yearly sales business plan template

And if (or more likely when ) those goals change over time, you need to regularly communicate those shifts and the strategic adjustments that come with them to your team.

Your sales strategy keeps your sales process productive — it offers the actionable steps your reps can take to deliver on your vision and realize the goals you set. So naturally, you need to communicate it effectively. A sales plan offers a solid resource for that.

For instance, your sales org might notice that your SDRs are posting lackluster cold call conversion rates. In turn, you might want to have them focus primarily on email outreach, or you could experiment with new sales messaging on calls.

Regardless of how you want to approach the situation, a thoughtfully structured sales plan will give both you and your reps a high-level perspective that would inform more cohesive, effective efforts across the team.

An effective sales org is a machine — one where each part has a specific function that serves a specific purpose that needs to be executed in a specific fashion. That's why everyone who comprises that org needs to have a clear understanding of how they specifically play into the company's broader sales strategy.

Outlining roles and responsibilities while sales planning lends itself to more efficient task delegation, improved collaboration, overlap reduction, and increased accountability. All of which amount to more streamlined, smooth, successful sales efforts.

Sales planning can set the framework for gauging how well your team is delivering on your sales strategy. It can inform the benchmarks and milestones reps can use to see how their performance stacks up against your goals and expectations.

It also gives sales leadership a holistic view of how well a sales org is functioning as a whole — giving them the necessary perspective to understand whether they have the right people and tools in place to be as successful as possible.

Sales planning isn‘t (and shouldn’t) be limited to the actual sales plan document it produces. If that document is going to have any substance or practical value, it needs to be the byproduct of a thorough, well-informed, high-level strategy.

When sales planning, you have some key steps you need to cover — including:

• Gather sales data and search for trends.
• Define your objectives.
• Determine metrics for success.
• Assess the current situation.
• Start sales forecasting.
• Identify gaps.
• Ideate new initiatives.
• Involve stakeholders.
• Outline action items.

When putting this list together, I consulted  Zach Drollinger — Senior Director of Sales at edtech provider Coursedog — to ensure the examples detailed below are sound and accurate.

Step 1: Gather sales data and search for trends.

To plan for the present and future, your company needs to look to the past. What did sales look like during the previous year? What about the last five years? Using this information can help you identify trends in your industry. While it's not foolproof, it helps establish a foundation for your sales planning process.

For the sake of example, let‘s say that I’m a new sales director for an edtech company that sells curriculum planning software to higher education institutions. My vertical is community colleges, and my territory is the East Coast.

Once I assume this new role, I‘m going to want to gather as much context as possible about my vertical and how my company has approached it historically. I would pull information about how we’ve sold to this vertical.

How much new business have we closed within it in the past five years? How does that compare to how we perform with other kinds of institutions? Are we seeing significant churn from these customers?

I would also want to get context about the general needs, interests, and pain points of the kinds of institutions I‘m selling to. I’d look for insight into figures like degree velocity, staff retention, and enrollment.

Ultimately, I would get a comprehensive perspective on my sales process — a thorough understanding of where I stand and what my prospects are dealing with. That will ensure that I can deliver on the next step as effectively as possible.

Step 2: Define your objectives.

How do you know your business is doing well if you have no goals? As you can tell from its placement on this list, defining your goals and objectives is one of the first steps you should take in your sales planning process. Once you have them defined, you can move forward with executing them.

To extend the example from the previous step, I would leverage the context I gathered through the research I conducted about both my and my prospect's circumstances. I would start setting both broader goals and more granular operational objectives .

For instance, I might want to set a goal of increasing sales revenue from my vertical. From there, I would start putting together the kind of specific objectives that will facilitate that process — like connecting with administrators from at least 30 community colleges, booking demos with at least 10 schools, and successfully closing at least five institutions.

Obviously, those steps represent a streamlined (and unrealistically straightforward) sales process, but you get the idea — I would set a concrete goal, supplemented by SMART objectives , that will serve as a solid reference point for my org's efforts as the sales process progresses.

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Step 3: Determine metrics for success.

Every business is different. One thing we can all agree on is that you need metrics for success. These metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs). What are you going to use to determine if your business is successful? KPIs differ based on your medium, but standard metrics are gross profit margins, return on investment (ROI), daily web traffic users, conversion rate, and more.

I kind of covered this step in the previous example, but it still warrants a bit more elaboration. The “M” in SMART goals (“measurable”) is there for a reason. You can‘t tell if your efforts were successful if you don’t know what “successful” actually means.

The edtech sales example I‘ve been running with revolves mostly around me assuming ownership of an existing vertical and getting more out of it. So it’s fair to assume that sales growth rate — the increase or decrease of sales revenue in a given period, typically expressed as a percentage — would be an effective way to gauge success.

I might want to structure my goals and objectives around a sales growth rate of 20% Y/Y within my vertical. I would make sure my org was familiar with that figure and offer some context about what it would take to reach it — namely, how many institutions we would need to close and retain.

Step 4: Assess the current situation.

How is your business fairing right now? This information is relevant to determining how your current situation holds up to the goals and objectives you set during step two. What are your roadblocks? What are your strengths? Create a list of the obstacles hindering your success. Identify the assets you can use as an advantage. These factors will guide you as you build your sales plan.

Continuing the edtech example, I would use the historical context I gathered and the objectives I set to frame how I look at my current circumstances. I might start by considering my goal of increasing revenue by 20% Y/Y. In that case, I would look at the company's retention figures — ideally, that would give me a sense of whether that needs to be a major area of focus.

I would also try to pin down trends in the colleges that we've already closed — are there any pain points we consistently sell on? I might take a closer look at how we demo to see if we might be glossing over key elements of our value proposition. Maybe, I would use conversation intelligence to get a better sense of how reps are handling their calls.

Ultimately, I would try to identify why we're performing the way we are, the inefficiencies that might be resulting from our current strategy, and how we can best set ourselves up to sell as effectively as possible.

Step 5: Start sales forecasting.

Sales forecasting is an in-depth report that predicts what a salesperson, team, or company will sell weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. While it is finicky, it can help your company make better decisions when hiring, budgeting, prospecting, and setting goals.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, economics has become less predictable. Claire Fenton , the owner of StrActGro — a professional training and coaching company — states, “Many economic forecasters won't predict beyond three months at a time.” This makes sales forecasting difficult. However, there are tools at your disposal to create accurate sales forecasts .

In our edtech example, I would approach this step by trying to estimate how my sales org is going to fare with the specific vertical we‘re pursuing in the time window we’ve allotted.

The method I decide to go with will depend on factors like how many concrete opportunities we have lined up — in addition to elements like the kind of historical data we have handy, how the reps working these deals tend to perform, and the degree of insight we have about our potential customers.

Let's say I consider those factors and decide to run something called a multivariable analysis. In that case, I could start by taking stock of the opportunities my reps have lined up. Then, I could look at the reps working those deals, their typical win rates, and the time they have to close — among other factors.

For instance, I might calculate that a rep working with a particularly large institution has a 50% chance of closing within the window we‘ve allotted. Using that insight, we could attribute 50% of the potential deal size to our forecast — we’d repeat that process with all of the opportunities in question and ideally get a solid sense of the revenue we can expect to generate in this window.

Step 6: Identify gaps.

When identifying gaps in your business, consider what your company needs now and what you might need in the future. First, identify the skills you feel your employees need to reach your goal. Second, evaluate the skills of your current employees. Once you have this information, you can train employees or hire new ones to fill the gaps.

Continuing the edtech example, let‘s say my forecast turned up results that weren’t in keeping with what we need to reach our goals. If that were the case, I would take a holistic look at our process, operations, and resources to pin down inefficiencies or areas for improvement.

In my search, I find that our sales content and marketing collateral are dated — with case studies that don‘t cover our product’s newest and most relevant features. I also might see that our reps don‘t seem to have too much trouble booking demos, but the demos themselves aren’t converting due to a lack of training and inconsistent messaging.

And finally, I find that a lack of alignment with marketing has prospects focusing on unrealistic outcomes our sales team can‘t deliver on. Once I’ve identified those gaps, I would start to hone in on ways to remedy those issues and improve those elements.

Step 7: Ideate new initiatives.

Many industry trends are cyclical. They phase in and out of “style.” As you build your sales plan, ideate new initiatives based on opportunities you may have passed on in previous years.

If your business exclusively focused on word-of-mouth and social media marketing in the past, consider adding webinars or special promotions to your plan.

In the edtech example we've been running with, I would likely ideate initiatives based on the gaps I identified in the previous step. I would start a push to ensure that our sales content and marketing collateral are up-to-date and impressive.

I would also consider new training programs to ensure that our coaching infrastructure is prioritizing how to conduct effective demos. Finally, I would start to work on a plan with marketing to ensure our messaging is aligned with theirs — so we can make sure prospects' expectations are realistic and effective.

One way or another, I would take the gaps I found and find concrete, actionable ways to fill them. I would make sure that these initiatives aren't abstract. Just saying, " We're going to be better at demos," isn‘t a plan — it’s a sentiment, and sentiments don't translate to hard sales.

Step 8: Involve stakeholders.

Stakeholders are individuals, groups, or organizations with a vested interest in your company. They are typically investors, employees, or customers and often have deciding power in your business. Towards the end of your sales planning process, involve stakeholders from departments that affect your outcomes, such as marketing and product. It leads to an efficient and actionable sales planning process.

This step is sort of an extension of the previous two — once I‘ve identified the key issues and roadblocks obstructing my edtech startup’s sales org, I would start identifying the right people to fulfill the necessary initiatives I've put together.

In this example, I would tap some stakeholders in charge of our sales content and marketing collateral to produce newer, more relevant case studies and whitepapers we can pass along to the institutions we're working with.

I would also go to middle management and either offer more direction for coaching on demos or bring in a third-party training service to offer more focused, professional insight on the issue.

Finally, I would connect with marketing leadership to align on the benefits and outcomes we generally stress when pitching the schools we sell to. That way, we can ensure that the institutions we're connecting with have realistic expectations of our product or service that we can speak to more clearly and effectively.

Step 9: Outline action items.

