To run a business successfully, you need to have a plan for each process and workflow. Departments and teams need to have guidelines to follow and work needs to be standardized. One of the most important plans for any business is its sales plan. Here are six tips for creating a great sales plan.
1. Determine Your Goals And Action Items
A good sales plan starts with your company’s sales goals and the action items necessary to reach or exceed those goals. Consider your business’s sales needs and what you want to be able to achieve. Collect data from past sales to develop predictions for your sales potential. Then you can begin to determine likely goals and figure out what actions you would need to take to reach them.
2. Choose a Sales Plan Type
There isn’t only one type of sales plan. Each business’s plan is unique to that company’s circumstances and needs, but there are several templates you can incorporate into yours. They include account plans, territory plans, annual sales plans and long-range sales plans. Account plans are meant for individual sales representatives to use for their sales strategies. They’re segments of larger sales plans. Territory plans segment customers based on meaningful criteria, such as geography, industry and customer size. Annual sales plans involve yearly sales decisions and targets. Long-term sales plans lay out your company’s long-term sales goals.
3. Identify Co6 Tips for Creating a Great Sales Plan
sts And Decide on a Budget
You cannot develop a great sales plan in isolation. Not only should you incorporate input from multiple sources and request feedback throughout the development process, but you should also keep costs in mind and develop a budget for your plan. Costs can include marketing, employee salaries, purchasing tools and daily operations. Your budget should incorporate all actual and potential costs. Consider how much you plan to spend monthly and annually and then settle on an appropriate percentage of revenue on your sales budget. You can adjust that percentage as necessary.
4. Develop Metrics
You will need to revisit your sales plan periodically to ensure it is still successful and relevant to your business and goals. To assist in regular reviews, develop metrics. You can use metrics to measure the overall success rate of your sales plan and determine what aspects of it you may need to revise or improve. Commonly implemented metrics include the total number of leads your sales representatives have generated, the customer retention rate and comparisons between sales quotas and results. You can input this data into an analytics platform to use immediately or store it for future use.
5. Include All Relevant Procedures And Items for Your Business
Because each sales plan is unique, each one requires different procedures and items to be successful. However, there are certain sales plan aspects that are universal or commonly included. You should study these procedures and items. If you think they would be beneficial to you, include them in yours. They include sales forecasts, product road maps, coordination between sales and marketing, inventory organization, and targeted verticals and accounts.
6. Define Roles And Choose Appropriate Tools
Your sales team members must know the plan and their roles within that plan. Clearly define roles and make sure each team member is acutely aware of his or her position and what he or she must do to help make the sales plan successful. You should also provide your sales team with the tools they need to follow the sales plan and achieve your business’s goals, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Project Management (PM) platforms. Tools are essential for the efficiency and accuracy of your sales workflows.
Make sure your sales plan makes logical sense and is easy for employees to follow and use. It should also fit well with all your other plans and strategies. Your sales plan should cover all aspects of sales and be flexible enough that you can easily update or change it when you need to.
