Marketing plan importance

Marketing is often treated as a minor topic in business plans often mixed in with sales strategy and under utilized and misunderstood by most technical start up entrepreneurs. Marketing portion of a business plan for a start up is as important as the management team experiences and expertise. Marketing plan must reflect how well the management knows it market niche which includes first and foremost a list of potential customers followed by the list of competitors direct and indirect.
Pricing is one of the key activities covered under marketing plan and needs to be approved at the highest level in the start up organization. Far too often a salesperson is given the latitude to set prices in the field sitting in front of a client. Sales people should not set prices but gather market info and provide feedback to start up management which will then set the highest prices the market can bear. The first group to object to the high prices should be the start ups sales team. The bar should be set high and sales staff challenged to sell at prices they considered too high.