Once you have implemented this strategy to create your sales planning process, the final step is outlining your action items. Using your company's capacity and quota numbers, build a list of steps that take you through the sales process. Examples of action items are writing a sales call script, identifying industry competitors, or strategizing new incentives or perks.

In our edtech example, some key action items might be:

• Revamp our prospecting strategy via more involved coaching and re-tooled sales messaging.
• Revamp administrator and college dean buyer personas.
• Conduct new trainings on demoing our software.
• See our new prospecting strategy from ideation to execution.
• Align with our sales enablement stakeholders for new, more relevant case studies and whitepapers.

Obviously, that list isn‘t exhaustive — but those are still the kinds of steps we would need to clarify and take to structure a more effective high-level strategy to produce different (ideally much better) results than we’ve been seeing.

One thing to keep in mind is that sales planning shouldn't end with creating the document.

You‘ll want to reiterate this process every year to maintain your organization's sales excellence.

Now that you‘re committed to the sales planning process, let's dive into the written execution component of sales planning.

Featured Resource: Sales Plan Template

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How To Draft A Yearly Sale Plan With Sample Templates To Boost Your Annual Sales! [Free PDF Attached]

Naveen Kumar

A regular guy starts year planning with important days like birthdays, anniversaries, festivals, and holidays but a sales manager starts it with annual or yearly sales planning. It is easy to close one, two, or ten sales with skill (and a little luck), but you need a successful sales plan for consistent roof-breaking numbers.

What Is a Sales Plan?

A sales plan is a document containing statistics, insights, tactics, and best practices to boost sales for a specific time. It is not an official document like sales reports and proposals and requires no submission or approval from any authority/management. The sole purpose of creating a sales plan is to use it as a reference document during the execution process.

Here's a complete PPT Bundle on Sales Plan you should have:

Building an Actionable Sales Plan PPT Set

The PowerPoint Bundle provides a comprehensive framework for crafting a robust sales strategy. Encompassing key elements such as competitor analysis, distribution channel evaluation, and marketing strategy development, the template guides users through a systematic approach to understanding customer and market dynamics. The inclusion of a detailed channel marketing plan, launch strategy, and exploration of the buyer's journey ensures a holistic view of the sales process. Additionally, the template digs deep into effective lead-generation processes and activities, equipping users with the tools needed to drive successful sales outcomes. Download now!

Download this template

How to Create A Yearly Sales Plan

Sales plans can be created and divided based on the requirement. For example, based on the objective duration, it can be a weekly, monthly, 30-60-90 day plan, quarterly, annual, or yearly sales plan. Based on the type of targets, plans can be sales training, budget, or territory plan. 

Whatever the type of sales plan, it must cover business elements like revenue, metrics, targeted audience (TA), selling tactics, etc. The nine core elements a sales plan must include are given below. We have added one sample template with each element for improved efficiency. At the end of this blog, we have also shared four major components that form the complete sales plan .

Let’s start with the core elements and corresponding pre-designed sample templates: 

1.   Executive summary:  It provides a brief overview of the sales plan. The executive summary section covers objectives, strategies, the scope of the plan, phases, and duration. 

Executive Summary Yearly Sales Plan Sample Template

The given sample executive summary layout for the annual sales plan will help you explore more in this context. This design has pre-designed space for the company’s vision, mission, background, capabilities, accreditations, promoters & shareholdings, and financial highlights. As the design is customizable, you can add text or relevant images and make your sales presentation shine.

2.   Business and revenue targets:  Generating more revenue is the ultimate goal of a sales strategy. This section establishes a clear understanding of revenue targets (for a given period) and how those goals will be achieved through business process improvements. 

Tip:  Classify revenue targets based on categories like territory, quarter, market segment, etc., to set more clear objectives.

Business Goals With Revenue Targets Sample Template For Sales Plan

This sample PPT Design will help you set clear business goals with attached revenue targets for your sales team. It will help you classify priorities, define short-term goals, estimate costs, and strategize expenditures to drive maximum revenue. Get this design today!

3. Prior Performance Review:  You will grow faster if you start learning from your mistakes. Writing this section in your sales plan will give you an opportunity to look into your mistakes in past strategies and turn these into a learning guide. 

Previous Year Performance Review Template For Annual Sales Plan

This performance review sample template will help you draft a more reliable and successful sales strategy with insights into the previous year’s performance. It has seven pre-designed charts to showcase data on sales performance in an eye-catching manner. This slide is compatible with data-harnessing tools like MS Excel, Tableau, etc. 

4. Market Analysis:  Strong research on market trends, customer choices, and other latest aspects will form the backbone of your sales strategy. This section will comprise all this research and factors that affect sales.

Market Analysis Report Yearly Sales Plan Template

This PowerPoint set will help you present your market research findings in a comprehensive manner. It has the right set of graphs and charts to present your theoretical data in an analytical manner. With this presentation slide, you will be able to present data on global industry revenue, competitors and their market percentage, major segments, periodic and regional trends, and the CAGR. Get it today!

5. Sales Tactics:  A true sales manager is like a magician. He/she has a lot of technique under his sleeves. This part of sales strategy is a chance to teach your peers about best sales techniques, tried and tested sales methodologies, and tactics.

Tip:  You can add sales playbooks, case studies, and guides in this section.

Five-Step Effective Sales Strategy Sample Template

This sales strategy sample design will help you in creating an effective sales plan. It covers five-step techniques: identifying the target audience and needs, forming a connection, developing team skills, testing sales channels, and closing sales. Grab this PPT Slide today!

6. Selling opportunities and segments: The  more you are able to identify your sales opportunities at the beginning of a sales cycle, the more you can use these to generate exponential revenue. This section includes potential sales opportunities like renewals, upsells, cross-sells, referrals, etc. It also includes information on existing and new customer segments.

Cross-sell And Upsell Opportunity Techniques Sample Presentation Design

This template will help you identify and enlist selling opportunities for your annual sales plan. You can use this PPT Graphic to analyze and illustrate important components of your selling tactics. Get this slide now by clicking on the download link below!

Four Quadrant Customer Segment Matrix Template For Yearly Sales Plan

Use this sample matrix design to create and explore customer segments for your upcoming sales strategy. This template segments customers into categories like VIPs, core & non-core customers, and potential customers. You can edit or create new segments based on your requirements using this editable sample layout.

7. Gap Analysis:  The first step towards your goal is to know your current position. In this section, comprehend your team capabilities, resources (tools and workforce), and existing state in sales target achievement.

Gap Analysis Template For  Yearly Sales Plan Execution

This sample template will enable you to analyze your current position in the sales process and adjust your strategy to achieve the target. It will help you carry out true analysis considering facts, problems, impact, root cause, and emotion. Use this PPT Design to focus on solutions and the desirable state of your sales process.

Action Plan:  You are all done with homework; it is time to form an action plan. Here, a sales manager will assign tasks and responsibilities to teams or individuals. These tasks will be direct sales oriented, like prospecting, demos, and meetings.

Team Action Plan Sample Template For Annual Sales Strategy

Use this PowerPoint graphic to form a solid action plan and drive excellent sales throughout the year. It will help you provide clear information on assigned activities with a pre-designed space for information on team members, goals, objectives, and strategies. Get this PPT slide now!

9. Performance Monitoring:  Continuous monitoring of sales strategy is a necessity to define its success and improvement. Benchmarking the correct performance metrics is the beginning of the monitoring process.

Sales Team Performance Metrics Template For Yearly Sales Plan

This sample dashboard design will help you define metrics and monitor sales team performance in an easy way. Our designers curate it after extensive research, and all metrics added in this template are well-researched. In this PPT Slide, you will find performance indicators like total sales, revenue, profit, churn, increment sales, up/cross-sell, and accumulated revenue.

Four Selling Points of A Sales Plan

A sales plan talks about your idea and strategy to boost sales. It should be written in straightforward language to be easy to understand and execute. While it should cover all the above nine elements, it can be written to address these four major pieces:

• Goals:  Define and set clear objectives for your team and sales plan. Do not focus solely on numbers; otherwise, it will be a failure. Choose goals setting methods like SMART — Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timed.
• Analysis:  A sales plan needs not just market analysis but internal sales team analysis as well. You can use analysis techniques like SWOT — strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats. 
• Strategy:  This is the protein sap of your sales plan. Define a competitive strategy to position your product or service higher in the market and use it to meet your customer needs at every stage of the funnel.
• Tactics:  To draft an actionable sales plan, you must enlist ideas backed up with data, insights, or historical evidence. Taking risks is good, but do not exaggerate. Keep your tactics simple, specific, and realistic.

Designing a sales plan is never easy. It takes immense effort, knowledge, research, data, and unique ideas to capture the market. To help you, we are providing these plug-and-play (yearly) sales plan sample templates that can give you a head-start in this process. Download these designs with simple clicks, start drafting a yearly sales plan, and streamline the revenue flow.

FAQs on Yearly Sales Plan

1. how do you write a yearly sales plan.

A yearly sales plan must be written with precision and include strategic decisions backed up with data to ensure success. You can follow the steps below to write it:

• Define your sales team goal for the year.
• Do market research for the latest trends and customer requirements.
• Analyze your current position, resources, and capabilities.
• Gather insights and data on the previous year’s sales plan.
• Adopt effective techniques from other sales strategies. 
• Introduce or suggest new sales tactics, methodologies, and techniques.
• Make an execution plan for these sales techniques.
• Set benchmarks for measuring success.
• Monitor the execution process and update, if necessary.

2. What are the objectives of sales planning?

The objective of sales planning depends on the type of strategy. If you design a territory sales plan, its purpose is to target sales of a particular region. Sales training plans aim to train the sales team in advanced skills. Sales planning aims to increase sales, organization growth, and revenue for the desired period, region, or skill.

3. What are four sales strategies?

Four basic sales strategies salespersons use are

• Script-based selling or canned selling:  Salespersons use pre-written scripts to sell standard products.
• Need-satisfaction selling:  The salesperson asks relevant questions to understand customers’ needs and sells the product using a customized script by showing them how it will satisfy their needs. It is a more advanced version of script-based selling.
• Consultative selling or need-based selling:  Salespersons work more as advisors or consultants and provide customized solutions to clients based on demands. The products here are not standardized but created with the vision of delighting customers. 
• Strategic-partner selling:  A selling partnership between seller and buyer where both parties invest their resources to drive profits. Mostly seen in a joint venture.

