How to Create a Sales Plan in 7

Steps (+ Free Template)

A sales plan is a document used to establish sales objectives and develop
strategies necessary to achieve them. Typically, this document establishes a plan
for revenue growth and other measurements of success. Sales plans consist of
sections outlining goals, identifying key customer attributes, and listing
necessary strategies, tools, metrics, and estimated expenses.

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The seven specific steps needed to create your sales plan include:

1. Outline Your Mission &

Objectives
Start by outlining your company mission statement, as well as your sales
objectives, in terms of growth. This section will serve as the foundation of your
sales plan, defining your unique selling proposition and thus making it
critically important to your plan’s success because it will guide your future sales
efforts.

Before you go too far, be sure you have clearly defined your mission statement,
which is a formal statement describing what your business stands for and what it
aims to achieve. An example of a good mission statement is:

“We provide customers with cutting-edge digital marketing solutions with best-
in-class technical support at a profit to our shareholders.”

A mission statement should be the framework for all strategic planning and a
cornerstone of your sales management practices.

Establish Your Sales Objectives

Sales objectives are goals supporting the company’s growth a year from now, as
well as years in the future, in terms of revenue, market share, or profit margin.
By establishing these sales goals, you are explaining what success will look
like in the clearest terms while also giving your team targets to rally around.

Next, describe your sales objectives using the SMART format:

SMART goals acronym

Start by creating one to three SMART objectives for your plan’s first year. What
is it you hope to achieve in terms of growth a year from now? Once you have
stated your objective, describe how the objective will be measured as well as
how often you intend to audit the objective’s progress.

2. Describe Your Sales Team’s

Roles & Responsibilities
Your sales plan should list the roles of your sales team as well as any separate
marketing and agency support. Summarize the responsibilities of each role or
their expected contribution to the sales process. Next, list the names of the
individual team members and their personal key performance indicators (KPIs).
This step benefits the team by providing clear expectations for performance and
details how they will be held accountable.

In addition to the team’s direct sales activities, you should also list indirect sales
responsibilities. Some examples of indirect sales responsibilities include website
enablement, running lead acquisition campaigns, and developing sales
collateral.

3. Define Your Customer

Focus
You want to clearly describe the key characteristics of your ideal customer.
There are three things to consider in this section, which include building a
profile of your ideal customer, describing their expected buying patterns or
creditworthiness, and defining your anticipated sales territory. This will be used
to identify prospects, prioritize sales efforts, and create a customer-centric
business.

Here are the things you should do in order to define your customer focus:

Build Your Ideal Customer Persona

A customer profile is a general description of your ideal customer. In this
section, summarize the attributes of customers that you are targeting. This
includes demographics, which not only describe a population in terms of
location, age, and gender, but should also include psychographics, or the things
that might influence their attitudes, aspirations, or other behavior like interests
and lifestyle.

You may have more than one ideal customer profile if you have a high mix of
products or services. For more information, we have an article on how to
create a customer persona, which includes additional templates and
examples for your reference.

For example, if you’re using a business-to-consumer (B2C) sales model, your

ideal customer profile will include attributes such as gender, age, family life,
homeownership status, income, education, interests, and available sales
channels. To describe your ideal customer in a business-to-business (B2B) sales
model, include additional information, such as relevant job titles, key
responsibilities, memberships, clubs, and the communication channels they use.

Describe Customer Buying Patterns

Thinking about your ideal customer organization is only relevant to business-to-
business (B2B) sales, and this step can be skipped if that’s not your business
model. Describe the type of organization you are targeting. This is the
organization where your ideal customer works or is the customer itself. Typical
criteria include company size by annual revenue, company size by the number
of employees, and relevant Industries.

Define Your Sales Territory

For both B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) businesses, define the sales
territories where you expect to find your ideal customer. This should be a
concise description of the geographic region that you are going to operate within
and why you believe it will support your sales goals. It may be that you also
want to define a list of named accounts to each salesperson or focus them on a
specific market niche.

4. Consider Your Strategies &

Tactics
This section of your sales plan template is where you define the longer-term
strategies and day-to-day tactics you’ll use to acquire new business as well as
grow business with existing customers. These are the tasks your team will use to
execute your sales plan and acquire or grow ideal customers outlined in the step
above.

