Sales planning is one of the first things a sales manager should work on. In our sales planning, we are using an 11-stage planning process.

(Updated January 4, 2018.

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

In “Developing Your Strategic Sales Plan – Part One,” we covered the first four stages of the sales planning process:

Establish your time line and your goals
- The time period the plan will cover and the goals you expect to achieve
Sales Team Structure
- How is your team structured? Does the structure allow for maximum productivity? Does that structure take advantage of each salesperson’s strengths?
Define your market
- What is your market? How are your territories designed, and can your territories support your sales and revenue objectives?
Know your competition
- When you go out into the marketplace, it’s important to know and understand your competition. Who are they, what do they offer, what is their USP, and what do you need to make sure you get the deal?

In “Developing Your Strategic Sales Plan – Part Two”, we look at subsequent stages of the planning process:

Define your ‘USP’ – (Unique Selling Proposition)
- Why should someone buy from you and not the competition?
Profile your ideal customers
- Define the types of customers you are looking for.
Collect relevant sales and customer data
- Understanding your customer metrics.
Interpret the data & Evaluate your teams sales ratios
- Understand your sales metrics.
Develop your tactics
- What you will do to accomplish your goals.
Writing the Plan
- Write the Plan for everyone in your organization. to follow.
Schedule Specific Times for Sales Plan Evaluation
- The Plans are flexible. Be ready to adjust.

It’s hard to express the importance of planning to a sales leader. With planning, leadership can:

Examine their thought processes
Take a closer look at their markets
Provide the type of leadership that your team is looking for
Helps to insure that you’ll get results

As Sun Tzu wrote over 2300 years ago,

“ With careful and detailed planning one can win; With careless and undefiled planning, one cannot. How much more certain is defeat if one does not plan at all? From the way planning is done beforehand, we can predict victory or defeat.”

V. Define Your USP, Unique Selling Proposition

Defining your USP is important in developing your ‘go to market’ strategy. Everyone in your organization has to know what separates you from the competition. If you’re not aware, how will your clients know?

Success in the market place is based on your believing in your products and services. Before you can sell to someone else, you need to sell yourself. Do your salespeople believe that they represent the best solutions in their market?

This is especially critical if your products and services are similar to the competition. For example:

You sell a roof. They sell a roof. You sell warranties. They sell warranties. You sell access control systems. They sell access control systems. So:

What makes you unique?
Why should a customer choose your organization over the competition?

If you can’t define what makes your offering unique, you can’t explain it to your customers. This is a crucial stage of the planning process to get your salespeople and management involved in defining your USP.

To help in this phase, develop a list of questions to ask yourself and others in the organization. Here are three questions to use as a starting point:

Ask each salesperson:

“What makes doing business with them, not the company, an advantage for their customers?”
“What makes doing business with your company an advantage for the customer?”
“What makes your product or service unique in the eyes of the customer?”

When defining your USP, another good source to use is your current customer base. Ask them:

Why they had chosen your organization when they decided to make their initial purchase?
What do they like about the way your company functions?
What changes would make you a better service provider?

Gaining input from others is a good place to start when defining your ‘USP.’ Remember to talk to people inside and outside of the organization.

VI. Profile Your Ideal Customers

Want to close more? Select more likely prospects. Many people waste time going after the wrong kinds of client. Knowing who you’re focussing on is a key to developing your sales strategy. To find your ideal client, find answers to questions such as?

Which clients produce the highest margins?
Which industry has our best clients?
How were the leads for those clients developed?
How long was the sales cycle?
Which clients pay the best?
Which clients have made multiple purchases?

These questions are a starting point. I’m sure you can come up with more.

It’s important to know what types of customers you want. It could also be more important to know the customers you don’t want. Inquire which of your current customers actually represent the type of business that you don’t want?

Is there an industry type?
Is the business you get low margin business?
Which customers have the highest cancellation rate?
Which ones are the ‘slow pays’?

Develop a list of the good and the bad. Once you have a list, you can develop your strategy that targets those that represent the best in your particular market.