4. What makes a good sales strategy?

An excellent sales strategy must:

• Align your sales goals with organizational goals, vision, and mission.
• Be crafted after a complete analysis of the targeted audience (TA), market demands, and buyer’s personas.
• It must strengthen your go-to-market positioning, sales motions, channels, and existing methodologies.
• Most importantly, a good sales strategy not just generates/increases sales and revenue but also helps you understand customer pain points and meet demands.

Download the free Yearly Sales Plan Templates PDF .

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Sales | How To

How to Create a Sales Plan in 10 Steps (+ Free Template)

Published March 9, 2023

Published Mar 9, 2023

REVIEWED BY: Jess Pingrey

WRITTEN BY: Jillian Ilao

This article is part of a larger series on Sales Management .

• 1 Establish Your Mission Statement
• 2 Set Sales Goals & Objectives
• 3 Determine Your Ideal Customer
• 4 Set Your Sales Budget
• 5 Develop Sales Strategies & Tactics
• 6 Implement Sales Tools
• 7 Develop Your Sales Funnel
• 8 Create Your Sales Pipeline
• 9 Assign Roles & Responsibilities
• 10 Monitor Progress & Adjust Accordingly
• 11 Examples of Other Free Small Business Sales Plan Templates
• 12 Sales Planning Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
• 13 Bottom Line

Sales plans enable businesses to set measurable goals, identify resources, budget for sales activities, forecast sales, and monitor business progress. These all contribute to guiding the sales team toward the company’s overall strategy and goals. In this article, we explore how to create a sales plan, including details on creating an action plan for sales, understanding the purpose of your business, and identifying your ideal customers.

What Is a Sales Plan? A sales plan outlines the strategies, objectives, tools, processes, and metrics to hit your business’ sales goals. It entails establishing your mission statement, setting goals and objectives, determining your ideal customer, and developing your sales strategy and sales funnel. To effectively execute your sales plan, assign roles and responsibilities within your sales team and have metrics to measure your outcomes versus your goals and objectives.

Ten steps to creating an effective sales plan

Download and customize our free sales planning template and follow our steps to learn how to create a sales plan to reach your company’s revenue goals.

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Free Sales Plan Template

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💡 Quick Tip:

Once you’ve created a sales plan, give your sales team the tools to execute it effectively with robust customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Use a CRM like HubSpot CRM to help your sales team collaborate on deals, develop sales reports, track deals, and create custom sales dashboards

1. Establish Your Mission Statement

A mission statement summarizing why you’re in business should be part of your action plan for sales. It should include a broad overview of your business’ products or services and your brand’s unique selling proposition. For example, you wouldn’t say, “We provide customers with insurance policies.” Instead, you might frame it as “We provide customers with cost-effective financial risk management solutions.”

It’s essential to fully understand your unique selling proposition before creating a mission statement. This allows you to learn why you’re different from competitors in your industry. It also helps you determine how your unique proposition suits a niche market better.

Steps on how to create a unique selling proposition

For instance, using the same insurance example above, you may realize specific markets are easier to sell based on that selling proposition. Therefore, it’s a good idea to narrow in on your mission statement by saying, “We provide startup businesses with cost-effective risk management solutions.”

2. Set Sales Goals & Objectives

Once you have summarized why you’re in business in a mission statement, begin setting sales goals . Typically, business goals will include one year, but may also include three- or five-year projections.

Steps on how to set sales goals

Here are a few options for how to set sales revenue goals for your business:

• Set sales amount: You may have a specific amount in mind for a sales goal. For instance, you may determine that $200,000 is a reasonable sales goal based on prior sales and your company’s ability to generate new business.
• Desired profitability: First, calculate the total anticipated expenses for the set time period to find the break-even point. From there, you can calculate how much revenue your team needs to bring in to make a certain profit margin. For example, if annual operating costs are expected to be $100,000, and you want to make a 30% profit, your sales goal is $130,000.
• Projected sales forecast: Based on an industry-standard or estimates you attained by running a sales forecast, you may find it’s better to use a projected sales forecast as your sales goal.

Pro tip: Projecting sales can be challenging without a suitable sales forecasting model. Our free sales forecast templates help you create simple, long-term, budget-based, multi-product, subscription-based, and month-to-month business sales forecasts. Some customer relationship managers (CRMs) like Freshsales have sales goal-tracking functionalities that allow you to set and assign sales goals for your team.

Five-year sales forecast template example (Source: Fit Small Business )

Sales goal tracking in Freshsales (Source: Freshsales )

Sales goals must reflect new business revenue and sales from existing or recurring customers. Then, you must add specific sales objectives that identify and prioritize the sales activities your team needs to complete to meet sales goals. This creates an objective way to measure success in hitting goals at all levels: organizational, sales department, team, and individual sales rep, which is an essential part of sales management .

For example, imagine your total revenue goal is $200,000 in year two and $300,000 in year three. You then add an objective, such as stating you want your business’ revenue from existing customers to grow 15% in year three. This can be measured by evaluating your percentage of revenue from existing customers in year three compared to year two.

3. Determine Your Ideal Customer

Determining the ideal customer or target market is the next step of your business plan for sales reps. It may have been accomplished when you developed your mission statement, but also when you set your sales goals and discovered how broad your market needs to be to reach them. Describing your ideal customer helps dictate who you’re selling to and your selling approach.

One way to establish your ideal customer is by creating a series of unique customer profiles . Each profile specifies key demographics, behaviors, interests, job positions, and geographic information about one of your ideal buyer types. Based on your customer profiles, you can then develop more targeted marketing strategies for lead generation and nurturing to move leads through the sales process more efficiently and close more deals.

Pro tip: Making a customer persona can be challenging, especially if it is based on the wrong data or if you just focus on the demographics. Check out our article on creating a customer persona to help you define your company’s ideal buyer types and guide your lead generation and marketing activities.

4. Set Your Sales Budget

After establishing your objectives and identifying your ideal customer personas—and before developing your actual strategies and tactics—you must identify a sales budget to work with. It should include estimated expenses for salaries, travel expenses, and the cost of any software tools or service providers used to help with sales and marketing. While these are meant to be estimates, research and due diligence should be done to avoid financial errors.

One way to set your sales budget, particularly for software tools and services you may be interested in, is to create and issue a request for proposal (RFP). Issuing an RFP allows you to post a summary of your needs to solicit proposals on potential solutions. In addition to providing accurate budget estimates from various qualified vendors and contractors, it may also help you discover cost-effective or high-performing options you were previously unaware of.

5. Develop Sales Strategies & Tactics

A sales strategy explains how you plan to outsell your competitors and accomplish your sales goals. It defines specific, detailed tactics your team will use to pursue your sales goals. These may involve using Google Ads, cold calling, and drip email marketing campaigns as part of a lead generation strategy. Available strategies differ depending on your company’s resources, skill sets, sales operation, and product or service offerings.

Strategies and tactics should be personalized for your ideal customers based on their unique interests, behaviors, and the best ways to connect with them. For example, some customer profiles show your ideal buyer generally only makes purchases based on trusted referrals. In this case, you could implement a referral strategy that provides incentives to generate more customer referrals .

Plus, different sales strategies will be needed to acquire new business vs keeping existing customers. When selling to existing customers, for example, your strategy could include cross-selling tactics where additional products are recommended based on prior purchases. The short-term cross-selling tactics could require customer service reps to send 30 emails per week recommending a complementary product to existing customers.

For a new business strategy, sales reps might rely on emotional selling methods when using cold calling as a tactic. Instead of product features, cold calling scripts would be geared to evoke feelings that lead to buying decisions. Tactics could reflect the objective of having reps make 15 cold calls each week. They could use a script that opens with a story about how a purchase made a customer feel or how someone felt because they didn’t purchase the product.

Pro tip: Ensuring your strategies are properly executed requires excellent sales leadership and a healthy environment for sales reps to operate in. Our how-to guide for building a positive sales culture shows you how to create an environment that promotes high job satisfaction, low employee turnover, and profitability.

6. Implement Sales Tools

Your sales strategy template should reference the software, hardware, and materials you use to manage the sales operation and make each team member more efficient. One of the most notable tools to include is the customer relationship management (CRM) system . It allows your team to organize contact information, streamline sales tasks, and facilitate communication with customers and leads.

HubSpot CRM , for instance, makes it easy to organize information about leads, contacts, and deal opportunities. Additionally, from a HubSpot CRM lead profile, you can initiate a conversation with that contact by calling, emailing, or scheduling an appointment.

HubSpot CRM contact profile (Source: HubSpot )

CRMs are also used to monitor and report sales progress. For example, many have dashboards and functionality, such as alerts, which make it easy to identify where your team may be underperforming. These could also tell you which leads are most likely to convert and should be focused on. Sales information such as deals closed, revenue generated, and leads created can be presented in a detailed report .

These types of insights can also be shown on the CRM’s system dashboard . Pipedrive is an example of a CRM that has a customizable dashboard that displays both activity information and performance-based data. Activity data include emails sent, received, and outstanding tasks to be completed. Performance-based data, on the other hand, have deals lost or the average value of won deals.

Pipedrive’s customizable dashboard (Source: Pipedrive )

Other sales enablement tools can make your sales team more effective. These include voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) phone systems , lead generation platforms, email campaign tools, content creation platforms, and task automation software. These tools can be found within CRM software or through CRM integrations and standalone applications.

In addition to technology tools, sales and marketing templates should be used to streamline outreach initiatives. Scenario-based, premade sales email templates , for instance, allow salespeople to have an email already crafted for their specific situation.

Creating and storing business proposal templates in your CRM also streamlines the contact procurement and business proposal generation process . This way, whenever a prospect says they’d like to receive a quote or you’re responding to a request for a proposal, you already have a customizable template ready to go.

Pro tip: Effective cold calling scripts sales reps can use as a guide when placing calls to new leads is a tremendous sales tool to include in your action plan for sales. Get started using our guide for writing a cold calling script , which includes examples and free templates.

