How to Create a Sales Plan for Your Business
Every business needs effective planning to stay on track. If you’re a business owner, this means having processes established to help you reach your sales goals, improve customer service scores and even streamline production. Sales goals are often where businesses put most of the focus because that’s the metric that means it’s successful. To hit your sales goals, you need a great sales plan. These simple steps will help you create one.
Establish Your Goals
Sales plans exist as a roadmap to help your business improve sales. The first step to drawing that map is establishing where you want to go. What are your sales goals? Are you trying to increase certain sales metrics? Boost profitability? Whatever the case, figuring out your main focus is step one.
After you’ve identified your goal, you need to make it quantifiable. For example, “I want to increase profitability by 5% this quarter.” Tacking a specific number and time frame to your plan helps you take meaningful steps at the proper pace to achieve your goal.
Identify Your SWOTs
That acronym stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. This step is essentially an analysis of your business’s health and the surrounding competition. It can show you what areas of your business you can easily leverage to reach your goal and which areas will need some development to support your vision.
This step is an excellent exercise when you know you need to grow your business to reach your goals but you aren’t sure where to start. Looking at the competition shows you where you’re lacking against others in your industry and what services you can rely on while you shore up other parts of your business.
Create a Strategy
Once you know your goals and your SWOTs, you can start to create a strategy for success. The key in this step is to stay as realistic as possible. It might sound great to double your revenue in a month by making everyone work overtime, but your staff probably won’t be on board. Instead, create a strategy that works within your existing means to reach your goal.
Let’s go back to the profitability example from the first section. Your goal is to increase profitability by 5% in one quarter. Your strategy could plan for incremental price raises on certain products, slightly higher sales quotas for your staff and switching to a new supplier with better prices. This strategy puts you on a path to more profits without significantly stressing the processes you already have in place.
Choose Your Tactics Wisely
A plan and strategy is great, but when it comes time to implement them, there’s still some research to be done. Your profitability plan in the previous section looks great and you want to roll it out. Before you do so, it’s wise to look into how similar tactics have worked for other businesses. Maybe a competitor increased some of their prices last quarter but didn’t make enough sales to boost profits. Or maybe someone else switched suppliers and saw the quality of their products decline.
When you take the time to see what has and hasn’t worked for other businesses, it keeps you from making those same mistakes. If you see that raising prices doesn’t really increase profits, then you can leave your prices where they are and focus on another tactic that promises better results.
Writing Your Sales Plan
After you’ve taken the days or weeks to go through the above steps, you should have a pretty good idea of what your sales plan will look like. Now it’s time to write it up. Sales plans are official business documents and have a certain structure you should follow. The parts include everything from an executive summary to a detailed action plan so your business leadership or financial partners can see how you plan to make improvements.
A sales plan is a roadmap that guides your business forward, and making a great one will help you succeed in all your sales efforts.
