Establish your sales plan
What is a Sales Plan and what can it do for my business?
Welcome to this article where I will be explaining the need for a Sales Plan, how to establish the plan and how it fits into your business plan.
The Sales Plan
A sales plan is a set of realistic targets that map directly into your financial planning and uses your market and customer research data to forecast your likely sales activity for the coming 12 months. In some cases this can also be estimated for the second or even third year.
The sales plan looks at what products or services you are planning to sell, line by line, and is the driver for your sales and marketing activity planning. In other words, if you plan to sell 10 items per week, what is the sales and marketing activity that will drive this activity to actually occur.
You can download a free sales plan template at the bottom of this article. This template is an Excel spread sheet that has calculations built into the sheet for adding up each month and a rolling cumulative figure to the end of the year.
Research will you need to do
OK, in my third article Define Your Customer Groups, I introduced you to the concept of looking at your customers and breaking them into groups. Each customer group will require different things from you and your products and services. So, in terms of your sales plan, consider which group will buy which product or service.
Then, you will need to research how many of these particular groups are in your area you intend to operate. A good source of data is the Census statistics available on your Local or County Council web site. If this does not give you the detail that you may require, you may need to consider some form of detailed market research to determine things like:
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Shopping area foot fall
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Buying habits of your customer groups
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Travel statistics
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Life style statistics
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Etc…………
Once you have a clear and data driven view of your potential market place, you can now think about your marketing and sales activity to:
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Let people know how to find you
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Let people know what you do
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Inform people of your Unique Selling Proposition
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Getting them to contact you
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Converting that lead into a customer
I cannot over stress the importance of market research. This data, along with knowing your competition, will give you good insight into your challenge in terms of reaching your customers and making sales in your chosen market.
How to construct a Sales Plan
If you have already downloaded your free Sales Plan template, this section will be easier to follow.
First, determine your realistic target sales quantities per customer group for each of your products or services. Then, for each month, add these together to estimate your likely sales value. Continue this activity for each of the following 11 months. This is your sales plan.
It is not real, it is not a guarantee of business, it is not cash in the bank. It is however, a list of targets for your business to achieve in order for your business to perform to your financial goals.
Beware, a sales plan is only of any use if it is realistic, backed up by effective sales and marketing activity plans and established as a live document (live in terms that this will be revisited on a monthly basis to see how you are doing against the plan and to be able to take the appropriate action).
Quantities may be numbers of units, hours employed, frequency of service etc. Whatever is a “sales unit” for your business’ products or services.
The purpose of a sales plan
The focus of any business must be sales. Sales provide the life blood of the business, cash, and the sales plan drives the business to:
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Understand the market place
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Understand the customer
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Understand the competition
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Have a key goal set for the business to achieve
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Take actions needed to improve the financial situation
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Review the success of all marketing and sales activities, campaigns etc.
Remember, like any other goal or objective use SMART objectives (Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic, Time bound).
If you have not done so already, you can down load your free copy of the SMART Objectives article at the bottom of this page.
If you have missed any of the previous articles, you can access them now by using any of the following links:
Graham Cripps
Results Consortium Ltd