7. Develop Your Sales Funnel

Setting up a sales funnel within your sales strategy template lets you visualize the stages of the customer journey, from becoming aware of your business to buying from it. By creating and understanding the different statuses of your leads, you can track progress and determine how effective you are at converting leads to the next stages in the funnel.

Using a sales funnel with conversion rates also makes it easier for you to adjust your sales strategies and tactics based on how effectively you’re getting leads through the funnel. For instance, let’s say you have 100 leads in the awareness stage of the funnel. You decide to cold call 50 of them and write a sales email to the other 50 to qualify leads by setting up a product demonstration.

After each campaign, you find you were able to qualify seven of the leads that were cold-called and only two of the leads you had emailed. Based on these funnel conversion rates of 14% (7/50) from cold calling and 4% (2/50) from emailing, you would likely adjust your tactics to focus more on calling instead of emailing.

Do you need help creating a sales funnel for your business? Our guide to creating a sales funnel explains the step-by-step sales funnel creation process and provides free templates and specific examples.

8. Create Your Sales Pipeline

Once your sales process’ sales funnel stages are identified, develop the sales pipeline stages . These stages include your team’s sales activities to move leads through the funnel. For example, you need to get a lead from the sales funnel stage of brand awareness to show interest in learning more about one of your services. To do this, you could add a sales pipeline activity like setting up a demo or presentation appointment through a cold call.

Adding your sales pipeline to your sales strategy is essential because it describes all the activities your sales reps need to do to close a sales deal. CRM systems like Freshsales allow you to create and track the pipeline stages for each lead or deal within the lead record.

Funnel view of Freshsales’ deal pipeline (Source: Freshsales )

Listing each pipeline stage also helps you identify tools and resources needed to perform the activities for each stage. For example, if you use phone calls to initiate contact with or introduce a product to a lead, you could develop outbound sales call scripts for your team.

After the initial contact by phone, you may use email to follow up after a call and then nurture leads throughout the sales process. As part of your follow-up, create and automate a sales follow-up email template to get them to the next pipeline stage.

The sales funnel shows where a lead is in the sales process. The sales pipeline, on the other hand, lists activities needed to drive leads to the next stage in the sales funnel. Both should be used in your sales strategy when defining the repeatable steps required to generate leads and close deals. Check out our article to learn how to create a winning sales process with insights on both creating a sales process and measuring its success.

9. Assign Roles & Responsibilities

Regardless of the size of your business or sales operation, your business plan for sales reps should include the role and responsibility of each person in the sales team. Each role should have a name, such as someone being a sales development representative (SDR). There should also be a summary of their responsibilities, such as “the SDR is responsible for setting up sales appointments using the activities listed in the sales pipeline.”

Measuring the performance of any sales position is simple through key performance indicators (KPIs). Specific KPIs should be used to measure performance for each role and should be included in your plan. Below are some examples of KPIs that can be used by the members of the sales team and their respective responsibility:

• Sales development representative: Responsible for introducing products and services, qualifying leads, and setting up appointments for the account executive. Performance is measured by calls placed, emails sent, and appointments generated.
• Account executive: Responsible for nurturing qualified leads, delivering the sales pitch , sending quotes, and closing deals. Performance is measured by business proposals sent, the average time in the proposal consideration stage, deals closed, and deal closing rate.
• Customer service representative: Responsible for managing customer needs, handling billing, and managing service tickets by assisting customers. Performance is measured by customer satisfaction, retention rates, and total tickets resolved.
• Sales manager: Responsible for the entire sales operation or team for a specific region or product/service line. Performance is measured by job satisfaction rates of sales reps, pipeline and funnel conversion rates, team sales deals closed, and team revenue growth.

While assigning roles in your plan, a sales rep’s territory could be based on geography, industry, potential deal size, or product/service line, creating more specialization for better results. Our six-step process on proper sales territory management is an excellent resource for segmenting, creating, and assigning sales territories.

This section of the business plan is also a prime spot for individually setting sales quotas for each rep or team needed to hit your organizational sales goals. Sales quotas should be a specific KPI for that sales role and be set based on the experience, skill level, and resources of that individual or team. These quotas should also be based on your organizational, department, and team goals and objectives.

10. Monitor Progress & Adjust Accordingly

Once the strategic business plan is in motion, monitor its progress to make any required adjustments. For instance, while your sales operation is running, you may find certain sales tactics are working better than expected, and vice versa. Your sales goal template should account for using that tactic more, as well as any new sales tools, budgetary changes, new roles, and possibly even a new sales goal.

As in the earlier example, if you found that cold calling was significantly more effective than emailing, reduce or abandon the email method in favor of cold calling. You could also invest in sales tools especially useful for cold calling, such as power dialing using a voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) phone system, or hire additional staff to place calls. All of these will be part of your updated business plan.

Pro tip: Focusing on the big picture by creating, executing, and adjusting a strategic business plan is one of the most critical traits of an effective sales leader. For more insights on what it means to be a sales leader and how to become one, check out our ultimate guide to sales leadership .

Examples of Other Free Small Business Sales Plan Templates

Apart from our free downloadable sales strategy template, other providers have shared their version of a free strategic sales plan examples. Click on our picks below to see if these templates fit your business process better:

HubSpot’s free sales planning template helps users outline their company’s sales strategy. It contains sections found in most sales plans, as well as prompts for you to fill out your company’s tactics and information. These include company history and mission, team structure, target market, tools and software used, positioning, market strategy, action plan, goals, and budget.

HubSpot sales strategy template (Source: HubSpot )

HubSpot’s sales goals template with the mission, vision, and story of the company (Source: HubSpot )

Visit HubSpot

Asana’s free sales plan template helps organizations analyze their current sales process, establish their sales objectives, identify success metrics, and plan actionable steps. The sales business plan template is embedded within Asana’s platform, automatically integrating aspects such as goals and measuring them against results or sales performance.

Asana sales plan example (Source: Asana )

Visit Asana

Sales Planning Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is sales planning.

Sales planning is creating a document that outlines your sales strategy, objectives, target audience, potential obstacles, and tools to achieve goals within a specified period. This may include your daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and long-term revenue objectives.

What is included in a sales plan?

A sales strategy plan template typically includes the following key elements:

• Target customers, accounts, or verticals
• Stock-keeping units (SKUs)
• Revenue targets or forecasts
• Strategies and tactics
• Pricing and promotions
• Deadlines and directly responsible individuals (DRIs)
• Team structure and coordination
• Market conditions

What are the different types of strategic sales planning?

The type of strategic planning for sales that you choose for your team ultimately depends on different factors. These include your revenue goals, available resources, the ability and bandwidth of your sales team, and your personal commitment to your plans. Once you have determined the details of these factors, you can choose from these types of strategic sales planning:

• Revenue-based sales action plan template: This is ideal for teams aiming for a specific revenue goal. It focuses on in-depth sales forecasting, improvement of conversion rates, and closing more deals.
• Sales business plan based on the target market: This plan is best for businesses that cater to several markets that are different from each other. In this situation, you must create separate sales goal templates for enterprise companies and small businesses.
• Sales goals plan: This focuses on other goals such as hiring, onboarding, sales training plans, or sales activity implementation.
• New product sales business plan: This plan is developed for the launch and continued promotion of a new product.

Bottom Line

While any business can set bold sales goals, creating a sales plan outlines how your team will achieve them. By following the best practices and 10-step process laid out above, your sales goal template defines what your sales process will look like. It will help establish baselines for accountability and identify optimal strategies, tactics, and the tools needed to make your team as efficient as possible.

About the Author

Jillian Ilao

Jill is a sales and customer service expert at Fit Small Business. Prior to joining the company, she has worked and produced marketing content for various small businesses and entrepreneurs from different markets, including Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Singapore. She has extensive writing experience and has covered topics on business, lifestyle, finance, education, and technology.

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10 Free Sales Plan Templates for an Effective Sales Strategy

Praburam Srinivasan

Growth Marketing Manager

February 15, 2024

Every sales team wants to win more leads and close more deals. But how do you make that happen? With a solid sales plan, of course! 

A sales plan gives your team a way to focus on your goals while taking only the necessary steps to get there. It has everything you need to win, which means it’s often a comprehensive guide—and that takes time.

And we’re guessing you’re already pressed for time. ⏲️

Fortunately, creating a plan doesn’t have to be complicated—with the right template, you can simplify the process.

That’s why we’re sharing this list of the best sales plan templates. Not only are these sales strategy templates absolutely free but they’ll also save you time so you can start closing those deals faster. ⚡

What Is a Sales Plan and Why Create One?

1. clickup sales plan template, 2. clickup sales and marketing plan template, 3. clickup sales strategy guide template, 4. clickup sales pipeline template, 5. clickup sales kpi template, 6. clickup b2b sales strategy template, 7. clickup sales calls template, 8. word sales plan template by business news daily, 9. word sales plan template by templatelab, 10. excel sales plan template by spreadsheet.com.

A sales plan is your roadmap for how to make sales effectively. Think of it in the same way that a business plan guides the strategy for your company or a marketing plan sets out how you’ll find, reach, and serve your ideal customers. 

A good sales plan sets out your sales goals , objectives, and sales activities. It considers your target audience, brand, products, services, and needs—and covers which sales tactics and strategies you’ll use to close deals, as well as which metrics you’ll use to measure success. 

Your sales plan is a practical plan that outlines who’s responsible for what, the resources you’ll need, and the overall goals you’re working toward. Without one, your sales team will feel lost and struggle to connect with your customer base.

With a strategic sales plan, though, the sales manager and the entire team will know exactly what you’re trying to achieve and the steps needed to get there. 📚

How to choose the best sales plan template

There are so many different sales plan templates out there. Some are designed for specific niche audiences, while others are more generic and easier to customize. How do you know which is the right template for you?

When you’re thinking about using a sales plan template, consider the following: 

• Ease of use: Is the template easy to use? Will everyone in the team structure and sales planning process be able to understand it fully?
• Customization: Can I personalize the template to match my sales goals?

• Collaboration: Can my sales team work on this template together?
• Integrations: When I create a sales plan, can I integrate this template with other aspects of my sales pipeline or workflow, like task management?
• Artificial intelligence: Can I use a built-in AI writing tool or copywriting tool to help me complete the template? Are there automation features that speed up the process?
• Platform: Which sales app is this template for? Do I have it already, or should I invest in it? What’s the pricing like?

