Show me the plan - Palo Alto Software Marketing Plus 2.2 - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, July, 1997 by Carol S. Holzberg

Marketing Plus 2.2

RATING: ***

WIN

When a pipe springs a leak, you call a plumber. When your business needs a marketing plan, try Marketing Plus (MP) 2.2. Developed by Tim Berry, a professional marketing consultant, this comprehensive package contains the right tools for designing and implementing a successful marketing plan. With MP, you'll spend less time planning and more time boosting your company's sales and profits.

We created a new plan by entering data in MP's Plan Options Screen. This dialog box was somewhat confusing initially, but we pressed F1 to launch context-sensitive help. The Options screen helped us identify up to six column labels for MP spreadsheets and prompted us to select expense- and sales-tracking methods. You can change spreadsheet column headings as you work, without losing data. While filling in spreadsheet details, Copy Right and Copy Down functions easily duplicate cell contents in other rows or columns. Unfortunately, there's no Undo function to correct simple errors.

MP develops a marketing plan based on your specific needs, complete with an easy-to-understand task list. As you work through the list, MP provides helpful marketing tips and task completion instructions. Some MP tasks, such as Create Target Markets, Create Expense Budget, and Create Sales Forecast, feature built-in spreadsheet tools that prepare projections about potential customers, annual growth rates, marketing expense budgets, and sales. We compared expected versus actual expenses and sales and graphed results in bar, stacked bar, line or pie charts. The Strategy Pyramid task helped us lay out business strategies, programs, and tactics in a pyramid chart. MP's Marketing Organization section covers business sales and organizational topics, but unfortunately, it doesn't have built-in organizational chart tools. It does allow you to import BMP- or WMF-formatted organizational charts prepared in other applications.

Although MP has no ready-made templates, it includes text examples with copy and paste tools to bring in selected excerpts. A built-in spellchecker proofreads your writing and totals the word count. A sample marketing plan assists with plan development, and the three printed manuals contain program instructions and information on successful marketing techniques. If the thought of developing an effective marketing plan makes you break out in a cold sweat, let Marketing Plus sweat the details for you instead.

DETAILS

Marketing Plus 2.2

Publisher: Palo Alto Software, 541-683-6162, 800-229-7526, www.palo-alto.com

Est. Street Price: $99 Requirements: Windows 3.1 or higher, 8MB of RAM, 6MB of hard-disk space