VII. Collect Relevant Sales And Customer Data

When planning for the future, you need accurate historical data. If I have a goal to make X number of sales and X amount of revenue this year, look at what you did last year. Then determine:

How many prospects were there?
How many prospects will you need this year?
How many presentations were made last year?
How many presentations will you need this year?
What was your average sales price?
What should the average sales price be this year?

If your team has been selling for a while, you can get the answers to these questions from the historical data. If you have no history, then establish realistic data points for your goals.

Establish Team Goals

You should have already established your team goals. Based on team goals, you may need to answer more questions to properly build a plan.

In this example, it’s divided into to 4 categories:

Defining Quota Attainment
New Business Development
Sales to Existing Clients
Territory Development

I. Defining Quota Attainment:

What was the team quota for the year?
Was the quota distributed by salesperson or territory?
What was the team’s percentage in reaching their quota last year?
What was the percentage toward the quota for each of your team members?
What is the team’s target quota for the planning year?
How will you distribute the quota, by salesperson or territory?

II. New Business Development

What is the profile of your top clients? You worked on this in stage VI.
- This could be by industry, size, or number of employees. It’s the profile of the type of customers you want.
How many prospects for new clients did your team develop last year?
- You should evaluate on the basis of the overall team as well as for each of your salespeople or territories.
How many new clients did you gain last year?
- This should also be for the team and each of your salespeople or territories.
What was the team-closing ratio of prospects to closes, last year?
- Do this for the team and by salesperson or territory.
What was the team-closing ratio, presentations to closes, last year? Evaluate for the team and by salesperson or territory

III. Sales To Existing Clients:

What was the total number of sales from existing clients?
- For the team and by salesperson or territory.
What was my average sale price for existing clients?
- For the team and by salesperson or territory.
what was the length of the average sales cycle to new clients last year?
- For the team and by salesperson or territory.

IV. Territory Development:

Most of this you looked at this in Stage III, “Defining Your Market.” You will just need to add some additional information.

How would you define your territories? (geography, vertical, by city, state, county, or zip code)?
How many new accounts should each territory produce in a planning year?
How many existing clients should there be in each territory?
What are the key accounts you expect to develop this year?
- For the team and by salesperson or territory

This is just a sample of the type of information and data needed for your strategic sales plan.

VIII – Interpret The Data & Evaluate Your Team’s Sales Ratios

You’ve established your goals, your time line, and collected the data. Now we need to understand what the data represents.

If you have no historical data, this part of the planning process is mostly guesswork. You’ll need information on all your prospects, the presentations made, and sales.

How many people were seen?
How many proposals delivered?
Who were they?

If you lost a sale, you should have records that show the client, the salesperson, as well as the reason the sale was lost.

If you don’t have a good sales process in place, give me a call. This is one of the services I offer.

In “Developing Your Strategic Sales Plan – Part One,” we established a sample set of goals and a time line. We will use those numbers in this example:

The goal was to beat last year’s revenue of $1,300,000 by 20%?

Last year, your quota was 1.2 million in sales. For this example, we’ll say the quota was divided into two parts.

Sales to existing clients, $800,000.
Sales to new clients, $400,000.

The quota for this planning year is 1.3 million in sales. This is also divided into two parts.

Sales to existing clients, $875,000.
Sales to new clients, $425,000.

To reach your goal of 120% of quota, you will need to produce an additional $260,000 in additional sales.

Last years data showed that sales to existing clients were $800,000. A total of 44 sales were made at an average sale price of $18,182.00. We now know that barring any changes, our average sale price is $18,182.00. Now look at your sales ratios from last year.

Evaluate Your Team’s Sales Ratios

Sales ratios can tell you things like:

How many leads develop into prospects?
How many prospects you need to make a proposal to?
How many proposals convert to sales?

Let’s say the historical data told you that 120 leads converted into 75 prospects. Leads are names and phone numbers. Prospects represent those to whom you were able to make a presentation. The result is a lead to prospect ratio of approximately 62%.

Of those 75 prospects , 45 proposals were delivered. Your ratio of prospects to proposals is 60%. This means that 60% of your prospects became selling opportunities.

You delivered 45 proposals and made 22 sales. Your closing ratio is approximately 48%.

