Does your team have a sales plan guide? It takes an average of eight cold call attempts to reach a prospect, and 80% of sales require more than five follow-ups. In addition, consumers have many different businesses to choose from, and longer sales cycles reflect that. That’s why sales teams must formalize well-documented sales plans to guide them daily, establish goals, and help them hit targets.
What Is a Sales Plan Guide?
A sales plan is a document that lays out goals, objectives, target audience, and any potential obstacles. A winning sales plan guide is referenced daily by the sales team and becomes a guiding light in their day-to-day professional life. Similar to a business plan but solely focused on sales, a sales plan lays out how your overall business goals will happen.
It also might include information about the team structure, individual key performance indicators, revenue goals, customer personas and profiles, and any resources to help achieve the goals.
What Are the Goals of a Winning Sales Plan?
A great sales plan needs to accomplish a few specific things, such as:
- Laying out team objectives
- Offering strategic direction
- Outlining roles and responsibilities
- Monitoring team progress
This sales plan can’t be created solely in the silo of your own company. A good sales plan also needs market research, trend analysis, competitive intel, and more to craft a well-rounded strategy.
How to Write the Best Sales Plan Guide
1. Use a Sales Plan Template
With a free sales plan template, you can save lots of time and quickly get over the anxiety of creating something from scratch. Use proven design concepts and save time, all while creating a winning document that conveys everything you want.
In cloudHQ’s Google Docs Templates, all templates even have royalty-free stock images, illustrations, and photographs you can use for both personal and commercial projects.
2. Create a Mission Statement
Include a brief history of the business, a mission statement, and a forward-facing vision for background context as you build out further parts of the sales plan.
3. Don’t Skim Over Your Ideal Customer Profiles
Knowing who your target audience is, their pain points, their job titles, what they struggle with, and more is a key part of a winning sales plan. It’s common to fill out ideal customer personas half-heartedly, but without it, sales reps might start targeting people outside your ideal customer. This can cause win rates to drop and sales cycles to lengthen, ultimately decreasing your revenue.
4. Define Roles and Responsibilities
Without clearly defined roles, you might find team members overlapping. Describe who is on each team, their role, and how it functions within the larger group.
5. Create a List of Your Sales Tools, Software, and Resources
Do you feel like you have a million different sales automation tools floating around? You want to define your main CRM clearly and then the supporting software that sales reps might use for note-taking, call recordings, market research, email follow-ups, data scraping, and more. This will also help you see what tools overlap and where you can save on budget.
6. Clearly Define the Prospecting Strategy
How will you qualify leads? What will you do with unqualified leads? Clearly define the prospecting strategy before your sales team starts selling, so there’s no confusion on where leads need to go in your pipeline.
7. Craft an Action Plan
Now that you’ve completed the key sales guide groundwork, it’s time to start selling! Draft a quarterly action plan for how your sales reps will each hit their targets.
8. Define Your Goals
Last but certainly not least, write out specific goals. Most of these goals will be revenue-based, but it takes a little bit of math to figure out your customer acquisition cost, average deal price, and length of contract — and then put all that into quarterly, monthly, and annual revenue goals.
Save Time With a Sales Plan Guide
With all this work ahead of you to create a winning sales plan, it’s best to start with a free sales plan template. This way, you start with the framework already built for you, and you just have to fill in the relevant sections for your company.
cloudHQ’s Google Docs Templates also includes business proposal templates, business plan templates, marketing templates, and much more. Use these thoughtfully crafted, pre-written frameworks for anything your business needs.