Sales Plan:

6 Benefits of Developing a Sales Plan

Not every organization needs a sales plan in its early stages.

A lack of a sales plan gives the organization freedom to experiment, gather data, and form hypotheses to support its plan instead of copying a competitor.

8 Components of a Sales Plan (and How to Build One)

A sales plan could, theoretically, include anything related to sales efforts. However, your initial sales plan can include only essential ingredients that can be adjusted as the business grows and adapts.

To make this concrete, consider the following hypothetical:

A digital marketing consultancy doing $3 million in annual revenue with founder-led sales and organic lead generation would like to build a concrete sales function. 

They’ve recently hired a sales director to build the program, here are the steps they might take.

1. Goals and objectives

The very first question a sales leader needs to answer is “where am I at, and where do I want to go?”

There are many ways to communicate a sales team’s goals and objectives that are grounded in revenue and profitability.

Previous sales data, sales performance, and input from senior leadership should all be considered when setting goals for a sales organization.

Establish as many baseline metrics as possible to forecast future costs and revenues. 100% precision is impossible, but informed estimates provide a foundation that can be communicated and iterated upon later.

With this documented, sales leaders can calculate individual employee revenue targets and thresholds to remain profitable. This foundation establishes the numbers the organization as a whole, and thresholds individuals should reach to achieve the broader business goals.

Sales leaders should include assumptions for other teams and channels as well, such as predicted increases in lead volume delivered by marketing, and churn or upsell forecasts.

This document helps sales leaders stay accountable and help them see when and if they’re falling short of their goals.

For example, in the growth model above, with two new account executives on the team, they can visualize the impact made to the sales program and if improvments will help them hit revenue goals.

It can help provide insights such as if average contract values could be improved, and training programs can be designed around upsells and contract expansion.

Alternatively, other goals may include conversion rate to opportunities, meetings booked, or contracts closed.

2. Target market and target customers

Quantitative goals, target market, and target customers are important components of a business strategy.

Tightening the definition of an ideal customer profile, buying group, and target market is crucial. This can change over time and multiple customer segments can be targeted.

Customer research is foundational to build a model of your target market. This work is often housed in the marketing or product team.

Collaboration with these teams is necessary to analyze customer interview transcripts and ultimately create buyer personas, buying groups, and a solidified ideal customer profile for prospecting and crafting messaging.

The ideal customer profile can be specific or broad depending on what is the most useful for the teams involved.

The ideal customer profile can also be sub-segmented to get more specific, especially if account executives are divided by territory, vertical, or company size.

3. Competitive analysis and industry trends

It is important to stay informed of external macro trends that could impact the sales process.

For example, AI could be a threat and an opportunity for businesses selling marketing software or services. Prospects are likely to have questions, so having answers documented and ready could be a point of differentiation for the business.

Sales leaders can distill this information into their sales plan with two common sales tools: A SWOT analysis, and sales battle cards.

After SWOT has been documented, sales leaders may apply this information to address specific competitors with sales battle cards.

Creating battle cards for each competitor can be useful in sales conversations to address objections and effectively position strengths in relation to the industry.

There are many examples of sales battle card templates, here is one:

At the end of this process, having regularly updated SWOT analysis and battle cards accessible can keep sales teams up to date when selling against specific competitors.

4. Key sales strategies and sales tactics

Once an understanding of the business's own strengths and weaknesses as well as the broader industry is gained, it is possible to begin scripting the actual playbook that will be used to generate the sales pipeline.

This can include inbound marketing and sales, tradeshows and conferences, cold calling and building out an SDR function, which will depend on the sales plan. Having already established a sales program goal before this allows sales leaders to identify specific strategies and customer segments that will help  achieve that goal.

Sales leaders may or may not hire different people for each of these roles, but it helps to have guidelines and a plan for each step of the sales process.

Chunking out the sales process like this also allows sales leaders to build a sales model, both qualitative and quantitative. Both of these tools will help you optimize your sales system and produce more results. We’ll cover these in the next section.

For now, establish protocols and playbooks for each step of the sales process.

For example, at the meeting stage, there is likely a series of meetings that ladder up to the final scoping call where you send over the contract. Perhaps there is first a discovery call where the sales rep qualifies the prospect, and then a scoping call where an account executive hones in on the details of the engagement, followed by a contract call where the customer signs a deal.

At each step of this process, sales leaders can outline a loose playbook for reps to follow. One particularly useful artifact here is to compile a list of common objections with your answers to them:

These documents will help new sales hires onboard more quickly as well as prevent deals from falling through. It should be updated regularly.

It’s helpful to keep a general sales FAQ document that can be used to predict and preempt common questions:

The documents, strategies, and sales tactics will differ depending on your business model and sales approach.

Some companies, for example, will have a large SDR function with many outbound emails. This will require not only content and marketing alignment, but a clean database of prospects and constant quantitative optimization.

Other companies may be higher touch, running tables at tradeshows and having a more qualitative relationship with their sales process.