What was your average selling price to new clients last year?

Based on your calculations and historical information, how many leads will you need to reach your goal of 26 new accounts this year? Based on your average sales price last year, of $18,182.00, you would produce $472,732.00 in revenue.

Your goal was $425,000 in new client revenue. This is excellent. You established a goal for new client development.

You perform the same types of analysis for each of your goals. Based on the data you have, this can help you determine if your goals are attainable.

IX. Develop Your Tactics

You’ve prepared the data and developed your strategy. Now it’s time to develop your tactics.

Tactics are the means or procedures for doing something. In this case, the tactics are the means or procedures for reaching our goals. A lot of sales plans and strategies look good in the boardroom, but fall short in the field. Any strategy without the tactics to achieve it is weak at best.

Let’s look at how we could define tactics for one of our goals from the example. Your goal is to increase the number of new prospects by 20% over last year.

Last year we had 120 leads that converted into 75 prospects. You want to increase the number of prospects by 20%. Let’s say your sales process is the same as last year. You don’t need to do anything to improve your sales process or the teams selling skills. That means you need approximately 90 prospects.

Based on your lead-to-prospect ratio of 62%, you need approximately 145 leads this year. So what tactics will you use to accomplish the goal?

Have each salesperson identify X number of customers that match your ideal customer profile. These are customers in their respective territory.
Have them develop their action plan that will reach each of the potential customers.
Develop a direct mail or email campaign for each potential new client. Develop a schedule for sending them out by month, or calendar quarter.
Have each salesperson develop and implement a referral program. This could include X number of letters per week, X number of emails per wee, X number of client visits per week to ask for referrals.
Your team could participate in X number local trade shows.
Develop a plan to spend a minimum of 15 minutes a day using social media. This is a good way to communicate with your target customers.

These tactics are measurable and definable. This is an example of what could be included in the your plan. Establish tactics for all of the goals in your Strategic Sales Plan. Once you have established the tactics, you can revisit and modify as you implement them.

X. Write The Plan

You and your team have done the research, established your goals, and defined your tactics. Now is when you are ready to actually write the plan. Why is this the last step and not the first? Because at this point you are much more thoroughly prepared. I see people start off with the sales plan outline as opposed to the planning process. When you read them or try to execute the strategy, they aren’t well enough defined and they fall short. First planning allows you and your team to have focused on the information.

This planning process gives you a structure to:

Evaluate your goals and objectives
Developed the strategy
Formulate your tactics

As you now sit down to actually write the plan, it’s more like a review. You are now putting the final touches on the work you’ve have done.

XI. Schedule Times for Sales Plan Evaluation

“ With careful and detailed planning, one can win; with careless and less detailed planning, one cannot win.” Sun Tzu

The goal is to evaluate your planning process, including:

Evaluating the time spent in the planning process
The personnel involved in planning
How to manage the process going forward
Evaluating the strategy and tactics

You and your team should review the plan and adjust it as market conditions and other factors change. You also want to test the effectiveness of your tactics. Always search for new ways of accomplishing your goals.

In your review sessions, check to see if you’re on track to meet your goals for the year. If not, what adjustments are needed to insure that you succeed.

What parts of the plan are working and not? You may need to adjust your key account strategy as new accounts move up and others leave or move down the list.

Plan Review is one of the most important parts of the planning process. This should be a part of your final strategic sales plan document.

Planning is an organic and ongoing process. You want to determine when you will start the planning process next year, and what part of the process you’ll improve.

So:

Establish a yearly planning period to address the needs for the coming year.
Established and schedule quarterly reviews of the plan to make adjustments.

Conclusion

Taking the time to develop your Strategic Sales Plan can become the most productive time in your sales management career. Is it something you can produce in an hour or two? No, it takes time and a commitment to develop, execute and refine a truly successful sales strategy.

Here is some additional information you may find helpful in your planning process.

“Developing Your Strategic Sales Plan – Part One”

“Sales Managers Can Use SWOT Analysis To Develop Their Sales Team.”

“Strategic Sales Plan, The Five Key Components.”

“Create A Customer Profile To Improve Results”

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)