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.

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.

What is a sales plan?

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.

What are the goals of an effective sales plan?

The purpose of your company’s sales plan is to:

  • Communicate your company’s goals and objectives.
  • Provide strategic direction.
  • Outline roles and responsibilities.
  • Monitor your sales team’s progress.

Communicate your company’s goals and objectives.

Goals and objectives are the lifeblood of successful sales efforts. You can‘t know what you’re working for or whether you‘ve achieved anything meaningful if you don’t have them in place.

Your sales reps need to have a solid sense of what‘s expected of them — you can’t go to your team and just say, “Sell.” You have to establish clear benchmarks that reconcile practicality with ambition.

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.

Provide strategic direction.

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.

Outline roles and responsibilities.

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.

Monitor your sales team’s progress.

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 Process

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:

  1. Gather sales data and search for trends.
  2. Define your objectives.
  3. Determine metrics for success.
  4. Assess the current situation.
  5. Start sales forecasting.
  6. Identify gaps.
  7. Ideate new initiatives.
  8. Involve stakeholders.
  9. Outline action items.

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.

Read the full blog on our partner HubSpot‘s website. Need help executing your sales plan, contact us today to get a free assessment of your marketing needs.