overnight due to future developments.     Sales Revenue Forecast. This shows your estimates of future sales revenue for your business. To finish your marketing plan, youll need to spell out the specific actions you will take to achieve your forecast sales revenues.     Take a moment before proceeding any further and reread your work from Chapter 3 to decide if it still represents an accurate statement of how you view your business. If the statements are not accurate and complete, stop here and rewrite them. Make sure they correspond to your current thinking.     2. Competition Analysis     When customers consider patronizing your business, they first consider whether or not you can solve their problem. But they dont stop there. They also compare your business with other businesses.     Its helpful for you to make a similar comparison so that you understand how your customers think. This exercise, as any exercise in the marketing area, requires some mental gymnastics. Your job is to place yourself in your customers frame of mind and objectively compare your business to the competition.     If you have difficulty with this task, perhaps a good friend can help you out. Sometimes business owners let their personal prejudices taint their opinion of a competitor. If your competitor provides a larger selection of merchandise or better service and lower prices than you, it wont matter much to your customers that you dont like the other business television ads or think it has ugly delivery trucks.     Think for a moment about the decisions your customers face. What specific methods can they use or places can they go to solve their problem? Incidentally, some of these places and methods may not involve a competing business. Customers do things for themselves or get their needs solved from friends, community and government agencies or other sources.     First, identify the most likely three ways your customers are going to solve their needs in addition to your business, and make a note of each. These are your principal competitors. To be thorough, write a short statement of each competitors main strengths and weaknesses. Remember to place yourself in the mind of your customers when you do this exercise.     In the accompanying example, note that Antoinette grouped her competitors instead of treating each store separately, because some stores are very similar. You might choose to group your competition or list more than three competitors. As always, feel free to adapt the exercise to your needs.   Antoinettes Dress Shop: Strengths and Weaknesses of Three Competitors     Department stores: Bagnins, Jerrys, Glendales. Principal strengths: Wide selection of merchandise. Principal weaknesses: High prices, inconvenient hours, no alterations.     Latest fashion stores: Wild Thing, Marians, Golden Frog. Principal strengths: Fashion conscious, frequent new styles, low prices. Principal weaknesses: Casual wear only, dont cater to mature women, no alterations.