Last week I wrote about sales strategies. The sales strategy provides the basis for the sales plan. It provides the background as to why you are going to do the activities that you are going to do. These activities form the sales plan.
The sales plan is then derived from the sales strategy. It defines how you are going to go about making sales. The plan will be based on available resources, both personnel and financial. Where historical data is available, this will be used to help to guide the ideas of activity and targets that are set. Where appropriate, sales targets and goals will be defined. Without some SMART goals, it can be easy to start to only focus on some tasks rather than others.
The plan is aligned to the main stages of the sales process:
Suspect. This is activity designed to create opportunities. It includes a mixture of both passive and proactive activity. Passive activity is essentially marketing – making potential customers aware of the product and the problems that it solves. The precise mix of this activity will be dependent upon the product and market but will include some or all of Email Marketing, Blogging and Content Marketing, Video Marketing, Event Marketing, Customer Marketing, Direct Mail Marketing, Social Media Marketing. Proactive activity will include research of specific potential customers and targeted communications to gain an initial meeting. It will also be necessary to define how to approach potential customers to gain their attention.
Prospect. This stage is designed to determine if a company is a potential customer or not. It requires us to meet with the relevant people to find out their needs and how the product can help them to resolve those needs. It will help at this stage to develop a questioning structure and outline meeting plan for initial meetings. At this stage, we develop a checklist for each opportunity to ensure that we learn everything that we need to learn about our customer in relation to this opportunity.
Opportunity. In this stage, we present a proposal to the customer, potentially followed by a presentation. The proposal will document the customer’s objectives and associated needs, the features and benefits of implementing your solution and proof that you can deliver. The definition of a good opportunity will be developed to assist in prioritising activity between individual opportunities. Activity here will very much be driven by the particular needs of the customer and how this translates into a deal.
Close. In this stage, we negotiate and close the deal. Activity here will very much be driven by the particular needs of the customer and how this translates into a deal. It is possible to construct a negotiation matrix of variables to assist with this. A list of common objections can also be defined in anticipation of potential objections. Finally, we will develop a checklist of actions that are required to be completed before the close is attempted.
The majority of the pre-defined activity in the plan is focussed on the early stages of the plan. As opportunities progress through the process, the required activity will be much more dependent upon the specific opportunity and pre-defining this is much more difficult. There are also many more potential customers and opportunities than closed deals leading to more activity in the early stages of the plan.
This week I have written proposals for three companies to help them to develop their sales strategy and plan. If you would like some help, please get in touch.