Asking yourself these questions will help you figure out what your needs are, so you can then choose a template to match. 

10 Sales Plan Templates to Help You Close Your Next Deal

Now that you have a better idea of what you’re looking for, let’s explore what’s out there. Take a look at our hand-picked selection of the best sales plan templates available today for Microsoft Word and sales enablement tools like ClickUp.

Smart sales teams use a sales plan to map out their route to success. The best sales teams use the Sales Plan Template by ClickUp to simplify the process and ensure they don’t leave anything out.

This template is designed with all the structure you need to create a comprehensive sales plan that can drive results. Use this template to set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) business goals; plan strategies and tactics; and organize all your sales ideas in one place.

The list-style template is split into sections that cover the executive summary all the way through to specific tactics and strategies. Beneath this, you can arrange tasks and subtasks, and see the progress at a glance. View task titles, deadlines, who’s responsible, approval status, and a visual progress bar.

Use this template if you want to consolidate all your sales tasks and initiatives in one area. Add your sales tasks and tactics, then tag team members so you can see what’s happening and hold everyone accountable. ✅

While sales and marketing teams often work independently, sometimes it’s useful to collaborate on shared goals. With the Sales and Marketing Plan Template by ClickUp , you can organize and run your sales and marketing operations from one location.

Our collaborative template makes it easy to set sales and marketing goals and objectives, visualize your tasks, work together on sales and marketing campaigns, and track your results in real-time. View the status of your sales and marketing projects, adjust your plans, and monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs)—all from one view.

This sales and marketing plan template allows you to split your tasks into sections. The examples in the template include revenue goals, competitive analysis, and action items, but you can customize these to match your needs exactly.

View tasks beneath these categories to see at a glance whether there are any roadblocks when a task is due, and who is responsible for it.

Add this template to your collection if you want to work more collaboratively with your marketing team—especially on preparing assets for sales calls or outreach programs. 📞

Before you can plan your sales tactics, you first need to decide what your overall goals are. The Sales Strategy Guide Template by ClickUp is your go-to resource for determining your approach.

This sales process template explains the benefits of having a well-defined approach and gives you a central place to create, review, and store your own. Everyone on your team can then access your sales strategy guide to help them understand what to do when prospecting and closing deals.

Our sales goals and strategy guide template is presented in a document format. Some sections and headings allow you to split your guide into different areas, making it easier to read and understand.

Use the prompts to fill out your own strategy guide details like your target market, sales strategies, and how you’ll monitor progress.

Use this sales strategy guide template to create a resource for your team. Make it the only destination for everything your sales reps need to know to execute an effective sales plan. 📝

Sales strategies are a must-have for any great sales team, but beyond that, you need a way to record and monitor specific tasks or initiatives. That’s where the Sales Pipeline Template by ClickUp comes in handy whether you need a visual into sales forecasting or your specific sales goals.

This sales pipeline template gives you one place to store all your daily sales-related tasks. With this template, it’s easy to work toward your sales goals, track leads, map out each step of the sales process, and organize all your tasks in one place.

You can view a task’s title, assignee, status, due date, complexity level, start date, and department—or customize the experience with your own custom fields. 

With ClickUp’s Sales KPI Template , you and your team can create and manage goals surrounding your sales initiatives. See instantly what’s in progress and when it’s due, alongside the task’s impact level.

This allows you to identify high-priority tasks to focus on and to react quickly if it looks like there’s a roadblock.

This sales KPI template includes:

• Custom Statuses: Create tasks with custom statuses such as Open and Complete to keep track of the progress of each KPI
• Custom Fields: Utilize 15 different custom attributes such as Upsell Attempts, Value of Quotes, Product Cost, No of Quotes by Unit, Repeat Sales Revenue, to save vital KPI information and easily visualize performance data
• Custom Views: Open 4 different views in different ClickUp configurations, such as the Weekly Report, Monthly Report, Revenue Board per Month, and Getting Started Guide so that all the information is easy to access and organized
• Project Management: Improve KPI tracking with tagging, dependency warnings, emails, and more

This template gives you a simple way to see which tasks are complete or in progress, so you can monitor the progress of your project and crush your sales KPIs. 📈

While there’s not a huge difference in the way we market to business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) customers these days, it’s still useful to have specific templates for niche needs. If you’re driving sales in the B2B space, you need the B2B Sales Strategy Template by ClickUp .

Like our first sales plan template, this one gives you space to communicate your sales objectives and revenue targets, but it also introduces other areas—like market research, stakeholder analysis, customer relationships, buyer persona, and customer pain points. 

This document-style template is highly customizable so you can make it match your brand style and sales approach. Fill in each section and use the supplied prompts to complete your B2B sales strategy document even faster. 

Add this template to your collection if you’re working in B2B sales and want to approach your process in a more organized way. Use the template to build a strong sales strategy, then share it with the rest of your sales team so they know how to execute against your sales and company goals. 🎯

ClickUp’s Sales Calls Template is designed to streamline the sales process, from tracking contacts and calls to managing sales opportunities.

The template includes custom statuses for creating unique workflows, ensuring that every call and client interaction is accounted for. It also provides an easy-to-use Sales CRM to manage and track leads, visualize sales opportunities in the sales funnel, and keep all contacts organized.

With additional features like the Sales Phone Calls SOP Template, sales professionals can empower their teams to make every call count and close more deals. ClickUp’s Sales Calls Template is a versatile solution for sales teams, aiding in everything from daily calls to long-term sales forecasting.

We’re big advocates of using ClickUp as the go-to place to store everything about your sales workflow, but if you’re limited to using Microsoft Word or Google Docs, then this template is a great option.

This sales business plan template has sections for your executive summary, mission statement, target customers, sales targets, benchmarks, and more. Each section has useful prompts to guide you on completing your new sales plan.

Use this template if you’re tied to using Microsoft Word and want a comprehensive guide on how to create your own sales plan or sales strategy. 📄

If you want a free sales plan template or want to choose from a variety of options, this collection of Word templates by TemplateLab is a good place to do that.

There’s a wide range of options available including sales process plans, lead generation plans, sales action plans, and sales report templates . Each template works with Microsoft Word, and you can customize the look and feel to match your brand or your sales goals.

Use this resource if you prefer to see a range of templates on one page, or if you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for until you see it. You can easily set your sales goals and the action steps needed to achieve them. 📃

Successful sales strategies need to be integrated with other teams—like your marketing department—to ensure your sales objectives are clear and possibly align with the overall marketing strategy too. Choose your specific sales goals, set revenue targets, and describe everything in detail with these Word sales planning and sales process templates.

The Excel Sales Plan Template by Spreadsheet.com is a comprehensive and user-friendly tool designed to assist businesses in developing effective sales strategies and managing their sales activities.

T his template is crafted with the aim of providing a structured framework for sales planning, enabling organizations to set clear objectives, track performance, and optimize their sales processes.

Reach Sales Goals With Free Sales Plan Templates

A strategic sales plan makes it easier to achieve your goals. Give your team the guidance and support they need with the help of a well-crafted free sales plan template.

If you’re considering making even more improvements in how you work, try ClickUp for free . We don’t just have incredible sales process templates: Our range of features and AI tools for sales make it easy for you to optimize and run your entire sales funnel and CRM system from one place. ✨

Questions? Comments? Visit our Help Center for support.

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Blog Business How to Create a Sales Plan: Strategy, Examples and Templates

How to Create a Sales Plan: Strategy, Examples and Templates

Written by: Aditya Rana Mar 25, 2024

The difference between a company struggling to drive sales and one that’s hitting home runs often boils down to a well-crafted sales plan.

Without knowing how to write a sales plan , your sales reps will lack vision, not understand the market, and be ineffective at engaging potential customers.

Most businesses fail in sales planning because they don’t focus on their unique value. If you’re struggling with sales, here’s what you need to do: define your goal(s), create customer personas, and create an action plan for success.

One of the best ways to organize this information in one place is to use sales planning templates . In this post, I’ll show you how to write a sales plan (…with plenty of template examples included of course!).

Click to jump ahead:

What is a sales plan?

Benefits of a sales plan, how to create a sales plan, sales plan example, sales plan templates.

A sales plan is a strategic document that outlines how a business plans to convert leads into sales. It typically details the target market, customer profile, and actionable steps that must be taken to achieve revenue targets.

Here’s a great example of a sales plan that includes all these elements neatly packed into one document.

Every company needs a sales plan, but have you ever wondered why?

Why should businesses invest time and resources in creating sales plan when they could…well…be focusing on sales?

Sales plans are worth it because they tell sales employees what to do.

Without a sales plan, your sales efforts will end up becoming a disorganized mess. Let’s explore the benefits of sales plans in detail.

Help you identify and target the right market

A sales plan helps you figure out the target market that’s most likely to be responsive to your messaging.

I mean do you really want to waste your time trying to sell to someone who has no need for your product or isn’t interested in your offering?

But if you know who your customer is, you can target their pain points.

Help you set goals

All great sales plans require you to set goals that are actually attainable and budgeted for.

Without goals, your sales team essentially operates in the dark unsure of what success looks like and how to achieve it.

One of the best ways to set goals is by conducting a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) to understand the market landscape.

Help you forecast sales

Since sales plans require you to study historical sales data , you have the ability to understand trends, seasonality, and customer buying patterns.

This information can be used to accurately forecast future sales performance.

And when you chart it out visually like in this example, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your sales strategy.

Help you identify risks

Because sales plans require you to study the market, you’ll be able to uncover risks such as market saturation, competitors, and shifting customer needs.

With this knowledge, you have the ability to be flexible in your approach.

Besides market risks, sales plans also help you pinpoint risks within your company such as a lack of qualified leads or unclear communication between departments.

Improve customer service

It may sound counterintuitive but creating a sales plan also actually improves your customer service.

Researching and trying to understand customer needs means new insights that you can share with the customer service team which allows them to tailor their approach.

You’ll also be able to train sales service reps to anticipate questions and concerns so that they can communicate effectively.

Increases sales efficiency

Sales plans help standardize sales tactics and ensure sales reps follow the same best practices to reduce inconsistencies and improve effectiveness.

