.jpg)
Are you one of those people that start the year without goals? If you say that the calendar doesn't hold you hostage, it is okay. But, do you have goals for your existence? What are the steps you are putting in place to achieve those targets? Planning is the answer you are looking for. A plan is an excellent way to ensure you are on the right path to achieving the set targets.
Salespeople and sales teams have targets. This calls for a sales plan. A sales plan helps outline the salespeople's steps to achieve their goals and targets. Planning for your sales week is inclined towards a sales strategy. This is a guideline for meeting your short-term goals, i.e., weekly or daily goals. The success of short-term goals determines the success of long-term goals.
Related: How To Develop A Buyer Persona
A sales plan is the; who, where, why, when, how, and whom that will guide you toward hitting your yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly or daily sales goals.
According to Jess Pingrey, a sales plan establishes sales objectives and develops strategies necessary to achieve them. Typically, this document specifies a plan for revenue growth and other measurements of success. In addition, sales plans consist of sections outlining goals, identifying key customer attributes, and listing necessary strategies, tools, metrics, and estimated expenses.
A sales plan can be drafted on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly plan, focusing on the sales you ought to make depending on the given period and how you will achieve them.
How To Create A Sales Plan
So, what’s your plan? How do you build it (and stick to it)?
A sales plan should include the following:
Sales forecasting and goal-setting
Market and customer research
Prospecting and partnerships
Using results from an older plan as the cornerstone for the new plan is advisable. First, review the old plan, know what to change, and implement that in the new one. For success to happen, you must follow your sales plan and be consistent. You can then tell one of your closest people to help you monitor your consistency in following your plan, which will help you keep motivated towards executing your tasks just like your sales plan flows.
Steps to create a sales plan
1. Put down your mission statement.
This is a foundation for your sales plan and helps define your unique selling proposition or point. This makes it vital to your plan’s success because it will guide your future sales efforts. A mission statement describes what your business stands for and aims to achieve. Clearly defining your mission statement and what you stand for is a good driving factor toward creating a perfect sales plan. Think about your company mission and how the sales team works towards that goal.
2. Define your goals
When it comes to sales, the endpoint defines what matters most. Sales objectives are goals supporting the company’s growth currently and years in the future in terms of revenue, market share, or profit margin. By establishing clear sales goals, you are explaining what success will look like in the most straightforward terms while also giving your sales team targets to follow.
Start by choosing the sales metrics that matter most to your business. This could be:
Annual or monthly recurring revenue (ARR or MRR)
Retention or churn rates
Average conversion time
Average conversion rate
Customer lifetime value (LTV)
Look at last year's results. Were you being realistic or overly expectant? Did your sales revenue increase? Did you hit the desired numbers? Answers to these questions will help inform your new targets and help with the sales plan to achieve them. Break these targets down and have milestones set for each member of your sales team. These should challenge and motivate your sales team without being so difficult they kill morale.
3. Define Your Target Market.
Jason Zook explains it best; "When you try to create something for everyone, you end up creating something for no one." Therefore, knowing your target market and audience is crucial for your business.
To know your business, you might need to have a buyer persona in place; this helps you know your target audience, what things they like, where they are, and their preferences. Additionally, your buyer persona should include; demographic information about your supporters or purchasers.
On the road to building your audience profile, ask yourself these:
How big is the market?
Is there a built-in demand for what you're selling?
What’s your current market position?
Who are your competitors? What are their strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats?
Once it gets confusing, go back to your strengths, see what makes you stand out from the rest, and start from there.
4. Understand your customers
While defining ideal customers depends on your company and market, here are some essential characteristics you’ll want to identify:
Company size (number of employees, number of customers, yearly revenue)
Scope of the relevant department
Geographical information
Industry
Job title of your POC
Buying process
The goal they’re trying to achieve with your product or service
Also, don’t forget to consider whether they will be a good ‘fit.’ If this is a long-term relationship you’re developing rather than a one-night stand, you want to make sure you speak the same language and share a similar culture and vision.
Use this information to build out an ideal customer profile. This fictitious organization gets significant value from using your product/service and provides substantial value to your company. In addition, a customer profile helps you qualify leads and disqualify bad-fit customers before you waste time trying to sell to them.
5. Create A Customer Journey
A well-planned customer journey helps you as an entrepreneur to build trust with your customers at an early start, and this enables you to dig deep to know what their interest is all about before they even come to you for further negotiations or consultations.
