financial Plan
• 10. Appendix
• Business Plan Summary

Other Helpful Business Planning Articles & Templates

How to Create a Customer Success Plan: Strategies and a Template

The concept of a customer success plan has emerged as a beacon of growth and sustainability. But what exactly is a customer success plan?

Simply put, it’s a strategic blueprint designed by a customer success team to ensure the long-term success of their clients. This plan goes beyond traditional sales and support; it’s about fostering a deep, ongoing relationship that benefits both your customer and your organization.

The importance of a robust customer success plan cannot be overstated. In today’s competitive landscape, the role of the customer success team extends far beyond mere customer service. It’s about building customer loyalty, ensuring customer retention, and creating customer and product advocates.

A well-crafted customer success plan lays the groundwork for achieving these goals, ultimately leading to sustained business growth and a thriving customer base.

Table of Contents

The Foundation of Customer Success Planning

Exploring the Definition and Key Components of a Customer Success Plan

A customer success plan is not a one-size-fits-all solution; it’s a tailored approach that addresses the unique needs and goals of each customer. The plan is often spearheaded by a dedicated customer success manager or team, who work closely with customers to understand their journey, from onboarding through the entire customer lifecycle.

Key components of a successful plan include understanding customer goals, monitoring customer health scores, and aligning with the customer’s expectations and desired outcomes.

The Three Pillars of Customer Success

At the heart of customer success planning are three pillars: customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer retention. These pillars represent the core objectives that every customer success team strives to achieve.

By focusing on these areas, customer success managers and their teams can ensure that they are consistently meeting and exceeding customers’ expectations.

What Does a Good Customer Success Plan Look Like?

A good customer success plan is a comprehensive roadmap that guides both your team and your customer towards mutual success. It includes a detailed customer journey map, clearly defined success metrics, and a strategy for regularly reviewing and updating these elements. The plan should be dynamic, adapting to the evolving needs of the customer and the market.

Effective customer success plans are not just about reacting to customer inquiries or issues. They are proactive, leveraging customer data and insights to anticipate needs and create opportunities for growth. These plans require close collaboration across teams, such as sales, marketing, and support, to ensure everyone works towards the same goals.

In summary, creating a customer success plan is a vital strategy for any organization looking to thrive in the modern business landscape. Understanding customer needs, aligning with them, and continuous improvement are key. Having a well-executed customer success plan can exceed customer expectations, driving long-term success and fostering loyalty.

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your Customer Success Plan

How to Create a Customer Success Plan: A Step-by-Step Approach

Creating a customer success plan is not just a task; it’s a journey towards building a sustainable and rewarding relationship with your customers. Begin by gathering your customer success team and setting clear objectives. A successful plan is more than a document; it’s a commitment to your customers’ success.

First, assemble all necessary customer data and insights. This is where your customer success managers play a pivotal role. They should understand the customer journey inside out, from the initial sales process to ongoing engagement. This knowledge forms the bedrock of your plan.

Identifying and Prioritizing Customer Needs: The Top 3-5 Priorities

The next crucial step is to identify and prioritize your customers’ needs. This isn’t about guessing but about engaging in meaningful dialogue with your customers. Conduct quarterly business reviews or surveys to gather customer feedback. Remember, the customer’s expectations set the direction for your plan.

Typically, the top priorities include customer satisfaction, product adoption, and customer retention. Align your team’s efforts towards these goals. Ensure every member of the customer success team understands these priorities and how their role contributes to achieving them.

Structuring Customer Success Team: Key Elements and Strategies

Structuring your customer success team is about more than roles and responsibilities; it’s about creating a synergy that aligns with your customer success strategy . Effective customer success plans incorporate key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success and customer health scores to gauge ongoing customer relationships.

Develop a customer journey map that details every stage of the customer lifecycle. This map should be the guiding light for your team, ensuring that every interaction with the customer is purposeful and aligned with the overall success plan.

Writing a Success Plan: What to Include and Why

When it comes to writing your customer success plan, clarity and comprehensiveness are key. Your plan should include:

Customer Goals and Outcomes : Outline what success looks like for your customer. Align these goals with your team’s actions.

Success Metrics and KPIs : Define clear metrics to measure progress. These could include customer retention rates, customer health scores, or Net Promoter Scores (NPS).

Customer Journey Map : This should detail each touchpoint with the customer, from onboarding to advocacy.

Action Plan for Each Stage : Develop specific strategies for different stages of the customer lifecycle, like onboarding, product training, and support.

Feedback and Adjustment Mechanism : It is important to regularly collect and address customer feedback so that your team can continually improve and adapt the plan.

Expansion Strategy : Plan for future growth with the customer, including upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

Remember, a customer success plan is not static. It should evolve with your customer’s needs and your team’s learning. It is important to review and update the plan on a regular basis to ensure that it stays relevant and effective. Make sure to check it frequently to make necessary changes and improvements.

In conclusion, developing a customer success plan is crucial for ensuring customer satisfaction and longevity. It’s about putting your customers at the heart of your business and aligning your team’s efforts with their success . With a clear, actionable, and adaptive customer success plan, you’re not just aiming for customer satisfaction; you’re striving for customer delight and loyalty.

Essential Strategies for Effective Customer Success Plans

The Role of Client Success Planning in Business Growth

In business growth, client success planning is not just an option; it’s a necessity. A well-crafted customer success plan is a testament to your commitment to your customers’ achievements and your own. It’s about creating a partnership where both your customer and your business grow together.

This synergy is achieved when the customer success team focuses on aligning customer goals with your business objectives. A customer’s success should be seen as a cornerstone of your company’s growth strategy .

Every successful interaction, every resolved inquiry, and every piece of customer feedback brings invaluable insights that can drive innovation and improvement.

Building a Strong Customer Success Strategy

Creating a successful customer experience requires a comprehensive approach that covers the entire customer journey, rather than just addressing customer inquiries. This strategy should be crafted by customer success managers and their teams, focusing on customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.

It’s important to have a clear understanding of the customer journey, defined success metrics, and their expectations and pain points.

Your strategy should include plans for regular customer contact, such as quarterly business reviews, to ensure that you’re consistently aligned with customer needs and can demonstrate progress.

The 4 Models of Succession Planning in Customer Success

Succession planning in customer success is crucial for maintaining continuity and service excellence. There are four main models to consider:

The Hierarchical Model : Focusing on developing leaders within the customer success team for future roles.

The Specialization Model : Encouraging team members to specialize in specific areas of customer success.

The Rotation Model : Offering team members the chance to work in different roles within the team, fostering a more holistic understanding of customer success.

The Mentoring Model : Pairing less experienced team members with seasoned customer success managers for guidance and knowledge transfer.

Each of these models plays a vital role in ensuring that your customer success team remains robust, versatile, and ready to face future challenges.

