Achieving your sales goals, may you be a corporate entity or a professional within the sales industry, can be easier if you have a strategic sales plan at hand. Having a strategic sales plan can help you create objectives and goals as well as come up with key steps or action plans that will allow you to achieve your targets at a given time period. Hence, a strategic sales plan gives you an overview on how you can guide your business from where it is at the moment to the operational condition where it would like to be.
We listed several strategic sales plan examples that can guide you in developing your own strategic sales plan. Look closely on the content and format of these examples so you can efficiently put together all the information that you would like to present in your own document.
Strategic Sales Plan Format Example
Strategic Sales Planning and Forecasting Example
Importance of a Strategic Sales Plan
Allowing the business to continue its activities without a sales strategic plan can result to loss of sales leads, lower profitability, and inability to hit sales quota. Even if there are times where you can be lucky and survive without a sales plan, would you really rely on chance or luck when it comes to business sustainability?
If you do not have any strategic sales plan at hand, do not expect your sales team to be at its most productive. Moreover, do not think that you can get the best results and returns within an operational year. Listed below are a few of the reasons why it is important for your business to have a strategic sales plan.
- A strategic sales plan helps the entire sales team identify the appropriate sales targets that they need to provide the business with. If there are already expectations regarding this matter, the sales team can create action plans and strategies that will allow them to hit their quota at a given time period.
- A strategic sales plan ensures that the budget allocation of the sales team is fit for its sales activities, efforts, and other needs. This can give the sales team the ability to execute action plans and other processes accordingly. With this, it will be faster for them to achieve their sales targets since they already have their needed resources.
- A strategic sales plan specifically presents the alignment of the sales action plan and strategies that will be used by the business to its target audience. It is important for this document to ensure that all sales efforts are relevant and necessary so that business resources will not be put to waste.
- A strategic sales plan allows your business to review your sales goals, whether it is still fit with the current needs and demands of the company and its operations. If your business will continuously develop strategic sales plan every operational year, you can have references that can give you an idea on how to better your sales performance and improve your approaches when viewing sales opportunities.
- A strategic sales plan assesses the current condition of the sales team. This enables decision-makers to identify the particular tactics that the sales team can use so that they can efficiently provide their deliverable for the business. More so, this helps the sales team to be realistic when viewing how they perform, which is a great way to motivate them and be more focused with what they do.
Sales Planning with Strategies Example
Sales Plan Strategic Preparation Example
How Can a Strategic Sales Plan Help Your Business
There are a lot of businesses that interlink their strategic sales plans with their marketing plans, and this is due to a relevant and practical reason. As an example, a hotel marketing plan can be aligned to the hotel’s strategic sales plan. This ensures that all marketing and sales activities work hand in hand to maximize potential sales returns. Aside from this, here are more ways on how your business can benefit from using a strategic sales plan whether it is incorporated in a marketing plan or is a stand-alone document:
- Creating a strategic sales plan can promote risk management within the sales team and the entire business processes where it is involved with. If you will have a strategic sales plan, you can list down the possible risks and threats that the business may face due to the impacts and effects of both internal and external factors. With this, the entire sales team can be more aware on how to overcome unfortunate circumstances and unforeseen risks.
- Making a strategic sales plan can make the sales team become more collaborative. Since a number of sales individuals and representatives from the management and operations create a strategic sales plan, it will be faster for action plans to be developed by considering the long-term and short-term goals of the entire business operations.
- Developing a strategic sales plan serves as a document that can present a benchmark of where the business would like to be directed when it comes to its sales concerns, goals, and vision. This document also measures the time that it will take for the business to get there and the steps that are essential to be followed so that objectives can be achieved. Through this, the sales team can apply adjustments to its sales plan if it is necessary to the growth and development both of the business and the sales team workflow.
