A sales plan is the first step towards defining your sales strategy, what your sales goals are and how you’re going to reach them.
You need to formalize who your target audience is, how your team will be structured, what types of reps you will hire, what communications and measurement tools you’ll use, your revenue goals and how you will measure performance.
A refined sales plan is a go-to resource for your reps. It helps them better understand their role, responsibilities, targets, tactics and methods. Done right, it empowers your reps to perform at their highest level. Because it’s loaded with detailed strategies and best-practices, your reps can consistently refer back for ongoing support.
In this article, we’ll outline what a sales plan is, why it’s important to create one and exactly what you should include in your own plan.
The seven steps to creating a sales plan:
Your sales plan is a roadmap that outlines how you’ll hit your revenue targets, who your target market is, the activities needed to achieve your goals and any roadblocks you may need to overcome along the way.
Many business leaders see the sales plan as an extension of the traditional business plan. The business plan contains strategic and revenue goals across the organization, while the sales plan lays out how to help achieve them within the sales organization.
An effective sales plan must communicate the following information:
Before we explore these areas in more depth, you must understand the benefits a sales plan brings. By understanding its purpose, you can more effectively communicate and secure boardroom buy-in.
The benefits of a sales plan
Most salespeople are driven by action. Because they focus on getting the job done by any means necessary, planning often gets neglected in favor of short-term results.
While this may help them hit quota, the downside is it’s unpredictable. Sales processes should be treated as a system with steps that can be optimized. If reps are doing wildly different things, it’s hard to uncover what’s working and what’s not. A good sales plan can keep them on track using repeatable systems.
This also means that everyone will work toward the same outcome. For example, if £250,000 worth of new business is your “true north” goal for next quarter, you can collaborate and ensure you achieve it together.
As you uncover the activities and methodologies that work best, you can refine your plan and flesh these out into playbooks. Adopt several different sales methodologies across the sales pipeline, focusing on activities that move the needle. Why? Because some methodologies work better than others in certain situations and reps may encounter various scenarios through the buying journey.
Each methodology should guide your reps on what to do throughout the sales process and how to push the deal along. The right methodology will meet your buyer’s needs and ease them through the pipeline.
For example, a SPIN Selling methodology is great for uncovering prospects’ pain points and getting to the heart of the problem, so it works best in the early discovery and qualification stages of the sales process. On the other hand, a Consultative Selling approach helps you reframe how your product or solution will uniquely solve problems, making it ideal for the later intent and evaluation stages.
Your sales plan should also shine a light on the tools and talent you need to adopt and nurture. Uncover answers to the following questions:
In order to answer these questions accurately, you must collect the right information and data. Your plan is likely to fail if you make assumptions about customer needs and market conditions.
Tailored sales plans for different functions
What period of time should your sales plan cover? Which functions and departments should it apply to? Each organization and function is different. When creating your sales plan, you have two options:
The direction you choose will depend on your headcount and how complex each function is. For example, if you have a sales development team with a large headcount (including managers), then having a dedicated sales plan is justified.
While the content will vary for each function, the framework will remain the same. With this in mind, let’s explore the seven components of an effective sales plan.
No matter their function or seniority, everyone in your organization must work toward the same goals.
This means understanding what your organization is trying to achieve, and where in the market you position yourself.
To understand this, sales leaders must be involved in all areas of the business strategy. Collaborating and working toward the same goals is impossible if they’re determined by only a select group of stakeholders.
Let’s assume you’re a sales director who has joined an organization to lead their sales efforts. To fully familiarize yourself with the company’s positioning, take the following steps:
This insight can provide context around how your company is currently positioned in the market. You’ll get to see what influences this information, providing you with your customer’s perspective.
Finally, speak with the team that was in charge of defining the company positioning. Come armed with a list of questions, and use this time to find out why they made certain decisions. Here are some examples:
How to communicate mission and positioning
Within this section of the sales plan, include the following information:
Now you know what your company stands for and why it exists in the market, you must define your revenue goals and other targets that sales are responsible for.
As mentioned earlier, sales goals are usually aligned with business goals. Revenue goals are established in the boardroom and it’s your job to achieve them.
This is why sales leaders and chief revenue officers (CRO) are a critical piece of the boardroom puzzle. They have the performance insights that will drive achievable goal-setting (and what it takes to achieve them).
Revenue goals will shape your sales strategy, use them to reverse engineer quotas, sales activity and the staff you need to execute them.
Use data on sales activity and past performance to calculate sales targets. You should break this down by pipeline stage and activity conducted by reps across all functions.
For example, how many cold emails does it take to generate a deal? What is the average LTV of your customer? Breaking down these numbers allows you to accurately forecast what it will take to achieve your new revenue goal.
It will also reveal the expertise needed for each activity, along with any required changes to your organizational structure (which we’ll explore in the next section).
How to communicate goals and targets
Your sales plan must clearly state the revenue goal everyone is working toward. This will ensure all team members are working together on the same page.
Break this revenue goal down further into sales targets and activity targets for your team. These might include:
Include targets for the time it takes to act on each activity. For example, past performance might indicate a higher appointment rate when lead response time is less than five hours. Using this insight, you can define service-level agreements (SLAs) for each activity.
Next, define targets for other metrics. This includes win rate and conversion rates between pipeline stages.
Activities are the specific actions you and your reps can control, while sales targets are the results provided by those activities. By setting goals for both, you can optimize each activity to further move the needle as you execute on your sales plan.
Within this section of the sales plan, include the following information:
With your goals defined, you can work on identifying the talent and expertise needed in order to achieve them.
Who you hire will depend on your business model and the activities needed to reach your goals. For example, a marketing agency that depends on strong relationships will benefit more from a business development executive than an SDR.