Once you have established your strategies and tactics, it is a good idea to create
a dashboard that displays progress against your plan at a
glance. Freshsales allows you to easily track the progress of your
opportunities, create tasks to help you reach your goals, and filter deals by sales
reps to develop the most effective sales strategies. Sign up for a free 21-day
free trial.

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In addition to offering revenue growth potential, new business acquisition

strategies help reduce risk by minimizing your reliance on a single account. In
your sales plan, list strategies for adding new customer or prospect information
that fit your ideal customer profile to your sales pipeline. Then, identify at least
two tasks that will be performed by members of the sales team on a daily or
weekly basis to help them meet their sales quota.

Here are examples of three business acquisition strategies you can use in a sales
plan template:

Manage Sales Quotas

 Make no less than 20 cold calls of introduction to new prospects each
week
 Make no less than 6 face-to-face contacts with new prospects each week
 Make no less than 3 pitch presentations each week

Increase Awareness for Products,

Services & Solutions
 Participate in no less than three professional associations in which my
best prospects and customers belong
  Attend all trade shows and conventions that my best prospects and
customers attend
 Purchase the mailing list of these associations and send a letter of
introduction

Obtain Referrals From New

Customers
 Within 30 days of delivering my product or service, I will follow up with
each of my new customers to ensure that they are satisfied
 If they are not delighted, I will aim to resolve this so that I can go back to
seek customer referrals at a later date
 If they are delighted, I will ask them to send at least three customer
referrals

In addition, we have compiled a list of sales strategy tips that can help you
get started. Those tips, along with those in this article, should be considered as
you build out the strategy that makes the most sense for your business.

5. List Your Sales Plan Tools

& Systems
Use this section to summarize the systems and tools that will be used to support
the successful implementation of your sales plan. This will ensure your sales
process is managed and activities are performed using the best methods.

Here are three common types of tools that can help you create a sales plan:

Customer Relationship
Management Software
CRM software lets you manage sales activity in real-time, measure
performance, access information quickly, and may allow you to make updates
even when you are away from the office. If the ability to access data in real-time
isn’t enough, some CRMs allow you to structure your sales pipeline into
meaningful stages and measure every aspect of your plan as you implement it,
without needing to create additional sales reports.

Contact management software helps streamline your sales process by keeping

relevant information about contacts such as title, relationship details, and call
notes in one central place. Freshsales CRM manages all of your relevant
information and can be accessed via the mobile app when you’re on the go.
Visit Freshsales for a 21-day free trial.

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Video Conferencing Software

While some sales meetings take place in person, as our society becomes more
digital, video meeting are more popular. Every sales team should choose video
conferencing software that helps them engage with prospects and customers to
move the sales process forward.

There are many affordable video conferencing software choices available. For
example, Zoom offers a free version for meetings up to 40 minutes and has
affordable plans for longer meetings.

Scheduling Software
Scheduling meetings manually can be difficult when you’re working with a lot
of customers and prospects. Fortunately, there are many programs available that
can help automate the process, eliminating the back and forth of finding a
convenient meeting time.

For example, Calendly is software that automatically connects to your

calendar, so customers and prospects know when you’re free to meet. You can
simply send them your personal Calendly link and they can choose a meeting
time, after which it’s automatically put onto both of your calendars.
6. Assign Your Sales Plan
Metrics
Once you have decided upon your sales objectives, decide how to measure your
sales performance to monitor the health of your sales plan and meet those sales
objectives. You do this by establishing a sales process, defining the critical steps
in each stage, and then describing success in terms of conversion rates and
resource time or process flow.

For example, common metrics you will measure on a monthly or quarterly basis
include:

 Year-over-year (YOY) revenue: How do your sales this year compare at

the same time to last year’s sales?
 New business revenue: Track your monthly and quarterly revenue
coming in from new accounts.
 Individual sales rep performance: Monitor the performance of each
sales rep by tracking their monthly, quarterly, and YOY sales targets.
 Recurring revenue: Track how much revenue is coming in from current
accounts (loyal customers).
 Customer churn: Monitor how many customers you are losing to churn
on a regular basis. If your churn goes up significantly, you’ll know you
need to analyze the reasons and create a win-back campaign.