The most important function for a manager is the development of a ‘sales plan’. For a sales manager, a sales plan will simply allow you to achieve your goals.

The sales manager does this with a strategic sales plan. This plan outlines the strategies and tactics the sales team will use to achieve the sales goals.

(Updated January 4, 2018.

‘Developing Your Strategic Sales Plan’, Part One and Part Two are the most important and listened to Sales Management Workshop podcasts. ‘Developing Your Strategic Sales Plan Part One was the second podcast I recorded. I didn’t feel the information was complete, However, I didn’t rerecord the podcast, but added some additional information in the show notes which are the result of responses from our listeners.)

In the first podcast, “Introduction to Sales Management Workshop,” I talked a little about leadership. Leadership is a subject we will often talk about in this podcast series. A major component of leadership is planning. If you don’t take the time to develop an actual plan for your team, you are simply relying on luck.

Developing Your Strategic Sales Plan

Sales planning starts with numbers. You have been given the sales numbers for the year. As you review the numbers, one critical truth gets revealed: the health and future of the company is in your hands. The sales numbers represent your goal.

Now that you know the goal, your job as the sales manager is to develop a plan to insure that this goal becomes a reality.

What Makes Up A Strategic Sales Plan?

Your strategic sales plan is your roadmap to achieving your goals. The plan will give you the opportunity to develop your strategy, and define and implement your tactics.

Your Strategic Sales Plan might consist of four components:

The Strategic Sales Plan: Focuses on your strategy.
The Sales Process: Is your approach to selling your product or service.
The Territory Planner: Focuses on your service area including salespeople’s individual territories.
The Major Account Planning: Strategies and tactics that maintain existing customers and increase the account’s value to your organization.

The Planning Process

Planning is an investment in your sales management future. Every year, you have an average of 260 to 262 workdays.

The planning process could entail the use of 6 or more of those days. That’s less than 2.5% of the workdays in a year. Not much when you consider the advantages that planning could bring to your team.

Most of the time I use a 11-step process when developing a sales plan. Your first task is to look at the 11 steps and determine who you have inside or outside the organization to help you. As you review the steps, look for help based on their expertise with the subject matter.

The 11 Stage Sales Planning Process

I refer to the first four stages of the planning process as “Understanding the playing field:”

1. Establish your ‘time line’ and your goals
2. Sales team structure
3. Define your market (Territory)
4. Know your competition – (Competitive Intelligence)

The second set of stages will allow you to develop a focus for achieving your goals and a metric you can use to insure that you stay on track. This includes:

5. Defining your ‘USP’ – (Unique Selling Proposition)
6. ‘Profile’ your ideal customers
7. Collecting relevant sales and customer data
8. Interpreting the data & evaluating team sales ratios
9. Developing tactics
10. Writing the ‘plan’
11. Scheduling specific times for quarterly plan evaluation

In this episode, we look at steps 1, 2, 3, and 4. They represent the playing field.

Building Your Sales Planning Team

I already mentioned finding additional expertise to help in the planning process. Don’t attempt to tackle this planning process alone. Get others involved. This could be individuals from both inside and outside the organization. Build your planning team by thinking about those and their departments who could realistically add value to the process. Think about:

With which departments does the sales team interact?
Will you bring in a consultant or coach to help guide you through the process?
Which vendors could help with the process?
What senior management should be included?

Who’s On The Planning Team?

Let’s build the Team. As you plan out your team, think about what roles you will select for each team member. Below, I’ve made some recommendations that the different roles could play. The most important position is the project manager. Also, look for those people who could help:

Sales planning project manager
Outside consultant or experienced coach
Research on the market
Product information consultant
Competitive analyst
Sales data collection
Sales process development consultant
A developer of your USP
Writer of the plan

I. Establish Your Time Line And Your Goals

What period of time will the plan cover? I recommend a one-year plan. That plan would be based on the goals for that year. An example of your sales team goals could be exceeding the team’s revenue target of 1.3 million by 20%. This could be accomplished by:

Increasing sales to existing customers by 15%
Adding 26 new major accounts
Increasing the number of new prospects by 20%

Your sales plan would be based on achieving this set of goals. Yours could be a lot different, covering multiple product lines and market channels etc.

If you have multiple product lines, place a quota for each of your product lines.

If you sell service contracts, you should also have well-defined sales targets and quotesl.

No matter how your offering appears, the process is the same. Most importantly, have defined goals and design your plan to achieve them.

A note: I’ve had discussions with managers and owners who had neither sales quotas nor targets for their sales people. They say, “We don’t set quotas our people just go out and sell.”

Not having quotas is a mistake. Every business should have a budget and target revenue numbers. If you don’t, how do you know how to manage your business? Your job is to establish the team’s sales goals.

II. Sales Team Structure

How is your sales team constructed? Salespeople can be divided into two camps:

Hunters that like to go out and find new clients
Farmers, who are best at handling existing clients

What types of salespeople are best for your organization?

