For a business to reach the true heights of its potential, planning is essential. Incorporating a sales plan into your business will act as a map to measure success and help grow your business efficiently to reach organisational goals. A sales plan is particularly important as it can greatly impact a business’s revenue and profits. A statistic shared by FinancesOnline shows that 50% of high-performing sales teams have a 12-month view of their plans, while 10% map out the next three years. In this article, we will look at how you can set up a sales plan for your business, to grow your business in a measurable sustainable way.
A sales plan is the strategy of how a business’s sales team will meet organisational goals by hitting sales targets and generating revenue. The information in a sales plan may include revenue goals, team structures, target audience and different resources necessary for achieving targets.
A sales plan may be confused with a business plan, however, these are different things. The best way to differentiate these two plans is to understand that a business plan will show a business’s goals including details on how the marketing and HR departments should operate, while a sales plan will describe the steps of how your goals will be achieved by the sales department.
Incorporating a sales plan into your business will have some important benefits that will help you grow and reach your highest potential. These benefits include:
Mitigate your risks – A sales plan will help you identify the risks that your sales team may face when moving customers through the sales funnel. This means that you will be more prepared for challenges, helping you overcome them efficiently, and leading to more productivity and higher revenues.
Have a guided sales team – Your sales team will be guided by a sales plan. This means that they will know the level at which they should be performing, the tasks that they should prioritise and more. As a result, your sales team will be more productive and efficient when winning deals, helping increase revenue across your business.
Monitor your team’s progress – A sales plan will help management monitor their team’s progress. With the sales plan incorporating time-based goals for representatives to meet, it becomes a much easier process for management to track a sales team’s performance. Management will be able to measure the sales plan’s progress and adjust the sales team’s structure and personnel if needed to stay on track to achieving organisational goals.
To create a successful sales plan, multiple steps must be followed that include:
This section will look at each of these points in detail to help you create the best sales plan for your business.
The first step for you to create the perfect sales plan happens before you plan for the future. Instead, you must assess your current sales situation e.g., a market audit, considering sales data that has been recorded from how your business has been performing in the past and present. This is so you can identify any gaps that may be in your sales process that will need to be addressed in the sales plan, as well as other areas to focus on. Identifying this information will help you create the best sales plan tailored to your business.
Now that you have a clear understanding of how your sales team currently operates, it is time to determine the clear mission statement of your sales plan. This statement should be an overview of what your organisational goals are with broad details of what your sales team will need to do to help achieve these goals.
As well as a clear mission statement, more in-depth strategic details must be outlined for the sales team to view. These strategic details should include information such as what communication channels your sales team must focus on, e.g., focus on email nurturing. It is important to have multiple different communication channel strategies in your plan as they will all help your performance. An interesting statistic presented by Truelist shows that 73% of sales representatives who used social selling in their strategy met their quota 23% more often than representatives who do not. As a result, your sales team will have more guidance with the strategic elements of their approach, helping them perform at a higher level and keeping your sales team aligned with each other.
Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-bound (SMART) objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) are very important to include in a sales plan. Time-based goals are very important for sales teams to perform at their highest efficiency. A sales plan will have time-based goals for staff to see, helping incentivize them and guiding them to the level that they should perform to meet these goals.
For your sales team to be successful, they must have a clear understanding of their target market. This means there should be a clear description of the target market that the sales team will be interacting with. This could be presented in the way of a customer profile for the sales team to view, helping them understand their customers so they are able to give more personalised service, increasing the likelihood of them winning more deals.
Many sales teams use software to help them operate at the highest efficiency and productivity possible. This software can include
CRM software – Helps increase the efficiency of your sales team while increasing your data visibility helping management and leadership. This will improve your customer relationships and lead to an increase in the number of sales your business will make.
Business process automation software – Automates sales tasks, e.g., automatically assigning leads, to increase the efficiency and productivity of your business.
Communication software – This will help your sales team communicate with each other and management in a more streamlined way, promoting collaboration and improving decision-making time.
The structure of your sales team should be clearly outlined. A sales team’s roles and responsibilities will be clear for each sales representative to view, helping them understand what is expected of them and how they will function within the business. This will help a sales team’s efficiency and performance within your business.
Once your sales plan is created, it must now carefully be tracked by management and leadership. Regular checks on KPI progress, sales numbers and revenue are necessary to make sure that the sales plan is being followed. Your sales plan should now be able to be developed and evolved based on how your business is performing, as well as how the market evolves. You must always evolve your sales plan as the market will continually evolve, meaning if you do not make alterations, you may fall behind in your market. By altering your plan based on new information that presents itself as time passes, you give your business the best chance of staying in a competitive position in the market and increasing your sales.
TEB is a sales automation CRM software that will help your business reach its goals and perform at its full potential. With TEB, you can stay on track with your plans with increased efficiency and productivity. TEB does this with multiple key features such as:
If you would like to find out more about how TEB can help your business perform to its highest level, get in contact with us to schedule a demo here.
