Sales planning is a fundamental component of sound selling. After all, you can‘t structure an effective sales effort if you don’t have, well, structure. Everyone — from the top to the bottom of a sales org — benefits from having solid, actionable, thoughtfully organized sales plans in place.
What is a Sales Plan
A sales plan lays out your objectives, high-level tactics, target audience, and potential obstacles. It's like a traditional business plan but focuses specifically on your sales strategy. A business plan lays out your goals — a sales plan describes exactly how you'll make those happen.
Sales plans often include information about the business's target customers, revenue goals, team structure, and the strategies and resources necessary for achieving its targets.
Sales Planning Process
Sales planning isn‘t (and shouldn’t) be limited to the actual sales plan document it produces. If that document is going to have any substance or practical value, it needs to be the byproduct of a thorough, well-informed, high-level strategy.
When sales planning, you have some key steps you need to cover — including:
Gather sales data and search for trends.
Define your objectives.
Determine metrics for success.
Assess the current situation.
Start sales forecasting.
Identify gaps.
Ideate new initiatives.
Involve stakeholders.
Outline action items.
Step 1: Gather sales data and search for trends
To plan for the present and future, your company needs to look to the past. What did sales look like during the previous year? What about the last five years? Using this information can help you identify trends in your industry. While it's not foolproof, it helps establish a foundation for your sales planning process.
Step 2: Define your objectives
How do you know your business is doing well if you have no goals? As you can tell from its placement on this list, defining your goals and objectives is one of the first steps you should take in your sales planning process. Once you have them defined, you can move forward with executing them.
Step 3: Determine metrics for success
Every business is different. One thing we can all agree on is that you need metrics for success. These metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs). What are you going to use to determine if your business is successful? KPIs differ based on your medium, but standard metrics are gross profit margins, return on investment (ROI), daily web traffic users, conversion rate, and more.
Step 4: Assess the current situation
How is your business fairing right now? This information is relevant to determining how your current situation holds up to the goals and objectives you set during step two. What are your roadblocks? What are your strengths? Create a list of the obstacles hindering your success. Identify the assets you can use as an advantage. These factors will guide you as you build your sales plan.
Step 5: Start sales forecasting
Sales forecasting is an in-depth report that predicts what a salesperson, team, or company will sell weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. While it is finicky, it can help your company make better decisions when hiring, budgeting, prospecting, and setting goals.
Step 6: Identify gaps
When identifying gaps in your business, consider what your company needs now and what you might need in the future. First, identify the skills you feel your employees need to reach your goal. Second, 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: Ideate new initiatives
Many industry trends are cyclical. They phase in and out of “style.” As you build your sales plan, ideate new initiatives based on opportunities you may have passed on in 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: Involve stakeholders
Stakeholders are individuals, groups, or organizations with a vested interest in your company. They are typically investors, employees, or customers and often have deciding power in your business. Towards the end of your sales planning process, involve stakeholders from departments that affect your outcomes, such as marketing and product. It leads to an efficient and actionable sales planning process.
Step 9: Outline action items
Once you have implemented this strategy to create your sales planning process, the final step is outlining your action items. Using your company's capacity and quota numbers, build a list of steps that take you through the sales process. Examples of action items are writing a sales call script, identifying industry competitors, or strategizing new incentives or perks.
How to Write a Sales Plan
Create a mission statement.
Define your team's roles and responsibilities.
Identify your target market.
Outline your tools, software, and resources.
Analyze your position in your industry.
Plan your marketing strategy.
Develop your prospecting strategy.
Create an action plan.
List your goals.
Set your budget.
1. Create a mission statement
Start your sales plan with a mission statement — a concise, straightforward distillation of what your business hopes to accomplish from a fundamental, more idealistic perspective. You don't want to get too hung up on detailing the “how” behind your business here.
Offer your vision — not your “About Us” page.
2. Define your team's roles and responsibilities
Next, describe who is on your team and what their roles are. Perhaps you manage five salespeople and work closely with a sales enablement professional and a sales ops specialist. If you‘re planning on adding headcount, include the number of employees, their job titles, and when you're planning to bring them on the team.
3. Identify your target market
Whether you're writing your first sales plan or your 15th, knowing your target demographic is crucial. What do your best customers look like? Do they all belong to a specific industry? Exceed a certain size? Struggle with the same challenge?
Keep in mind you might have different buyer personas for different products. For example, Pipedrive's salespeople might primarily sell marketing software to CMOs and sales software to sales directors.
4. Outline your tools, software, and resources
You should also include a description of your resources — and that's not necessarily limited to the software you might be leveraging. You should detail key tools like the CRM you‘re using, but don’t ignore resources like the budget you might have for a sales contest. You should also address resources like training, documentation, and sales collateral.
5. Analyze your position in your industry
Now, name your competitors. Explain how your products compare, where theirs are stronger than yours, and vice versa. In addition, discuss their pricing versus yours. You should also discuss market trends. If you're a SaaS company, you should note what vertical-specific software is becoming more popular. If you sell ads, mention the rise in programmatic mobile advertising. Try to predict how these changes will influence your business.
6. Plan your marketing strategy
In this section, describe your pricing and any promotions you're planning on running. What key actions will you take to increase brand awareness and generate leads? Note the impact on sales.
Here's a mock version:
- Product A: Increasing price from $40 to $45 on Feb. 2 (2% reduction in monthly sales)
- Product B: Free upgrade if you refer another customer from Jan. 1-20 (20% increase in monthly sales)
- Product C: Decreasing price from $430 to $400 on March 1 (15% increase in monthly sales)
- Product D: No change
7. Develop your prospecting strategy
How will your sales team receive and qualify the leads generated by your marketing strategy? Don't forget to include the criteria prospects should meet before sales reps reach out.
8. Create an action plan
Once you‘ve outlined where you want to go, you must figure out how you'll get there. This section summarizes your game plan for hitting your revenue targets. Try to be thorough but concise when detailing these steps — and try to support any items you detail with a clear, viable timeline.
9. List your goals
Most sales goals are revenue-based. For example, you might set a total target of $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Alternatively, you can set a volume goal. That could be 100 new customers or 450 sales. Make sure your objective is realistic; otherwise, your entire sales plan will be largely useless.
Factor in your product's price, total addressable market (TAM), market penetration, and resources (including your sales headcount and marketing support).
Your goal should also be closely tied to your high-level business goals. For example, suppose the company is trying to move upmarket. In that case, your goal might be “Acquire 20 Enterprise logos” rather than “Sell X in new business” (because the latter will encourage you to solely chase deals rather than focus on the right type of customers).
10. Set your budget
Describe the costs associated with hitting your sales goals. That usually includes:
- Pay (salary and commission)
- Sales training
- Sales tools and resources
- Contest prizes
- Team bonding activities
- Travel costs
- Food
Compare the sales plan budget to your sales forecast for accurate budgeting.
If you want to take your plan to the next level, read on to learn some tips for creating a highly effective sales plan.
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