To gain a deeper understanding of the customer journey, let us first define what exactly customer journey means; customer journey refers to a process by which a customer interacts with a company to achieve a goal. Of late, to maintain a customer and walk with them through a successful journey requires you to do lots of follow-ups and is not limited to sending thank you messages and follow-up emails about the performance of a product.
Knowing your customers' interests, physical experiences, and needs will help you successfully walk with them so long as they are addressed accordingly. For example, one way of handling customers’ needs is by getting your services and products right before them; you could create an attractive website, open up various social media platforms, and then advertise just right before the people you think are your immediate or target customers.
Because your customer journey is comprehensive and more likely to include every aspect of your business, you might need to have resources to allocate to every activity that is more likely to take place. Some of these suggested activities that are more likely to occur could include; conducting business research, and finding out customer experience and what you may need ahead as you venture into improving your products or services. All those activities need resources; therefore, they must be planned for.
6. Define Your Value Proposition
The question here is: what do you bring to the table?
More leader questions here:
Why do customers buy from us?
Why do customers buy from our competitors and not us?
Why do some potential customers not buy at all?
Stay far away from describing what you do, and lean into what your product or service can do for the customer. Customers buy benefits.
7. Organise your sales team
Have a clean and organized house. If your organization wants to be at the top of the rest in selling, you must recognize that it’s time to sell. A company’s sales representatives are the company’s head because they speak on behalf of the company and are the face. According to research, formal continuous training can yield 50% higher net sales per sales representative. In addition, training the sales team helps them to know which duties to execute accordingly.
You want a team that will impact your sales and increases your investment return; it must be well-trained and perfect. A well-trained sales team understands how best to pitch and make a sale. But, of course, having a good sales team also depends on how much time you dedicate to it and how much you value the team.
Here are three basic structures for your sales team:
The island: Individual reps who work alone.
Assembly line: Each sales rep is assigned a specialized role, such as lead generation, SDR (qualifier), Account Executive (closer), or Customer Success (farmer).
Pods: Each sales rep is assigned a specialized role in a pod or group responsible for the entire journey of specific customers.
8. Encourage the use of sales tools
Get started today, use sales management software and save your team’s time up to 80%, invest that time in other sales-generating activities, and earn more revenue for your business. Sales management software is worn by salespeople to trace their daily activities, maintain track of pipelines and deals, manage contacts, monitor prospects and customers, manage tiresome managerial tasks, and make the sales process more straightforward. In addition, the software provides updated sales tools for data entrance and management. Managers also use it to discover trends, opportunities, and team wins and check out valuable insights that could have a huge blow.
Basically, you’ll need tools for these areas to cover all aspects of the sales process:
CRM software (like Monkeypesa)
Lead generation and prospecting tools
Internal communication software
Engagement and outreach tools
Documentation Software
Sales enablement stack
9. Do Prospecting
Sales prospecting refers to a process whereby a company’s sales representatives make outbound calls or send outbound emails to leads/prospects in hopes of creating new business by searching for new potential buyers/customers for your products or services.
Making mobile calls, sending emails, SMS text messages, notifications, and reminders to people who have shown interest in your products or services is what we call sales prospecting. All the above are forms of prospecting with hopes that we may turn those specific interested people into future customers.
Given that sales representatives approach people or companies that they already know, the chances are high that they are likely to pitch through and get a deal. One good thing about sales prospecting is that it keeps new customers/leads flowing into a business; when they are convinced, they could become lifetime supporters of a company.
While doing prospecting, the sales process can make it easy for sales prospectors to determine whether a lead can qualify to be a prospect and whether prospects can qualify as potential buyers or customers for your product/service.
10. Track, Measure and Adjust The Plan
This is very important. It informs on the success of your entire plan with respect to goals and targets. When it comes to sales, most businesses tend to focus on 2 metrics; how many sales have been made and how much revenue has been made. These 2, however, paint a quarter of the real picture of what is happening in your sales. Tracking these only shows the end of the funnel; hence you end up missing.
Tracking:
Helps you understand what could not be working within your sales process.
It helps you get insight into how each of your sales reps is performing
To get insight into employee morale
Conclusion
A sales campaign is a focused effort to promote and sell a product or service to a specific target audience. Planning and executing a successful sales campaign requires careful consideration and strategy. By following a structured approach, you can effectively reach and engage your target audience and ultimately drive sales and achieve your business goals.