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Unlocking success: a step-by-step sales business plan blueprint.

Download Sales Business Plan Template for Strategic Growth

Anisha N

Published: April 13, 2023

We're all guilty of subscribing to a myriad of newsletters and blogs by sales gurus who will guarantee that their practices will bring you success – whether it's personalizing your newsletter format, cold emails, or changing the 'Buy Now' button.

News flash – these aren't actual sales business plans or even sales strategies.

Building and developing a solid sales business plan is the foundation of your business. A sales plan outlines your future goals–be it revenue targets, sales targets, or even a marketing strategy–a sales business plan will propel you to always be two steps ahead of the game.

Whether you're focused on eCommerce, B2C, inbound, outbound, or even enterprise companies–a business plan is essential to survive.

So, what's a sales business plan? How do you build it (and stick to it)?

By the end of this guide, you'll be armed with the right plan to win the fight for your business and stay ahead of the curve at all times.

Let's dive in.

What is a Sales Business Plan?

A sales business plan is a strategic document that outlines the goals, objectives, and strategies of a company's sales team to achieve its revenue targets. The plan serves as a roadmap to guide the sales team in achieving their targets by outlining the steps they need to take in order to achieve success.

Here are a few sales business plan statistics -

  • Only 22% of companies feel that their salespeople have the necessary resources to be successful. (CSO Insights)
  • Companies with a documented sales process generate 18% more revenue than those without one. (HubSpot)
  • Salespeople who use social selling techniques are 50% more likely to meet or exceed their sales quotas. (LinkedIn)
  • 73% of sales teams say that the ability to collaborate is critical to their success. (Salesforce)
  • Companies with a formal sales methodology in place have a win rate that is 28% higher than those without one. (HubSpot)

A sales business plan typically includes a SWOT analysis, which helps to identify the company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the market. It also includes a target market analysis, which helps to identify the customers the company wants to target and how to reach them.

In addition, a sales plan outlines the sales team's objectives, which include the revenue targets they need to achieve, the products or services they need to sell, and the metrics they need to track to measure their success.

The plan also details the strategies and tactics that the sales team will use to reach their goals, including lead generation, prospecting, nurturing, and closing sales.

Overall, a sales business plan is a critical tool for any sales team, as it helps to focus their efforts, track their progress, and identify areas for improvement.

What is the Structure of a Sales Plan Template?

Sales plans vary from business to business, depending on their niche, the industry they are in, and more, but typically, they include the following sections -

1. Executive Summary

The executive summary is a critical part of a sales business plan that provides a high-level overview of the plan's key elements to stakeholders.

The executive summary should be brief, clear, and compelling, with a maximum of two pages. To create an effective summary, highlight the key points of the plan, including sales goals, target market, sales strategy, and revenue projections. Use simple language and include a call-to-action to encourage stakeholders to take the next steps, such as investing or partnering.

The executive summary is like an elevator pitch, and it needs to grab the reader's attention, communicate the plan's essence, and encourage action.

2. Company Overview

The company overview is a section in the sales business plan that provides an introduction to the company, its history, and the products or services it offers. This section aims to give the reader an understanding of the company's background, goals, and vision for the future.

Here are some pointers to help create an effective company overview -

  • Briefly describe the company's history, including how and when it was founded and any significant milestones achieved to date.
  • Explain the company's mission and values, highlighting what sets it apart from competitors.
  • Provide a brief overview of the products or services the company offers, outlining their unique features and benefits.
  • Highlight any key partnerships or collaborations that the company has established to help achieve its goals.
  • If the company has any notable achievements or recognition, mention these briefly to help build credibility.

3. Market Trends and Analysis

The market analysis is a crucial section of the sales business plan that provides a comprehensive understanding of the industry and the company's place within it.

This section should cover the following -

  • Define the target market by describing the ideal customer, including their demographics, psychographics, and behavior patterns.
  • Analyze the industry by identifying its size, growth potential, and key trends. This analysis should also include an overview of the competitive landscape, including the company's main competitors and their strengths and weaknesses.
  • Conduct a SWOT analysis to identify the company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This analysis should help the company understand its position in the market and determine potential strategies for growth.
  • Determine the market share and sales potential by analyzing the company's current and potential customers, the competition, and the overall market size.
  • Identify any regulatory or environmental factors that could impact the industry, including government policies or changes in consumer behavior.

4. Sales Strategy

By developing a clear and effective sales strategy, the company can ensure that its sales efforts are aligned with its overall goals and objectives. A well-crafted sales strategy can help the company achieve its sales targets, expand its customer base, and gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.

  • Define the sales goals by setting specific, measurable targets for revenue, market share, and other key performance indicators.
  • Identify the target customers and their needs, including their pain points and motivations for purchasing the company's products or services.
  • Determine the sales channels the company will use to reach its target customers, including direct sales, online sales, and third-party sales channels.
  • Outline the sales tactics that the company will use to reach its target customers, including advertising, promotions, and pricing strategies.
  • Detail the sales team structure, including roles and responsibilities, hiring plans, and training programs.
  • Provide a sales forecast that outlines expected revenue and sales growth based on the sales strategy.

5. Sales Forecasting

The sales forecast predicts future sales performance and is a critical component of the sales business plan. This section should provide a detailed analysis of the company's sales projections, including historical sales data, market demand, sales channels, sales team, pricing strategy, and external factors.

By creating a detailed sales forecast, the company can set realistic sales targets, monitor performance, allocate resources effectively, and adjust its sales strategy as needed.

The budget section of the sales business plan outlines the financial resources needed to achieve the sales goals.

This section should cover the following:

  • Estimate the costs associated with the sales strategy, including marketing expenses, sales team salaries, and travel costs.
  • Identify any capital investments required to support the sales strategy, such as new equipment, technology, or facilities.
  • Outline the expected revenue and profits based on the sales forecast and sales strategy.
  • Develop a cash flow projection that details the timing and amount of cash inflows and outflows associated with the sales strategy.

By creating a detailed budget, the company can ensure that it has the financial resources needed to execute its sales strategy effectively. The budget can also help the company prioritize its spending, identify potential areas of cost savings, and monitor its financial performance against its sales goals.

7. Implementation Plan

The implementation plan outlines how the company will execute its sales strategy and achieve its sales goals. This section should cover the following:

  • Identify the specific actions required to implement the sales strategy, such as developing new sales materials, hiring additional sales staff, or launching a new product.
  • Assign responsibility for each action item and establish timelines for completion.
  • Establish a system for monitoring progress and evaluating the effectiveness of the sales strategy.
  • Develop contingency plans to address any potential obstacles or challenges that may arise.

The implementation plan can also help the company track progress, identify areas for improvement, and make necessary adjustments to the sales strategy as needed.

8. Metrics and KPIs

Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used to measure the success of the sales strategy and provide insight into the performance of the sales team. This section should cover the following:

  • Identify the metrics and KPIs that will be used to evaluate the success of the sales strategy, such as sales revenue, sales growth, customer acquisition cost, or customer lifetime value.
  • Establish a system for tracking and analyzing these metrics and KPIs regularly.
  • Develop a process for using this data to make informed decisions about the sales strategy and identify opportunities for improvement.
  • Assign responsibility for monitoring and analyzing these metrics and KPIs to specific individuals or teams within the company.

With the right metrics and KPIs, the company can track the success of the sales strategy and make data-driven decisions to improve performance.

9. Risks and Challenges

The risks and challenges section of the sales business plan identifies potential obstacles that could impact the success of the sales strategy.

It assesses the likelihood and potential impact of each risk or challenge, develops contingency plans to address them, and assigns responsibility for monitoring and addressing these risks or challenges to specific individuals or teams within the company.

By doing so, the company can develop contingency plans to minimize its impact, adapt to changes in the market, remain competitive, and achieve its sales goals despite potential obstacles.

10. Conclusion

The conclusion section of the sales business plan summarizes the key points and highlights the overall value of the sales strategy. This section should cover the following:

  • Recap the key points of the sales business plan, including the company overview, market analysis, sales strategy, sales forecast, budget, implementation plan, metrics and KPIs, and risks and challenges.
  • Emphasize the value of the sales strategy, including the potential impact on sales revenue, market share, and customer acquisition.
  • Provide a call-to-action that encourages stakeholders to support and implement the sales strategy.
  • Thank stakeholders for their time and commitment to the sales business plan.

The conclusion section provides a final opportunity to reinforce the key points of the sales business plan and inspire stakeholders to take action.

How to Write a Winning Sales Business Plan Template: A Step-By-Step Blueprint

Writing a sales business plan template may seem like a lot of work, but once you do, you've already skipped leaps and bounds to take your business to the next level.

Let's break down this process, step-by-step, to help you write a winning sales business plan template -

1. State your Company's Mission

Your company's mission statement should explain what your business does, why it exists, and how it aims to achieve its goals.

Here are some tips for creating a compelling mission statement -

  • Keep it short and simple.
  • Use strong and clear language.
  • Make sure it aligns with your company's overall vision and goals.
  • Communicate how your business is unique.
  • Focus on the benefits you provide to customers.

Your mission statement should inspire and motivate your team while also communicating your values to potential customers. It sets the foundation for the rest of your sales business plan, so take the time to craft a mission statement that accurately reflects your company's goals and values.

2. Set Objectives and Timeframes

In this section, you should identify specific, measurable goals for your sales team, and establish a timeline for achieving them.

Here are some tips for setting objectives and timeframe -

  • Identify both short-term and long-term goals.
  • Make sure your goals are specific and measurable, such as "increase sales by 10% in the next quarter."
  • Set realistic and achievable goals.
  • Assign each goal to a specific team member or department.
  • Establish a timeline for achieving each goal.

By setting objectives and a timeframe for achieving them, you can motivate your sales team and provide a clear roadmap for success. Make sure to regularly track your progress toward these goals and adjust your strategy as needed to ensure you're on track to meet them.

3. Identify your Team Structure

The third step in creating a sales business plan is to identify your team structure.

This involves identifying the key players in your sales team, outlining their roles and responsibilities, and providing a brief overview of their experience and qualifications.

Here are some tips for describing your team -

  • Identify the key players in your sales team, such as sales representatives, account managers, and sales managers.
  • Outline each team member's role and responsibilities in the sales process.
  • Provide a brief overview of each team member's experience and qualifications.
  • Consider including a chart or diagram that illustrates the structure of your sales team.

By clearly defining your sales team and their roles, you can ensure that everyone is on the same page and working together toward your sales goals. Additionally, highlighting your team's experience and qualifications can help build confidence in your ability to deliver results.

4. Define your Target Market

The fourth step in creating a sales business plan is to define your target market.

This involves identifying the specific group or groups of people that your products or services are intended for and understanding their needs, preferences, and behaviors.

Here are some tips for defining your target market -

  • Start by analyzing your existing customer base to identify common characteristics such as age, gender, location, income level, etc.
  • Conduct market research to gain a deeper understanding of your target market's needs, preferences, and behaviors.
  • Develop buyer personas that represent your ideal customers, including their goals, challenges, and pain points.
  • Consider the size and growth potential of your target market, as well as any trends or changes that may affect their behavior.
  • Identify any gaps or unmet needs in the market that your products or services could address.

By defining your target market, you can create more targeted and effective sales strategies that are tailored to the needs and preferences of your ideal customers. This can help you build stronger relationships with your target audience, increase customer loyalty, and ultimately drive sales growth.

5. Evaluate Resources

This step involves taking stock of the resources you have at your disposal and assessing how you can leverage them to achieve your objectives. Here are some key aspects to consider:

  • Human Resources : Consider the size and skill set of your team. Determine if you have enough people with the right skills to achieve your sales goals, and if not, consider hiring or outsourcing.
  • Financial Resources : Assess the financial resources you have available, including cash on hand, lines of credit, and investments. Determine if you have enough funds to achieve your sales objectives or if you need to secure additional financing.
  • Technology Resources : Evaluate the technology resources available to your team, including hardware, software, and other tools. Determine if you have the right technology to support your sales efforts and if any upgrades or investments are necessary.
  • Intellectual Property : Consider any patents, trademarks, or other intellectual property that can support your sales efforts. Determine if you have any competitive advantages that can be leveraged to increase sales.
  • Facilities and Equipment : Evaluate your physical resources, including office space, production facilities, and equipment. Determine if you have enough space and equipment to support your sales efforts, or if any upgrades or investments are necessary.

By evaluating your available resources, you can determine what you have at your disposal to support your sales strategy and identify any areas where you may need to invest or make changes to achieve your objectives.

6. Carry Out Competitive Analysis with Competitors

This involves taking stock of the resources you have available to support your sales efforts, as well as identifying any additional resources you may need to acquire.

Here are some key things to consider when evaluating your resources:

  • Sales Team: Evaluate the skills and experience of your sales team to ensure that they are capable of executing your sales strategy effectively.
  • Marketing Materials: Assess the quality and effectiveness of your existing marketing materials, including brochures, websites, social media channels, and other promotional materials.
  • Customer Data : Analyze your customer data to identify trends and patterns that can inform your sales and marketing strategies.
  • Sales Tools and Technologies: Determine whether your team has the right tools and technologies to support their sales efforts. This could include customer relationship management (CRM) software, sales automation tools, or other sales technologies.
  • Training and Development: Identify any gaps in your team's skills or knowledge, and develop a plan to address them through training and development initiatives.

By evaluating your resources in this way, you can identify any gaps or weaknesses in your sales process and develop strategies to address them. This will help you ensure that you have the resources you need to achieve your sales objectives and drive growth for your business.

7. Set the Budget

The seventh point is to set a budget for your sales business plan.

This step is essential to ensure that you have the necessary resources to implement your sales strategy effectively. Here are some tips on how to set a budget for your sales plan:

  • Determine your Revenue Goals: Your revenue goals will guide you in setting a realistic budget. Consider the size of your market, the competition, and your pricing strategy.
  • Calculate your Expenses: You need to estimate your expenses to set a budget. Make a list of all your expenses, including salaries, marketing, technology, and travel expenses.
  • Prioritize Expenses: Once you have calculated your expenses, prioritize them. Identify the essential expenses that you must incur to implement your sales strategy.
  • Allocate Resources: Allocate resources based on your priorities. Make sure that you have enough funds to cover your critical expenses and have some funds set aside for unexpected expenses.
  • Review and Adjust: Regularly review your budget and adjust it as needed. Make sure that you are on track to meet your revenue goals, and adjust your expenses accordingly.

Setting a budget is crucial for the success of your sales business plan. It will help you allocate resources effectively, prioritize expenses, and track your progress toward your revenue goals.

8. Define your Organization's Marketing Strategy

Marketing strategy is an essential component of a sales business plan as it outlines the approach a company will take to promote and sell its products or services to its target customers. The following are some key elements to consider when defining the marketing strategy for your sales business plan:

  • Value Proposition: Define the unique value proposition of your product or service, and identify the key benefits and features that set it apart from competitors.
  • Target Audience: Determine the specific demographics, needs, and behaviors of your target audience, and how your product or service can address their needs.
  • Positioning : Define the position of your product or service in the marketplace, based on factors such as pricing, quality, and features.
  • Channels : Identify the channels through which you will reach your target audiences, such as social media, email marketing, or direct mail.
  • Budget : Determine how much you will allocate to marketing activities, and how you will measure the return on investment.
  • Marketing Tactics : Define the specific tactics you will use to promote your product or service, such as advertising, content marketing, or event sponsorships.
  • Metrics : Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) you will use to measure the success of your marketing efforts, such as website traffic, lead generation, or sales conversion rates.