One of the best ways to standardize practices is to use a flowchart like in this example to make sure everyone knows what to do when facing a decision.

Increases your profits

Sales plans generally guarantee a boost in profits because it allows sales team to laser-focus on high-value opportunities instead of being headless chickens.

Reducing wasted effort and a higher frequency of closed deals is a win in my book any day.

One of the best ways to measure changes in profits is to use a simple template to review performance like in this example.

Help you understand customer needs

Contrary to what you might think, sales plans aren’t just about selling but also about understanding customers at a deeper level.

The process of creating a plan forces you to analyze customer data, buying habits, and pain points, all of which will help you understand what makes your customers tick and build trust and loyalty.

Here’s a great example of a customer persona you can edit to include in your sales plan.

A sales plan is a document that helps you maximize profitability by identifying valuable segments and outlining strategies to influence customer behavior.

Common elements most sales plans include:

• Sales goals : Information on revenue, market share, and more.
• Sales strategy: Information on how to reach potential customers and convert them.
• Target audience: Information on ideal customers and their needs.
• Metrics : Methods to track progress.
• Resources :  Tools, budget, and personnel needed to achieve sales goals.

Let’s take an in-depth look at how to create a sales plan.

( Note : You don’t need to include each of these points in your sales plan but I recommend you cover most of them to build a plan that’s well-rounded).

Define your business mission and positioning

Before you jump into tactics, build a strong foundation by defining your company’s mission and positioning.

Here’s why this step is a must-do:

• Your mission statement defines your company’s purpose and values and gives your sales team and customers something to relate to.
• Your positioning statement defines how your product or service meets a specific need and sets you apart from the competition.

Trying to sell without any alignment to company values will lead to inconsistent messaging and damage your brand reputation.

Here’s a great example of a sales plan template you can customize with your own brand’s mission and positioning statements.

Define your target market

Unless you think you can sell to every person possible, you’ll need to define your ideal target market.

Study your customer base and ask questions like: do most of the customers belong to a specific industry? Or do they all face the same pain point?

Also, keep in mind that target market can change over time due to changes in your product, pricing, or factors out of your control, so it’s important to review and update your target market frequently.

Understand your target customers

This step often gets mixed with the previous one, so pay close attention.

Your target customers are those who your business wants to target because they’re most likely to make a purchase.

You can figure out who your target customers are by creating customer profiles by breaking down your target market into smaller groups based on geography, behavior, demography, and more.

Here’s a great sales plan template where you can edit in your own customer persona.

When making your buyer personas, make sure you answer the following questions.

• Motivations and challenges:  What are customer pain points? What drives purchasing decisions?
• Behaviors and preferences:  How do customers research products? What communication channels do they prefer?
• Goals and aspirations:  What are your prospective customers trying to achieve? How can your product or service help them get there?

Define sales objectives and goals

Setting clear, measurable goals gives you a method to measure performance of your sales strategies.

More importantly though, they give your sales team targets to aim for which then allows them to work in a structured and focused manner.

Your sale goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). This is to make sure they’re realistically achievable within a set timeframe.

Here’s a comparison of good sales goal setting vs a bad one.

• ✅Drive $100,000 in sales of product X by Y date using Z tactics
• ❌ Increase overall sales in each product line

You can organize this information using a template like in this example, especially if you have multiple product lines.

Define your value proposition

Your value proposition is a concise statement that explains why a customer should choose your product or service over the competition.

Here’s an example of a value statement:

“For busy small business owners, we provide a user-friendly accounting software that saves you time and money, allowing you to focus on growing your business.”

Here are some tips on defining your value proposition:

• Identify customer needs:  What are the core challenges and pain points your ideal customer faces? Understanding their needs allows you to position your offering as the solution.
• Highlight your unique benefits:  What sets your product or service apart? Focus on benefits you deliver that address the customer’s needs.
• Quantify the value:  When possible, quantify the value you offer. Can you demonstrate a cost savings, increased efficiency, or improved outcomes?

Map out the customer journey

Unless you’re extremely lucky, no one is going to purchase from you during the first interaction.

That’s why it’s crucial for you to know the steps a customer takes from initial awareness to purchase. Mapping out their journey allows you to personalize messaging and influence behavior.

Here are some tips on how to create a customer journey map :

• Identify the stages:  Break down the journey into distinct stages, such as awareness, consideration, decision, and post-purchase.
• Define touchpoints: Pinpoint the different touchpoints where your customer interacts with your brand (example: website, social media, customer reviews).
• Understand customer needs at each stage: What information are they looking for at each stage? What are their concerns and motivations?
• Identify opportunities to engage:  Identify opportunities to engage with your potential customers and move them along the buying journey.

Want some help creating customer journeys?

This customer journey map template is an excellent way to bring customer journeys to life.

Gather existing sales data

This step involves collecting and analyzing all available data on past sales performance.

This data is critical in helping you spot trends, patterns, and areas for improvement in your sales operations.

Perform sales forecasting

Sales forecasting is the practice of estimating future sales which can be presented as a report highlighting expected sales volume weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually.

Though not always 100% accurate, sales forecasting is key to writing sales plans because it’ll provide you with a clear picture of the ground reality which leads to better decisions on budgeting.

Here’s a template you can use to perform sales forecasting to makes the sales planning process effective.

Define your sales KPIs

KPIs are a fancy way of saying that you need to set metrics to track effectiveness of your sales strategy and team’s performance.

Some example KPIs you can include in sales plans are:

• Number of sales
• Sales revenue
• Average deal size

This sales report template is a great example of how you can include KPIs in your meetings to test performance and adjust strategy.

Identify gaps in the sales process

This step is all about analyzing your current sales process to figure out gaps and/or potential obstacles preventing you from achieving goals.

When you identify a gap, brainstorm potential solutions so that you can create a specific action plan.

Understand the sales stages

When writing a sales plan, make sure you cover each stage of the sales cycle. If you’re unsure of what the sales stages are, here’s a quick recap.

Prospecting

This is the foundation of the sales process where you identify potential customers who might be a good fit for your product or service.

Preparation

Once you have a list of prospects, you need to research their needs, challenges, and buying habits.

This is all about how you contact and communicate with prospects.

Presentation

This section is your opportunity to showcase the value proposition of your product or service. Tailor your presentation to address the prospect’s specific needs and demonstrate how your offering can solve their problems.

Handling objections

Identify common objections your sales team might encounter related to price, features, competition, or need. Develop clear and concise responses to address these concerns proactively.

Equip your sales team with effective closing techniques to secure commitments from prospects who are interested but might hesitate.

Plan your follow-up strategy based on the prospect’s decision timeline and the stage of the sales cycle. For longer timelines, periodic updates and information sharing through digital sales rooms can maintain engagement and provide valuable resources conveniently.

Organize the sales team

Organizing the sales team entails defining roles and responsibilities clearly to cover all aspects of the sales process effectively.

This might involve segmenting the team based on product lines, customer segments, or territories.

Here’s an example of how it might look:

Sarah — Sales Director — will lead the sales team, set overall strategy, goals and direction. Michael and Jessica — Business Development Executives — will focus on prospecting new leads. They will research potential customers, identify those who might be a good fit for the product, and qualify leads by gathering information and assessing their needs. William — Sales Development Manager — will manage the business development executives and ensuring they follow best practices. Chris and Lisa — Account Executives — will handle qualified leads. They build relationships with potential customers, present product demos, address objections, and close deals.

Using an org chart like in this example is a great way to visualize this information.

Outline the use of sales tools

Sales tools play a crucial role in streamlining the sales process and enhancing productivity.

Make sure you outline the tools your team will use, how they fit into different stages of the sales process, and any training required to maximize their utility.

This ensures that your team has the resources needed to engage effectively with prospects and customers.

Set the budget

Setting the budget involves allocating resources efficiently across various sales activities to achieve your objectives without overspending.

This includes expenses related to personnel, sales tools, marketing initiatives, travel, and customer entertainment.

A well-planned budget balances investment in growth opportunities with the overall financial health of the business.

Create a sales strategy and action plan

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork of what you want to achieve and how you plan to achieve it, it’s time to bring it all together into a single view.

Create an action plan which not includes your strategy but also concrete steps.

Your action plan should outlines specific activities for each stage of the sales funnel from prospecting (lead generation channels) to closing (structured process and follow-up strategy with timelines) and everything in between.

Performance and results measurement

Last but not least, your sales plan should present a clear and quantifiable means to track the effectiveness of sales activities.

How are you going to measure outcomes against predefined targets?

Performance measurement is key because it builds accountability and allows you to always have a pulse on customer behavior, preferences, and trends that’ll help you make decisions based on data.

If you’ve made it this far, give yourself a pat! I’ve covered A LOT on elements that you can include in a sales plan.

However, in most cases, you don’t always need to go that in-depth and instead should aim for brevity so that anyone in your team can stay up-to-date without having to worry about the nitty gritty details.

Here’s a sales plan example that’s brief but highly effective. It includes a summary of all you need in one document, a target market analysis, a customer profile, and an action plan.

Want even more sales plan templates for design inspiration or to customize and make your own?

This 30-60-90 day sales plan provides a great way to organize goals, priorities, performance goals, and metrics of success over three three timeframes: first 30 days, first 60 days, and first 90 days.

This sales plan is structured around key components that drive the sales process: objectives, strategies, tactics, and key metrics. It emphasizes a multi-channel approach to sales,, with a strong focus on measuring performance through metrics.

This sales roadmap is a great way to visualize activities such as defining strategy and generating leads to more advanced steps.

Conclusion: Save time on designing and updating sales plans and focus on growing your business with Venngage templates

Though there’s no secret formula for effective sales plan design, it’s good practice to include the basics or information on the target market, a customer persona, and a strategy on how you plan to sell.

What you definitely shouldn’t do is write a sales plan and then never look at it again.

And trust me, I know how time-consuming and frustrating it can be to edit your sales plan especially if you don’t have design skills. One small change might make the icons or numbers go all out of whack.

That’s why I recommend customizing our sales plan templates instead so that you can focus your energy on strategy.

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How to Create a Sales Plan: Tips, Examples & Free Sales Plan Template

Tactics and strategies are great. But when you create a sales plan, you set a clear path to success, with each step mapped out ahead of you.