Developing and Implementing an Account Success Plan

An account success plan is your blueprint for individual customer engagement. It’s about understanding the unique needs and goals of each customer and how your product or service fits into their success story. This plan should be tailored to each customer, taking into account their customer data, feedback, and health score. It is crucial to establish precise key performance indicators (KPIs) and success metrics that are regularly evaluated. This will help in better understanding the progress being made towards achieving the desired goals and objectives.

Close collaboration between customer success, sales, and marketing teams is essential in developing an account success plan. This ensures a unified approach and helps in aligning the expectations of all stakeholders involved. The goal is to create processes that not only address feedback but also proactively identify opportunities for customer expansion and success.

In order to ensure effective customer success, it is necessary to establish and maintain a strong and mutually beneficial relationship with your customers. It’s about being proactive, responsive, and constantly evolving to meet and exceed customer expectations. By focusing on these essential strategies , you’re not just working towards reducing customer churn; you’re building a foundation for lasting customer loyalty and continuous business growth.

Remember, in customer success, every small step taken is a leap towards achieving monumental success for both your customers and your business.

Templates and Tools for Crafting Your Plan

Customer Success Plan Templates: A Practical Resource

Embarking on the creation of a customer success plan can feel daunting. However, with the right templates at your disposal, this journey becomes more navigable and efficient.

Customer success plan templates serve as a valuable resource, providing a structured framework to build upon. These templates include key sections like customer goals, strategies for onboarding new customers, customer health score tracking, and quarterly business reviews. They guide customer success teams to cover all necessary aspects, ensuring that no critical element is overlooked.

Remember, these templates are not set in stone but are starting points to be tailored to each customer’s unique journey.

Template example

Now, let’s dive into a practical example of what a customer success plan template might look like. Remember, this template is a starting point, a framework to build upon and customize according to the unique needs of your customers and your business . A well-designed customer success plan template is a powerful tool in your arsenal, guiding you towards achieving success for your customers and your company.

1. Customer Overview

Customer Name:

Business Sponsor:

Key Stakeholders:

Customer Goals:

2. Customer Onboarding

Onboarding Process:

Key Milestones:

Assigned Customer Success Manager:

3. Quarterly Business Review Plan

Review Dates:

Objectives:

Success Metrics:

4. Sales Process and New Customer Acquisition

Sales to Success Transition:

New Customer Welcome Strategy:

5. Customer Health Score Monitoring

Key Metrics for Health Score:

Regular Monitoring Schedule:

Action Plan for Health Score Improvement:

6. Customer Experience and Engagement

Regular Check-ins Schedule:

Customer Feedback Mechanisms:

Customer Advocacy Opportunities:

7. Expansion and Renewal Strategy

Up-sell/Cross-sell Opportunities:

Renewal Milestones and Strategy:

8. Notes and Observations

Customer Feedback Highlights:

Team Observations and Insights:

This customer success plan template serves as a roadmap to guide you and your customer through the journey of collaboration and growth. It ensures that you stay organized, aligned with customer expectations, and deliver an exceptional experience. From the initial onboarding process to regular quarterly business reviews, this template empowers you to create customer success plans that are both effective and dynamic.

Remember, the key to a successful customer success plan lies in its adaptability and alignment with your customer’s evolving needs. Use this template as a foundation to build upon, tailoring it to fit the unique circumstances and goals of each customer.

With this approach, you’re not just creating a plan; you’re forging a path to help your customers achieve their goals, nurturing a relationship that leads to mutual growth and success.

Tools and Software for Organizing and Implementing Your Plan

Leveraging the right tools and software is crucial for implementing an effective customer success plan. These tools help organize customer data, track key metrics, monitor customer health scores, and facilitate communication within the team and with customers. They enable customer success teams to stay on the same page, align expectations, and reduce churn effectively.

Utilize software that integrates with your sales process, allowing for a seamless transition of customer contact information and insights from the sales teams to the customer success team.

How to Stay Organized as a Customer Success Manager

Being an effective customer success manager requires a key skill of staying organized. It involves not just managing customer notes and feedback but also aligning with the broader customer success strategy and team goals. Regularly update and review customer outcomes, confirm expectations, and create processes to address feedback.

Organizing quarterly business reviews with customers is also vital to demonstrate progress, reassess goals, and align strategies for continued success.

Summarizing the Importance of a Well-Structured Customer Success Plan

As we conclude, let’s reemphasize the pivotal role of a well-structured customer success plan. It’s more than a document; it’s the backbone of a thriving business, a strategic blueprint that guides customer success teams in nurturing and sustaining productive relationships with customers. This plan is crucial in ensuring your customers’ success, which in turn, becomes your success.

It meticulously addresses every facet of the customer’s journey, from onboarding to ongoing engagement, and anticipates their evolving needs, paving the way for effective product adoption and fostering customer advocacy.

A good customer success plan, exemplified by a comprehensive customer success plan template, does not leave customer satisfaction to chance. It strategically maps out the sales process, ensures smooth onboarding of new customers, and creates customer success plans that are tailored to meet specific needs.

This approach results in a dynamic interaction where customers don’t just feel heard, but genuinely understood.

Encouraging Continuous Improvement and Adaptation in Customer Success Strategies

In customer relations, continuous improvement and adaptation are not just beneficial; they are imperative. Your customer success plan must be a living document, one that evolves with customer feedback, shifts in market trends, and fresh customer insights.

Regularly engaging in quarterly business reviews offers a platform to reassess and realign strategies with your customer’s expectations and goals.

It is essential to foster a culture where every member of the customer success team, from the frontline managers to the business sponsors, is committed to this ethos of continuous improvement. Create and update customer success plans regularly to track progress and identify areas for improvement.

Encourage your team to stay proactive, not just in managing current customer relationships but also in anticipating future needs and opportunities.

In essence, a successful customer success plan is a collaborative effort that requires the involvement and commitment of the entire team. From the initial stages of creating a customer success plan to the continuous process of adapting and improving it, every step is crucial. It’s about aligning your team around a shared vision of customer success, where the success of your customers equates to the success of your business.

In conclusion, as you embark on this journey of creating and refining your customer success plans, remember that at the core of every strategy , every decision, and every action is your customer. Your dedication to their success is what will ultimately drive your business forward.

Here’s to building robust, lasting relationships, achieving remarkable outcomes together, and celebrating each milestone of success along the way!

Customer Service Business Plans

Call center business plan.

Vashon Solicitation Services is a start-up business providing clients with top quality call center services 24 hours-a-day.

Personal Shopping Services Business Plan

Buy the Time is a start-up personal shopping service based in Seattle, Washington.

Effective, efficient, and personable customer service can sometimes make or break a business. If you have ideas for new methods of providing in-person, online, or phone-based customer service, you may consider establishing a customer service business.

And in order to provide the best service possible, you’ll need a business plan to do it. Check our library of sample plans to ensure you have everything you need to launch your business.