By clearly defining your marketing strategy in your sales business plan, you can ensure that your efforts are focused, efficient, and aligned with your overall business objectives.

9. Figure Out the Sales Strategy

This step involves developing a detailed plan for selling your product or service to your target market.

Here are some things to consider when developing your sales strategy -

  • Sales Channels: Consider the best channels for selling your product or service, such as online marketplaces, social media, direct sales, or distribution partnerships.
  • Sales Process: Outline the sales process, including how you will generate leads, how you will qualify leads, how you will make your sales pitch, and how you will close deals.
  • Sales Team: Determine who will be responsible for sales, their job descriptions, and how they will be trained and compensated.
  • Sales Goals: Establish specific, measurable sales goals and objectives, such as revenue targets, sales volume, or customer acquisition.
  • Sales Forecast: Develop a sales forecast based on your target market, pricing strategy, and sales goals. This should include projections for monthly, quarterly, and annual sales.
  • Sales Metrics: Determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) you will use to track your sales success, such as conversion rates, customer lifetime value, and customer acquisition cost.

By developing a clear and comprehensive sales strategy, you will be better equipped to execute your sales plan and achieve your business goals.

10. Define an Action Plan

The final step to writing a sales business plan is to define an action plan.

This step involves determining how the objectives will be achieved and what actions need to be taken to implement the sales strategies outlined in the previous steps. Some key elements of this step include:

  • Assigning Tasks and Responsibilities: Determine who will be responsible for implementing each aspect of the sales plan and assign tasks accordingly.
  • Setting Timelines: Establish specific timelines for each action item to ensure that the sales plan stays on track and progresses toward achieving its objectives.
  • Monitoring Progress: Regularly monitor progress towards the objectives and make adjustments to the action plan as necessary.
  • Identifying Potential Roadblocks: Anticipate any challenges or roadblocks that may arise during implementation and develop contingency plans to address them.
  • Identifying Metrics: Establish metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of the sales plan and adjust the action plan accordingly.

By defining a clear action plan, a sales business plan can be effectively implemented, and the sales team can work towards achieving the objectives and targets set out in the plan.

Why Do Organizations Need a Sales Plan?

Organizations need a sales business plan for several reasons -

1. Clarity of Goals and Objectives

A sales business plan provides a clear roadmap for an organization to achieve its sales goals and objectives. Defining the steps that need to be taken helps ensure that everyone in the organization is working towards the same goals.

2. Resource allocation

A sales business plan helps organizations allocate resources effectively. By knowing where the company is headed, it can identify the resources required to achieve those goals and allocate them accordingly.

3. Improved decision-making

With a sales business plan, organizations can make informed decisions about their sales strategy. They can assess the viability of different sales channels, sales techniques, and sales campaigns based on the data they have collected.

4. Better risk management

A sales business plan can help organizations identify and manage risks more effectively. By forecasting sales revenue and expenses, companies can develop contingency plans to address potential risks.

5. Improved Communication

A sales business plan provides a clear and concise way to communicate the organization's sales strategy to stakeholders. This ensures that everyone in the organization is on the same page and working towards the same goals.

4 Examples of Sales Business Plan Templates

Here are a few examples of sales business plan templates that you could take inspiration from -

30-60-90 Day Sales Plan

A 30-60-90 day sales plan is a detailed outline of the tasks and goals a salesperson hopes to accomplish within the first 30, 60, and 90 days of starting a new job or taking on a new sales territory. The plan is designed to help the salesperson quickly ramp up their productivity and start making meaningful contributions to the team.

Here is a template for a 30-60-90 day sales plan -

First 30 Days

  • Meet with my manager and team members to gain an understanding of the company's products, services, and sales processes.
  • Study the company's existing customer base and their needs.
  • Begin establishing relationships with key customers.
  • Attend sales training sessions to further develop my skills and learn more about the company's offerings.
  • Develop a list of potential prospects in my assigned territory.
  • Schedule meetings with the manager and team members.
  • Analyze the company's existing customer data.
  • Make a list of key customers to reach out to.
  • Attend scheduled sales training sessions.
  • Create a list of potential prospects.

Second 30 Days

  • Start making sales calls to prospects and schedule appointments.
  • Follow up with previous prospects and leads.
  • Conduct thorough research on potential prospects to understand their needs and pain points.
  • Develop a clear understanding of the competitive landscape.
  • Refine my sales pitch and value proposition.
  • Make at least [X] several sales calls per day.
  • Schedule appointments with interested prospects.
  • Follow up with previous leads.
  • Research potential prospects.
  • Analyze the competition and develop strategies to differentiate from them.
  • Work with my manager to refine my sales pitch and value proposition.

Third 30 Days

  • Close deals with interested prospects and achieve sales targets.
  • Continue building relationships with key customers.
  • Develop a pipeline of potential future sales.
  • Develop strategies to retain existing customers.
  • Identify areas for improvement and provide feedback to the team.
  • Create a customer retention plan.

2. Monthly Sales Plan Template

A monthly sales plan is a document that outlines the sales activities, goals, and strategies for a specific month. It is a crucial part of a company's sales strategy and helps the sales team to stay focused and accountable for their performance.

Here is a template for a monthly sales plan -

I. Overview

  • Month: [insert month]
  • Sales team: [list the sales team members]

II. Monthly Sales Goals

  • Revenue goal: [insert revenue goal for the month]
  • Sales target: [insert sales target for the month]
  • Key performance indicators (KPIs): [list the KPIs that will be tracked for the month]

III. Sales Strategies

  • Marketing activities: [list the marketing activities planned for the month]
  • Sales activities: [list the sales activities planned for the month]
  • Promotions and discounts: [list the promotions and discounts planned for the month]

IV. Sales Forecast

  • Projected revenue: [insert projected revenue for the month]
  • Sales pipeline: [list the sales opportunities in the pipeline for the month]
  • Sales conversion rate: [insert the sales conversion rate for the month]

V. Resources

  • Sales tools and technology: [list the sales tools and technology that will be used during the month]
  • Sales team training: [list the training sessions planned for the month]

VI. Risks and Challenges

  • Potential obstacles: [list the potential obstacles that may hinder sales performance]
  • Mitigation strategies: [list the strategies to mitigate the potential risks and challenges]

VII. Action Plan

  • Weekly sales goals: [list the weekly sales goals for the month]
  • Assigned tasks and responsibilities: [list the tasks and responsibilities assigned to each sales team member]
  • Deadlines: [list the deadlines for each task]

VIII. Conclusion

  • Recap of monthly goals and strategies
  • Next steps and follow-up actions.

3. Territory Sales Plan Template

A territory sales plan is a comprehensive strategy designed to outline the sales objectives, goals, and tactics that will be implemented in a specific geographic area or "territory."

This plan should provide a clear roadmap for how a sales team will approach and engage with potential customers in their assigned area, and outline the resources needed to achieve the desired outcomes.

A template for a territory sales plan might include the following sections -

  • Executive Summary: This section provides a brief overview of the territory sales plan, including the purpose, objectives, and key strategies.
  • Territory Analysis : This section should provide a detailed analysis of the assigned territory, including information about the market, competition, target customers, and other relevant data.
  • Sales Goals: This section should outline the sales goals and objectives for the territory, including revenue targets, customer acquisition goals, and other key performance indicators.
  • Sales Strategies: This section should provide a detailed overview of the strategies and tactics that will be used to achieve the sales goals outlined in the previous section. This may include details about lead generation, customer engagement, sales presentations, and other sales-related activities.
  • Resource Allocation: This section should outline the resources required to implement the sales strategies outlined in the previous section. This may include budgetary requirements, staffing needs, and other resources necessary to support the sales team.
  • Implementation Plan: This section should provide a detailed timeline and action plan for implementing the sales strategies and achieving the sales goals outlined in the previous sections.
  • Performance Metrics: This section should outline the key performance metrics that will be used to measure the success of the territory sales plan, including sales revenue, customer acquisition rates, and other relevant data.
  • Conclusion : This section should summarize the key points of the territory sales plan and highlight the expected outcomes and benefits of implementing the plan.

By using a template such as the one outlined above, sales teams can create a plan that is tailored to their unique needs and objectives, and that can be easily communicated to stakeholders and team members.

Wrapping Up,

Effective planning is crucial for the success of any business, and this is especially true when it comes to achieving sales targets. Before promoting your product or service, it's essential to establish clear goals and determine the strategies that will help you achieve them.

With a well-defined plan in place, you'll have the clarity and direction necessary to make informed decisions and stay on track toward achieving your objectives.

Don't leave the success of your sales plan to chance - schedule a demo with one of Salesken's experts today and discover how our innovative solutions can help you achieve your sales targets.

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Sales | How To

How to Create a Sales Plan in 10 Steps (+ Free Template)

Published March 9, 2023

Published Mar 9, 2023

Jess Pingrey

REVIEWED BY: Jess Pingrey

Jillian Ilao

WRITTEN BY: Jillian Ilao

This article is part of a larger series on Sales Management .

  • 1 Establish Your Mission Statement
  • 2 Set Sales Goals & Objectives
  • 3 Determine Your Ideal Customer
  • 4 Set Your Sales Budget
  • 5 Develop Sales Strategies & Tactics
  • 6 Implement Sales Tools
  • 7 Develop Your Sales Funnel
  • 8 Create Your Sales Pipeline
  • 9 Assign Roles & Responsibilities
  • 10 Monitor Progress & Adjust Accordingly
  • 11 Examples of Other Free Small Business Sales Plan Templates
  • 12 Sales Planning Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
  • 13 Bottom Line

Sales plans enable businesses to set measurable goals, identify resources, budget for sales activities, forecast sales, and monitor business progress. These all contribute to guiding the sales team toward the company’s overall strategy and goals. In this article, we explore how to create a sales plan, including details on creating an action plan for sales, understanding the purpose of your business, and identifying your ideal customers.

What Is a Sales Plan? A sales plan outlines the strategies, objectives, tools, processes, and metrics to hit your business’ sales goals. It entails establishing your mission statement, setting goals and objectives, determining your ideal customer, and developing your sales strategy and sales funnel. To effectively execute your sales plan, assign roles and responsibilities within your sales team and have metrics to measure your outcomes versus your goals and objectives.

Ten steps to creating an effective sales plan

Download and customize our free sales planning template and follow our steps to learn how to create a sales plan to reach your company’s revenue goals.

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Free Sales Plan Template

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💡 Quick Tip:

Once you’ve created a sales plan, give your sales team the tools to execute it effectively with robust customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Use a CRM like HubSpot CRM to help your sales team collaborate on deals, develop sales reports, track deals, and create custom sales dashboards

1. Establish Your Mission Statement

A mission statement summarizing why you’re in business should be part of your action plan for sales. It should include a broad overview of your business’ products or services and your brand’s unique selling proposition. For example, you wouldn’t say, “We provide customers with insurance policies.” Instead, you might frame it as “We provide customers with cost-effective financial risk management solutions.”

It’s essential to fully understand your unique selling proposition before creating a mission statement. This allows you to learn why you’re different from competitors in your industry. It also helps you determine how your unique proposition suits a niche market better.

Steps on how to create a unique selling proposition

For instance, using the same insurance example above, you may realize specific markets are easier to sell based on that selling proposition. Therefore, it’s a good idea to narrow in on your mission statement by saying, “We provide startup businesses with cost-effective risk management solutions.”

2. Set Sales Goals & Objectives

Once you have summarized why you’re in business in a mission statement, begin setting sales goals . Typically, business goals will include one year, but may also include three- or five-year projections.

Steps on how to set sales goals

Here are a few options for how to set sales revenue goals for your business:

  • Set sales amount: You may have a specific amount in mind for a sales goal. For instance, you may determine that $200,000 is a reasonable sales goal based on prior sales and your company’s ability to generate new business.
  • Desired profitability: First, calculate the total anticipated expenses for the set time period to find the break-even point. From there, you can calculate how much revenue your team needs to bring in to make a certain profit margin. For example, if annual operating costs are expected to be $100,000, and you want to make a 30% profit, your sales goal is $130,000.
  • Projected sales forecast: Based on an industry-standard or estimates you attained by running a sales forecast, you may find it’s better to use a projected sales forecast as your sales goal.

Pro tip: Projecting sales can be challenging without a suitable sales forecasting model. Our free sales forecast templates help you create simple, long-term, budget-based, multi-product, subscription-based, and month-to-month business sales forecasts. Some customer relationship managers (CRMs) like Freshsales have sales goal-tracking functionalities that allow you to set and assign sales goals for your team.

Five-year sales forecast template example.

Five-year sales forecast template example (Source: Fit Small Business )

Freshsales sales goal tracking filter options.

Sales goal tracking in Freshsales (Source: Freshsales )

Sales goals must reflect new business revenue and sales from existing or recurring customers. Then, you must add specific sales objectives that identify and prioritize the sales activities your team needs to complete to meet sales goals. This creates an objective way to measure success in hitting goals at all levels: organizational, sales department, team, and individual sales rep, which is an essential part of sales management .

For example, imagine your total revenue goal is $200,000 in year two and $300,000 in year three. You then add an objective, such as stating you want your business’ revenue from existing customers to grow 15% in year three. This can be measured by evaluating your percentage of revenue from existing customers in year three compared to year two.

3. Determine Your Ideal Customer

Determining the ideal customer or target market is the next step of your business plan for sales reps. It may have been accomplished when you developed your mission statement, but also when you set your sales goals and discovered how broad your market needs to be to reach them. Describing your ideal customer helps dictate who you’re selling to and your selling approach.

One way to establish your ideal customer is by creating a series of unique customer profiles . Each profile specifies key demographics, behaviors, interests, job positions, and geographic information about one of your ideal buyer types. Based on your customer profiles, you can then develop more targeted marketing strategies for lead generation and nurturing to move leads through the sales process more efficiently and close more deals.

Pro tip: Making a customer persona can be challenging, especially if it is based on the wrong data or if you just focus on the demographics. Check out our article on creating a customer persona to help you define your company’s ideal buyer types and guide your lead generation and marketing activities.

4. Set Your Sales Budget

After establishing your objectives and identifying your ideal customer personas—and before developing your actual strategies and tactics—you must identify a sales budget to work with. It should include estimated expenses for salaries, travel expenses, and the cost of any software tools or service providers used to help with sales and marketing. While these are meant to be estimates, research and due diligence should be done to avoid financial errors.

One way to set your sales budget, particularly for software tools and services you may be interested in, is to create and issue a request for proposal (RFP). Issuing an RFP allows you to post a summary of your needs to solicit proposals on potential solutions. In addition to providing accurate budget estimates from various qualified vendors and contractors, it may also help you discover cost-effective or high-performing options you were previously unaware of.

5. Develop Sales Strategies & Tactics

A sales strategy explains how you plan to outsell your competitors and accomplish your sales goals. It defines specific, detailed tactics your team will use to pursue your sales goals. These may involve using Google Ads, cold calling, and drip email marketing campaigns as part of a lead generation strategy. Available strategies differ depending on your company’s resources, skill sets, sales operation, and product or service offerings.

