Sales planning is an essential component of sound selling. After all, your sales effort would be zero if you don’t have, well, structure. Everyone – from the top to the bottom of a sales company – benefits from having solid, and actionable thoughtfully organized sales plans in place. A perfect sales plan offers clarity and direction for your sales team, covering – prospects you’re trying to reach, goals you’re trying to hit, and insights you’re trying to deliver. Here’s a complete guide on a sales plan, its process, and tips to create an effective sales plan.
What is a sales plan?
A sales plan is essential for putting your objectives, and high-level tactics into action for targeting audience and solving potential obstacles. It contains information about the business’s target customers, team structure, revenue goals, and the strategies and resources necessary for accomplishing its targets. Goals of a sales plan cover:
- Monitor your sales team’s progress.
- Define roles and responsibilities.
- Provide strategic direction.
- Communicate your company’s goals and objectives.
Sales planning process
When sales planning, you have some key steps you need to cover, including:
Step 1: Collect sales data and search for trends
To plant the present and future, you have to see and analyze trends of past. What did sales look like during the previous years? While it’s not foolproof, it helps you create a foundation of your sales planning process.
Step 2: Set your objectives
How do you know your business is up or down if you have no goals? So, clearly define your objectives so that you can move forward for executing them.
Step 3: Determine metrics
Every business is different from others. A business success is achieved from metrics, which are key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs difference is based on your medium, but standard metrics are conversion rate, daily web traffic users, return on investment (ROI), gross profit margins, and more.
Step 4: Study the current situation
How is your business running right now? What are your roadblocks? What are your strengths? These are some of the major questions that you should find the answers by analyzing the current situation of your business.
Step 5: Begin with sales forecasting
Sales forecasting is an in-depth report that contains information on what a salesperson, team, or company will sell weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. It helps your organization make better decisions when hiring, budgeting, prospecting, and setting objectives.
Step 6: Identify gaps
Consider what your company needs now and what it might need in the future, when identifying gaps in your business. Find the skills you feel your employees need to reach your goal, and evaluate the skills of your current employees. Once you have this information, you can train employees or hire new ones to fill the gaps.
Step 7: Take new initiatives
As you build your sales plan, take new initiatives based on opportunities you may have passed on is previous years. If your business exclusively focused on word-of-mouth and social media marketing in the past, consider adding webinars or special promotions to your plan.
Step 8: Final actions
Once you have implemented strategies to create your sales planning process, the final step is outlining final actions. Based on your company requirements, build a list of steps like writing a sales call script, identifying industry competitors, or strategizing new incentives or perks.
How to write a sales plan?
Your sales plan should be clearly defined. Develop your marketing strategy. Create an action plan. List your goals. Set your budget. Here’s a full list of methods for writing a sales plan.
- Define your mission: Begin with your sales plan by creating a mission, comprising what your business hopes to accomplish from a fundamental, more idealistic perspective.
- Know your team’s roles and responsibilities: Define who is on your team and what their roles are. For example, Joan is the Director of Sales Development, Jim is the Account Executive, and Mathew, Don, and Bobby are Sales Development Representatives.
- Identify your target market: Whether you’re writing your first sales plan or your 15th, you must know your target demographics. What do your customers look like? Do they all belong to a specific industry? What is the size of the industry? Are there any challenges? You must have specific answers to all these crucial questions.
- Know your tools, software, and resources: You should list down the tools you have like CRM and sales tools you’re using, but don’t ignore resources like the budget you might have for a sales contest.
- Study your position in your industry: Know and compare your position of with your competitors. Find how your product, pricing, and market trends are different from others. Do changes if required and predict how these changes will influence your business.
- Develop your marketing strategy: Describe the pricing and promotions you’re planning on running. What key actions will you take to increase brand awareness and generate leads? How you can convert leads into prospects/sales? Note the impact on sales.
- Create an action plan: Once you’ve outlined where you want to go, you must understand how you’ll get there. Summarize your game plan for hitting your target numbers.
- Define your goals: Most sales goals are revenue-based. Make sure your objective is realistic; otherwise, your entire sales plan will be largely useless.
- Set your budget: Describe the costs associated with hitting your sales goals. That usually includes – pay, sales tools, contest prizes, sales training, team bonding activities, travel costs, food, and others.
The last words
As technology changes from time to time, so do the market strategies too. You should periodically review and update it as time goes on to ensure you’re focused and on track.