The Internet is full of people who will tell you all about the success they’ve found from their strategies, whether it's personalizing a newsletter subject line or changing the color of the 'Buy Now' button.

But, news flash—these tips and tricks aren’t actual sales strategies .

To create real, lasting growth for you and your company, you need to create your own grand strategy. And that starts with a solid sales plan .

So, what’s your plan? How do you build it (and stick to it)?

We’re about to take a deep dive into sales plans. By the end of this guide, you’ll be completely equipped to win the fight for business growth. And we can't recommend it enough—grab our free sales plan template here in the Sales Success Kit today:

GET THE SALES SUCCESS KIT →

What is a Sales Plan? (And What Makes for Successful Sales Planning?)

Armed with the information you'll compile within your sales plan, you can quickly identify any upcoming problems, sales droughts, or opportunities—and then do something about them.

If done correctly, the right sales plan template empowers you to spend even more time growing and developing your business, rather than responding reactively to the day-to-day developments in sales.

Sound exciting? Let’s jump right in.

Download Your Free Sales Plan Templates Today

Want to build your own sales plan template that'll clarify your business plan and accelerate your growth? Grab the Sales Success Kit , including...

...and more to help you set up strategic sales planning and quotas for your team.

Want to stand out in the competitive market? Explore the insights of challenger selling .

What’s in a Sales Plan? 6 Elements Every Sales Plan Needs

In basic terms, a sales plan template includes:

• Sales forecasting and goal-setting
• Market and customer research
• Prospecting and partnerships

Each part of the sales plan naturally works itself into the next, starting with your high-level goals, then considering market factors, and finally looking at who you know, and how to find more prospects to help hit your sales goals .

Here are the key elements to include in your plan:

1. Mission Statement

What gets your sales reps out of bed in the morning? What’s the clear mission that pushes your team to keep fighting for that win?

Your mission statement is a concise statement of the ‘big picture’—the main idea and goal you want to achieve. Think about your company mission and how the sales team forms part of that overarching goal.

2. Sales Goals and Revenue Targets

A sales plan must include achievable sales goals and the targets your sales reps will be working to reach. Use previous years' results to tell you what's reasonably possible for your team to do. Include specific metrics and KPIs , how these are performing currently, and what you plan to do to improve them.

This may also include information about your product’s pricing , planned discounts, and how your team can focus on the right customers to get the most revenue possible. Link these sales goals to the business goals your company is working to achieve.

3. Analysis of the Target Market

Your plan should clearly identify your ideal customer profile and information about the target market and demographic you plan to sell to. Are you breaking into a new market? Are you targeting small business or enterprise customers ? Give a concise description of your target audience and the stakeholders you’ll need to sell to.

4. Sales Strategy Overview and Methods to Reach Target Customers

This should include a brief overview of the customer journey , pain points , and how your salespeople will engage and follow up with new prospects throughout their journey to purchase. You'll likely outline specific sales activities you'll focus on, such as improving referral numbers, testing new cold-calling email strategies, or dipping your toe in social selling.

You may also include information about the marketing strategy and lead generation methods used to gather new leads and how sales managers will support the team.

5. Use of Resources and Sales Tools

How much does it cost your team to close a new deal? What is your budget for the sales team, or for sales tools ?

Inside your plan, list the resources you have available to you, and how you plan to use them during the year. This includes monetary resources, as well as human resources.

Next, show how your resources will be used. For example, how much will you spend on sales tools? Which CRM software is your team depending on? Briefly explain how you plan to use each tool and why you’ve allocated resources in that way.

6. Sales Team Structure

The structure of your sales team includes which reps are available during what times of the year, their specialties and skills, and where they focus in the sales process .

Also, include information about the sales managers, their teams, and the incentives you offer your reps.

The Benefits of Sales Planning: Why You Need a Sales Plan

Creating a sales plan from scratch can be daunting, even with the right sales planning template. So, why should you have your sales strategy written down and ready to act on?

Let’s talk about the benefits of sales planning to attract new business and grow your market share.

Clear, Time-Bound Goals Help You Reach Revenue Targets

There’s a reason they say, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

If you want your sales team to execute on and accomplish your sales goals, you need to have a plan in place. When targets are linked to specific timeframes and actions, your whole team will see how their individual work is involved in reaching your sales goals.

Prioritize Time and Resources

Without a specific action plan in place , your team won’t be able to prioritize their time with the right sales tactics and strategies to hit their targets.

With a clear outline of the tactics that bring the most significant ROI for your team, each rep can get the best results for the time they spend selling.

Clear Action Plan to Reach Your Goals

With an action plan in place, each team member knows what they’re supposed to be doing, and why they’re doing it. This keeps them motivated and helps them see how their individual efforts make a difference.

4 Types of Sales Plans (How to Choose Which Planning Style is Right for Your Sales Team)

It’s difficult to templatize a good sales plan since every plan is unique to the business and team it applies to. So, what are some examples of the types of sales plans you might create, and how can you choose between them?

• Revenue-based sales plan: If you’re aiming for a specific revenue goal, this type of sales plan will be focused on in-depth sales forecasting and specific actions to improve conversion rates and close more deals.
• Sales plan based on the target market: If you’re selling to vastly different markets, you may want to create a different sales plan based on the market you’re targeting. For example, your sales plan for enterprise companies would differ from your sales plan for selling to SMBs.
• Sales goals plan: A plan that’s focused on goals (other than revenue) may include hiring and onboarding, sales training plans, or plans to implement a new type of sales activity into your process.
• New product sales plan: When launching a new product, it’s a good idea to develop a specific business plan around its launch and continued promotion. This plan may include finding and contacting strategic partners, building a unique value prop in the market, and creating new sales enablement content for the team to use when selling this product. This type of sales plan can also apply to launching new features in your SaaS product.

How to Choose the Right Sales Planning Style

Ultimately, this will depend on factors such as:

• Your revenue goals
• The resources at your disposal
• Your sales team’s abilities and bandwidth
• Your personal commitment to seeing this plan through

When you’ve determined who is involved in sales planning, how committed they are, and the resources you can use to make this plan happen, you can start building your own sales plan.

9 Steps to Create a Sales Plan to 10x Your Sales Team’s Results

It may seem like a lot of work to develop a sales plan at this point. But once you do, you’ll be in a place to take your sales (and brand) to the next level.

Let’s break down this process, step-by-step, so you can start achieving greater results.

1. Define Your Sales Goals and Milestones

With a sales plan, we begin at the end: an end goal.

Start by choosing the sales metrics that matter most to your overall business. This could be:

• Annual or monthly recurring revenue (ARR or MRR)
• Retention or churn rates
• Average conversion time
• Average conversion rate
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)

It doesn’t matter so much which metric you choose —the important point is that it can tell you whether your work has succeeded.

Next, look at last year’s forecast and results . Were you being realistic? How did sales revenue increase annually? How does that compare your company to the industry standards? Use this information to determine what realistically you can bring in based on the size of the market, your company goals, and the experience and resources available to your sales team .

After setting clear sales goals, it’s time to set milestones . This involves breaking that big number down into smaller expectations with strict deadlines. These should challenge and motivate your sales team , without being so difficult they kill morale.

Lean on your sales team during this process. After all, they’re in the trenches with you and probably have the best knowledge about your customers. Learn about what they do during the workweek to close deals. Ask how much they’re currently doing, and how much bandwidth they have to do more. This will give you a real, frontline take on what goals and milestones to set in your sales plan template.

Finally, create specific targets with clear deadlines . For example, to achieve a sales goal of increasing revenue by 15 percent YOY, you might set the milestone of increasing your customer base by 20 percent, or increasing sales by 50% for a specific product.

Brought together, these milestones inform and support your overall sales plan, giving you a clear, actionable workflow to hit your overall goals for the year.

2. Clearly Define Your Target Market or Niche

You need to know the market you’re in and the niche you’re going to occupy so you can properly position your business for growth.

What’s a business niche? It’s more than just what your business specializes in—a niche is the space your business occupies with your products, content, company culture, branding, and message. It’s how people identify with you and search you out over the competition.

As serial entrepreneur Jason Zook explains: “ When you try to create something for everyone, you end up creating something for no one. ”

Don’t do that.

Instead, start by looking at a niche and asking yourself these questions:

• How big is the market?
• Is there a built-in demand for what you're selling?
• What’s your current market position?
• Who are your competitors? What are their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats?

If you’re stuck, start by going back to your own strengths . List out your strongest interests and passions. Pick a field where the odds are already in your favor—where you have a proven track record, more expertise to offer, an extensive contact base, and people who can provide you with intros.

These kinds of strategic advantages will help you clarify your buyer persona and amplify the results of your planning.

Start with one product in one niche—you can always branch out to a complementary niche later. Sell beautiful, handcrafted tea cups? How about a booming doily business? Or customizable teaspoons?

A niche doesn’t limit you. It focuses you.

3. Understand Your Target Customers

Chasing the wrong customers will only waste your time and money, so don't allow them to sneak into your sales plan.

Your best customers are the ones that are successful with your product and see the ROI of it. Talk to them, and find out what they have in common.

While defining ideal customers depends on your company and market, here are some basic characteristics you’ll want to identify:

• Company size (number of employees, number of customers, yearly revenue)
• Size of the relevant department
• Geographical information
• Job title of your POC
• Buying process
• The goal they’re trying to achieve with your product or service

Also, don’t forget to think about whether they will be a good ‘fit’. If this is a long-term relationship you’re developing rather than a one-night stand, you want to ensure you speak the same language and share a similar culture and vision.

Use this information to build out an ideal customer profile . This fictitious organization gets significant value from using your product/service and provides significant value to your company. A customer profile helps you qualify leads and disqualify bad-fit customers before you waste time trying to sell to them.

Once you know the type of company you want to target with your sales team, it’s time to get inside their head. Start by hanging out where they hang out:

• Are they on social media? What’s their network of choice?
• Are they members of any Facebook or LinkedIn groups?
• Can you answer industry questions for them on Quora or Reddit?
• What podcasts do they listen to, or what resources do they read?

Get in your customers’ heads, and you’ll be in a much better position to sell to them.