Do you need most of the team capable of developing new clients? This would require mastering 2 disciplines:

Lead generation and handling
Presentation, demonstration, and closing

Do you need most of the team comfortable working with existing customers? This would require them to master 2 disciplines:

Presentation, demonstration, and closing
Client development and account penetration

Do you need most of the team to be strong at prospecting, making the initial sale, and maintaining the customer? This then would require them to master 3 disciplines:

Lead generation and handling
Presentation, demonstration, and closing
Client development and account penetration

We all know salespeople that assure you that they’re good at all three disciplines. I can tell you that I did all three and maybe you did as well. Just because we did it doesn’t mean it’s the most effective way to develop business. Each of these three disciplines requires a different skill set to be truly effective.

Lead Generation

Lead generation and handling requires a strong ‘hunter’ mentality. Whether you generate leads with cold calls, on the phone, with direct mail or email, this is a special skillset. This is a true ‘hunter’. How many of your current salespeople are true hunters who could successfully fill this role?

Presentation, Demonstration, Closing

Presentation, demonstration, and closing represent another special skillset. Some sales strategies aim for the ‘one call’ close. Other strategies could involve many sales calls. A more complex sale could require sales people who can manage multiple stakeholders and decision makers. Whatever the case, if they get the chance to present and demonstrate, they have a high probability of getting the deal. How many of your current salespeople are true closers who could fill this role?

Client Development

Salespeople responsible for client development must be capable of establishing relationships and maintaining them. These are the ‘consultant’ sales people. They can gain the trust of the client. They have the ability to evaluate their short, medium, and long term needs. They can provide informed solutions. This is the definition of the ‘Farmer’. How many of your current salespeople are true farmers?

I see many companies with the misconception that all salespeople are both hunters and farmers.

Some salespeople can do both. Yet once their account base begins to grow, they spend all their time with existing clients. It also means that new business development will suffer.

You can’t generate exceptional results unless you have the right people doing the job. In an ideal world, I would build my sales team with three distinct types:

Lead Generators – focused on developing and managing lead flow
New Business Development Managers – focused on bringing new clients into the business
Account Managers – focused on major accounts for retention and additional sales

That is real a sales team. Each member of the team brings a strength the others may not have. Think about it. Why have a highly technical salesperson knocking on doors? Is that the best use of their time and ability?

III. Define Your Market

How are your individual sales territories designed? Are your territories made up of:

A series of states?
A series of counties?
A city?
A number of zip codes?
A set of vertical markets?

Whatever the case, proper territory design is crucial to sales teams success. To properly design your territories, you need to understand:

Your products and services
Your ideal customers
The projected revenue of each territory
How your sales people would manage their territory

Think about what is needed in a defined territory. Suppose your ideal prospect is a company with 100+ employees. How many companies with 100+ employees to are needed to:

Support 1 salesperson
Produce the desired revenue

Hypothetically your ideal customer is a hotel of more than two stories. How many hotels are needed to support the sales efforts and revenue expectations?

A good place to start is with census data. This is a place to find good information about your territory. You can find lots of demographic information on the census website.

For more information on territory planning take a look at ‘Sales Territory Planning, Design, and Territory Management.’

IV. Know Your Competition

It is important to know the playing field and all the players. The players would be your competition. Almost every prospect you see will have one main question: Who will they do business with?

Will It Be You Or Your Competition?

Collect as much information as you can about the competition. Start by developing a list of the top five competitors as you work your territory. Find out:

Is the company national or local?
How long has the company been in business?
Who runs the organization?
What are their strengths?
What are their weaknesses?
What is their USP?
How would you rate their salesperson?

Most of the information on your competition should come from your salespeople. Aside from the initial information gathering stage, I would suggest that you make reviewing the competition a monthly activity.

Conclusion

Planning is the key. We’ve covered the first four parts of the sales planning process. I hope this information is helpful as you take your leadership to the next level. In the next podcast, “Developing Your Strategic Sales Plan – Part Two”, we’ll cover steps 5 – 11.

Affiliate Links To Books I Recommend

(The links below are my affiliate link to Amazon. I will receive a small commission when you purchase an item using this link. Thanks.)

Sun Tzu: War and Management : Application to Strategic Management and Thinking,

by Chow-Hou Wee

This is an excellent book on strategy. Published in 1996, it looks the relationship between Japanese and American business practices through a discussion of the world’s oldest military treatise.

HBR’S 10 Must Reads: The Essentials,

by Harvard Business Review.

These are the 10 seminal articles by management’s most influential experts, on topics of perennial concern to ambitious managers and leaders hungry for inspiration–and ready to run with big ideas to accelerate their own and their companies’ success.

HBR’s 10 Must Reads Boxed Set (6 Books) (HBR’s 10 Must Reads)