Strategies and tactics should be personalized for your ideal customers based on their unique interests, behaviors, and the best ways to connect with them. For example, some customer profiles show your ideal buyer generally only makes purchases based on trusted referrals. In this case, you could implement a referral strategy that provides incentives to generate more customer referrals .

Plus, different sales strategies will be needed to acquire new business vs keeping existing customers. When selling to existing customers, for example, your strategy could include cross-selling tactics where additional products are recommended based on prior purchases. The short-term cross-selling tactics could require customer service reps to send 30 emails per week recommending a complementary product to existing customers.

For a new business strategy, sales reps might rely on emotional selling methods when using cold calling as a tactic. Instead of product features, cold calling scripts would be geared to evoke feelings that lead to buying decisions. Tactics could reflect the objective of having reps make 15 cold calls each week. They could use a script that opens with a story about how a purchase made a customer feel or how someone felt because they didn’t purchase the product.

Pro tip: Ensuring your strategies are properly executed requires excellent sales leadership and a healthy environment for sales reps to operate in. Our how-to guide for building a positive sales culture shows you how to create an environment that promotes high job satisfaction, low employee turnover, and profitability.

6. Implement Sales Tools

Your sales strategy template should reference the software, hardware, and materials you use to manage the sales operation and make each team member more efficient. One of the most notable tools to include is the customer relationship management (CRM) system . It allows your team to organize contact information, streamline sales tasks, and facilitate communication with customers and leads.

HubSpot CRM , for instance, makes it easy to organize information about leads, contacts, and deal opportunities. Additionally, from a HubSpot CRM lead profile, you can initiate a conversation with that contact by calling, emailing, or scheduling an appointment.

HubSpot CRM sample lead profile.

HubSpot CRM contact profile (Source: HubSpot )

CRMs are also used to monitor and report sales progress. For example, many have dashboards and functionality, such as alerts, which make it easy to identify where your team may be underperforming. These could also tell you which leads are most likely to convert and should be focused on. Sales information such as deals closed, revenue generated, and leads created can be presented in a detailed report .

These types of insights can also be shown on the CRM’s system dashboard . Pipedrive is an example of a CRM that has a customizable dashboard that displays both activity information and performance-based data. Activity data include emails sent, received, and outstanding tasks to be completed. Performance-based data, on the other hand, have deals lost or the average value of won deals.

Pipedrive’s customizable dashboard (Source: Pipedrive )

Other sales enablement tools can make your sales team more effective. These include voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) phone systems , lead generation platforms, email campaign tools, content creation platforms, and task automation software. These tools can be found within CRM software or through CRM integrations and standalone applications.

In addition to technology tools, sales and marketing templates should be used to streamline outreach initiatives. Scenario-based, premade sales email templates , for instance, allow salespeople to have an email already crafted for their specific situation.

Creating and storing business proposal templates in your CRM also streamlines the contact procurement and business proposal generation process . This way, whenever a prospect says they’d like to receive a quote or you’re responding to a request for a proposal, you already have a customizable template ready to go.

Pro tip: Effective cold calling scripts sales reps can use as a guide when placing calls to new leads is a tremendous sales tool to include in your action plan for sales. Get started using our guide for writing a cold calling script , which includes examples and free templates.

7. Develop Your Sales Funnel

Setting up a sales funnel within your sales strategy template lets you visualize the stages of the customer journey, from becoming aware of your business to buying from it. By creating and understanding the different statuses of your leads, you can track progress and determine how effective you are at converting leads to the next stages in the funnel.

Using a sales funnel with conversion rates also makes it easier for you to adjust your sales strategies and tactics based on how effectively you’re getting leads through the funnel. For instance, let’s say you have 100 leads in the awareness stage of the funnel. You decide to cold call 50 of them and write a sales email to the other 50 to qualify leads by setting up a product demonstration.

After each campaign, you find you were able to qualify seven of the leads that were cold-called and only two of the leads you had emailed. Based on these funnel conversion rates of 14% (7/50) from cold calling and 4% (2/50) from emailing, you would likely adjust your tactics to focus more on calling instead of emailing.

Do you need help creating a sales funnel for your business? Our guide to creating a sales funnel explains the step-by-step sales funnel creation process and provides free templates and specific examples.

8. Create Your Sales Pipeline

Once your sales process’ sales funnel stages are identified, develop the sales pipeline stages . These stages include your team’s sales activities to move leads through the funnel. For example, you need to get a lead from the sales funnel stage of brand awareness to show interest in learning more about one of your services. To do this, you could add a sales pipeline activity like setting up a demo or presentation appointment through a cold call.

Adding your sales pipeline to your sales strategy is essential because it describes all the activities your sales reps need to do to close a sales deal. CRM systems like Freshsales allow you to create and track the pipeline stages for each lead or deal within the lead record.

Funnel view of Freshsales’ deal pipeline (Source: Freshsales )

Listing each pipeline stage also helps you identify tools and resources needed to perform the activities for each stage. For example, if you use phone calls to initiate contact with or introduce a product to a lead, you could develop outbound sales call scripts for your team.

After the initial contact by phone, you may use email to follow up after a call and then nurture leads throughout the sales process. As part of your follow-up, create and automate a sales follow-up email template to get them to the next pipeline stage.

The sales funnel shows where a lead is in the sales process. The sales pipeline, on the other hand, lists activities needed to drive leads to the next stage in the sales funnel. Both should be used in your sales strategy when defining the repeatable steps required to generate leads and close deals. Check out our article to learn how to create a winning sales process with insights on both creating a sales process and measuring its success.

9. Assign Roles & Responsibilities

Regardless of the size of your business or sales operation, your business plan for sales reps should include the role and responsibility of each person in the sales team. Each role should have a name, such as someone being a sales development representative (SDR). There should also be a summary of their responsibilities, such as “the SDR is responsible for setting up sales appointments using the activities listed in the sales pipeline.”

Measuring the performance of any sales position is simple through key performance indicators (KPIs). Specific KPIs should be used to measure performance for each role and should be included in your plan. Below are some examples of KPIs that can be used by the members of the sales team and their respective responsibility:

  • Sales development representative: Responsible for introducing products and services, qualifying leads, and setting up appointments for the account executive. Performance is measured by calls placed, emails sent, and appointments generated.
  • Account executive: Responsible for nurturing qualified leads, delivering the sales pitch , sending quotes, and closing deals. Performance is measured by business proposals sent, the average time in the proposal consideration stage, deals closed, and deal closing rate.
  • Customer service representative: Responsible for managing customer needs, handling billing, and managing service tickets by assisting customers. Performance is measured by customer satisfaction, retention rates, and total tickets resolved.
  • Sales manager: Responsible for the entire sales operation or team for a specific region or product/service line. Performance is measured by job satisfaction rates of sales reps, pipeline and funnel conversion rates, team sales deals closed, and team revenue growth.

While assigning roles in your plan, a sales rep’s territory could be based on geography, industry, potential deal size, or product/service line, creating more specialization for better results. Our six-step process on proper sales territory management is an excellent resource for segmenting, creating, and assigning sales territories.

This section of the business plan is also a prime spot for individually setting sales quotas for each rep or team needed to hit your organizational sales goals. Sales quotas should be a specific KPI for that sales role and be set based on the experience, skill level, and resources of that individual or team. These quotas should also be based on your organizational, department, and team goals and objectives.

10. Monitor Progress & Adjust Accordingly

Once the strategic business plan is in motion, monitor its progress to make any required adjustments. For instance, while your sales operation is running, you may find certain sales tactics are working better than expected, and vice versa. Your sales goal template should account for using that tactic more, as well as any new sales tools, budgetary changes, new roles, and possibly even a new sales goal.

As in the earlier example, if you found that cold calling was significantly more effective than emailing, reduce or abandon the email method in favor of cold calling. You could also invest in sales tools especially useful for cold calling, such as power dialing using a voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) phone system, or hire additional staff to place calls. All of these will be part of your updated business plan.

Pro tip: Focusing on the big picture by creating, executing, and adjusting a strategic business plan is one of the most critical traits of an effective sales leader. For more insights on what it means to be a sales leader and how to become one, check out our ultimate guide to sales leadership .

Examples of Other Free Small Business Sales Plan Templates

Apart from our free downloadable sales strategy template, other providers have shared their version of a free strategic sales plan examples. Click on our picks below to see if these templates fit your business process better:

HubSpot’s free sales planning template helps users outline their company’s sales strategy. It contains sections found in most sales plans, as well as prompts for you to fill out your company’s tactics and information. These include company history and mission, team structure, target market, tools and software used, positioning, market strategy, action plan, goals, and budget.

HubSpot sales plan template

HubSpot sales strategy template (Source: HubSpot )

HubSpot’s sales plan template with the mission, vision, and story of the company

HubSpot’s sales goals template with the mission, vision, and story of the company (Source: HubSpot )

Visit HubSpot

Asana’s free sales plan template helps organizations analyze their current sales process, establish their sales objectives, identify success metrics, and plan actionable steps. The sales business plan template is embedded within Asana’s platform, automatically integrating aspects such as goals and measuring them against results or sales performance.

Asana sales plan template

Asana sales plan example (Source: Asana )

Visit Asana

Sales Planning Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is sales planning.

Sales planning is creating a document that outlines your sales strategy, objectives, target audience, potential obstacles, and tools to achieve goals within a specified period. This may include your daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and long-term revenue objectives.

What is included in a sales plan?

A sales strategy plan template typically includes the following key elements:

  • Target customers, accounts, or verticals
  • Stock-keeping units (SKUs)
  • Revenue targets or forecasts
  • Strategies and tactics
  • Pricing and promotions
  • Deadlines and directly responsible individuals (DRIs)
  • Team structure and coordination
  • Market conditions

What are the different types of strategic sales planning?

The type of strategic planning for sales that you choose for your team ultimately depends on different factors. These include your revenue goals, available resources, the ability and bandwidth of your sales team, and your personal commitment to your plans. Once you have determined the details of these factors, you can choose from these types of strategic sales planning:

  • Revenue-based sales action plan template: This is ideal for teams aiming for a specific revenue goal. It focuses on in-depth sales forecasting, improvement of conversion rates, and closing more deals.
  • Sales business plan based on the target market: This plan is best for businesses that cater to several markets that are different from each other. In this situation, you must create separate sales goal templates for enterprise companies and small businesses.
  • Sales goals plan: This focuses on other goals such as hiring, onboarding, sales training plans, or sales activity implementation.
  • New product sales business plan: This plan is developed for the launch and continued promotion of a new product.

Bottom Line

While any business can set bold sales goals, creating a sales plan outlines how your team will achieve them. By following the best practices and 10-step process laid out above, your sales goal template defines what your sales process will look like. It will help establish baselines for accountability and identify optimal strategies, tactics, and the tools needed to make your team as efficient as possible.

About the Author

Jillian Ilao

Jillian Ilao

Jill is a sales and customer service expert at Fit Small Business. Prior to joining the company, she has worked and produced marketing content for various small businesses and entrepreneurs from different markets, including Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Singapore. She has extensive writing experience and has covered topics on business, lifestyle, finance, education, and technology.

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6 Steps to Create a Successful Sales Business Plan

6 Steps to Create a Successful Sales Business Plan

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Written By Michelle Richardson

sales representative business plan

Michelle Richardson

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What is Sales Planning? How to Create a Sales Plan

Jay Fuchs

Published: December 06, 2023

Sales planning is a fundamental component of sound selling. After all, you can‘t structure an effective sales effort if you don’t have, well, structure . Everyone — from the top to the bottom of a sales org — benefits from having solid, actionable, thoughtfully organized sales plans in place.

how to create a sales plan; Sales team creating a sales plan for the upcoming quarter

This kind of planning offers clarity and direction for your sales team — covering everything from the prospects you‘re trying to reach to the goals you’re trying to hit to the insight you're trying to deliver on.

But putting together one of these plans isn‘t always straightforward, so to help you out, I’ve compiled this detailed guide to sales planning — including expert-backed insight and examples — that will ensure your next sales plan is fundamentally sound and effective.

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In this post, we'll cover:

What is a sales plan?

Sales planning process.

  • What goes in a sales plan template?

How to Write a Sales Plan

Tips for creating an effective sales plan, sales plan examples, strategic sales plan examples.

A sales plan lays out your objectives, high-level tactics, target audience, and potential obstacles. It's like a traditional business plan but focuses specifically on your sales strategy. A business plan lays out your goals — a sales plan describes exactly how you'll make those happen.

Sales plans often include information about the business's target customers, revenue goals, team structure, and the strategies and resources necessary for achieving its targets.

sales representative business plan

Free Sales Plan Template

Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent sales plan.

  • Target Market
  • Prospecting Strategy

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

What are the goals of an effective sales plan?

sales representative business plan

And if (or more likely when ) those goals change over time, you need to regularly communicate those shifts and the strategic adjustments that come with them to your team.

Your sales strategy keeps your sales process productive — it offers the actionable steps your reps can take to deliver on your vision and realize the goals you set. So naturally, you need to communicate it effectively. A sales plan offers a solid resource for that.

For instance, your sales org might notice that your SDRs are posting lackluster cold call conversion rates. In turn, you might want to have them focus primarily on email outreach, or you could experiment with new sales messaging on calls.

Regardless of how you want to approach the situation, a thoughtfully structured sales plan will give both you and your reps a high-level perspective that would inform more cohesive, effective efforts across the team.

An effective sales org is a machine — one where each part has a specific function that serves a specific purpose that needs to be executed in a specific fashion. That's why everyone who comprises that org needs to have a clear understanding of how they specifically play into the company's broader sales strategy.

Outlining roles and responsibilities while sales planning lends itself to more efficient task delegation, improved collaboration, overlap reduction, and increased accountability. All of which amount to more streamlined, smooth, successful sales efforts.

Sales planning can set the framework for gauging how well your team is delivering on your sales strategy. It can inform the benchmarks and milestones reps can use to see how their performance stacks up against your goals and expectations.

It also gives sales leadership a holistic view of how well a sales org is functioning as a whole — giving them the necessary perspective to understand whether they have the right people and tools in place to be as successful as possible.

Sales planning isn‘t (and shouldn’t) be limited to the actual sales plan document it produces. If that document is going to have any substance or practical value, it needs to be the byproduct of a thorough, well-informed, high-level strategy.

When sales planning, you have some key steps you need to cover — including:

  • Gather sales data and search for trends.
  • Define your objectives.
  • Determine metrics for success.
  • Assess the current situation.
  • Start sales forecasting.
  • Identify gaps.
  • Ideate new initiatives.
  • Involve stakeholders.
  • Outline action items.

When putting this list together, I consulted  Zach Drollinger — Senior Director of Sales at edtech provider Coursedog — to ensure the examples detailed below are sound and accurate.

Step 1: Gather sales data and search for trends.

To plan for the present and future, your company needs to look to the past. What did sales look like during the previous year? What about the last five years? Using this information can help you identify trends in your industry. While it's not foolproof, it helps establish a foundation for your sales planning process.

For the sake of example, let‘s say that I’m a new sales director for an edtech company that sells curriculum planning software to higher education institutions. My vertical is community colleges, and my territory is the East Coast.

Once I assume this new role, I‘m going to want to gather as much context as possible about my vertical and how my company has approached it historically. I would pull information about how we’ve sold to this vertical.

How much new business have we closed within it in the past five years? How does that compare to how we perform with other kinds of institutions? Are we seeing significant churn from these customers?

