Look no further if you want to create a sales action plan that actually works. This guide will help you identify your target market, reach them effectively and close more sales. It is essential to have a solid plan and to follow it through consistently in order to be successful in sales.
It can be difficult to create a successful action plan; there are many factors! This is why we have created this comprehensive guide to creating a sales strategy plan that is successful.
What’s a Sales Action Plan?
A sales action plan is a roadmap that outlines the steps you will take to achieve your sales goals. It focuses on the relationships you can build and the transactions you can make with customers.
Sales plans include information about who are you looking to sell to, your revenue goals and how to structure the teams for success.
An effective sales plan:
- Communicate your sales goals.
- This document outlines your staff’s responsibilities and the roles of your leadership
- Your sales team will be given strategic direction
- This guide will help to develop your decision-making strategy, and help you get towards your organizational goals.
A sales plan can be used for month-to-month guidance. It can also be used for a longer-term analysis of the sales team. To determine if your business goals are being met, you can compare your actions and your results over time.
Why is a business plan important?
Salespeople are often action-oriented. They are driven to do the job well and often overlook planning in favor of short-term results.
This could help them reach their quotas. It has the downside of being unpredictable. Sales processes should be seen as a system that can easily be optimized.
Sales plans will help them stay on track by using repeatable systems.
Your sales action plan should include the tools and talents you need to develop. These questions will help you determine if your tools, team, and goals align with your business goals.
- Who do we need to hire to complete each step?
- Who will manage these teams and who will be their leader?
- Which CRM is best suited to each stage?
- What tools are you going to need to support your team’s work?
- How can we measure performance?
This information is essential to answer these questions accurately. Your plan will fail if you make assumptions about the market and customer needs.
Why you should implement a strategic sales plan
If your sales team doesn’t have one, you might consider creating one. This plan is regularly referenced and updated and is the result a careful data analysis and collaboration between departments.
Research has shown that top-performing sales professionals are guided by a well-structured, tightly controlled sales structure.
This structure is missing in most sales professionals who are underperforming.
For sales success and productivity, a well-defined strategy is crucial. If a salesperson wants to achieve their goals more effectively, they should create and implement a strategy.
There are a few key indicators that show the need to have a strategy for sales implemented sooner than usual.
Sales Planning Process
Sales planning does not only include creating a sales plan. It is important to have a high-level strategy in order for that document to be more than a book on the shelves.
You should:
- Analyse sales data from the previous year to identify market trends.
- Set sales targets to reach your revenue goals.
- Determine the success metrics.
- Assess your current situation to identify any weaknesses and strengths that could pose a problem.
- Forecasting sales is based on historical data, demand trends, and other factors.
- Identify the gaps that you need to close in order to achieve your goals.
- You might have new opportunities that you didn’t know about in the past.
- Other departments, such the Product and Marketing teams, need to be involved.
- Give examples of actions items that are based upon quota or capacity numbers.
Don’t forget that planning doesn’t end with the creation or distribution of a document.
You must repeat this process every year to maintain your company’s sales excellence.
Now that you have committed to the sales process, let’s dive into the written execution portion of sales planning.
9 Step Plan to Reach Short-and Long-Term Sales Goals
How can you create an action plan that yields real, measurableresults
Employees need a plan that gives direction and a purpose. It should help your employees achieve their goals in areas such as prospecting and quotas. If your action plan is more detailed, your team will be less likely to be confused and unable to make their own decision.
These are just some of the most important activities you should include in your sales plan.
1. Identify Your Ideal Clients
If you want to succeed in any part of your sales strategy, you must identify the people that you want to target. Ask your sales team:
- Which clients offer the greatest long-term value?
- What size company do you want to target?
- How did your solution help clients succeed?
- Where did your top customers come (i.e. Cold calls, canvassing, word of mouth and word of mouth
- Which industry are you targeting
Once you have identified your target audience, it is time for you to plan how you will interact to increase sales. What are the most important needs of your prospects? What can you do to help them reach their goals?
Which are the best places to communicate with clients? Are they more responsive via email, phone calls, or face-to-face interactions?
Your action plan should include a complete overview of how to find and nurture clients.
2. Analyze historical performance
Unless your business has just started, you should be able to draw on past successes and failures. Take a look at your past successes and losses and ask these questions:
- Which sales strategies generated the most revenue for your business?
- What type of target customers is most likely to respond positively?
- Did you find that certain months or seasons were more likely to reach your quota?
- Which member of your team was the most successful?
- Which areas generated the highest ROI for your team?
Analyzing past performance will help you gain a better understanding about your prospects and customers.
This information can also be accessed via sales tracking software. This information can be accessed through sales tracking software.
3. You can chart your destination (choose a goal)
Failure to plan is planning for disaster.
Once you have a clear understanding of your past performance, you can begin to plan for the future. You may have exceeded your sales quota by 60% in the last year and you want to increase your sales quota to 80% by the end of this year.
You can make informed decisions about your sales goals and targets by setting a goal or target. Your goals and objectives should be specific, both short-term and long-term.
Have questions?
- What is the big picture? (A 100% sales success rate in quotas)
- Annual sales goals? (Maybe a 20% increase annually)
- What are the quarterly goals? (Another 5% would be more realistic)
- What can sales professionals do for their monthly performance improvement?
