How To Write a Successful Sales Plan? Know your stuff!
Especially in a turbulent economy, having a strategy and a plan is critical for staying focused, staying on track and making the mid-course corrections necessary to succeed. But the basis of any plan has to be based on your knowledge of your business. What has worked and what hasn’t worked? More importantly, IS THAT STILL TRUE? So do an analysis of your business whether you are the CEO or the Sales rep.
- First, what is your average deal? I really have to laugh when I ask a sales person and they tell me that “there is No average”. The dictionary defines “Average” as:
–noun Statistics.
the mean obtained by adding several quantities together and dividing the sum by the number of quantities: the arithmetic mean of 1, 5, 2, and 8 is 4. Now, why is this important? You have to know based on your business, what you need to do to succeed. Knowing that if I closed 20 deals last year and made 110% , with an average deal size of $30,000, that is good information. (Usually what I do is take out the two biggest deals that are not typical) So now I can focus on how many I need. I can now look at my performance YTD and my pipeline and see where I am at, NOT JUST from a dollar amount. So now YTD I have 15 deals and that average is $27,000, I know that the deals are getting smaller, (or that I had a couple of big ones if you didn’t take them out) and I need x number of deals based on the average deal in order to make my number. Now I can look at my pipeline and see if I have the deals I need.
- Where did the sales come from? This is critical. Are they upgrades and add-on business? Are they all net-new customer wins? Did I prospect them or did they come from marketing or trade shows? Most people I talk to THINK they know where their business came from. However, when we really analyze it, the answer is almost always different. Why do this? If something is working, DO MORE OF IT! Now, this does not mean stop prospecting just because you find that most of the deals came from marketing. What this means is that if you find that you didn’t prospect most of your deals, then you can increase your pipeline and sales, just by getting better at prospecting. ADD THAT TO YOUR PLAN. Create a prospecting plan and a marketing plan, based on what you know.
- Start Building a plan! Capture what you have found, write it down, share it with your team. Then find the ACTIONS you can take to finish Q4 Strong.
More later this week. What you should know about your accounts…..
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