How can you write an effective Sales Plan?

Answer 1

Developing an effective sales plan is crucial to getting the results you want for your business. Whether you are self employed and selling your own services, a small business owner, or a sales manager for a large organisation, the steps to developing your sales business plan are the same. Follow these 3 steps and prepare a plan that will turn your goals into actions.

3 steps to developing a sales plan:

1. Define your goal, the desired outcome
2. Plan to achieve the desired result
3. Turn plans into actions

Step 1- Define your goal

Start to develop your plan by setting a goal, an objective that you want to achieve. Many sales operations make the mistake of basing their plan on what they think their sales team can sell. Turn this on its head and build a picture of what your most desired outcome is for the next 12 months. What would be a perfect year for you or your business. Take into account all costs, and maximum capabilities of production and delivery of your product or provision of your service. Think about both sales order numbers, and revenue and profit figures. Now write down your desired outcome and you can develop a sales plan around this exciting goal.

At this point do not worry about any constraints such as budgets, size of sales team, or sales prospect numbers. The above exercise is only to establish what your best possible outcome is for the coming sales year. At the end of step 3 we will check on how achievable the sales plan is and then make any necessary changes. Because you started with your most desired outcome this is a sales plan led by desired results, not a sales plan restricted by what you think can be done.

Step 2 - Develop a sales plan to achieve the desired outcome

Step 2 of how to develop a sales plan is to focus on what you have to do to achieve your plan. These are not clearly defined actions, they are the smaller objectives that will work towards achieving the desired outcome. So if your goal in step 1 was to make a certain amount of revenue or profit, now you set the smaller objectives, such as sales targets, or the number of new customers that will give you that goal.

In this step you look at smaller detail. For example, if you are going to increase sales where is the best place for that increase to come from. Is one sales area going to be more productive than another. If you have set a financial goal will one sales area be more economical to service compared to others. Consider where and how you will get your best return on investment. To develop the best sales plan do not get held back by any restrictions at this stage. We will look at how realistic your sales plan is in step 3.

Step 3 - Turn your sales plan into actions

Step 3 of how to develop a sales plan, and here we draw up an action plan to achieve all the smaller objectives from step 2 that will give us our most desired outcome from step 1. This is the fun part where you can see how you can achieve your most wanted business goals with your sales plan.

Go through your list of minor objectives from step 2 and next to each one assign a set of actions that will make it happen. So if one of your objectives was to increase sales by 10% this is where you decide how you are going to do that. You could have to decide between increasing sales from existing resources by 10%, or by adding to those resources with additional sales people or marketing campaigns to get that additional 10%. Step 3 of the sales plan is also where you delegate the actions to the best people or departments. If you are a small business owner or you are self employed,you might want to consider outsourcing some of the actions.

When you have a list of the actions you want to move forward with you need to make them SMART. If you are unfamiliar with this acronym it stands for: Specific - Measurable - Achievable - Realistic - Time bound. It basically means that you write your sales plan actions so that they are specific and targeted at your objectives. The results will be measurable so you can monitor your success. They are achievable with the resources you have available. Your goals, and the expected results of your actions, are realistic. And, you have set timescales within which the actions will be achieved.

3 Steps to developing a sales plan

Developing a sales plan using these 3 steps will open up your thinking and base your plan on goals that are your most desired outcome, not a plan based on what you do now plus some additions. It lets you come up with real goals, and go outside of the usual constraints and restrictions that hold back many corporate organisations.