- What are my team’s goals each day?
- What activity metrics will you use to keep your team happy?
Describe your destination and the steps to get there.
If your goal is to increase closed business overall, you might ask your sales reps to make more calls every day.
The more calls you make, the greater your sales opportunities. Your team can work together to increase their success rate monthly. You can also track your overall growth quarterly to aim for better results each year.
4. Place resources in place
Now that you’re clear on where to look, what tools do you need to help you maximize your opportunities and empower your teams?
Your most valuable resource is your salespeople. You need to ensure that you have enough people to achieve your goals. This includes creating a compensation structure that motivates employees.
Next, invest in the technology and tools that will allow you to succeed.
Gamification and Workforce optimization: What are you doing to encourage friendly competition among your employees? Do you have a budget in place?
CRM tools What can your teams do to track their interactions with key clients and customers?
Prospecting tools What kind of sales analytics and lead nurturing tools do your staff require? Are automations necessary?
Once you have identified the tools your employees need, make sure your team members are equipped to use them. This could mean implementing training sessions, assigning mentors to new team players, or holding individual meetings.
5. Assign Territories
Now it is time to make sure that there is no overlap between your teams. It is difficult for everyone to focus on the same goal.
Your sales team will be able to target the right customers in the right places by assigning territories. This reduces the chance of costly redundancies.
The largest accounts are where the most valuable and profitable reps will be. You can assign territories based upon everything, including geography, customer type, industry, and sales potential.
By defining territories, sales reps can be more strategic in their efforts to meet the needs of clients. You can:
- Top performers should be assigned to high-value accounts
- Align salespeople with the most suitable regions or segments for their talents
- All reps should have sufficient lead to work and accounts for services.
- You can build stronger, more lasting relationships between your brand and customers.
6. Create scripts
Your sales team now understands where it should be focusing. It’s time to help them increase sales. You can create templates to send follow-up emails, voicemails, and other communications.
Keep your scripts focused on the pain points your customers. People buy emotionally and then justify their decisions rationally.
The Sandler pain funnel can be used to qualify, close, and prospect more deals.
Encourage your team members to find out about the problems customers are facing and to develop scripts to fix them. The conversation should be 70 to 30 on the customer’s end.
Think about how your sales team could use scripts you provide to qualify leads you generate. Are you able ask questions that will help segment customers and increase your chances for cross-sells or upsells?
7. Minimum Daily Sales Activities
Sales teams should be able achieve measurable, real goals with guidance and support. This is the time for your sales team to get started by setting minimum tasks.
It is important to challenge employees, but also to be realistic. Staff may feel disengaged if they are asked to do more than they can.
You can track and measure the following:
Leads What number of new leads should your employees be able to contact each day. How will they nurture and qualify these leads? Spotio’s Lead Machine can help agents find new leads each day.
Contacts What number of people will your sales team be able to contact each day? Contact can include in-person visits, emails, phone calls, or social media connections. It’s all about building a relationship with leads through multiple channels.
Follow-ups: How do salespeople increase their chances to sell to people who haven’t returned emails or answered the phones? You can also think about “follow-ups” as upsells and cross-sells to existing clients.
8. Forcing Accountability
How can you make sure your employees deliver the results you desire? Is it possible to see which team members are achieving their goals by using software and lead nurturing pipelines.
Tracking all sales activities your employees engage in every day has many benefits. Sales managers can track whether their goals are being met, and what strategies should be modified if they aren’t. Employees can track their performance with a dashboard.
Salespeople love to compete against their peers. You could create a leaderboard in your workplace to celebrate and highlight the most successful salespeople.
Tip: Once you have identified top performers, pair them with lower performing sales reps for cross-training.
9. Track Performance
You must track performance at all levels, including individual reps, teams, and businesses. Are your reps meeting their activity goals? What’s the problem? What opportunities are they missing
To identify issues in your sales pipeline, you can track your performance. Many sales teams fail in keeping track of key data and KPIs. This can often mean that they don’t know how best to increase their chances of success.
You can track the performance at all levels of your team to identify top performers, determine who needs more training, and pinpoint which sales strategies are not impacting the bottom line.
Other than looking at individual reps, ask yourself:
- Which regions perform the best?
- What sales actions are most effective in achieving the best results?
- Are there any bottlenecks in your pipeline?
- These are the problems we must fix.
Deals, Meetings, and Pitches:
Your Sales Activity plan is designed to provide guidance to your sales team in order for them to make smart business decisions. Supporting your sales team can help improve sales results by addressing issues you directly control, such as a lack of direction or guidance.
A strategy that works for reps will make it easier to reach your goals.
A successful action plan focuses on proactive steps your company can take to increase sales. Let the process evolve for everyone. Accept feedback from your employees, and then examine the quantitative data in sales activity tracking system.
Your employees might be able to offer advice on the steps to take to increase your chances of closing deals.
Are you ready to take action?
There is no single strategy that will guarantee outstanding sales results. How you look at your processes, customers, and customers will determine the success of your team.
A sales action plan can help guide your employees to greater success, and provide the support they require to succeed.
Conclusion
A sales action plan is an integral part of any successful sales strategy. You can dramatically increase your chances to reach your goals by taking the time and following through with your plan.