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How to Write a Market Analysis for a Business Plan

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A lot of preparation goes into starting a business before you can open your doors to the public or launch your online store. One of your first steps should be to write a business plan . A business plan will serve as your roadmap when building your business.

Within your business plan, there’s an important section you should pay careful attention to: your market analysis. Your market analysis helps you understand your target market and how you can thrive within it.

Simply put, your market analysis shows that you’ve done your research. It also contributes to your marketing strategy by defining your target customer and researching their buying habits. Overall, a market analysis will yield invaluable data if you have limited knowledge about your market, the market has fierce competition, and if you require a business loan. In this guide, we'll explore how to conduct your own market analysis.

How to conduct a market analysis: A step-by-step guide

In your market analysis, you can expect to cover the following:

Industry outlook

Target market

Market value

Competition

Barriers to entry

Let’s dive into an in-depth look into each section:

Step 1: Define your objective

Before you begin your market analysis, it’s important to define your objective for writing a market analysis. Are you writing it for internal purposes or for external purposes?

If you were doing a market analysis for internal purposes, you might be brainstorming new products to launch or adjusting your marketing tactics. An example of an external purpose might be that you need a market analysis to get approved for a business loan .

The comprehensiveness of your market analysis will depend on your objective. If you’re preparing for a new product launch, you might focus more heavily on researching the competition. A market analysis for a loan approval would require heavy data and research into market size and growth, share potential, and pricing.

Step 2: Provide an industry outlook

An industry outlook is a general direction of where your industry is heading. Lenders want to know whether you’re targeting a growing industry or declining industry. For example, if you’re looking to sell VCRs in 2020, it’s unlikely that your business will succeed.

Starting your market analysis with an industry outlook offers a preliminary view of the market and what to expect in your market analysis. When writing this section, you'll want to include:

Market size

Are you chasing big markets or are you targeting very niche markets? If you’re targeting a niche market, are there enough customers to support your business and buy your product?

Product life cycle

If you develop a product, what will its life cycle look like? Lenders want an overview of how your product will come into fruition after it’s developed and launched. In this section, you can discuss your product’s:

Research and development

Projected growth

How do you see your company performing over time? Calculating your year-over-year growth will help you and lenders see how your business has grown thus far. Calculating your projected growth shows how your business will fare in future projected market conditions.

Step 3: Determine your target market

This section of your market analysis is dedicated to your potential customer. Who is your ideal target customer? How can you cater your product to serve them specifically?

Don’t make the mistake of wanting to sell your product to everybody. Your target customer should be specific. For example, if you’re selling mittens, you wouldn’t want to market to warmer climates like Hawaii. You should target customers who live in colder regions. The more nuanced your target market is, the more information you’ll have to inform your business and marketing strategy.

With that in mind, your target market section should include the following points:

Demographics

This is where you leave nothing to mystery about your ideal customer. You want to know every aspect of your customer so you can best serve them. Dedicate time to researching the following demographics:

Income level

Create a customer persona

Creating a customer persona can help you better understand your customer. It can be easier to market to a person than data on paper. You can give this persona a name, background, and job. Mold this persona into your target customer.

What are your customer’s pain points? How do these pain points influence how they buy products? What matters most to them? Why do they choose one brand over another?

Research and supporting material

Information without data are just claims. To add credibility to your market analysis, you need to include data. Some methods for collecting data include:

Target group surveys

Focus groups

Reading reviews

Feedback surveys

You can also consult resources online. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau can help you find demographics in calculating your market share. The U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Small Business Administration also offer general data that can help you research your target industry.

Step 4: Calculate market value

You can use either top-down analysis or bottom-up analysis to calculate an estimate of your market value.

A top-down analysis tends to be the easier option of the two. It requires for you to calculate the entire market and then estimate how much of a share you expect your business to get. For example, let’s assume your target market consists of 100,000 people. If you’re optimistic and manage to get 1% of that market, you can expect to make 1,000 sales.

A bottom-up analysis is more data-driven and requires more research. You calculate the individual factors of your business and then estimate how high you can scale them to arrive at a projected market share. Some factors to consider when doing a bottom-up analysis include:

Where products are sold

Who your competition is

The price per unit

How many consumers you expect to reach

The average amount a customer would buy over time

While a bottom-up analysis requires more data than a top-down analysis, you can usually arrive at a more accurate calculation.

Step 5: Get to know your competition

Before you start a business, you need to research the level of competition within your market. Are there certain companies getting the lion’s share of the market? How can you position yourself to stand out from the competition?

There are two types of competitors that you should be aware of: direct competitors and indirect competitors.

Direct competitors are other businesses who sell the same product as you. If you and the company across town both sell apples, you are direct competitors.

An indirect competitor sells a different but similar product to yours. If that company across town sells oranges instead, they are an indirect competitor. Apples and oranges are different but they still target a similar market: people who eat fruits.

Also, here are some questions you want to answer when writing this section of your market analysis:

What are your competitor’s strengths?

What are your competitor’s weaknesses?

How can you cover your competitor’s weaknesses in your own business?

How can you solve the same problems better or differently than your competitors?

How can you leverage technology to better serve your customers?

How big of a threat are your competitors if you open your business?

Step 6: Identify your barriers

Writing a market analysis can help you identify some glaring barriers to starting your business. Researching these barriers will help you avoid any costly legal or business mistakes down the line. Some entry barriers to address in your marketing analysis include:

Technology: How rapid is technology advancing and can it render your product obsolete within the next five years?

Branding: You need to establish your brand identity to stand out in a saturated market.

Cost of entry: Startup costs, like renting a space and hiring employees, are expensive. Also, specialty equipment often comes with hefty price tags. (Consider researching equipment financing to help finance these purchases.)

Location: You need to secure a prime location if you’re opening a physical store.

Competition: A market with fierce competition can be a steep uphill battle (like attempting to go toe-to-toe with Apple or Amazon).

Step 7: Know the regulations

When starting a business, it’s your responsibility to research governmental and state business regulations within your market. Some regulations to keep in mind include (but aren’t limited to):

Employment and labor laws

Advertising

Environmental regulations

If you’re a newer entrepreneur and this is your first business, this part can be daunting so you might want to consult with a business attorney. A legal professional will help you identify the legal requirements specific to your business. You can also check online legal help sites like LegalZoom or Rocket Lawyer.

Tips when writing your market analysis

We wouldn’t be surprised if you feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information needed in a market analysis. Keep in mind, though, this research is key to launching a successful business. You don’t want to cut corners, but here are a few tips to help you out when writing your market analysis:

Use visual aids

Nobody likes 30 pages of nothing but text. Using visual aids can break up those text blocks, making your market analysis more visually appealing. When discussing statistics and metrics, charts and graphs will help you better communicate your data.

Include a summary

If you’ve ever read an article from an academic journal, you’ll notice that writers include an abstract that offers the reader a preview.