I would also want to get context about the general needs, interests, and pain points of the kinds of institutions I‘m selling to. I’d look for insight into figures like degree velocity, staff retention, and enrollment.

Ultimately, I would get a comprehensive perspective on my sales process — a thorough understanding of where I stand and what my prospects are dealing with. That will ensure that I can deliver on the next step as effectively as possible.

Step 2: Define your objectives.

How do you know your business is doing well if you have no goals? As you can tell from its placement on this list, defining your goals and objectives is one of the first steps you should take in your sales planning process. Once you have them defined, you can move forward with executing them.

To extend the example from the previous step, I would leverage the context I gathered through the research I conducted about both my and my prospect's circumstances. I would start setting both broader goals and more granular operational objectives .

For instance, I might want to set a goal of increasing sales revenue from my vertical. From there, I would start putting together the kind of specific objectives that will facilitate that process — like connecting with administrators from at least 30 community colleges, booking demos with at least 10 schools, and successfully closing at least five institutions.

Obviously, those steps represent a streamlined (and unrealistically straightforward) sales process, but you get the idea — I would set a concrete goal, supplemented by SMART objectives , that will serve as a solid reference point for my org's efforts as the sales process progresses.

Step 3: Determine metrics for success.

Every business is different. One thing we can all agree on is that you need metrics for success. These metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs). What are you going to use to determine if your business is successful? KPIs differ based on your medium, but standard metrics are gross profit margins, return on investment (ROI), daily web traffic users, conversion rate, and more.

I kind of covered this step in the previous example, but it still warrants a bit more elaboration. The “M” in SMART goals (“measurable”) is there for a reason. You can‘t tell if your efforts were successful if you don’t know what “successful” actually means.

The edtech sales example I‘ve been running with revolves mostly around me assuming ownership of an existing vertical and getting more out of it. So it’s fair to assume that sales growth rate — the increase or decrease of sales revenue in a given period, typically expressed as a percentage — would be an effective way to gauge success.

I might want to structure my goals and objectives around a sales growth rate of 20% Y/Y within my vertical. I would make sure my org was familiar with that figure and offer some context about what it would take to reach it — namely, how many institutions we would need to close and retain.

Step 4: Assess the current situation.

How is your business fairing right now? This information is relevant to determining how your current situation holds up to the goals and objectives you set during step two. What are your roadblocks? What are your strengths? Create a list of the obstacles hindering your success. Identify the assets you can use as an advantage. These factors will guide you as you build your sales plan.

Continuing the edtech example, I would use the historical context I gathered and the objectives I set to frame how I look at my current circumstances. I might start by considering my goal of increasing revenue by 20% Y/Y. In that case, I would look at the company's retention figures — ideally, that would give me a sense of whether that needs to be a major area of focus.

I would also try to pin down trends in the colleges that we've already closed — are there any pain points we consistently sell on? I might take a closer look at how we demo to see if we might be glossing over key elements of our value proposition. Maybe, I would use conversation intelligence to get a better sense of how reps are handling their calls.

Ultimately, I would try to identify why we're performing the way we are, the inefficiencies that might be resulting from our current strategy, and how we can best set ourselves up to sell as effectively as possible.

Step 5: Start sales forecasting.

Sales forecasting is an in-depth report that predicts what a salesperson, team, or company will sell weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. While it is finicky, it can help your company make better decisions when hiring, budgeting, prospecting, and setting goals.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, economics has become less predictable. Claire Fenton , the owner of StrActGro — a professional training and coaching company — states, “Many economic forecasters won't predict beyond three months at a time.” This makes sales forecasting difficult. However, there are tools at your disposal to create accurate sales forecasts .

In our edtech example, I would approach this step by trying to estimate how my sales org is going to fare with the specific vertical we‘re pursuing in the time window we’ve allotted.

The method I decide to go with will depend on factors like how many concrete opportunities we have lined up — in addition to elements like the kind of historical data we have handy, how the reps working these deals tend to perform, and the degree of insight we have about our potential customers.

Let's say I consider those factors and decide to run something called a multivariable analysis. In that case, I could start by taking stock of the opportunities my reps have lined up. Then, I could look at the reps working those deals, their typical win rates, and the time they have to close — among other factors.

For instance, I might calculate that a rep working with a particularly large institution has a 50% chance of closing within the window we‘ve allotted. Using that insight, we could attribute 50% of the potential deal size to our forecast — we’d repeat that process with all of the opportunities in question and ideally get a solid sense of the revenue we can expect to generate in this window.

Step 6: Identify gaps.

When identifying gaps in your business, consider what your company needs now and what you might need in the future. First, identify the skills you feel your employees need to reach your goal. Second, evaluate the skills of your current employees. Once you have this information, you can train employees or hire new ones to fill the gaps.

Continuing the edtech example, let‘s say my forecast turned up results that weren’t in keeping with what we need to reach our goals. If that were the case, I would take a holistic look at our process, operations, and resources to pin down inefficiencies or areas for improvement.

In my search, I find that our sales content and marketing collateral are dated — with case studies that don‘t cover our product’s newest and most relevant features. I also might see that our reps don‘t seem to have too much trouble booking demos, but the demos themselves aren’t converting due to a lack of training and inconsistent messaging.

And finally, I find that a lack of alignment with marketing has prospects focusing on unrealistic outcomes our sales team can‘t deliver on. Once I’ve identified those gaps, I would start to hone in on ways to remedy those issues and improve those elements.

Step 7: Ideate new initiatives.

Many industry trends are cyclical. They phase in and out of “style.” As you build your sales plan, ideate new initiatives based on opportunities you may have passed on in previous years.

If your business exclusively focused on word-of-mouth and social media marketing in the past, consider adding webinars or special promotions to your plan.

In the edtech example we've been running with, I would likely ideate initiatives based on the gaps I identified in the previous step. I would start a push to ensure that our sales content and marketing collateral are up-to-date and impressive.

I would also consider new training programs to ensure that our coaching infrastructure is prioritizing how to conduct effective demos. Finally, I would start to work on a plan with marketing to ensure our messaging is aligned with theirs — so we can make sure prospects' expectations are realistic and effective.

One way or another, I would take the gaps I found and find concrete, actionable ways to fill them. I would make sure that these initiatives aren't abstract. Just saying, " We're going to be better at demos," isn‘t a plan — it’s a sentiment, and sentiments don't translate to hard sales.

Step 8: Involve stakeholders.

Stakeholders are individuals, groups, or organizations with a vested interest in your company. They are typically investors, employees, or customers and often have deciding power in your business. Towards the end of your sales planning process, involve stakeholders from departments that affect your outcomes, such as marketing and product. It leads to an efficient and actionable sales planning process.

This step is sort of an extension of the previous two — once I‘ve identified the key issues and roadblocks obstructing my edtech startup’s sales org, I would start identifying the right people to fulfill the necessary initiatives I've put together.

In this example, I would tap some stakeholders in charge of our sales content and marketing collateral to produce newer, more relevant case studies and whitepapers we can pass along to the institutions we're working with.

I would also go to middle management and either offer more direction for coaching on demos or bring in a third-party training service to offer more focused, professional insight on the issue.

Finally, I would connect with marketing leadership to align on the benefits and outcomes we generally stress when pitching the schools we sell to. That way, we can ensure that the institutions we're connecting with have realistic expectations of our product or service that we can speak to more clearly and effectively.

Step 9: Outline action items.

Once you have implemented this strategy to create your sales planning process, the final step is outlining your action items. Using your company's capacity and quota numbers, build a list of steps that take you through the sales process. Examples of action items are writing a sales call script, identifying industry competitors, or strategizing new incentives or perks.

In our edtech example, some key action items might be:

  • Revamp our prospecting strategy via more involved coaching and re-tooled sales messaging.
  • Revamp administrator and college dean buyer personas.
  • Conduct new trainings on demoing our software.
  • See our new prospecting strategy from ideation to execution.
  • Align with our sales enablement stakeholders for new, more relevant case studies and whitepapers.

Obviously, that list isn‘t exhaustive — but those are still the kinds of steps we would need to clarify and take to structure a more effective high-level strategy to produce different (ideally much better) results than we’ve been seeing.

One thing to keep in mind is that sales planning shouldn't end with creating the document.

You‘ll want to reiterate this process every year to maintain your organization's sales excellence.

Now that you‘re committed to the sales planning process, let's dive into the written execution component of sales planning.

Featured Resource: Sales Plan Template

HubSpot's Sales Plan Template: 10 Section Prompts for Outlining Your Sales Plan

5. Analyze your position in your industry.

Now, name your competitors. Explain how your products compare, where theirs are stronger than yours, and vice versa. In addition, discuss their pricing versus yours. You should also discuss market trends. If you're a SaaS company, you should note what vertical-specific software is becoming more popular. If you sell ads, mention the rise in programmatic mobile advertising. Try to predict how these changes will influence your business.

In our edtech example, I would take a thorough look at the types of institutions that typically buy from us. What do their enrollment figures look like? If we had a tiered pricing structure, what price point do they typically buy at? What's the ballpark of their typical budgets? And perhaps most importantly, what are the pain points that generally drive them to explore our solution?

Once I had a picture of those elements, I would look at the rest of our competitive landscape — and ideally, I would be able to cover those same bases for our competitors and their buyers.

By pinning down those elements — among several others — I would get a sense of what kind of buyers gravitate to each solution in our market. It would cue me into how prospects typically perceive our offering, showing us who we are in our competitive landscape.

Having that sense will give my team an understanding of where they're selling from, what kinds of institutions are going to be most receptive to our efforts, and how to best approach every engagement we pursue.

6. Plan your marketing strategy.

In this section, describe your pricing and any promotions you're planning on running. What key actions will you take to increase brand awareness and generate leads? Note the impact on sales.

Here's a mock version:

  • Product A: Increasing price from $40 to $45 on Feb. 2 (2% reduction in monthly sales)
  • Product B: Free upgrade if you refer another customer from Jan. 1-20 (20% increase in monthly sales)
  • Product C: Decreasing price from $430 to $400 on March 1 (15% increase in monthly sales)
  • Product D: No change

For our edtech example, let's say we intend to lean heavily on an inbound marketing strategy. In that case, leadership at the company would want to invest in a company blog that covers trends and concepts in the education industry. Ideally, that resource will produce a steady stream of leads while simultaneously establishing our business as a trusted authority in the space.

7. Develop your prospecting strategy.

How will your sales team receive and qualify the leads generated by your marketing strategy? Don't forget to include the criteria prospects should meet before sales reps reach out.

Let‘s say that our hypothetical edtech company’s inbound marketing infrastructure development pans out. We're able to maintain a reputable blog about the education industry that brings in a steady stream of leads. That could provide the basis for an effective prospecting strategy.

Our content marketing department could produce and qualify warm leads to pass to our sales team. Ideally, we'll have more effective, focused criteria to determine whether and how to reach out to those leads. From there, we might elect to focus primarily on email outreach — a plan that could be complemented by a more conventional cold-calling strategy.

8. Create an action plan.

Once you‘ve outlined where you want to go, you must figure out how you'll get there. This section summarizes your game plan for hitting your revenue targets. Try to be thorough but concise when detailing these steps — and try to support any items you detail with a clear, viable timeline.

Here's what part of the action plan might look at our hypothetical edtech company:

Objective: Increase revenue in our East Coast community college vertical by 20% Y/Y.

  • Leverage conversation intelligence to shadow calls — offering more perspective on effective elements of current strategies and areas for improvement.
  • Reference historical data in CRM for trends in successful and unsuccessful sales engagements with these kinds of contacts.
  • Implement a new training framework for demos. (Timeline: Q1)
  • Conduct email outreach to inbound leads (Timeline: Q1-Q4)

We would flesh this plan out to cover the key actions that are going to shape our high-level strategy and guide the more granular aspects of its implementation. Committing plans to writing is crucial in sales — including action items in your sales plan gives you a definitive forum for that.

9. List your goals.

Most sales goals are revenue-based. For example, you might set a total target of $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Alternatively, you can set a volume goal. That could be 100 new customers or 450 sales. Make sure your objective is realistic; otherwise, your entire sales plan will be largely useless.

Factor in your product's price, total addressable market (TAM), market penetration, and resources (including your sales headcount and marketing support).

Your goal should also be closely tied to your high-level business goals. For example, suppose the company is trying to move upmarket . In that case, your goal might be “Acquire 20 Enterprise logos” rather than “Sell X in new business” (because the latter will encourage you to solely chase deals rather than focus on the right type of customers).

Of course, you'll probably have more than one goal. Identify the most important, then rank the rest by priority. If you have territories, assign a sub-goal to each. That will make it easier to identify over- and under-performers.

Lay out your timeline too. Having regular benchmarks lets you know if you‘re on track, ahead, or behind in meeting your targets. Suppose your sales goal for the first quarter of the year is selling $30,000. Based on last year’s performance, you know January and February sales are slower than March.

With that in mind, your timeline is:

  • January: $8,000
  • February: $8,000
  • March: $14,000

You should also write in the DRIs if applicable. For example, maybe Rep Carol‘s January quota is $5,000. Rep Shane, who‘s still ramping, has a $3,000 monthly quota. On a smaller team, this exercise helps people avoid replicating each other‘s work and shifting blame around if targets aren’t met.

10. Set your budget.

Describe the costs associated with hitting your sales goals. That usually includes:

  • Pay (salary and commission)
  • Sales training
  • Sales tools and resources
  • Contest prizes
  • Team bonding activities
  • Travel costs

Compare the sales plan budget to your sales forecast for accurate budgeting.

If you want to take your plan to the next level, read on to learn some tips for creating a highly effective sales plan.

We've gone over what you should include in a sales plan, including some examples and mockups.

Learn some tips and tricks for creating a sales plan that helps you hit target numbers and exceed your higher-ups' expectations.

  • Use industry trends to strengthen your plan. When presenting your sales plan to a stakeholder, use industry trends to highlight why your plan will be effective.
  • Specify the technology you‘ll use to track success. You can do this for internal reference or let stakeholders know how you'll measure success. Some tools you can consider include CRM and dashboard software .
  • Support your budget proposal with hard facts and data. If you're creating a budget as a part of your plan, support it with previous performance data and sales forecasts.
  • Create different plans for each team. If you create a sales plan for business development, inbound sales, outbound sales, field sales, and so forth, you can get even more granular and specific in your goals and KPIs.
  • Get marketing's input. Marketing and sales alignment is critical for the success of your sales plan. The more input you have from marketing, the more you can align your lead generation, prospecting, and nurturing efforts.
  • Talk with your sales reps to understand their challenges. It might be easy to get lost in numbers and forecasts — but it‘s important to know your sales representatives' day-to-days to understand what will and will not prove effective or feasible.
  • Complete an in-depth competitive analysis. You must know what the competition is doing well to create a plan that nudges your company in that direction.

You can create a few different types of sales plans for your organization. Here are some examples.

30-60-90-Day Sales Plan

sales training template

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How to Create a Sales Plan: Tips, Examples & Free Sales Plan Template

How to Create a Sales Plan: Tips, Examples & Free Sales Plan Template

Tactics and strategies are great. But when you create a sales plan, you set a clear path to success, with each step mapped out ahead of you.