What’s important is to outline this in advance, as it will help establish a cogent approach to the sales program and procure the right tools, budget, and personnel to run it.

5. Sales forecasting models

Once a macro-revenue goal has been established, market research has been conducted, and key sales plays have been constructed, sales leaders can visualize their sales plan with forecasting models – both qualitative and quantitative.

The qualitative one shows how the sales team is currently driving sales and what the system looks like. Flowchart tools or a whiteboard are helpful to visualize this:

This model shows the sales team exactly which steps are involved in the sales process, and it’s often broken out by sales channel or customer segment.

Then, take each step of the process and add it into a spreadsheet to build a quantitative forecast for the whole system. This will include baseline assumptions as well as any opportunities for improvement in the system.

The above example shows a company’s numbers from last year to establish baseline assumptions for the future forecast.

In sales forecasting, sales leaders can assume certain channels will grow (such as more inbound leads and more referrals) and other channels will stagnate or shrink. These are hypotheses, but they inform a reality-based plan.

The main utility of this quantitative forecast is to calculate the volume of incremental revenue needed to hit the macro goal.

Sales leaders may need to make an educated guess as to what conversion rates and lead volume will be for new sales channels and efforts, but this will provide a foundation for how many leads need to be generated, how many meetings have to be booked, and what resources will be needed to get there. This helps to procure the right tools, budget, and resources to accomplish sales goals.

From there, sales leaders can create sales milestones. This is usually done on a quarterly basis.

Creating milestones is a great way to break down goals into smaller, more manageable pieces. By setting milestones in the sales plan, leaders can track their progress and ensure that they're on track to achieve their goals. For example, if the goal is to increase revenue by 10% over the next 12 months,  increasing revenue by 2.5% every quarter would be a reasonable milestone.

6. Sales tools

CRMs are essential, but marketing automation tools, lead generation services, and sales intelligence software should not be forgotten like LinkedIn Sales Solutions.

Sales Insights for example, helps build a sales plan with real-time data and insights, while LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps professionals uncover and connect with leads that are relevant to your business to help close deals.

Investing in the software training appropriate for the phase of business growth can speed up manual processes, grant visibility into customer data, and spotlight opportunities that may otherwise go unnoticed.

7. Sales budget plan

Sales leaders can't make an effective sales plan without factoring in budget. This includes both variable costs, such as travel expenses and subcontractors, as well as fixed costs, like salaries and software subscriptions.

Take a close look at what kind of ROI is expected from different investments, and use that to model out the costs of different strategies.

Sales leaders often face constraints from executive leadership which is why it’s important to address and document them in a sales plan to make a strong case for the requested budget. Locking in key performance indicators and sales forecasting early can make these conversations easier.

8. Sales training plan and hiring plans for sales departments

Finally, sales leaders need talent to reach their objectives. That starts with good hiring and recruitment practices, but it doesn't end there.

That should include everything from onboarding to sales certifications, and be tailored to meet the needs of the unique sales organization.

How to Implement a Sales Plan

While the sales planning stage takes time and work, great sales leaders also have a plan for implementation. Keep it simple. These five steps will ensure the team has what they need to reach their sales goals:

1. Write the sales plan

Take all the components above and put it into a document that is accessible by those that need access.

Sales leaders may want to write a sales plan directed towards executives (including budget and headcount planning) and then one for the sales team (including personas and sales strategies).

A company Wiki is a great place to store this document.

2. Set up a meeting cadence that works for the team

How sales leaders design meetings depends on how they want to run the organization.

3. Consider a marketing sales alignment meeting

The most successful sales plans are tightly aligned with marketing efforts. Yes, generating leads is important but it’s also important to align brand messaging and get marketing’s help in creating sales materials that help generate leads and close deals.

4. Create sales enablement materials

Sales materials can include external documents like case studies, whitepapers, and content. These materials are shareable with prospects and increase trust, provide information, and lower the friction and time to close deals.

Sales materials can also be internal, helping to arm the sales team with information and intelligence to close deals more effectively. A key document here is the “competitive battlecard” which was covered above. This provides a scaffolding for sales conversations where a prospect is considering signing with a competitor. Other materials include FAQs, slide deck templates, and scripts.

Creating sales and marketing alignment is important because marketing can support creating many of these documents.

5. Track performance and optimize along the way

Measurement not only helps in ensuring sales leaders hit the goals promised, but also gradually adjust variables as the sales plan is being executed.

For example, if the team is generating sufficient leads but they’re not a good fit, then sales leaders may need to revamp the prospecting process.

If the team is landing tons of meetings, but not closing any deals, it could be a fit problem. But it also may be necessary to revamp the meeting process or get sales training at the account executive level.

Always be learning and improving.

Conclusion

Sales planning is necessary, but it should also be fun.

Sales leaders get to map out big objectives and work backwards on a plan to get there.

If building out a new sales program, sales leaders have a lot of work cut out for them. But once they’ve got a sales plan in place and begin implementing, it gets easier to optimize, forecast, and of course, hit key numbers.