Use this same tactic when writing your market analysis. It will prime the reader of your market highlights before they dive into the hard data.

Get to the point

It’s better to keep your market analysis concise than to stuff it with fluff and repetition. You’ll want to present your data, analyze it, and then tie it back into how your business can thrive within your target market.

Revisit your market analysis regularly

Markets are always changing and it's important that your business changes with your target market. Revisiting your market analysis ensures that your business operations align with changing market conditions. The best businesses are the ones that can adapt.

Why should you write a market analysis?

Your market analysis helps you look at factors within your market to determine if it’s a good fit for your business model. A market analysis will help you:

1. Learn how to analyze the market need

Markets are always shifting and it’s a good idea to identify current and projected market conditions. These trends will help you understand the size of your market and whether there are paying customers waiting for you. Doing a market analysis helps you confirm that your target market is a lucrative market.

2. Learn about your customers

The best way to serve your customer is to understand them. A market analysis will examine your customer’s buying habits, pain points, and desires. This information will aid you in developing a business that addresses those points.

3. Get approved for a business loan

Starting a business, especially if it’s your first one, requires startup funding. A good first step is to apply for a business loan with your bank or other financial institution.

A thorough market analysis shows that you’re professional, prepared, and worth the investment from lenders. This preparation inspires confidence within the lender that you can build a business and repay the loan.

4. Beat the competition

Your research will offer valuable insight and certain advantages that the competition might not have. For example, thoroughly understanding your customer’s pain points and desires will help you develop a superior product or service than your competitors. If your business is already up and running, an updated market analysis can upgrade your marketing strategy or help you launch a new product.

Final thoughts

There is a saying that the first step to cutting down a tree is to sharpen an axe. In other words, preparation is the key to success. In business, preparation increases the chances that your business will succeed, even in a competitive market.

The market analysis section of your business plan separates the entrepreneurs who have done their homework from those who haven’t. Now that you’ve learned how to write a market analysis, it’s time for you to sharpen your axe and grow a successful business. And keep in mind, if you need help crafting your business plan, you can always turn to business plan software or a free template to help you stay organized.

This article originally appeared on JustBusiness, a subsidiary of NerdWallet.

On a similar note...

4 Customer Success Plan Templates and How to Use Them

Customer success is an incredibly impactful function when it comes to the longevity and happiness of your customers. Unlike customer support, there are often identical moving pieces in each customer's life cycle that make it easy to predict what kind of success interactions your customers will need. Creating reproducible plans can be a great way to ensure the success of both your team and your customers.

When you document customer success managers' actions, it makes it easier to guarantee that every customer has the same excellent experience. We've gathered some customer success plan templates that you can use to get started with a more defined customer success experience, along with tons of information about what customer success plans are, why they are valuable, and how to create them.

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What is a customer success plan?

A customer success plan is an actionable list of items that lays out what customer success looks like and what a customer or customer success manager (CSM) can do to get to it. It serves as a guide for CSMs to ensure that every necessary action gets accomplished and every customer receives the same fantastic experience.

Having a customer success plan in place can also ensure that every customer gets the outcome you intend from your actions. When you create a customer success plan, you usually do so with a customer success metric. That means that the value and impact of the plan can be easily trackable and that you can change the plan if you aren't hitting your goals.

Using a CRM, you may have your customer success plans built out to assign tasks to your CSMs automatically. If you aren't quite there yet, a documented checklist will do just fine (more on this later).

Recommended Reading

How to Improve Customer Loyalty With Customer Effort Score

What's the difference between customer success and customer service.

Customer service is typically reactive in response, whereas customer success is more proactive. While there will always be exceptions to this rule, the responsibility of customer service most often lies in responding to customer inquiries that come through a queue via email, live chat, or phone. Most customer service representatives aren't reaching out to customers proactively when they notice something has gone amiss with a customer's usage.

It is the responsibility of a CSM to ensure that customers are using the product as expected and meeting their goals. They routinely check customer engagement and health to reach out proactively with helpful tips and information to guide the customer in their usage. 

Customer Experience vs. Customer Success: Explained

Why should you create a customer success plan.

Customer success plans are helpful for your customers and your team members in that they ensure that specific, essential objectives get met. A good customer success plan should do the following:

Take the guesswork out of CSMs’ jobs

Having prebuilt customer success plans for specific, everyday things within the customer journey makes things more straightforward for your CSMs. Given that plans help standardize actions, the customer responses should be more predictable than with a customer success plan entirely of the CSM's making. Having a plan for your CSMs is like giving them a map before a road trip rather than driving without direction.

Create consistency

Inevitably your CSMs and others working on your team will have different personalities. While that may mean that some of their general approaches to working with customers may be different, there should still be a level of uniformity across experiences. Your customers will be more comfortable if they can know what to expect, and customer success plans do that by creating repeatable processes.

Boost revenue, expansion, and product usage

Customer success plans are custom-designed using company metrics and data. You build them to ensure specific outcomes, sometimes around expansion, revenue, or even product usage. Creating customer success plans around those actions helps to generate attention and focus. The more attention everyone pays to a unified thing, the more effective you will be when working toward it. 

Track changes and maximize efficacy

Having a documented process put in place makes it easy to track changes and how they affect key metrics. With customer success plans, you can know exactly when you made changes, what they were, and what impact they had.

This knowledge has power: You can measure what impact your customer success team has at the business level and also understand precisely what levers you had to pull to make it happen. This understanding is beneficial for your team, who can use this learning to change other aspects of the customer experience, and for your company, which now knows how to move the needle for other teams.

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How to create a customer success plan.

The process for creating a customer success plan will differ slightly depending on what tools your team has access to. For instance, if you have a CRM, you may want to build your processes there. If your team isn't yet investing in a CRM, you may just have a list of documents in your Confluence, Help Scout, Notion, or Google Drive folders.

 In our examples, we'll create customer success plan templates that you can use without a CRM. That said, no matter where you're creating it, the things you will need to think about will be the same. Let's look at how to create a customer success plan.

1. Understand what success looks like for your customers

Take some time to work cross-functionally and understand what activities successful customers need to undertake on their journeys. This process should consider the perspectives of every team — product, marketing, sales, engineering, customer experience, etc. — and the customer. Sometimes what a company wants a customer to do with their product is different from what the customer actually does.

Create a list of everything that a customer needs to accomplish to be successful, including everything from "open an account" to "turn on [x] feature" and "pay a monthly subscription."

2. Create a customer journey map

After you list all of the activities your customers need to take, begin to map them out on a timeline. When supplemented with data around customer touchpoints, this timeline will serve as the basis of your customer journey map.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of everything a customer goes through during their life cycle. Your CSMs should use this map as a data source when structuring your customer success plans and determining when they need to come into play.

3. Identify the highest impact, most replicable activities

It might not make sense to create customer success plans for every activity — having too many to go through can hinder rather than help your team's progress. So, look over your journey map and consider which actions would have the most impact if turned into customer success plans.