The Internet is full of people who will tell you all about the success they’ve found from their strategies, whether it's personalizing a newsletter subject line or changing the color of the 'Buy Now' button.

But, news flash—these tips and tricks aren’t actual sales strategies .

To create real, lasting growth for you and your company, you need to create your own grand strategy. And that starts with a solid sales plan .

So, what’s your plan? How do you build it (and stick to it)?

We’re about to take a deep dive into sales plans. By the end of this guide, you’ll be completely equipped to win the fight for business growth. And we can't recommend it enough—grab our free sales plan template here in the Sales Success Kit today:

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What is a Sales Plan? (And What Makes for Successful Sales Planning?)

Armed with the information you'll compile within your sales plan, you can quickly identify any upcoming problems, sales droughts, or opportunities—and then do something about them.

If done correctly, the right sales plan template empowers you to spend even more time growing and developing your business, rather than responding reactively to the day-to-day developments in sales.

Sound exciting? Let’s jump right in.

Download Your Free Sales Plan Templates Today

Want to build your own sales plan template that'll clarify your business plan and accelerate your growth? Grab the Sales Success Kit , including...

...and more to help you set up strategic sales planning and quotas for your team.

Want to stand out in the competitive market? Explore the insights of challenger selling .

What’s in a Sales Plan? 6 Elements Every Sales Plan Needs

In basic terms, a sales plan template includes:

  • Sales forecasting and goal-setting
  • Market and customer research
  • Prospecting and partnerships

Each part of the sales plan naturally works itself into the next, starting with your high-level goals, then considering market factors, and finally looking at who you know, and how to find more prospects to help hit your sales goals .

Here are the key elements to include in your plan:

1. Mission Statement

What gets your sales reps out of bed in the morning? What’s the clear mission that pushes your team to keep fighting for that win?

Your mission statement is a concise statement of the ‘big picture’—the main idea and goal you want to achieve. Think about your company mission and how the sales team forms part of that overarching goal.

2. Sales Goals and Revenue Targets

A sales plan must include achievable sales goals and the targets your sales reps will be working to reach. Use previous years' results to tell you what's reasonably possible for your team to do. Include specific metrics and KPIs , how these are performing currently, and what you plan to do to improve them.

This may also include information about your product’s pricing , planned discounts, and how your team can focus on the right customers to get the most revenue possible. Link these sales goals to the business goals your company is working to achieve.

3. Analysis of the Target Market

Your plan should clearly identify your ideal customer profile and information about the target market and demographic you plan to sell to. Are you breaking into a new market? Are you targeting small business or enterprise customers ? Give a concise description of your target audience and the stakeholders you’ll need to sell to.

4. Sales Strategy Overview and Methods to Reach Target Customers

This should include a brief overview of the customer journey , pain points , and how your salespeople will engage and follow up with new prospects throughout their journey to purchase. You'll likely outline specific sales activities you'll focus on, such as improving referral numbers, testing new cold-calling email strategies, or dipping your toe in social selling.

You may also include information about the marketing strategy and lead generation methods used to gather new leads and how sales managers will support the team.

5. Use of Resources and Sales Tools

How much does it cost your team to close a new deal? What is your budget for the sales team, or for sales tools ?

Inside your plan, list the resources you have available to you, and how you plan to use them during the year. This includes monetary resources, as well as human resources.

Next, show how your resources will be used. For example, how much will you spend on sales tools? Which CRM software is your team depending on? Briefly explain how you plan to use each tool and why you’ve allocated resources in that way.

6. Sales Team Structure

The structure of your sales team includes which reps are available during what times of the year, their specialties and skills, and where they focus in the sales process .

Also, include information about the sales managers, their teams, and the incentives you offer your reps.

The Benefits of Sales Planning: Why You Need a Sales Plan

Creating a sales plan from scratch can be daunting, even with the right sales planning template. So, why should you have your sales strategy written down and ready to act on?

Let’s talk about the benefits of sales planning to attract new business and grow your market share.

Clear, Time-Bound Goals Help You Reach Revenue Targets

There’s a reason they say, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

If you want your sales team to execute on and accomplish your sales goals, you need to have a plan in place. When targets are linked to specific timeframes and actions, your whole team will see how their individual work is involved in reaching your sales goals.

Prioritize Time and Resources

Without a specific action plan in place , your team won’t be able to prioritize their time with the right sales tactics and strategies to hit their targets.

With a clear outline of the tactics that bring the most significant ROI for your team, each rep can get the best results for the time they spend selling.

Clear Action Plan to Reach Your Goals

With an action plan in place, each team member knows what they’re supposed to be doing, and why they’re doing it. This keeps them motivated and helps them see how their individual efforts make a difference.

4 Types of Sales Plans (How to Choose Which Planning Style is Right for Your Sales Team)

It’s difficult to templatize a good sales plan since every plan is unique to the business and team it applies to. So, what are some examples of the types of sales plans you might create, and how can you choose between them?

  • Revenue-based sales plan: If you’re aiming for a specific revenue goal, this type of sales plan will be focused on in-depth sales forecasting and specific actions to improve conversion rates and close more deals.
  • Sales plan based on the target market: If you’re selling to vastly different markets, you may want to create a different sales plan based on the market you’re targeting. For example, your sales plan for enterprise companies would differ from your sales plan for selling to SMBs.
  • Sales goals plan: A plan that’s focused on goals (other than revenue) may include hiring and onboarding, sales training plans, or plans to implement a new type of sales activity into your process.
  • New product sales plan: When launching a new product, it’s a good idea to develop a specific business plan around its launch and continued promotion. This plan may include finding and contacting strategic partners, building a unique value prop in the market, and creating new sales enablement content for the team to use when selling this product. This type of sales plan can also apply to launching new features in your SaaS product.

How to Choose the Right Sales Planning Style

Ultimately, this will depend on factors such as:

  • Your revenue goals
  • The resources at your disposal
  • Your sales team’s abilities and bandwidth
  • Your personal commitment to seeing this plan through

When you’ve determined who is involved in sales planning, how committed they are, and the resources you can use to make this plan happen, you can start building your own sales plan.

9 Steps to Create a Sales Plan to 10x Your Sales Team’s Results

It may seem like a lot of work to develop a sales plan at this point. But once you do, you’ll be in a place to take your sales (and brand) to the next level.

Let’s break down this process, step-by-step, so you can start achieving greater results.

1. Define Your Sales Goals and Milestones

With a sales plan, we begin at the end: an end goal.

Start by choosing the sales metrics that matter most to your overall 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 (CLV)

It doesn’t matter so much which metric you choose —the important point is that it can tell you whether your work has succeeded.

Next, look at last year’s forecast and results . Were you being realistic? How did sales revenue increase annually? How does that compare your company to the industry standards? Use this information to determine what realistically you can bring in based on the size of the market, your company goals, and the experience and resources available to your sales team .

After setting clear sales goals, it’s time to set milestones . This involves breaking that big number down into smaller expectations with strict deadlines. These should challenge and motivate your sales team , without being so difficult they kill morale.

Lean on your sales team during this process. After all, they’re in the trenches with you and probably have the best knowledge about your customers. Learn about what they do during the workweek to close deals. Ask how much they’re currently doing, and how much bandwidth they have to do more. This will give you a real, frontline take on what goals and milestones to set in your sales plan template.

Finally, create specific targets with clear deadlines . For example, to achieve a sales goal of increasing revenue by 15 percent YOY, you might set the milestone of increasing your customer base by 20 percent, or increasing sales by 50% for a specific product.

Brought together, these milestones inform and support your overall sales plan, giving you a clear, actionable workflow to hit your overall goals for the year.

2. Clearly Define Your Target Market or Niche

You need to know the market you’re in and the niche you’re going to occupy so you can properly position your business for growth.

What’s a business niche? It’s more than just what your business specializes in—a niche is the space your business occupies with your products, content, company culture, branding, and message. It’s how people identify with you and search you out over the competition.

As serial entrepreneur Jason Zook explains: “ When you try to create something for everyone, you end up creating something for no one. ”

Don’t do that.

Instead, start by looking at a niche and asking yourself these questions:

  • 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, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats?

If you’re stuck, start by going back to your own strengths . List out your strongest interests and passions. Pick a field where the odds are already in your favor—where you have a proven track record, more expertise to offer, an extensive contact base, and people who can provide you with intros.

These kinds of strategic advantages will help you clarify your buyer persona and amplify the results of your planning.

Start with one product in one niche—you can always branch out to a complementary niche later. Sell beautiful, handcrafted tea cups? How about a booming doily business? Or customizable teaspoons?

A niche doesn’t limit you. It focuses you.

3. Understand Your Target Customers

Chasing the wrong customers will only waste your time and money, so don't allow them to sneak into your sales plan.

Your best customers are the ones that are successful with your product and see the ROI of it. Talk to them, and find out what they have in common.

While defining ideal customers depends on your company and market, here are some basic characteristics you’ll want to identify:

  • Company size (number of employees, number of customers, yearly revenue)
  • Size of the relevant department
  • Geographical information
  • Job title of your POC
  • Buying process
  • The goal they’re trying to achieve with your product or service

Also, don’t forget to think about 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 ensure 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 significant value to your company. A customer profile helps you qualify leads and disqualify bad-fit customers before you waste time trying to sell to them.

Once you know the type of company you want to target with your sales team, it’s time to get inside their head. Start by hanging out where they hang out:

  • Are they on social media? What’s their network of choice?
  • Are they members of any Facebook or LinkedIn groups?
  • Can you answer industry questions for them on Quora or Reddit?
  • What podcasts do they listen to, or what resources do they read?

Get in your customers’ heads, and you’ll be in a much better position to sell to them.

GET THE IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE KIT →

4. Map Out Your Customer’s Journey

The next part of an effective sales plan must address how that ideal customer becomes your customer. Do this by mapping out their journey, including actions and events during the different stages of the sales funnel :

  • Consideration

Conduct a customer survey or chat directly with your current, happy customers to gather valuable sales planning insights. Ask them:

  • When you became a customer, what did you want our product to do for you?
  • What features were important to you? Why?
  • What was your budget?
  • How did you solve this problem before using our product?

To fully understand their journey as a customer, you can also ask about past buying experiences:

  • When was the last time you bought something similar?
  • Was that a good or bad experience? Why?
  • What was the decision-making process like?
  • How did you evaluate different offers?
  • Which factors made you choose that particular solution?

Once you’ve identified the awareness, interest, and consideration stages, let your prospects and new customers build the rest of their roadmap by asking them: "What’s next?"

"What needs to happen to make you a customer?"

If, for example, they say they’ll have to get approval from the VP of Finance. Ask:

"Ok, and let's say he agrees that we're the right fit; what's next?"

We call this the virtual close , a way to put your prospect in a future-thinking state of mind that makes them imagine buying from you. Asking this question to several high-quality prospects will tell you those final few steps in the customer journey until they’ve signed on the dotted line.

Finally, piece together the post-sale journey. Once a prospect becomes a customer, what’s next? How do you enable them to use your product and be successful with it? What happened to create your most loyal customers? Understanding this piece of the sales process is essential to managing and increasing customer retention .

5. Define Your Value Propositions

You know your customers. You know their journey. Now, define where you fit in by looking at your competitive advantage . Fully articulating what sets you apart from the competition is a crucial element of your sales plan template.

Start by asking a few simple questions:

  • 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?
  • What do we need to do to be successful in the future?

Remember that customers buy benefits, not features. When describing your value proposition , it’s easy to get caught up in talking about you. What you’ve made. What you do. Instead, flip the script and talk about what your product will do for your customers . A strong competitive advantage:

  • Reflects the competitive strength of your business
  • Is preferably, but not necessarily, unique
  • Is clear and simple
  • May change over time as competitors try to steal your idea
  • Must be supported by ongoing market research

For example, the competitive advantage of help desk software has nothing to do with its social media integrations and real-time ticket tracking. It’s the fact that it allows its customers to focus on creating a great customer experience.

Here’s the point: Focus on value, not features, in your sales plan template.

Your competitive advantage will inform everything your company does moving forward, from marketing to product development. It’s a great example of where sales can influence the development of a product and the direction of a business.

6. Organize Your Sales Team

The way your sales team is organized can enable them to better serve their customers and bring new revenue into your business faster.

Here are three basic structures for your sales team :

  • The island: Individual reps 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, that’s responsible for the entire journey of specific customers.

Think about the strengths and weaknesses of your sales team members, and how they will truly thrive as part of the team.

7. Outline the Use of Sales Tools

Now it’s time to think about the tools you’re using. Building out your sales stack takes time and effort, but listing out that stack in your sales plan will help you avoid getting caught up with new tech that may or may not help your sales team.

Basically, you’ll need tools for these areas to cover all aspects of the sales process:

  • CRM software (like Close )
  • Lead generation and prospecting tools
  • Internal communication software
  • Engagement and outreach tools
  • Documentation software
  • Sales enablement stack

Think about how all of your sales tools work together through integrations and where automation comes into play to save your team time, and how you'll drive CRM adoption across your team members.

8. Build a Prospecting List

A prospect list is where we take all the theory and research of the last few sections of our sales plan template and put them into action.

At its core, a prospect list is a directory of real people you can contact who would benefit from your product or service. This can be time-consuming, but it's essential for driving your sales plan and company growth.

First, use your ideal customer profile to start finding target companies:

  • Search LinkedIn
  • Check out relevant local business networks
  • Attend networking events and meetups
  • Do simple Google searches
  • Check out the member list of relevant online groups

Target up to 5 people at each organization. Targeting more than one individual will give you better odds of connecting by cold email outreach as well as a better chance that someone in your network can connect you personally.

Remember, this isn’t just a massive list of people you could sell to. This is a targeted list based on the research you’ve done previously in your sales plan.

Once you have your list, keep track of your leads and how you found them using a sales CRM. This will keep historical context intact and make sure you don’t overlap on outreach if you’re working with teammates.

9. Track, Measure, and Adjust As Needed

Just because you’ve made a solid sales plan template to follow, doesn’t mean you get to sit back and watch the cash roll in.

Remember what Basecamp founder Jason Fried said about plans:

“A plan is simply a guess you wrote down.”

You’re using everything you know about the market, your unique value, target customers, and partners to define the ideal situation for your company. But yes, try as we might, very few of us actually see anything when we gaze deep into the crystal ball.

Instead, remember that your sales plan is a living, breathing document that needs to account for and adapt to new features, marketing campaigns, or even new team members who join.

Set regular meetings (at least monthly) to review progress on your sales plan, identify and solve issues, and align your activities across teams to optimize your plan around real-world events and feedback. Learn from your mistakes and victories, and evolve your sales plan as needed.

Create a Strategic Sales Plan to Grow Your Business

You’ve just discovered the basics—but I’ll bet you’re ready to go beyond that. Here are some final ideas to take your sales plan from a simple foundation to a strategic, actionable one.

Avoid Moving the Goalpost

Avoid making adjustments to the goals outlined in your sales plan—even if you discover you’ve been overly optimistic or pessimistic in your sales planning. When you're developing your very first sales plan template, it's natural to be wrong in some of your assumptions—especially around goals and forecasting .

Instead of letting it get you down, remember your plan serves as a benchmark to judge your success or failure. As you see places where your assumptions were wrong, carefully document what needs updating when it's time to revise your sales plan.

