in sales meetings, displaying thermometer posters, and awarding achievement prizes.   Step 7 - Develop Your Marketing Budget   Your marketing budget can be developed several ways, depending on whether you want to be more exact or to develop just a quick-and-dirty number. Its good to start out with a quick-and-dirty calculation and then to support it with further details.   First, if you have been in business for over a year and tracked your marketing-related expenditures, you could easily calculate your "cost to acquire one customer" or "cost to sell one product" by dividing your annual sales and marketing costs by the number of units sold (or customers acquired).   The next step is to take your cost to sell one unit or acquire one customer and simply multiply it by your unit sales or customer acquisition goal. The result of this simple computation will give you a rough estimate of what you need to invest to meet your sales goals for the next year.   Conclusion   There you have it: The Seven-Step, One-Day Marketing Plan. Its simple really. Of course youll need to study up a bit more about your marketing medium(s) of choice, its appropriateness for your message, and its associated costs. But try not to make the development of your plan a laborious, drawn-out task. Remember the 80 / 20 rule: 80% of your results will come from 20% of your effort.   My final word of advice is to make sure you set aside uninterrupted time to develop your marketing plan. It could very well be the most important document to which you and your team members will ever refer.   The Lifetime Value of Your Customer     Knowing the lifetime value of a customer is the first step in creating your marketing budget. Lifetime customer value has two components: (1) new customer acquisition cost and (2) lifetime revenue generated by a new customer. To properly develop your marketing budget you absolutely have to know these two figures.   For many small businesses these figures are a mystery, yet they are the key ingredients to making decisions concerning marketing expenditures. Questions such as, "What should I give away as a free bonus?" or "How much should I spend on ads for the last quarter?" are answered based on the understanding of the lifetime value of a customer.   How to Calculate New Customer Acquisition Costs   To calculate new customer acquisitions costs, first research what total marketing costs