These should be activities that yield a high customer engagement orrevenue — for example, setting up conversations around renewal or getting a customer's team onboarded to your project. 

The activities should also be reasonably high frequency to requirea customer success plan. If it's not something you are frequently doing, your team probably doesn't need to have a customer success plan for it.

4. Set metrics and benchmarks

As with almost anything you do in business, it's essential to have a way to measure the effectiveness of what you're implementing. With every SaaS customer success plan that you implement, identify the metric you are trying to shift. When you have a metric determined, take note of where that metric currently stands to understand what impact you have as time goes on and your team makes use of the plans you create.

Never be afraid of change. While creating a customer success plan is a significant first step, you should plan to visit and update it on a regular basis. Depending on the cadence of your product releases and updates, this may need to be more or less frequent (we think quarterly us a good rhythm to start at). After all, you don't want to add a fantastic new feature to your product and have it left out of conversations that your CSMs are having with customers. Even if your customer success plans don't mention specific features, it's still good to regularly revisit and update anything public-facing that may affect your customers.

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Customer success plan templates.

While every company is different, there are often a few key components of the customer life cycle that remain the same. The following customer success strategy templates will be helpful to kick-start your processes and give your team some ideas about where to start when working with new customers.

Handoff from sales to customer success

If a sales team primarily drives your revenue, the customer will likely already have a relationship with them. A handoff from sales to customer success ensures that the customer feels taken care of and the customer success team feels prepared with any information that the sales team gleaned during the sales process. Here's what this SaaS customer success plan might look like:

Schedule an internal handoff meeting. Your sales team should come prepared to talk about the customer's critical reasons for buying, any concerns they had, and what they are most looking forward to using.

Review other internal customer notes. See if the customer reached out to your support team, talked to your marketing team over social, or had any different touchpoints that you can review.

Email the customer to schedule an external handoff meeting. This meeting should be similar to the internal handoff but more customer-centric. Your sales team should explain the difference now with the engagement, what the customer can expect from customer success, and how they'll be stepping down.

Schedule the customer kickoff. This step involves emailing the customer and letting them know what the kickoff will entail and giving them the option to schedule a meeting at a time that works for them.

Copy template slides and create the deck. If you don't already have a slide template for kickoff calls, it may be helpful to create one.

Follow up if the customer hasn't responded to the request to schedule a kickoff.

Conduct the customer kickoff and present the product plan.

Send a wrap-up email. This email should include notes on any questions the customer asked and what their answers were.

Update customer notes. If you have a CRM or a central place where you keep customer information, update your notes on this customer after the call.

Customer has gone quiet

If a customer is not responding to your CSM's requests for contact or meetings, it may signify that something is amiss. Use this customer success plan template to get your customer to reconnect: 

Check customer notes. Review them for any extra contact outside of customer success, like if they have reached out to customer support, have any active bugs logged that are waiting for resolution, or are in talks with your sales team.

Verify the existence of a power user. Ensure that the person you are emailing is still at the company and is still the person that you should be in contact with.

Email the power user to follow up. This email should either be the new power user you have identified or the existing power user you've already been in contact with.

Email the executive or business sponsor. If you do not receive a response from the power user, loop in the executive or business sponsor.

Conduct a review. If able to get a meeting scheduled, review any open or challenging areas on the call with the customer. If unable to get an appointment scheduled, conduct a review of any open, problematic areas and try to move toward resolution.

Communicate any challenges conveyed by the customer internally.

Review usage patterns. Ensure that the company is still using the product and that usage hasn't dropped off. Usage drop-off is a sign that the customer is heading toward churn.

Continue trying to connect with the power user/business sponsor if you still haven't gotten a response.

Send a wrap-up email and address feedback. After you have made contact, write up a summary of your conversations and address any feedback that the customer brought up in your discussions.

Update customer notes. Continually update the customer notes after conversations to ensure that everyone internally is on the same page.

In some companies, customer success will be responsible for managing renewals. This responsibility will often fall to sales or a specific renewals team in larger companies. There are substantial benefits to both options. When customer success handles the renewal process, there is a lot more trust from the customer. When another team takes the renewal process, it's less likely that you will erode trust by bringing money into the conversation.

If you are choosing to have your customer success team handle renewals, here is a customer success plan template that you can modify and use:

Check customer notes to see if any open support conversations, bug logs, or other company contacts with other teams still need to be resolved.

Check if the renewal has already occurred automatically. If not, proceed.

Resolve any issues that showed up in step 1.

Prepare the renewal paperwork, including any options for expansion or upgrade.

Reach out to the business sponsor to schedule a meeting.

Meet to talk about the renewal process and continue the conversation about any upgrades or expansions that you have positioned.

Confirm expectations with the business sponsor.

Send renewal paperwork.

After receiving the signed renewal paperwork, update any customer notes and internal systems to reflect the change.

Customer success quarterly business review

Some customer success teams find it helpful to do a regular quarterly revisit with their customers, also known as a quarterly business review (QBR). In these meetings, the CSM reviews trends and metrics with the customer and covers how the customer progresses toward the goals they initially set in their kickoff. 

Even if you don't plan to have your team execute QBRs, this is an excellent customer success plan template for standing meetings where your CSMs review progress.

Review the customer’s health score and health score trend. Is it going up? Going down? What aspects of the health score have the most significant impact on its shifting?

Review any customer notes, including anything other teams add, such as marketing, product, or sales.

Review support tickets. Look at both currently open conversations and the ones that have been closed over the last quarter.

Check on open feature requests. Try to give them updates on anything that they've asked about.

Email the customer to set up the meeting.

Meet with the customer and review all of your findings from the previous steps.

Send a write-up of notes from the meeting to the customers and any attendees within your company.

Conduct an internal debrief on any action items that came from the meeting. For instance, give updates on the specific needs related to a feature request or feedback about how a support interaction went.

Schedule your next touchpoint; perhaps it’s not a QBR but a follow-up to address anything that came out of this meeting.

Use customer success plan templates for everyone's success

Planning never hurts anyone. Creating customer success plans ensures that your CSMs are well-prepared to be the best representatives of your company. It also means that they have the tools to help your customers be successful. 

Use our templates to create plans that work for your needs within your team — remember, no two companies are alike!

Like what you see? Share with a friend.

Mercer smith.

Mercer is the VP of CX Insights & Community at PartnerHero, a yoga fanatic, and strives to make the world a little bit happier one customer at a time. You can find her at mercenator.com and on Twitter .

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Scaling Customer Success in 2024 — The Complete Guide (+Expert Tips)

Published: March 29, 2024

New customers are important to every business, but there's an important audience for every business that shouldn’t be overlooked: existing customers.

“Is the person who purchased yesterday happy? Were they successful with our product?” are concerns of businesses everywhere.