Invite Your Others to Challenge Your Sales Plan

Never finalize a plan without another set of eyes (or a few sets.) Get an experienced colleague—an accountant, senior salesperson, or qualified friend—to review the document before solidifying your sales plan.

Your sales team is another strong resource for reviewing your sales plan. Ask their opinions, give them time to think about how it relates to their daily work, and agree on the key points that go into your sales plan.

Set Individual Goals and Milestones for Your Sales Team

We talked about creating milestones for your business, but you can take your sales plan to the next level by setting individual milestones for your sales team as well.

These individual goals need to consider the differences in strengths, weaknesses, and skills among your salespeople.

For example, if someone on your team is making a ton of calls but not closing, give them a milestone of upping their close rate . If someone’s great at closing but doesn’t do much outreach, give them a milestone of contacting 10 new prospects a month.

Doing this will help your individual reps build their skills and contribute to their company and career growth.

Ready to Hit Your Sales Goals?

In most sales situations, the biggest challenge is inertia. But with a solid, detailed sales plan and a dedicated team with clear milestones, you’ll have everything you need to push through any friction and keep on track to hit your goals!

All jazzed up and ready to put together your own sales plan? Download our free Sales Success Kit and access 11 templates, checklists, worksheets, and guides.

They're action-focused and easy to use, so you can have your best sales year yet.

Ryan Robinson

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How to Write a Sales Plan

Elizabeth Veras

Table of Contents

Every business needs a business plan as well as more detailed road maps that offer guidance to each department working toward that common goal. As the revenue-generating engine of your company, the sales department should be a top priority for this type of document, aptly named the “sales plan.” This guide introduces the concept of a sales plan and gives you all the guidance you need to create a sales plan that works for your business.

What is a sales plan?

A sales plan details the overall sales strategy of a business, including the revenue objectives of the company and how the sales department will meet those goals. This may also include revenue goals, the target audience and tools the team will use in their day-to-day. In addition, the sales plan should include examples of the hurdles and pain points the team might encounter, as well as contingency plans to overcome them.

“[A sales plan] is essential to support the growth of an organization,” said Bill Santos, vice president of the ITsavvy Advanced Solutions Group. “A sales plan helps individual reps understand the priorities of the business as well as the measurements by which they will be evaluated.”

Business plans vs. sales plans

Business plans and sales plans are closely linked. A sales plan, though, should outline the actions that the sales department will take to achieve the company’s broader goals. A sales plan differs from a business plan, though both work toward the same end.

“A business plan is a ‘what’ [and] a sales plan is a ‘how,'” said James R. Bailey , professor of management and Hochberg Professional Fellow of Leadership Development at the George Washington University School of Business. “Business plans are where a firm wants to go. A sales plan is a part of how they can achieve that. A business plan is direction; a sales plan is execution.”

For example, a software company that developed a new mobile application might state in its business plan that the app will be installed by 1 million users within a year of launch, while the sales plan describes how that will actually be achieved.

How to write a sales plan

Every sales plan should suit the individual needs of a different company, so they come in all shapes and sizes. There is no one-size-fits-all sales plan; the one you create will be unique to your business. With careful planning, you’ll have a much clearer vision of what you need to accomplish and a road map for how to get there. 

Chris Gibbs, vice president of global sales at Centripetal Networks, named some additional items that every sales plan should include.

  • Targeted accounts: Assign each salesperson a few key accounts to focus on, and grow from that base.
  • Targeted verticals: Sales teams might focus on specific market segments or verticals, such as a particular industry.
  • SKUs: Salespeople should emphasize certain SKUs or inventory items rather than get lost in a broad catalog of merchandise to sell.
  • Sales and marketing coordination: Sales and marketing teams should work together to create promotions to help generate sales.
  • Product road maps: Every company has a road map, and each product should have a road map that shows the plan and direction for a product offering over time to chart out when a product will launch and when it might sunset or be replaced by a newer model.
  • Forecasts: Sales forecasting is projecting sales volumes and expectations by comparing them historically to sales of previous years, and then conducting market comparison to determine where sales will fall against the competition.

“Sales plans are extremely important to ensure there is cohesiveness between product teams, sales and marketing,” Gibbs said. “In addition, they’re important for ensuring that timing of new products and/or new version releases coincide with sales objectives and forecasts.”

What are the steps to create a sales plan?

A sales plan is necessary for businesses of every size, from an individual entrepreneur to a Fortune 500 company. When you’re ready to actually write your sales plan, follow these steps:

1. Define the objectives. 

Clearly outlining your goals and stating your objectives should always be the first step in creating a sales plan or any other business venture. You should include the expected sales volume and any markets or territories you expect to reach. 

For example, let’s say you own a retail store selling household goods and electronics. If your purpose is to establish yourself as a trusted local retailer, ask yourself the following questions:

  • If so, are they purchasing anything or just browsing?
  • Was it word of mouth?
  • Was it through marketing efforts, such as email marketing, direct mail or social media?
  • How many are new customers?
  • How many are repeat customers?
  • Where do you want your sales to come from? 
  • What are some external and internal factors that could impact your sales? These include industry trends and economic conditions.

When you can precisely state your key objectives, you are setting yourself up to plan later steps around achieving your goals.

2. Assess the current situation.

The next step is to create an honest overview of your business situation in relation to the goal you set in the first step. 

Review your strengths and assets. Take a look at your resources and how you can apply them to your goal. This can include personal relationships and competitive advantages like new products or services.

For example, if your goal is to enhance your relationship with your customers, you’d need to ask yourself some questions to examine your current situation:

  • What is your current relationship with your customers?
  • Where did most of your sales come from?
  • Where would you like to expand your sales?

3. Determine and outline the sales strategies. 

Sales strategies are the actual tactics your team will use to reach customers. They can include marketing channels as well as procedures for lead generation and client outreach employed by your salespeople.

Here are two examples of potential sales strategies: 

  • Use your POS system to retain customer information so you can track current and new customers.
  • Employ email marketing, text message marketing , social media, outbound call center services and direct mail marketing campaigns.

4. Define roles for the sales team. 

Each member of the sales team should be assigned clear roles, whether they vary from person to person or everyone performs the same functions.

Defining the sales direction of the team is crucial, as it shows the focus of the company and helps the team target and execute sales most effectively.

The plan of attack for the sales team should be communicated clearly by leadership, whether it is from team leaders or the CEO.  

5. Inform other departments of sales objectives.

A sales plan shouldn’t just update a company president or C-suite; it should inform the whole organization of the sales team’s objectives. 

Clearly outline your plan for the rest of the company to help them understand the goals and procedures of the sales team. Other departments become more efficient when interacting with the sales team and clients. This also conveys a certain level of quality and professionalism to the clients about the company.

6. Provide tools for the sales team.

Provide the tools each member of the sales team needs to achieve the stated goals, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software. The best CRM software is customizable to meet a company’s needs, making it much easier for your team to use the software and work efficiently.

7. Detail how the department will track progress. 

Offer strategic direction and insight on how progress will be monitored. Having a quarterly review to assess whether the company is on target is just as important as the plan itself.

Markets change, and so should your sales plan. Keeping it up to date will help you capitalize on the market and achieve your goals. Tracking progress is made easier by the tools you use to collect data. That data will then have to be analyzed and presented in a way which all departments can understand and use for future growth. 

Key elements of a sales plan

Every sales plan should also include the following elements.

Realistic goals

You need to set achievable goals . Challenge your sales team, but don’t push too hard. Bailey said that these “deliverables” are among the key points to include in a sales business plan. 

“Deliverables need to be as specific as possible and moderately difficult to achieve – specific inasmuch as being measurable in a manner that is uncontested [and] moderately difficult inasmuch as making sales goals too difficult can lead to failure and discouragement.”

Midpoint goals also help build morale and keep the team working toward a larger goal. Instead of having one giant goal, creating smaller goals to achieve along the way will keep your team focused.

Sales tools

Tracking sales throughout the term is helpful, and you can employ tools to keep track of each team member as well as the department overall. It also helps establish a culture of accountability among salespeople.

“Tools can help, especially project management and CRM software,” Santos said. “Having a weekly cadence of update and review is also important, as it sends a message that ownership and updates are important.”

Clear expectations and a defined commission structure

Assign goals and responsibilities to each team member to make expectations clear. This is true whether or not each team member has the same goals.

“We meet with each individual to come up with a plan that works for them so that they can reach their goals,” said Leah Adams, director of client success at Point3 Security. “We measure results based on numbers. Each team member has his own plan and how they’re going to get there.”

It’s also necessary to spell out the commission structure in full detail.

“The only real difference is how sales count,” Bailey said. “In petroleum-based products … a few big clients are necessary. Compensation needs to be structured not just in contract value, but in graduated terms: Above $1 million, commissions move from 5% to 9%, and so forth. In smaller-volume enterprises, commissions might be front-loaded with higher percentages early, then graduated down. You have to reward what you want.”

Training programs

Along the way, some training might be necessary to maintain the momentum.

“What’s important to us is that we’re teaching these individuals to be the best salesperson they can be,” Adams said. “We help them do that by constantly training them and giving them knowledge of what’s going on in our industry. Everything stays on track because each member of the team knows their individual goal; though each person has a number, they also know the ultimate goal is for the entire team to hit.”

Adams said that an effective CRM keeps things organized and helps delegate tasks and responsibilities on a schedule that uses the company’s lead information.

Key steps to follow when devising a sales plan

Here are some best practices for creating a sales plan:

  • Refer to the business plan. The sales plan should directly address the objectives of the business plan and how those objectives can be achieved.
  • Advance clear objectives. The clearer the objectives are, the easier it will be to reach your goals.
  • Reference prior sales data. Chart sales over the previous few terms, and project the trend for the current term. New businesses can create sales projections based on expectations.
  • Outline the commission structure. This will help motivate your team and help you calculate anticipated costs.
  • Be clear about how progress is measured. There should be no dispute about this. If larger clients carry more weight than lower-volume buyers, that should be stated upfront.

The benefits of a sales plan

A sales plan keeps the sales department on track, considering the details of how they must operate to hit their targets and achieve company objectives. Because the sales team is the primary driver of revenue, it is an incredibly important document. [Related article: Adopting a CRM? How to Get Buy-in From Your Sales Department ]

“It’s extremely important to have a sales plan in place, almost a must,” Adams said. “Without this plan, it’s almost impossible to get through the year and hit the company’s sales goals.”

It’s not uncommon to encounter obstacles along the way, however. A good sales plan accounts for that.

“Almost always, you’ll run into the speed bumps along the way, but with a plan in place, it makes it a whole lot easier to navigate through it all,” Adams said. “The sales plan allows you to adjust when necessary so the goal can still be hit. I strongly believe a plan allows you to stay in control and reduce the risk while being able to measure the team’s results along the way to that finish line.”

Sales plan templates

Sales templates are helpful in that many of them are based on tried-and-true formats that have been used by businesses across several industries. They can also provide structure so that it is clear to each employee what their role and responsibilities are. 

“A template helps plan each individual’s daily activities in a structured way,” Adams said. “If you know what each person is doing daily, it’s easier to help correct what’s going wrong. It helps with things like conversion rates, etc. Yes, these templates can be customized in any way a team’s manager sees fit, based on how he believes the team will perform better.”

Sales plans should be unique to the company; however, there are key components they should always include. Because there is somewhat of a formula, you can use a template.

Templates are extremely helpful, Gibbs said. “It creates uniformity for the team, as well as a yearly or quarterly sales plan to present to senior management.”

Gibbs added that templates can easily be customized to meet the needs of a particular business or sales team.

Keeping your team on track with a sales plan

Planning is vital for any business, especially when dealing with sales targets. Before selling your product or service, you must outline your goals and ways to execute them. Essentially, a sales plan enables you to mitigate problems and risks. When there is a clear plan of action, you will know how to proceed in order to attain your goals. 

Enid Burns contributed to the writing and reporting in this article. Source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.

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Sales Representative Business Plan [Sample Template]

By: Author Tony Martins Ajaero

Home » Business Plans » Advertising & Marketing

Are you about starting a sales representative company? If YES, here is a complete sample sales representative business plan template & feasibility report you can use for FREE .

A sales rep is a sales professional who work independently, outside of and separate from any associated business offices. A Sales rep often sells a number of product lines, from a number of different businesses.

Starting this business is not an easy task, but to start; you need to become self-employed, which will give you the chance to every aspect of both sales and business operations, which may involve marketing, customer service, order processing and accounting.

A Sample Sales Representative Business Plan Template

1. industry overview.

Sales Representative is also known as Manufacturers Representatives or plain Rep. A successful sales representative represents eight to 10 complementary products that are not direct threats or competitors.

It is now becoming an obligation for manufacturers both inside and outside the united states to make use of outside sales forces in place of employing in-house sales personnel, because using a rep workforce can be or rather is more efficient and better cost-effective way to sell products.

Notwithstanding that the demand in this industry is always on the high aspect, getting into this industry is not a child’s play. It is well noted in the industry that it will take you nothing less than one to two years to build a stock of enough products to represent that will make you a good living.

The cost of starting this business is not as high as one may expect, but you should note that having an equipped home office and a good vehicle are all that you need to start. But like many salespeople, the potential earnings are good.

Sales reps of our modern age are doing more than selling than the ones of the past years, which is why experience is very paramount. Some reps also train Agency workforce in the use of the products they sell, offsetting a cost their customers would otherwise carry.

Some reps who sell to wholesalers make joint sales calls with the wholesaler’s in-house sales personnel, training them to sell the rep’s products.

Also many sales reps sell industrial products to manufacturers and end users such as processing plants, HMOs and government agencies. Getting products to market can be done by working trade shows for your industry where both manufacturers and customers can be found.

2. Executive Summary

The name of our business is Lego Sales Consult. We at Lego Sales Consultant, hope to provide representative services to targeted business environments in Atlanta, Georgia.

We believe that writing down our business plan will help us organise our business and also seek to generate a significant increase in Agency sales and profits from the delivery of product marketing, product advertising, retainer consulting, project consulting, market research and industrial analysis, feasibility studies, and strategic analysis and reporting services.

We believe that we have the potential to become the lead figure in the industry, and there is also a probability that our target customer will completely reject the Advertising and marketing but we understand that it is part of the industry and only consistency can make us successful.

With our adequate research and understanding of the industry, we have created effective strategies that will ensure that our agency will reach the greatest number of potential customers and serve our clients properly. We will also design, build, test and deploy the methods we deem for or necessary in other to market the products of our clients.

We also hope to keep our clients in the known by reporting the progress of the campaign in real-time to provide our customers maximum flexibility. We will also take note of all necessary actions and corrections after every exercise in order to grow our business.

Our business plan has been created on the basis of three years of market research. All the data concludes the size and growth of the market and geographical segments, customer needs, perception, and buying behaviour trends have been on the upswing, and are expected to continue in this trend for the next three years.

We at Lego Sales Consultant’s believe that we are well prepared to fill the vacuum in the marketing niche, and will be the very best in the industry.

We at Lego Sales Consultants hope to specialize in successful sales and marketing campaigns.  The owners of Lego Sales Consultants, Nathaniel Clayton and Ephraim Joseph have over 12 years of experience as sales agent between them.

Nathaniel Clayton use to be a senior sales consultant at Promerit Advertising agency. Ephraim Joseph was a sales and marketing director for Liberty Business LLC. Both have been friends for a very long time and they share the same vision and goals.