Use the targets established in the previous section to identify who you need to hire as part of your organizational structure. For example, if the average sales development rep can send 20 cold emails a day, and you need to send 200 in order to achieve your goals, you’ll need around ten reps in order to hit your targets.
Micromanaging should be avoided, but now is a good time to ask your existing teams to report on the time spent on certain activities. By keeping a timesheet, you’ll have an accurate forecast on how long certain activities take and the capacity of each rep.
How to communicate your sales organization and team structure
This section of your sales plan must justify who you need on your team and the budget required to hire them. Use the targets and activity-driven metrics mentioned in the previous section to quantify these needs.
Get specific by including the following information:
Include the information for each team member in a table in your sales plan. Example:
Visualizing each role helps all stakeholders understand who they’re hiring and the people they’re responsible for. It gives them an opportunity to collaborate on the plan and identify the responsibilities and qualities critical in ideal candidates.
Within this section of the sales plan, include the following information:
A sales plan is useless without knowing who to sell to. Having clearly defined customer personas and segments is critical for success.
Start with your target account criteria. Include the following information to clearly define which companies you’re looking to attract:
Collect as much insight as you can around their organizational challenges. This may include growth hurdles, hiring bottlenecks and even barriers created by legislation.
Within those target accounts are your buyers. These individuals have a need for your product and service, each with their own challenges and goals. The way you sell to each buyer will vary, even when they’re within the same organization.
How to communicate target audience and customer segments
Well-documented customer personas fueled by customer insights will help you steer your sales plan in the right direction. Strong personas include the following customer insights:
These insights will change as your business grows. Enterprise companies may wish to revisit their personas as they move upmarket. For startups, your target audience will evolve frequently as you find product-market fit.
It’s important to constantly revisit this part of your sales plan. Even if your goals and methodologies are the same, always have your finger on the pulse of your customer’s priorities.
Within this section of the sales plan, include the following information:
With the groundwork laid out, you can begin defining your sales approach. This includes the strategies, techniques and methodologies you’ll use to get your offering out to market.
This part of your sales plan may end up being the largest. It will outline every practical area of your sales strategy, including:
Start by mapping out each stage of your sales process. What are the steps needed to guide a prospect through your deal flow?
Traditionally, sales stages are broken down into nine categories:
Not all of these stages will be relevant to your organization. For example, a SaaS company that relies on inbound leads may do much of the heavy lifting during the initial meeting and demo.
Map out your sales process to identify each step. Get together with other stakeholders to figure out what it takes to close new deals. Your sales map should look something like this:
How to communicate sales strategies and methodologies
At this stage, many of your playbooks may not exist. The purpose of the plan is to forecast what you’ll need in order to achieve your new goals.
Break each sales stage down into separate activities, along with the stakeholder who is responsible for them.
With your sales activities laid out, you can research the techniques and methodologies needed to execute on them. For example, if you sell a complex product with lengthy sales cycles, you could adopt a SPIN selling methodology to identify pain-points and craft the best solution for leads.
To summarize, each stage must be broken up into the following sections:
Finally, use these activities and stages to form your sales playbooks. This will help you structure your training plan, providing a reference that reps can rely on for guidance.
Within this section of the sales plan, include the following information:
You have the “who” and the “what.” Now you must figure out “when” your sales plan will be put in place.
A structured sales execution clearly communicates when key milestones will be reached. It must outline when certain projects and activities will be complete, as well as recruitment timelines across each quarter.
The order in which you implement your plan will also depend on your priorities. Many sales organizations prefer to front-load the activity that will make a bigger impact on the bottom line.
For example, upon analyzing your current sales process and strategy, you may find your existing customers are a rich source of qualified leads. Therefore, it would make sense to prioritize account management activities that nurture more of these relationships using a structured referral program.
You must also consider how recruitment will affect workload across the rest of your team. Hire too quickly, and you may end up spending more time getting new reps up to speed and neglecting your existing team. This can make a big impact on culture and deal flow.
How to communicate your sales execution plan
By prioritizing each activity and goal, you can create a plan that balances short-term results with long-term investment.
Segment each stage of your plan by month and quarter. Start with a rough schedule detailing ballpark deadlines. This should include key hires, process implementation and any one-off projects that need completing.
Collaborate on this schedule with the boardroom before setting it in stone. Get all stakeholders involved in deciding when tasks should be completed. When applying this to your sales plan, use GANTT charts and tables to visualize projects and key milestones.
Within this section of the sales plan, include the following information:
Finally, your plan must include details on how performance is measured. Outline your most important sales metrics and activities, along with the technology needed to track them.
Performance metrics can indicate the effectiveness of your entire sales process. Your chosen metrics typically fall into two categories:
The metrics you select must closely align with your goals and sales activities. For example, at the appointment setting stage, you might measure the number of demos conducted.
Each team needs its own sales dashboard to ensure they’re hitting their targets. Sales development reps will have different priorities to account executives, so it’s critical they have the tools to focus on what’s important to them.
How to communicate sales performance metrics
Structure this part of your plan by breaking down each sales stage. Within these sections, list out the metrics needed to ensure you’re running a healthy sales pipeline.
Assign each metric to a member of your team, ensuring they’re measured against them as KPIs. For example, a sales rep could be measured against:
Doing this will help you run a smooth operation as soon as you implement your new sales plan. Finally, research and evaluate the technology needed to accurately measure these metrics. A good CRM is the best system to use for bringing your data together.
Within this section of the sales plan, include the following information:
An effective sales plan is an invaluable asset for your sales team.
Writing it helps you to define your sales strategy, targets, metrics and processes, while distributing it helps your reps understand what is expected of them and how to reach their goals.
That’s because providing supportive, comprehensive resources is the best way to motivate your team and inspire hard work. When you do the work to build a solid foundation, you equip your reps with everything they need to succeed.
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