Many companies struggle to help customers truly find success with their products. Customers sign up for a monthly package but ultimately cancel, or products get returned. When retention rates are low, something lethal is happening along the path of your customer journey.

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Given that we've all been disappointed customers at one point or another, this process is easy to understand. I was in this boat recently when I was searching for transcription software. A free program caught my eye, and after I went through the signup and video upload process, it told me that only the first 60 seconds of the transcription was actually free. I immediately canceled my account.

In the words of Chandler Bing, could I have BEEN any more annoyed? Maybe this was a bait-and-switch trick on the company‘s end. Maybe I overlooked obvious warnings and had misaligned expectations. Whatever the reason, my customer journey ended as quickly as it began, and that’s a concern for all companies.

Pinpointing exactly how to help customers achieve their desired outcomes is a big task, but you don‘t need to immediately hire a customer success manager to tackle this. There are many steps you can take to further your business goals and customer success, even with a small team and limited budget. Here’s how to start.

Table of Contents

What is scaled customer success?

Benefits of scaling customer success, how to scale customer success, 6 tips for scaling customer success.

Customer support is the reactive process of helping customers with a problem. Scaled customer success is the proactive process of providing customers with the resources and support they need to achieve their desired outcome with your product. This is done by creating repeatable systems that help you keep up with a growing customer base.

A customer success strategy can take the form of knowledge bases, program demos, etc., or can result in the development of entire dedicated customer success teams .

Your customer base will benefit from your scaled customer success initiatives, but how will YOU benefit? If you effectively scale customer success, you can expect to see these payoffs.

Increase in Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value (or CLV) refers to the sum total of revenue that a customer generates for a company, and your odds of increasing it rise when you scale customer success.

One CEO frames it this way: it's less about extending company reach and more about increasing the value you provide to existing customers.

“We focus on deepening our impact and ensuring each individual is getting a more enriched experience through our offerings,” says James Wilkinson, CEO of Balance One Supplements . It's paying off in spades.

"We’ve experienced a 40% increase in our CLV over the past year due solely to our large investment in scaling and optimizing our customer success, which has reflected a huge increase in revenue from our customers over the recent years," Wilkinson says.

Wilkinson attributes this significant increase in customer growth to customers’ high levels of satisfaction.

“We’re putting great efforts into providing a more personalized experience by collecting data and then using data analytics to improve our recommendations and support framework for our customers so that they consistently return to our brand and make more purchases," Wilkinson says.

Gather Insightful Customer Data

If you successfully scale your customer success, you'll gather data, insights, and ideas that will help further your business growth. The most important data to collect revolves around:

• Customer lifetime value.
• Decision makers.
• Segmentation data.
• Customer happiness.
• Sales won and sales lost.
• Support ticket success.

Learn more in our customer data guide .

Proactivity

When do you reach out to customer support? After you have a problem with a product. It‘s a necessary reactive form of customer support, but smart brands also support customers before there’s a problem.

Can you remember the last time a brand proactively tried to assist you with their product? I'll wait while you think. Proactivity is at the heart of scaled customer success, and it's a powerful way to support and empower customers to reach their potential.

Better Understanding of the Entire Customer Journey

You'll learn an incredible amount about your customers by proactively looking at what hurdles they might experience on their journey with your product.

There are huge payoffs to examining your customers‘ experience. You’ll:

• Understand customer expectations.
• Anticipate success hurdles.
• Proactively resolve problems.
• Improve customer experience.
• Reduce the burden on the customer support team.

This is particularly important for businesses in the startup phase. Rapid growth can unintentionally result in missing puzzle pieces, skipped opportunities, and overlooked customer health concerns.

With fresh insights into the customer journey, you can tweak your offer to perfectly meet customers' expectations.

With the benefits of scaled customer success understood, it‘s time to look at the nitty-gritty of how you improve your customer’s journey.

Create a clear onboarding process.

A key part of effectively scaling customer success is an onboarding process that sets expectations, answers questions, and anticipates customer issues. Failing to do this is costly.

One founder even says that most customer churn is the result of failed onboarding and that businesses need to be spending more time, money, and resources on building the best customer onboarding .

“This must be the most diligent part of your customer success process,” s hares Ed Porter, owner and chief revenue officer of Blue Chip CRO .

Porter says that onboarding requires diligence and time investment to ensure that all buyer personas understand how they will each receive the benefit.

“Often CSMs only talk to execs, who are farthest removed from the usage of the product or service. During onboarding, the full personas need to be mapped, engaged, and have a role to play that interfaces with your company,” says Porter.

Check out this onboarding process example from Duolingo :

Jey also recommends empowering your team to go the extra mile to resolve issues and exceed expectations. “By prioritizing customer success, you build a community of loyal advocates who drive sustainable growth,” Jey says.

Here’s an example of a customer support hub from Later :

One in 6 shoppers say they'll walk away from a purchase over bad service. The cost of poor customer experience is steep. Use these tips to help you build a system that works for both you and your customers.

1. Build a customer success team.

A customer success team (CS team) is a part of your company dedicated specifically to helping customers achieve their desired outcomes with your product. While it may seem like your entire company fits under this umbrella, many workers will never come into contact with customers themselves.

Customer success managers, on the other hand, work directly with customers and help improve the customer experience, retention rates, and revenue growth. These teams can come in different shapes and sizes: some companies have an entire customer success department, while a smaller team might have one customer success leader.

When managed properly, these teams are incredibly effective: The HubSpot customer success team was able to improve revenue retention from 80% to 100% by refining how we work ( here's how ).

2. Leverage automation tools.

AI can't do everything, but it can have a huge impact on your customer success. Shubham Nigam is an advocate for AI. As a Senior Software Engineer at LinkedIn Search for four years, he worked on the search feedback in the LinkedIn app. He said that millions of daily users resulted in thousands of pieces of feedback from customers; AI made the feedback manageable.

“Using AI, we were able to categorize pieces of feedback and find the best ones to work on. The only way to scale customer success is to use AI,” says Shubham Nigam. "Convert the unstructured customer feedback data into structured data through LLMs and then give feedback to product teams to fix it."

While not all companies can relate to receiving thousands of customer service messages per day, everyone can automate processes so they can focus on customer interactions.

See come of some of the free automation tools available in our Service Hub :

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Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office

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How small businesses can create meaningful impact with customers.

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Small businesses don’t have the same limitations as they did in the past. Modern trends and tools ... [+] make it easier to make a targeted, meaningful difference in supporting customers and communities.

You don’t have to have a big business or stellar resources to have a major impact on the world as a company. Small and medium businesses can influence their customers, employees, and communities alike in genuine and meaningful ways .

If you’re an entrepreneur, manager, or leader at an SMB, it’s important to consider how you can create a meaningful impact as a company. Here are some suggestions to get those creative gears turning.

Optimize Your Customers’ Experiences

Any company can offer value to its customer base. If a product meets a need, it can attract an audience looking for solutions to that need. However, exceptional companies invest in optimizing the entire customer journey surrounding each product and service.