3. Our Products and Services

We at Lego Sales Consultant’s plan to offer expertise in the services we plan to provide to the businesses in Atlanta, Georgia.

We believe that with the much experience we have in this field. Lego Sales Consultants will be able to sell and package its services in various ways that will give our prospective clients the opportunity to decide the sort of services they want from us. These include:

  • Product Marketing
  • Product distribution
  • Agency advertising
  • Retainer Consulting
  • Project Consulting
  • Market Research and Industry Sectors Analysis
  • Feasibility Studies
  • Strategic Analysis and Reports

4. Our Mission and Vision Statement

  • Our vision at Lego Sales Consultants is to become the leading agency in the sales representative market and also in all Atlanta, Georgia within the first three year of operation.
  • Our mission at Lego Sales Consultants is to offer our clients the best methods and tools in organising and implementing a successful sales and marketing campaign. We believe that our business will cut through the mumbo jumbo of pure awareness, mass marketing, increase sales, and improve client satisfaction with the agency.
  • We believe that our agency will grab clients and products immediately and drive home the right message to the right audience.  Lego Sales Consultants will exceed our customers’ expectations in the industry.

Our Business Structure

We believe that our founding workforce will depend solely on our founders themselves, with little back-up from a team of six, but as the business grows, Lego Sales Consultants will employ a team that includes15workers that will work under a president and two vice-presidents.

Our management philosophy at Lego Sales Consultants will be solely based on responsibility and mutual respect. We believe that individuals who will work at Lego Sales Consultants will choose to stay with us due to our business environment that encourages “C4A,” which is:

  • Competencies
  • Connections
  • Achievement

The three main management divisions at Lego Sales Consultants are Sales and Marketing, Operations, and Internal Business Management. We believe that the departments managed by the Sales and Marketing division will be: marketing, sales, products and services, research and development, and public relations operations.

The departments taken care of by the Internal Business Management division are: accounting, administration, and human resources development. Here are the workforces we hope to start with;

Agency President

Vice president

Sales Manager/Supervisor

Admin and HR Manager

Marketing and Sales Executive

Front Desk Officer

5. Job Roles and Responsibilities

  • Increases management’s effectiveness by recruiting, selecting, orienting, training, coaching, counselling, and disciplining managers; communicating values, strategies, and objectives; assigning accountabilities; planning, monitoring, and appraising job results; developing incentives; developing a climate for offering information and opinions; providing educational opportunities.
  • In charge of providing direction for the business
  • Creates, communicates and implements the organization’s vision, mission, and overall direction – i.e. leading the development and implementation of the overall organization’s strategy.
  • In charge of signing checks and documents on behalf of the company
  • Evaluates the success of the organization
  • Communicate Agency strategy to board of directors.
  • Attends board meetings.
  • Oversees revenue generation.
  • Presides over operations.
  • Identifies ways to maximize revenue.
  • Works with audit committee to prepare budgets.
  • Analyses financial reports.
  • Ensures Agency policies and procedures are followed by each department.
  • Attracts, retains and motivates staff.
  • Reports and shares information with the board to ensure they are kept fully informed on the condition of the Agency and important factors influencing it.
  • Identifies and leads new business opportunities.
  • Ensures highly productive relationships and partnerships for the benefit of the organization.
  • Sets goal, monitor work, and evaluate results to ensure that departmental and organizational objectives and operating requirements are met and are in line with the needs and mission of the organization.
  • Works alongside community leaders, executive directors, major donors/funders, government officials, and senior staff/board members.
  • Participates in and nurtures broad networks of alliances with others to exchanges knowledge and information about learning and change in support of change initiatives.
  • In charge of managing the daily running of the agency, including sourcing equipment, effective resource planning and implementing agency strategies and operations;
  • Carries out needs assessments, performance reviews and cost/benefit analyses;
  • In charge of setting and meeting performance targets for speed, efficiency, sales and quality;
  • Ensures all relevant communications, records and data are updated and recorded;
  • Advises clients on products and services available;
  • Liaising with supervisors, team leaders, operatives and third parties to gather information and resolve issues;
  • Maintains up-to-date knowledge of industry developments and involvement in networks;
  • Monitors random calls to improve quality, minimize errors and track operative performance;
  • Coordinates staff recruitment, including writing vacancy advertisements and liaising with HR staff;
  • Reviews the performance of staff, identifying training needs and planning training sessions;
  • Records statistics, user rates and the performance levels of the centre and preparing reports;
  • Handles the most complex customer complaints or enquiries;
  • In charge of organizing staffing, including shift patterns and the number of staff required to meet demand;
  • In charge of coaching, motivating and retaining staff and coordinating bonus, reward and incentive schemes;
  • In charge of forecasting and analysing data against budget figures on a weekly and/or monthly basis.
  • In charge of overseeing the smooth running of HR and administrative tasks for the organization
  • Maintains office supplies by checking stocks; placing and expediting orders; evaluating new products.
  • Ensures operation of studio equipment by completing preventive maintenance requirements; calling for repairs.
  • Defines job positions for recruitment and managing interviewing process
  • Carries out staff induction for new team members
  • In charge of training, evaluation and assessment of employees
  • In charge of arranging travel, meetings and appointments
  • Designs job descriptions with KPI to drive performance management for clients
  • Regularly hold meetings with key stakeholders to review the effectiveness of HR Policies, Procedures and Processes
  • Facilitates and coordinate strategic sessions.
  • Works directly with clients in a non-advising capacity, such as answering questions, scheduling appointments and making sure all training concerns are properly taken care off
  • Oversees the smooth running of the daily office activities.
  • Identifies, prioritizes, and reaches out to new partners, and business opportunities et al
  • Identifies business opportunities; follows up on development leads and contacts; participates in the structuring and financing of projects; assures the completion of music projects.
  • In charge of supervising implementation, advocate for the customer’s needs, and communicate with clients and music artists
  • Develops, executes and evaluates new plans for expanding increase sales
  • Documents all customer contact and information
  • Represents the Agency in strategic meetings
  • Helps to increase sales and growth for the company
  • In charge of preparing financial reports, budgets, and financial statements for the organization
  • Provides managements with financial analyses, development budgets, and accounting reports; analyses financial feasibility for the most complex proposed projects; conducts market research to forecast trends and business conditions.
  • In charge of financial forecasting and risks analysis.
  • Performs cash management, general ledger accounting, and financial reporting for one or more properties.
  • In charge of developing and managing financial systems and policies
  • In charge of administering payrolls
  • Ensures compliance with taxation legislation
  • Handles all financial transactions for the company
  • Serves as internal auditor for the company
  • Services existing accounts, obtains orders, and establishes new accounts by planning and organizing daily work schedule to call on existing or potential sales outlets and other trade factors.
  • Adjusts content of sales presentations by studying the type of sales outlet or trade factor.
  • Focuses sales efforts by studying existing and potential volume of dealers.
  • Submits orders by referring to price lists and product literature.
  • Keeps management informed by submitting activity and results reports, such as daily call reports, weekly work plans, and monthly and annual territory analyses.
  • Monitors competition by gathering current marketplace information on pricing, products, new products, delivery schedules, merchandising techniques, etc.
  • Recommends changes in products, service, and policy by evaluating results and competitive developments.
  • Resolves customer complaints by investigating problems; developing solutions; preparing reports; making recommendations to management.
  • Maintains professional and technical knowledge by attending educational workshops; reviewing professional publications; establishing personal networks; participating in professional societies.
  • Provides historical records by maintaining records on area and customer sales.
  • Contributes to team effort by accomplishing related results as needed.
  • Receives Visitors / clients on behalf of the organization
  • Receives parcels / documents for the company
  • Handles enquiries via e-mail and phone calls for the organization
  • Distributes mails in the organization
  • Handles any other duties as assigned my the line manager

6. SWOT Analysis

We at Lego Sales Consultants are taking our time to make sure we cover all aspects of preparation even before we open our doors. We understand the need for a SWOT Analysis. SWOT analysis is a process that identifies the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of an organization.

Specifically, SWOT is a basic, analytical framework that assesses what an organization can and cannot do, as well as its potential opportunities and threats. A SWOT analysis takes information from an environmental analysis and separates it into internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as its external opportunities and threats. So it is plain why we need to do this, that’s if we want to be successful.

We employed the services of a well known firm known for its unadulterated analysis and results, and we believe they did all necessary research to come up with the analysis presented to us. Outlined below is the summary of the analysis done for us;

Our SWOT Analysis, which was very extensive and detailed analysed that our strength as a sales representative agency lies with the following factors: our selling and marketing power, our Excellence in fulfilling the promise, our goal of developing visibility to generate new business leads, our ability to create multiple opportunities from a single line of expertise, high quality service and customer satisfaction, and our awesome management team.

Our SWOT Analysis also noted that our weaknesses will come from the fact that being a new agency; we will find it hard to get manufacturers or businesses to give us the job of representing them. Also customers might find it hard to trust our sales persons. We do not see all this as weaknesses but as a chance to create a better business.

  • Opportunities

Just like we must have explained earlier, businesses are now into employing external sales reps to help them market their products. They believe and it is true that these processes are more cost effective and more reliant than having in house sales and marketing department. We believe this and more is the more reason why the industry is very lucrative and massive.

Our SWOT Analysis noted that the threats we are likely to face may include unfavourable government policies, global economic downturn, new competitors, getting products and networking. We believe that Lego Sales Consultants is very much prepared and ready to take anything thrown to it from both external and internal forces.

7. MARKET ANALYSIS

  • Market Trend

It cannot be denied those customers’ needs are becoming more diverse and often change from day to day, pushing heavily on the resources and capabilities of sales organizations. Some of these businesses depend on low-cost sales channels, such as online and telesales, for smaller customers and on high-cost channels, such as face-to-face sales, for key accounts.

But that doesn’t mean that customers increasingly do not want simple, fast, and inexpensive transactions, on the one hand, and highly complex solutions designed by experienced (and often global) teams, on the other.

It is also important to note that before the drastic recession, many businesses in many industries were constructing new channels to reduce the price of servicing smaller customers. Remote interactions, however, have stayed rare for bigger managed accounts, whose need for “face time” was always beyond challenge.

But cost pressures coming from the recession have moved many B2B vendors to re-evaluate that stance, with surprising results. Patrons of businesses are becoming much more comfortable acquiring the information they need from sales resources over the telephone or through Web conferences and video conferences.

Also, the classic use of granular customer data and predictive analytics is no more the domain solely of B2C sellers such as Amazon.com. B2B sales teams now believe that the uncontrolled adoption of these techniques has raised the volume and quality of sales leads and improved conversion rates.

8. Our Target Market

We at Lego Sales Consultants believe we have unique offering of services that will appeal to a large customer base. We at Lego Sales Consultants hope to concentrate on big corporations because we believe that they provide the maximum profit potential. The groups of potential clients and patrons for Lego Sales Consultants are, in order of importance:

  • Big Corporations
  • Medium Companies
  • Small Businesses
  • Regional (Provincial) Government Offices
  • Individual Customers

Our competitive advantage

Within our business niche at Lego Sales Consultants, we believe that we do not have any competitors, but instead prospective business partners. This we are confident about because the agency will give its patrons solutions as well as value creations.

We also know and understand that our services have been and will always be looked for by companies ranging from high-level management firms to international market research companies. Businesses who want to market their products, boost their brand awareness, create a corporate identity, business development, channel development, and in-house market research will come knocking at our door to deliver the following value creations:

Consulting/Market Researchers/Traders/Suppliers

  • Improved communication
  • Access to new markets
  • Broader products offering
  • Lower cost of doing business
  • New ways of adding value

Technology Providers/Manufacturers:

  • Lower cost of sales
  • Access to niche markets
  • Better cost of identification

New business models (outsourcing alliances)

  • Individual Clients:
  • Shopping convenience
  • Immediate delivery
  • More frequent updates
  • Access to more products and services
  • Better pricing

9. SALES AND MARKETING STRATEGY

  • Sources of Income

We at Lego Sales Consultants plan to offer expertise in the services we provide to our patrons. With much experience in our field, we believe that Lego Sales Consultants will be able to sell and package our services in various ways that allows our prospective clients to choose their preferred benefit(s).

Our key fulfillment and delivery at Lego Sales Consultants will be provided by the principals of the business. Our core value is professional expertise provided by a combination of experience, smart and hard work, discipline, improvements, and education (in that order). We plan to gain income by offering the following services;

10. Sales Forecast

Our strategy at Lego Sales Consultants will focus first on maintaining the identity of the high-end buyer who appreciates quality service, but is also very demanding regarding value creations. We at Lego Sales Consultants will customize our services for each specific client. This approach we believe is called “individual sales strategy” because customization permits clients to participate in producing exactly what they want.

Our sales forecast at Lego Sales Consultants assumes that the yearly change in costs or prices will average 20%, which is a reasonable assumption for a new successful business. We at Lego Sales Consultants are expecting to increase sales modestly in 2017 and 2018, with sales growth accelerating in 2019-2022.

It is our expectation that the agency will double its starting sales within five years. Outlined below is our sales forecast for three, and it is worthwhile to note that these projections was done based on what is obtainable in the industry.

  • First Fiscal Year-: $750,000
  • Second Fiscal Year-: $1.4 million
  • Third Fiscal Year-: $3.2 million
  • Marketing Strategy and Sales strategy

We at Lego Sales Consultants believe that our marketing strategies will rely on the same basic principles as consumer marketing, but will surely be executed in a unique way. While consumers choose products based not only on price but on popularity, status, and other emotional triggers, we believe that our patrons will make decisions on price and profit potential alone.

We also understand that discovering new ways to build relationships through social media is currently a hot topic in the B2B marketing world. It is also well known that social media platforms have opened up two way conversations between businesses. We at Lego Sales Consultants believe that B2B marketing involves building valuable relationships to guarantee lasting customers — an important goal for any company,

We all know that the business to business market is the largest of all the markets, and exceeds the consumer market in dollar value. It is also very common that B2B marketing is largely employed by companies that make products consumers have no practical use for, such as steel.

However, it is also used by companies selling products and services bought by consumers and other businesses alike. We hope to market Lego Sales Consultants as huge business with a direct goal to take over the industry. We hope to do the following;

  • We plan to introduce Lego Sales Consultants by sending introductory letters with our business brochure to individuals, households, corporate organizations, schools, players in the real estate sector, and all the people of Alexandria.
  • We also plan to advertise Lego Sales Consultants in important financial and business related magazines, newspapers, TV stations, and radio station.
  • We also plan to advertise Lego Sales Consultants on yellow pages ads (local directories)
  • We also plan to attend important international and local real estate , finance and business expos, seminars, and business fairs et al
  • We also hope to Create different packages for different category of clients (individuals, start – ups and established corporate organizations) in order to work with their budgets
  • We also plan to make use the internet to promote our business
  • We hope to encourage word of mouth marketing from loyal and satisfied clients

11. Publicity and Advertising Strategy

We at Lego Sales Consultants understand our clients’ needs even before we decide to implement any marketing or advertising tactic. We understand that in consumer marketing, an effective advertisement can be blasted out over wide channels, and a percentage of consumers will be driven to buy the product.

But since B2B marketing is so much more specialized, we understand that many businesses run the risk of alienating their specific prospective candidates if they do not pay close attention to their needs before tailoring their services to those needs.

