What Is Sales Planning? How To Create A Sales Plan

Sales planning is a critical part of your sales success. With a strategic sales plan by your side, you can make data-driven decisions and lead your team to consistently hit their sales targets.

But what exactly does sales planning entail? How can you make your sales plans today? Why do you even need one in the first place? In this blog, we’ll go through all these questions and prepare you to make a winning sales plan by the end of this read. Let’s get started!

What do you mean by sales planning?

Sales planning refers to a detailed plan that includes multiple aspects of a successful sales execution. It’s similar to a business plan, except sales planning focuses entirely on your sales strategy and shows you how to achieve your sales target.

So what does a sales plan include? A sales plan includes your goals and objectives, insightful research into your resources, target audience, and budget as well as detailed strategies to execute that action plan.

Why should you do sales planning?

Oftentimes, small businesses and medium-sized entities misunderstand the importance of sales planning. But don’t be fooled. There are many benefits of sales planning you can take advantage of and here are some of them:

It helps you communicate your organization’s goals with each team member,
It provides you with strategic direction and an action plan,
It clearly outlines the roles and responsibilities of every person, and
It tracks your sales team’s progress to recognize room for improvement.

Sounds like a must-have, right? Well, if you want to grow your sales, it is! Do you want an easy step-by-step guide to create your own sales plans? Keep reading…

What are the 7 steps to creating a sales plan?

Sales planning can seem like a vague term with a lot of ground to cover. But in this blog, I want to reiterate that sales planning isn’t rocket science.

And if you’re still learning the ropes, I’ve broken down the sales planning procedure into 7 simple steps. Here is how you meet your sales target with a strategic sales plan:

1. Define your mission statement and goals

The start of a strategic sales plan is always with a mission statement. This is a concise statement of what you plan to achieve in terms of your sales performance. It’s important to not get caught up in unrealistic mission statements or goals, and stick to what looks realistic to you.

For example, hoping for a 60% increase in qualified leads or enjoying a 70% boost in sales revenue isn’t realistic. And setting that as your goal won’t get you far.

Check out this example of an excellent mission statement:

2. Outline your sales team’s roles and responsibilities

Next, you want to start assigning your team’s roles and responsibilities. When you want to achieve your goal, you have to huddle your team, set clear expectations, and give each person their unique set of responsibilities that contribute to the achievement of the initial goal.

💡 Tip: Try understanding your sales reps’ challenges to hit the ball out of the park. While it’s easy to get lost in the statistics of a sales plan, you should factor in the daily life of your sales rep to know if your plan is feasible beyond paper.

3. Identify and analyze your target market

You can’t execute any sales planning without knowing your target demographic. Who is buying your product or service? What problems do they have? Where are they searching for a solution?

Answering these types of questions is how you identify and analyze your target market. You can either do it by creating a buyer persona or have a detailed outline with all these answers. But why exactly do you need to identify or analyze your target market?

Well, imagine this: if you know where to find your ideal customer, what their pain points are, what their current solutions are, and what problems they are facing in their current situation, aren’t you better able to cater to their needs and create a lifetime customer?

4. Gather your tools and resources

You have your target audience locked in sight, you have your goal, and you also distributed responsibilities within your team. Now what?

It’s time to gather the tools and resources that can make it happen. Start by thinking about all the necessary tools, software, and resources you need for your sales goals to be achieved. For example, if your target audience is searching on Google, you’ll want to invest in SEO tools like SEMrush.

You’ll also need a CRM for sales reps as part of your sales planner too!

💡 Tip: Specify all the software you plan on using. This is important for internal reference when you need to know how you’re measuring your sales plans’ success. I recommend finding a simple CRM with a user-friendly but powerful dashboard like Jaldi CRM.

5. Set your budget

Budgets are important parts of your sales planning process. You should begin noting down all the costs— major and minor —you’ll incur to achieve the sales goal you’ve set.

To help you get started, here are some costs you should write down:

Sales training costs,
Software, tools, and resources costs,
Salaries and commissions,
Rent and office utilities,
Travel costs, and
Food and team-building expenditures.

💡 Tip: Support your budget calculations with hard facts and plenty of data for a data-driven solution. Sales forecasts, previous performance data, and competitor spending can provide valuable insight into your budgets!

6. Plan your marketing and prospecting strategy

Of course, it’s not a real plan unless it has some strategy involved. Luckily, sales planning has 2 types of strategies you need to be mindful of.

First, you have your marketing strategy. Largely relying on your marketing team, this section of your sales plans has to cover:

The price strategy you plan to execute,
The promotions you want to set in place, if any,
Your brand awareness strategy, and
The way you want to generate your leads.

Next, you have your prospecting strategy. Your prospecting strategy should answer one question. Just one. How will your sales team get and qualify every lead your marketing strategy generates? This can be via:

Email outreaches,
Cold calling,
Or anything else!

7. Create an action plan

Now, it’s time to tie together your sales team and resources with your sales strategies to achieve the objective. This section of the sales plan is the final step that summarizes the game plan for every player.

Just be sure to be thorough and concise with your action plan with a clearly communicated timeline!

💡 Tip: Marketing and sales go hand in hand. Don’t forget to include marketing input when you create your action plan. The more input your marketing team can provide you, the more payoff you will see from lead generation and nurturing.

Final Thoughts

And there you have it! You now know what sales planning is, what it entails, and what it takes to create your own sales plans. While sales planning can be a very lucrative part of your entire strategy, remember that this isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation.

Instead, create a sales plan that suits your organizational needs and resources. Plus, it’s crucial to review your sales plan every quarter and tweak it accordingly to fit your updated needs.