Businesses that look for ways to offer meaningful value throughout a customer’s experience can create ripple effects across their target audience, generating meaningful impact on a regular basis. They ensure that every element of a consumer’s journey has a maximum impact and leaves them with a positive impression of your brand.

Even a negative experience can ultimately strengthen a customer relationship, if handled properly. Take the example of a refund request. Rather than simply processing the request, SaaS platform Thryv explains how small businesses can use these occasions as an opportunity to create lifelong loyal customers who associate their brand with a positive experience.

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Business owners who use refund requests (or any similar business activities) as a moment to shine know how to build trust and transparency by listening to their customers. Using a CRM system is an easy way to track refund interactions and all communications with past, current and potential customers to ensure that all future engagements with these individuals are thoughtful and informed.

From going above and beyond to resolve an issue to wooing customers with offers that meet their particular needs, each interaction that a small business has with a customer provides a chance to make a lasting impact.

Use Workplace Giving Platforms to Empower Employees

Technology is a powerful tool. It gives SMBs increasing flexibility and ever-expanding capabilities to mimic behaviors that were previously reserved for larger businesses with more personnel and resources.

In the case of philanthropy , in particular, tech is enabling small businesses to have a more direct impact. Case in point: workplace giving platforms. These are employer-run software tools that empower employees to direct both a company’s donations and their own volunteer hours to targeted needs.

Double the Donation reports that workplace giving platforms are enabling small and mid-sized businesses to roll out their own corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns. It fractionalizes corporate giving, even on an SMB level, and empowers individual employees to get in on the action.

By integrating a workplace giving platform into your SMB, you can improve the quality of your company’s giving. The individual impetus behind your company’s charity efforts allows for a more surgical approach. This makes it easier to effectively meet specific needs in key demographics that are near and dear to your employees’ personal convictions and experiences.

The Power of Purposeful Impact

Corporate giving is a great way to supercharge a smaller company’s ESG efforts. With a little research and a leg up from the latest tech tools, it’s possible for SMBs to have a major impact that was previously only possible for larger corporations in the past.

Small business leaders have the opportunity to create a meaningful impact on their company’s customers, employees, and communities. The key differentiating factor is that these leaders must be willing to invest in finding the best ways to infuse each effort with meaning, whether it comes in the form of a company blog, a workplace giving platform, or anything in between.

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• Oracle Autonomous Database Data Share Quick Start Guide
• Welcome to Oracle Data Sharing

What is Data Sharing?

Data Sharing allows customers to improve their business and open up new opportunities.

Data Sharing scenarios:

For example, an HR department can share statistical employee data with the Financial department for cost analysis.

For example, a retailer shares regional sales and inventory data with a supplier to help improve the supplier's production line and locations.

For example, a restaurant shares historical time-based pattern of busyness to allow customers to plan for their reservations.

Oracle Data Sharing offers the following sharing options:

In this type of share, data is shared and published as well-defined, known, as-of-snapshots. At the time of publication, the tool generates and stores the data share as parquet files in the specified bucket. The recipient can directly access the share in the object store. See Share Data Versions Using Object Storage .

In this type of share the recipient accesses data directly from the Oracle table or view. This share gives the recipient the latest data. The advantage of this mode is that the data is up to date as of the time of query. See Share Live Data Using Direct Connection .

For further information on the Data Share tool usage and limitations, see The Data Share Tool .

Money blog: Second-class deliveries to be drastically cut in Royal Mail plan

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More than one in three UK water employees has reported being verbally abused at work, according to GMB Union.

A survey of almost 1,300 staff found industry workers have been physically assaulted and unsafe working alone, the Guardian reported.

The survey comes after backlash to news of sewage dumping practices.

The government has declined to launch a public inquiry into Thurrock council's bankruptcy , the Financial Times reports.

Residents had petitioned for an investigation into the Conservative-run Essex council.

But minister for local government Simon Hoare said a best value inspection report published last year was an effective way to look into the issue.

Co-op is reintroducing the  remote wine-tastings  first piloted during lockdown.

Winemakers will host sessions to members each month over Zoom following demand from customers, according to the supermarket.

Participants will receive advance notice of which wines will be the subject of the tastings.

Superdrug has axed the cost of VAT from its own-brand sun care range.

The retailer says the products should be deemed a healthcare essential and not a beauty treatment, and believes all sun protection should be exempt from the 20% levy.

The UK government is coming under increasing pressure to remove VAT on all sun care after a rise in calls for donations of such products, with some having to go without sun protection completely. 

The reduction is expected to save consumers around £1m.

Jamie Archer, own brand director at Superdrug, said: "Sun cream is currently classed as a cosmetic product and therefore carries the VAT associated with it, making it unaffordable for some people.

"We believe that everyone should have access to the products that protect their health and wellbeing and at an affordable price. 

"Therefore, we're proud to support our customers by removing 20% from our sun care range for a second year."

The cut means Solait Sun Cream SPF50 (200ml) costs £3.59 and the Solait Kid’s Roll-on Sun Cream SPF50+ (75ml) £2.79.

As many as 1,000 jobs could be cut by Royal Mail as the service plans to dramatically cut second-class letter deliveries.

In its submission to Ofcom's consultation on the future of the universal postal service, Royal Mail said its proposals would reduce all non first-class letter deliveries to save up to £300m a year.

Second-class letters would only be delivered three days a week - every other weekday.

However, the six-day-a-week service for first-class mail would be maintained - a row back on plans to axe Saturday deliveries.

The group said it didn't expect any compulsory redundancies and the roles would be reduced through natural staff turnover among its 130,000 employees.

They added that the proposals would not need a change in legislation, given it would still be delivering first-class post six days a week. It called for Ofcom to put the changes in place by April 2025.

Big Issue founder Lord Bird says the government has "lost the plot" over proposed legislation which critics say criminalises homelessness.

He called the Criminal Justice Bill a "waste of time" that fails to stop people living and dying on the streets of the UK.

The bill contains provisions to allow police to forcibly move on "nuisance" rough sleepers, with criteria including creating "excessive smell" or "looking like they are intending to sleep on the streets".

"How the hell are you going to enforce this?" said Lord Bird.

"You're going to get the old bill [police] or the local security going out their sniffing people? This is just a waste of time."

Lord Bird said it was "human rights abuse to let people live and die on our streets".

"When it's moved onto criminal justice issues, then you've lost the plot."

He pointed to "the evils" of no-fault evictions as one cause of homelessness.

"Today there will be somebody falling into homelessness because the government hasn't got off its rear and sorted out what it said it was going to do in 2019."

Lord Bill recalled his experience of living on the streets as a young man, including being urinated on and sexually propositioned by the public.

"Anybody who falls onto the streets in a very short period of time becomes so traumatised that they actually become dehumanised.

