How to Create a Sales Plan?

Do you have a sales plan? Entrepreneurs, sales executives, and sales managers all benefit from writing sales plans — whether for their business, department, or team. You must know where you’re going before you can hit your key targets, and from there, you must break down the strategies and tactics you’ll use to do it.

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’ target customers, revenue goals, team structure, and the strategies and resources necessary for achieving its targets.

What are the goals of an effective sales plan?

The purpose of your company’s sales plan is to:

Communicate your company’s goals and objectives.

Provide strategic direction.

Outline roles and responsibilities.

Monitor your sales team’s progress.

Monitor your sales team’s progress.

You can’t expect your sales team to work well if they don’t know your company’s goals and objectives. It is necessary to make sure the goals are clear and realistic. As they change over time, ensure you regularly communicate your strategy to the entire team.

Provide strategic direction.

A sales strategy is vital to selling your products or services. To execute your plan, your company needs to provide direction. Should your employees focus on email conversions versus social media conversions this quarter? Are you boosting your efforts on LinkedIn instead of Facebook? Your business needs to provide your team with guidance to be effective.

Outline roles and responsibilities.

Your company’s sales plan should outline the roles and responsibilities for your sales team and leadership. The benefits of this include efficient task delegation, improved collaboration, overlap reduction, and increased accountability.

Monitor your sales team’s progress.

Your sales team is the driving force behind your strategy. If they do well, so does the company. Unfortunately, the alternative is also correct. Monitoring your team’s progress on organizational goals allows you to manage your objectives. It ensures you have the people and tools in place to be successful.

Tips for Creating an Effective Sales Plan

We’ve gone over what you should include in a sales plan, including some examples and mockups.

Learn some tips and tricks for creating a sales plan that helps you hit target numbers and exceed your higher-ups’ expectations.

• Use industry trends to strengthen your plan. When presenting your sales plan to a stakeholder, use industry trends to highlight why your plan will be effective.
• Specify the technology you’ll use to track success. You can do this for internal reference or let stakeholders know how you’ll measure success. Some tools you can consider include CRM and dashboard software.
• Support your budget proposal with hard facts and data. If you’re creating a budget as a part of your plan, support it with previous performance data and sales forecasts.
• Create different plans for each team. If you create a sales plan for business development, inbound sales, outbound sales, field sales, and so forth, you can get even more granular and specific in your goals and KPIs.
• Get marketing’s input. Marketing and sales alignment is critical for the success of your sales plan. The more input you have from marketing, the more you can align your lead generation, prospecting, and nurturing efforts.
• Talk with your sales reps to understand their challenges. It might be easy to get lost in numbers and forecasts. But it’s important to know your sales representative’s day-to-day to understand what will and will not prove effective or feasible.
• Complete an in-depth competitive analysis. You must know what the competition is doing well to create a plan that nudges your company in that direction.