This is why we understand that our marketing plan must be focused in delivery and broad in application. This means that while consumer marketing can advertise very specifically ( one mass-consumed product advertised through print, television commercials and the Internet ) to a wide audience, our marketing plan at Lego Sales Consultants cannot.

Instead, we need to brand Lego Sales Consultants very broadly ( through email, corporate image and technical specifications ) to a very specific customer. We plan to promote our business through the following ways;

  • We hope to place adverts on both print ( community based newspapers and magazines ) and electronic media platforms; we will also advertise Lego Sales Consultants  on financial magazines, real estate and other relevant financial programs on radio and TV
  • Lego Sales Consultants will also sponsor relevant community based events / programs
  • We also plan to make use of various online platforms to promote the business. This will make it easier for people to enter our website with just a click of the mouse. We will take advantage of the internet and social media platforms such as; Instagram, Facebook , twitter, YouTube, Google + et al to promote our brand
  • We also plan to mount our Bill Boards on strategic locations all around Albany – New York.
  • We at Lego Sales Consultants also plan to engage in road show from time to time
  • We also plan to distribute our fliers and handbills in target areas all around Alexandria
  • We plan to make sure that all our workers wear our branded shirts and all our official vehicles are well branded with our company’s logo et al.

12. Our Pricing Strategy

Our major plan at Lego Sales Consultants is to make use of the extensive network of contacts both Nathaniel and Ephraim have with businesses all around United States.  We plan to make use of our internal expertise to launch an astounding strategy directed at a select group of its target customers. We at Lego Sales Consultants have close and effective relationships with our end-users, vendors (suppliers and sub-contractors), and even competitors.

We at Lego Sales Consultants hope to keep the prices of our services and commissions below the average market rate for our clients for the main time. We also hope to provide them with loans coupled with low interest rates that will bring them closer to the firm, and we hope to move our prices a little higher when we have achieved a substantial corporate identity in the micro lending and mortgage industry.

  • Payment options

We plan to provide various a wide varieties of payment options to suit our clients at Lego Sales Consultants. We understand the need and the diverse countenances of people, and the way they understand and process things differently, and we tend to provide a suitable platform that will suit all and sundry equally. Listed below are the payment options that we will make available to Lego Sales Consultants.

  • Payment through bank transfer
  • Payment through online bank transfer
  • Payment with check
  • Payment with bank draft
  • Cash payment

With reference to the above platforms, we have chosen a well renowned bank in the United States to aid in our business. We have chosen and opened a corporate current account with Capital one financial Corporation. Our bank account numbers will be made available in website and promotional materials to clients who may want to make cash deposit and it will also be given explicitly to clients on request.

13. Startup Expenditure (Budget)

The founders of Lego Sales Consultants use to be well known sales agents for large multinational businesses, procurement, and construction contracting services and, at the same time, are experienced market researchers in global markets. They both decided after extensive research to start Lego Sales Consultants. Outlined below is the cost analysis of starting Lego Sales Consultants;

  • The Total Fee for incorporating the Business in Atlanta, Georgia – $750.
  • The budget for Liability insurance, permits and license – $25,000
  • The Amount needed to acquire a suitable Office facility with enough space for standard sales agency in a business district 6 months (Re – Construction of the facility inclusive) – $250,000.
  • The Cost for equipping the agency (printers, fax machines, furniture, telephones, filing cabins, safety gadgets and electronics et al) – $100,000
  • The Cost of Launching our official Website – $600
  • Budget for paying at least 7 employees for 3 months and utility bills – $200,000
  • Additional Expenditure (Business cards, Signage, Adverts and Promotions et al) – $50,000
  • Miscellaneous – $1,000

From the detailed cost analysis above, we need $627,350 to start Lego Sales Consultants. We have put plans together to raise all necessary funds for Lego Sales Consultants.

Generating Funding / Start-up Capital for Lego Sales Consultants

Lego Sales Consultants is a well licensed and registered sales agency which is capitalized by two principal investors, Nathaniel and Ephraim. They are the founders and financiers of the business and hope to remain so for now, with hope to accept partners at a very ripe and mature stage in the business. Due to less constraint in financing Lego Sales Consultants, we have outlined the few ways we can acknowledge funding and start up capital. These was may include;

  • Generate part of the start up capital from the two principal investors
  • Accept soft loans from family members and friends
  • Agreeing to angel investors
  • Apply for business loan from my Bank (if need be)

Note : We at Lego Sales Consultants have been able to generate an enormous $700,000 from our two principal investors, who aligned and individually prune out $350,000 each. We believe that the amount is substantially enough to run the business for the first three months, which by then we expect to sustain the business by the cash and incentives generated from our business proceedings.

14. Sustainability and Expansion Strategy

We at Lego Sales Consultants plan to combine unparalleled quality with a cost-effective package to create a consulting and sales service with many competitive advantages. We also know that our seasoned management are qualified for multiple services, such as: business development, market development, market intelligence, industrial sectors analysis, and channel development.

We at Lego Sales Consultants hope to provide a large range of services to anyone from a high-level marketing firm to a home-based business owner; clients can always count on quick, accurate services from Lego Sales Consultants.

We are Lego Sales Consultants will design, build, test and deploy all possible strategies to achieve our aim and create profits for our clients.  We also plan to report the progress of the campaign in real-time to provide our customers maximum flexibility.

We at Lego Sales Consultants understand that consultant costs (in US$/man-hour) in Atlanta. It is worthwhile to note that this analysis is based on the assumptions that the local senior consultants’ and senior engineers’ salaries have increased by 70%.

This is because the United States skilled manpower market offers one biggest man-hour cost in the world, even with the estimated average increasing 20% per year. To take advantage of this situation, Lego Sales Consultants plan to make use of United States resources for serving both global and regional markets. We also plan to make our employees comfortable and always keep our clients in the known.

Checklist/Milestone

  • Business Name Availability Check: Completed
  • Business Incorporation: Completed
  • Opening of Corporate Bank Accounts various banks in the United States: Completed
  • Opening Online Payment Platforms: Completed
  • Application and Obtaining Tax Payer’s ID: In Progress
  • Application for business license and permit: Completed
  • Purchase of All form of Insurance for the Business: Completed
  • Conducting Feasibility Studies: Completed
  • Leasing, renovating and equipping our facility: Completed
  • Generating part of the start – up capital from the founder: Completed
  • Applications for Loan from our Bankers: In Progress
  • Writing of Business Plan: Completed
  • Drafting of Employee’s Handbook: Completed
  • Drafting of Contract Documents: In Progress
  • Design of The Company’s Logo: Completed
  • Graphic Designs and Printing of Packaging Marketing / Promotional Materials: Completed
  • Recruitment of employees: In Progress
  • Purchase of the Needed software applications, furniture, office equipment, electronic appliances and facility facelift: In progress
  • Creating Official Website for the Company: In Progress
  • Creating Awareness for the business (Business PR): In Progress
  • Health and Safety and Fire Safety Arrangement: In Progress
  • Establishing business relationship with banks, financial lending institutions, vendors and key players in the industry: In Progress

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Business Plan Template for Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives

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Selling pharmaceutical products in a competitive market requires a well-thought-out plan. That's where ClickUp's Business Plan Template for Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives comes in! This template is specifically designed for pharmaceutical companies and sales reps to outline their sales goals, target customers, and strategies for success.

With this template, you can:

  • Develop a comprehensive approach to selling pharmaceutical products
  • Identify key performance indicators to measure success
  • Collaborate with your team to align sales efforts and maximize results

Whether you're launching a new drug or expanding your market presence, this template will help you create a winning business plan and achieve your sales targets. Get started on ClickUp today and make your pharmaceutical sales soar!

Business Plan Template for Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives Benefits

When using the Business Plan Template for Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives, you can expect the following benefits:

  • Streamline your sales process and improve efficiency by having a clear plan in place
  • Set realistic and achievable sales goals that align with your company's objectives
  • Identify and target the right customers for your pharmaceutical products
  • Develop effective strategies to promote and sell your products in the market
  • Track and measure key performance indicators to assess your sales performance
  • Stay organized and focused on your sales objectives with a comprehensive approach

Main Elements of Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives Business Plan Template

ClickUp's Business Plan Template for Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives provides a structured approach to sales planning and strategy. Here are the main elements of this template:

  • Custom Statuses: Track the progress of your business plan with statuses like Complete, In Progress, Needs Revision, and To Do, ensuring clear visibility and accountability.
  • Custom Fields: Utilize custom fields such as Reference, Approved, and Section to organize and categorize important information within your business plan.
  • Custom Views: Access different views like Topics, Status, Timeline, Business Plan, and Getting Started Guide to gain a comprehensive overview of your sales goals, strategies, and progress.
  • Document Collaboration: Collaborate with your team in real-time by utilizing ClickUp's Docs feature, allowing you to create, edit, and share your business plan seamlessly.
  • Task Management: Break down your business plan into actionable tasks, assign them to team members, set due dates, and track progress using ClickUp's tasks feature.

With ClickUp's Business Plan Template, pharmaceutical sales representatives can streamline their sales planning process and effectively sell pharmaceutical products in the market.

How To Use Business Plan Template for Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives

If you're a pharmaceutical sales representative looking to create a comprehensive business plan, follow these four steps using the Business Plan Template in ClickUp:

1. Define your target market

Start by identifying your target market. Determine the specific healthcare professionals and institutions that are most likely to prescribe or use your products. Consider factors such as geography, specialty, and patient demographics.

Use custom fields in ClickUp to categorize and track your target market data, including key contacts and prescribing habits.

2. Set strategic objectives

Next, establish your strategic objectives for the year. These objectives should align with your company's overall sales and marketing goals. Think about what you want to achieve in terms of market share, sales growth, and customer relationships.

Create tasks in ClickUp to outline your strategic objectives and assign responsibilities to team members.

3. Develop your sales tactics

Once you have your objectives in place, it's time to develop your sales tactics. These are the specific actions and strategies you will implement to achieve your objectives. Consider tactics such as product presentations, educational events, relationship-building activities, and promotional campaigns.

Use the Board view in ClickUp to create columns for each sales tactic and move tasks across the board as they progress.

4. Monitor performance and adjust

As you execute your business plan, it's crucial to monitor your performance and make adjustments as needed. Regularly review your sales data, track the success of your tactics, and gather feedback from healthcare professionals.

Use Dashboards in ClickUp to visualize your sales performance, track key metrics, and identify areas for improvement. Set up Automations to receive real-time alerts and notifications based on specific performance thresholds.

By following these steps and utilizing the Business Plan Template in ClickUp, you'll be well-equipped to create and execute an effective business plan as a pharmaceutical sales representative.

Get Started with ClickUp’s Business Plan Template for Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives

Pharmaceutical sales representatives can use this Business Plan Template for Pharmaceutical Sales to help them outline their sales goals and strategies, track progress, and stay organized.

First, hit “Add Template” to sign up for ClickUp and add the template to your Workspace. Make sure you designate which Space or location in your Workspace you’d like this template applied.

Next, invite relevant members or guests to your Workspace to start collaborating.

Now you can take advantage of the full potential of this template to create a comprehensive business plan:

  • Use the Topics View to organize your business plan into different sections, such as market analysis, sales strategies, and target audience.
  • The Status View will help you track the progress of each section, whether it's complete, in progress, needs revision, or still to do.
  • The Timeline View will allow you to set deadlines for each section and visualize the overall timeline of your business plan.
  • Use the Business Plan View to get a holistic view of your entire plan, including all sections and their statuses.
  • The Getting Started Guide View will provide you with step-by-step instructions on how to use the template effectively.
  • Create custom fields like Reference, Approved, and Section to add additional information and categorize your business plan.
  • Update statuses and custom fields as you work on each section to keep track of progress and approvals.
  • Monitor and analyze your business plan to ensure it aligns with your sales goals and objectives.
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COMMENTS

  1. The Best Free Business Plan Template For Individual Sales Reps

    This Breaking Into Device template above is an example of the 30-60-90 plan in that it focuses on the long-term goal of change at the end of three months. In a typical 30-60-90 sales plan, you would state your goals, the action steps you will use to reach them, your target dates, and your metrics for success. 3.

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    A sales business plan—sales plan for short—is a document or presentation that defines the strategies your team will undertake to close deals, ... The purpose is to integrate new technology better or train a new sales rep into the team. Get the most from your 30-60-90 sales business plan with the template below. Each page concentrates on the ...

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  4. Business Plan Template for Sales Rep

    Here are four steps to effectively use the Business Plan Template for Sales Reps in ClickUp: 1. Define your sales goals. Start by clearly defining your sales goals. Determine what you want to achieve, whether it's increasing revenue, acquiring new clients, or launching a new product.

  5. Sales Business Plan: Create a Killer Plan

    How to Write a Winning Sales Business Plan Template: A Step-By-Step Blueprint. Writing a sales business plan template may seem like a lot of work, but once you do, you've already skipped leaps and bounds to take your business to the next level. Let's break down this process, step-by-step, to help you write a winning sales business plan template ...

  6. How to Create a Sales Plan in 10 Steps (+ Free Template)

    3. Determine Your Ideal Customer. Determining the ideal customer or target market is the next step of your business plan for sales reps. It may have been accomplished when you developed your mission statement, but also when you set your sales goals and discovered how broad your market needs to be to reach them.

  7. 10 Free Sales Plan Templates to Strategize & Reach Sales Goals

    Take a look at our hand-picked selection of the best sales plan templates available today for Microsoft Word and sales enablement tools like ClickUp. 1. ClickUp Sales Plan Template. Create and organize tasks by team, deliverable type, priority, due dates, and approval state with the ClickUp Sales Plan Template.

  8. 6 Steps to Create a Successful Sales Business Plan

    Step 1: Take Measure of the Sales Target. Before your rep can begin creating an effective business plan, they need to be comfortable with the sales target you've set for them. As a sales manager, you should examine each reps' performance data for the past six to twelve months, and identify key numbers including gross sales, profits, win ...

  9. What is Sales Planning? How to Create a Sales Plan

    Business Development Strategic Sales Plan. Download Now: Free Strategic Business Planning Template. A strategic sales plan for business development will focus on attracting new business to your company by networking with other companies, sponsoring events, and doing outreach. In your sales plan, you'll want to choose the right KPIs that best ...

  10. How to Create a Sales Plan: Tips, Examples & Free Sales Plan Template

    8. Build a Prospecting List. A prospect list is where we take all the theory and research of the last few sections of our sales plan template and put them into action. At its core, a prospect list is a directory of real people you can contact who would benefit from your product or service.

  11. How to Write a Winning Sales Business Plan

    Here is a snapshot of the winning sales business plan that helped shape Nimble into the industry leader it is today: Objectives- To provide a single, socially enriched system of record that helps businesses and small business teams cultivate relationships at scale. Customer Focus- Small business teams working primarily in small businesses ...

  12. How to Write a Sales Plan

    2. Assess the current situation. The next step is to create an honest overview of your business situation in relation to the goal you set in the first step. Review your strengths and assets. Take ...

  13. How to Write a 30-60-90 Day Sales Plan with Examples

    A 30-60-90 day sales plan is a three-month strategy designed to onboard new sales team members or sales managers. You can also use it to help guide reps in expanding to new territories or implementing new tools or processes. The distinguishing feature of the 30-60-90 day plan for sales lies in the name.

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