"There's nothing pretty about street life and therefore if people are behaving aggressively it's because really they need the A&E department."

Will the bill go through?

When the bill was introduced to parliament last year, Suella Braverman was still the home secretary.

She claimed at the time that rough sleeping was a "lifestyle choice".

The government has pledged to bring in the Criminal Justice Bill before the next election, although it is currently making its way through the House of Commons - with MPs proposing amendments, including dozens of Tories, that may come to a vote later.

Yesterday, minister Gillian Keegan was asked about the matter as Tory MPs seek to strip the provision to detain someone based on odour.

Asked if people should be arrested if they smell, Ms Keegan said: "Well, no, people should not be arrested just if they smell."

Royal Mail has reportedly launched an investigation into complaints that members of the public have been fined because their stamps were deemed counterfeit.

Affected customers have been told to pay £5 to collect post from Royal Mail.

The postal service switched to a barcoded stamp system last summer.

Questions have been raised over whether stamps are being wrongly identified as counterfeit after postmasters said the allegedly fake stamps were bought from Royal Mail directly.

Royal Mail has said the system is secure and any allegation that fake stamps were bought from its branches were "extremely serious".

Barcoded stamps became mandatory from 31 July 2023.

National insurance will be cut, for the second time this year, from 10% to 8% on employee earnings between £12,570 and £50,270 from Saturday.

The change, announced by the chancellor in his March budget, impacts around 27 million payroll employees across the UK.

The cut is worth almost £250 to someone earning £25,000 a year and almost £750 for those earning £50,000

Use our tool below for a rough guide to what tax changes can be expected for most people, as there are other variables not included which might affect how much tax you pay including being in receipt of the blind person's allowance or the marriage allowance. It also assumes you are not self-employed and are under pension age...

There are also national insurance cuts for the self-employed. This includes the scrapping of Class 2 contributions, as well as a reduction of the rate of Class 4 contributions from 9% to 6% for the £12,570 to £50,270 earnings bracket.

These will impact nearly two million self-employed people, according to the Treasury.

While many campaigners welcomed the national insurance announcement last month, they pointed out that the tax burden remains at record high levels for Britons - thanks in part to the threshold at which people start paying income tax being frozen, rather than rising with inflation.

By Daniel Binns, business reporter

Tesla has reported a sharp fall in worldwide sales amid increased competition and slowing demand for electric vehicles.

The carmaker said it delivered 386,810 vehicles during the first quarter of the year - down nearly 9% on the 423,000 it shipped from January to March last year.

Tesla said the fall was "partly" due to  disruption to shipping in the Red Sea region  and an arson attack at its gigafactory in Berlin.

It also blamed the phasing in of an updated version of its Model 3 sedan at its factory in Fremont, California.

Tesla's chief executive Elon Musk noted that rival electric carmaker BYD had also experienced a slump in sales.

He wrote on X: "This was a tough quarter for everyone."

However, some commentators blamed the controversy surrounding Mr Musk, along with increased competition from rivals and declining "excitement" about electric vehicles generally.

Wall Street tech analyst Dan Ives described the results as "an unmitigated disaster that is hard to explain away".

He said: "This was a train wreck into a brick wall quarter for Musk and co."

Mr Ives also warned Mr Musk needed to turn around the company's fortunes. "Otherwise, some darker days could clearly be ahead that could disrupt the long-term Tesla narrative," he added.

It comes just days after market intelligence firm Caliber claimed Mr Musk's right-wing political views and controversial public statements on X were putting off some customers from buying a Tesla.

"It's very likely that Musk himself is contributing to the reputational downfall," Caliber chief executive Shahar Silbershatz said.

Tesla did not respond to requests for comment about the claims.

Revolution Bars shares were suspended from the London Stock Exchange yesterday as the bar chain mulled its restructuring plans.

The suspension on the AIM index came after the group said it was unable to publish its interim results for the second half of last year by the end of March.

The news comes after an exclusive report by City editor Mark Kleinman found Revolution was considering a plan to closure around 20 bars out of its 80 venues.

Revolution said it continues to "evaluate all the options available to it", including engaging with key stakeholders and potential investors over a possible fundraise.

Their struggles are part of wider difficulties in the night-time economy, which Money team reporter Emily Mee examined earlier this year...

London's FTSE 100 is down around -0.5% this morning after temporarily breaking the 8,000-point barrier yesterday.

There had been expectations that the index could this week break its highest-ever record of 8,012.53 points, which was set in February last year.

However, it looks like the wait will go on - for today at least. It's at around 7,890 points this morning.

The performance echoes a weaker close on Wall Street yesterday, following concerns from some investors that the US Federal Reserve may not cut interest rates by as much as previously expected this year.

Among the firms experiencing a slump on Wednesday is Topps Tiles. Its shares are down almost 3%.

It comes after the company warned of "subdued demand" in a trading update. The firm also said sales had fallen in the second quarter due to lower footfall.

In contrast, Dr Martens opened the day brightly and climbed more than 5% following a report that the footwear brand might explore a possible sale. However, those early gains have since fallen back.

Meanwhile, oil prices have been steadily climbing, with the cost of a barrel of Brent crude hovering around $89 (£71) this morning - a six-month high.

This follows a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian refinery, coupled with ongoing tensions in the Middle East.

The currency markets are pretty flat - £1 will buy $1.26 and €1.17, similar to yesterday.

Gumtree has revealed the most common items for scam listings.

The online marketplace says smartphones, games consoles, digital cameras, headphones, dogs, collectables and guitars are the most common scam items.

There are also seasonal trends. At the start of the year job posting fraud and gym items for sale are more prevalent, while bikes tend to pop up in spring as people look to get outdoors.

During hot weather, you are likely to see more high-value outdoor items such as non-permanent swimming pools, jacuzzis, trampolines, air conditioning units and campervans.

New vehicle registrations in March and September always see a spike in bad listings, while rental fraud tends to increase when students look for accommodation for the year ahead – normally early summer through to September. 

This data comes as Santander saw cases of purchase scams jump by nearly a third (32%) in 2023.

80% of these started on online selling platforms.

Santander has teamed up with Gumtree to warn shoppers about what to look out for:

• An item priced more cheaply than expected, or using generic images that could have been taken from an online search, could be warning signs of a scam.
• Items for sale can often be filtered depending on postcode and location. Shop local, and make sure you see the item in person first.
• Use secure payment methods where you can. PayPal and debit and credit cards may offer more protection than a bank transfer.
• Attempts to communicate outside an official website should also be treated with suspicion.
• Check how long the seller has been a member of the selling website for and look at their profile, including reviews from other buyers. If the seller has been posting from multiple locations within a short timeframe, that could be another reason to be cautious.

Gumtree says it removed 1,177,292 listings for failing to meet its standards and policies in 2023.

42,725 of these raised suspicions of fraud, a decrease of 31% annually - credited by Gumtree on an improved safety infrastructure.

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