Sales Strategy Plan Example
Sales Plan and Strategies Example
Content of a Basic Strategic Sales Plan
If you want to create a typical sales plan, you have to make sure that you will point out all the areas of the operations where the sales team is involved as well as all the factors and elements that can affect the sales performance of the business. A basic strategic sales plan commonly defines and discusses the following:
- Define the target audience of the business. This can give the sales team an idea on how to remain relevant to its current customers while ensuring that there will be processes that can attract sales leads and potential clients.
- Provide a discussion about the revenue targets of the business. It is also essential for each sales agents or account executives to be given specific sales quota. This will help the business know whether the number of sales people is enough to ensure that there are entities who will take care of the clients of the business as well as those who can provide new ones for the company.
- Have a list of sales strategies and tactics that will be used in every activity, sales efforts, processes, and programs. May it be about promotion and advertising or even just the pricing methods of the product offers of the business, it is essential for particular strategies to be identified so that there will be appropriate measures to use when evaluating sales successes or losses.
- Present the time duration in which the strategic sales plan will be used. Have deadlines for every strategy incorporation and action plan implementation. The timeliness of each activity is very important as it needs to be aligned with the current needs of the business operations, the trends in the marketplace, and the demands of the business’s target audience.
- Develop a team structure that can present the individuals who are directly responsible for the execution of call-to-actions. You also have to ensure that there are communication lines and touch points open so that it will be easier for information flow to be implemented.
- List down all the resources that are necessary to be present within the entire strategic sales plan development and implementation. You have to ensure that all these resources can be provided by the business so that the exact plans of the sales team can be realized. However, keep in mind that there can be changes within the usage of the strategic sales plan which can result to the changes in needed resources as well.
Resort to your business plan guidelines when developing a strategic sales plan. This will help you come up with a document that can support the mission, vision, and goals of the business. Depending on the range of your business operations and the requirements of the management, you can add or remove information from the list above when creating your own strategic sales plan.
Sales and Marketing Strategy Plan in the IT Industry Example
Sales Strategy Planning Example
Basic Sales Strategy Plan Example
Strategic Sales and Marketing Plan Example
How to Come Up with a Comprehensive and Presentable Strategic Sales Plan
Creating a strategic sales plan may come with its own challenges especially when it comes to organization. These challenges should not hinder you to develop this document for your business as there are a lot of advantages and benefits that you can experience if you have one prepared and ready to use. Here are some ways on how you can come up with a comprehensive and presentable strategic sales plan:
- It is highly suggested for you to create a strategic sales plan draft first before developing the actual document. You can also make use of outlines and checklists that can help you create a brief strategic plan that contains all the information that you need to present to your target audience. If you will focus on the skeletal backbone of the strategic sales plan, then you can be more precise with the kind of information that you will include in the document.
- Know the particular start and end dates of the strategic sales plan’s usage. Doing this can give you the exact time frame in which all strategies and action plans must be implemented and assessed. This can also help you keep track of the dates in which the strategic sales plan already needs to be updated.
- Set reasonable, attainable, and measurable sales targets and objectives. Your strategies, no matter how good they are, will not fully benefit your business if your goals are too impossible to reach within the time frame that you have developed. Consider the action plans that you have in mind, the condition of the market as of the moment, the sales forecast of the sales team, and the particular changes that you can observe with the purchasing activities of your clients and/or customers.
- It is important for you to integrate the strategic sales plan of the business with its actual operations and both marketing and finance processes. Doing this can make your action plans easier to implement as they are already aligned with the goals, objectives, action plans, and vision of the other departments and areas of the business.
- Know how to properly format the document in a way that all the entities who will review or look at it can understand the content of the strategic sales plan. Use proper headings and subheadings that can separate the clauses of the strategic sales plan from one another. You also have to be consistent with the tone and language that you will use as these can affect how the document will be perceived by your target audience.
Since we have already provided you with downloadable examples, guidelines, and tips, it is already up to you on when to start the development of your strategic sales plan. Gather all the entities that are needed to be involved in the activity and try to draft a strategic sales plan document that can lead the business to the direction where profitability, sales improvement, and sustainability can be achieved.