GET THE IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE KIT →

4. Map Out Your Customer’s Journey

The next part of an effective sales plan must address how that ideal customer becomes your customer. Do this by mapping out their journey, including actions and events during the different stages of the sales funnel :

• Consideration

Conduct a customer survey or chat directly with your current, happy customers to gather valuable sales planning insights. Ask them:

• When you became a customer, what did you want our product to do for you?
• What features were important to you? Why?
• What was your budget?
• How did you solve this problem before using our product?

To fully understand their journey as a customer, you can also ask about past buying experiences:

• When was the last time you bought something similar?
• Was that a good or bad experience? Why?
• What was the decision-making process like?
• How did you evaluate different offers?
• Which factors made you choose that particular solution?

Once you’ve identified the awareness, interest, and consideration stages, let your prospects and new customers build the rest of their roadmap by asking them: "What’s next?"

"What needs to happen to make you a customer?"

If, for example, they say they’ll have to get approval from the VP of Finance. Ask:

"Ok, and let's say he agrees that we're the right fit; what's next?"

We call this the virtual close , a way to put your prospect in a future-thinking state of mind that makes them imagine buying from you. Asking this question to several high-quality prospects will tell you those final few steps in the customer journey until they’ve signed on the dotted line.

Finally, piece together the post-sale journey. Once a prospect becomes a customer, what’s next? How do you enable them to use your product and be successful with it? What happened to create your most loyal customers? Understanding this piece of the sales process is essential to managing and increasing customer retention .

5. Define Your Value Propositions

You know your customers. You know their journey. Now, define where you fit in by looking at your competitive advantage . Fully articulating what sets you apart from the competition is a crucial element of your sales plan template.

Start by asking a few simple questions:

• Why do customers buy from us?
• Why do customers buy from our competitors and not us?
• Why do some potential customers not buy at all?
• What do we need to do to be successful in the future?

Remember that customers buy benefits, not features. When describing your value proposition , it’s easy to get caught up in talking about you. What you’ve made. What you do. Instead, flip the script and talk about what your product will do for your customers . A strong competitive advantage:

• Reflects the competitive strength of your business
• Is preferably, but not necessarily, unique
• Is clear and simple
• May change over time as competitors try to steal your idea
• Must be supported by ongoing market research

For example, the competitive advantage of help desk software has nothing to do with its social media integrations and real-time ticket tracking. It’s the fact that it allows its customers to focus on creating a great customer experience.

Here’s the point: Focus on value, not features, in your sales plan template.

Your competitive advantage will inform everything your company does moving forward, from marketing to product development. It’s a great example of where sales can influence the development of a product and the direction of a business.

6. Organize Your Sales Team

The way your sales team is organized can enable them to better serve their customers and bring new revenue into your business faster.

Here are three basic structures for your sales team :

• The island: Individual reps work alone.
• Assembly line: Each sales rep is assigned a specialized role such as lead generation, SDR (qualifier), Account Executive (closer), or Customer Success (farmer).
• Pods: Each sales rep is assigned a specialized role in a pod, or group, that’s responsible for the entire journey of specific customers.

Think about the strengths and weaknesses of your sales team members, and how they will truly thrive as part of the team.

7. Outline the Use of Sales Tools

Now it’s time to think about the tools you’re using. Building out your sales stack takes time and effort, but listing out that stack in your sales plan will help you avoid getting caught up with new tech that may or may not help your sales team.

Basically, you’ll need tools for these areas to cover all aspects of the sales process:

• CRM software (like Close )
• Lead generation and prospecting tools
• Internal communication software
• Engagement and outreach tools
• Documentation software
• Sales enablement stack

Think about how all of your sales tools work together through integrations and where automation comes into play to save your team time, and how you'll drive CRM adoption across your team members.

8. Build a Prospecting List

A prospect list is where we take all the theory and research of the last few sections of our sales plan template and put them into action.

At its core, a prospect list is a directory of real people you can contact who would benefit from your product or service. This can be time-consuming, but it's essential for driving your sales plan and company growth.

First, use your ideal customer profile to start finding target companies:

• Search LinkedIn
• Check out relevant local business networks
• Attend networking events and meetups
• Do simple Google searches
• Check out the member list of relevant online groups

Target up to 5 people at each organization. Targeting more than one individual will give you better odds of connecting by cold email outreach as well as a better chance that someone in your network can connect you personally.

Remember, this isn’t just a massive list of people you could sell to. This is a targeted list based on the research you’ve done previously in your sales plan.

Once you have your list, keep track of your leads and how you found them using a sales CRM. This will keep historical context intact and make sure you don’t overlap on outreach if you’re working with teammates.

9. Track, Measure, and Adjust As Needed

Just because you’ve made a solid sales plan template to follow, doesn’t mean you get to sit back and watch the cash roll in.

Remember what Basecamp founder Jason Fried said about plans:

“A plan is simply a guess you wrote down.”

You’re using everything you know about the market, your unique value, target customers, and partners to define the ideal situation for your company. But yes, try as we might, very few of us actually see anything when we gaze deep into the crystal ball.

Instead, remember that your sales plan is a living, breathing document that needs to account for and adapt to new features, marketing campaigns, or even new team members who join.

Set regular meetings (at least monthly) to review progress on your sales plan, identify and solve issues, and align your activities across teams to optimize your plan around real-world events and feedback. Learn from your mistakes and victories, and evolve your sales plan as needed.

Create a Strategic Sales Plan to Grow Your Business

You’ve just discovered the basics—but I’ll bet you’re ready to go beyond that. Here are some final ideas to take your sales plan from a simple foundation to a strategic, actionable one.

Avoid Moving the Goalpost

Avoid making adjustments to the goals outlined in your sales plan—even if you discover you’ve been overly optimistic or pessimistic in your sales planning. When you're developing your very first sales plan template, it's natural to be wrong in some of your assumptions—especially around goals and forecasting .

Instead of letting it get you down, remember your plan serves as a benchmark to judge your success or failure. As you see places where your assumptions were wrong, carefully document what needs updating when it's time to revise your sales plan.

Invite Your Others to Challenge Your Sales Plan

Never finalize a plan without another set of eyes (or a few sets.) Get an experienced colleague—an accountant, senior salesperson, or qualified friend—to review the document before solidifying your sales plan.

Your sales team is another strong resource for reviewing your sales plan. Ask their opinions, give them time to think about how it relates to their daily work, and agree on the key points that go into your sales plan.

Set Individual Goals and Milestones for Your Sales Team

We talked about creating milestones for your business, but you can take your sales plan to the next level by setting individual milestones for your sales team as well.

These individual goals need to consider the differences in strengths, weaknesses, and skills among your salespeople.

For example, if someone on your team is making a ton of calls but not closing, give them a milestone of upping their close rate . If someone’s great at closing but doesn’t do much outreach, give them a milestone of contacting 10 new prospects a month.

Doing this will help your individual reps build their skills and contribute to their company and career growth.

Ready to Hit Your Sales Goals?

In most sales situations, the biggest challenge is inertia. But with a solid, detailed sales plan and a dedicated team with clear milestones, you’ll have everything you need to push through any friction and keep on track to hit your goals!

All jazzed up and ready to put together your own sales plan? Download our free Sales Success Kit and access 11 templates, checklists, worksheets, and guides.

They're action-focused and easy to use, so you can have your best sales year yet.

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Free Sales Plan Template

Free Template

Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent plan by HubSpot and Aircall .

This template includes sections for:.

• Company History & Mission
• Team Structure
• Target Market
• Tools and Software
• Positioning
• Marketing Strategy
• Prospecting Strategy
• Action Plan
• Sales Cadence

Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent plan.

Sales departments are doubling down their efforts. Only  18% of buyers  trust salespeople,  meaning that sales teams need to work smarter, not just harder. How can sales leaders ensure this happens?

A sales plan is an actionable way to simplify and document your sales goals and your strategies to accomplish them. Budgets, marketing strategy, positioning, and other topics are explained in detail as well. 

Download this template from HubSpot and Aircall , and build your sales plan . Make it simple for your team, direct reports, and execs to understand what your goals are, how you'll accomplish them, and any support you'll need. 

How do I write a sales plan?

Set your targets and goals, create your sales strategies, choose sales tactics and train your sales staff, set your budget and implement your plan.

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How do you create an individual sales plan?

Creating an effective sales plan: define your objectives, assign roles and responsibilities to the sales team, create your strategy, find your sales tools, define your metrics for success, set your budget, outline our action plan.

Is this really free?

Absolutely . Just sharing some free knowledge that we hope you’ll find useful. Keep us in mind next time you have marketing questions!

What are the 7 steps to creating a sales plan?

Step-by-step guide to creating your sales plan: set your target, assess the situation, identify barriers to success, list your strengths and resources, develop your sales strategy, figure out what you will need for your strategy, make an action plan.

What are the 4 selling strategies?

Four basic sales strategies for B2B are solution selling, account-based selling, strategic selling, and social selling.

Over 32,000 sales leaders and entrepreneurs are already using this sales plan template.

Download the free sales plan template.

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Create a Sales Plan That Actually Works (Tips + Template)

• January 21, 2021

True success always starts with a plan. And for sales success, nothing beats a strategic sales plan.

Designed specifically to help your sales team drive more sales, a sales plan can show you where you’re at, where you want to be, and even more important, how to get there.

The question, of course, is how to create a sales plan that actually impacts sales. Keep reading for tips and a template to quickly and confidently create a strategic sales plan for your business.

Table of Contents

What is a sales plan, what is included in a sales plan, sales plan examples: there’s no one right way, the benefits of a sales plan, how to write a sales plan, 7 tips to help you create a sales plan, sales strategy template, selling your sales plan, final remarks.

A sales plan is a strategy document that lays out a company’s plan for improving sales results in a specified time period. A sales plan makes it possible for everyone on the sales team to see the big picture, share the same overall objectives, and work the same plan to achieve them.

It usually includes:

• Specific revenue and performance goals for a given period
• The strategies for achieving them
• The resources and activities required to carry out those strategies

A sales plan covers a lot of important aspects of business growth: revenue goals, selling methods and metrics, target customers, current sales force capabilities, and more.

Specifically, it covers 9 pieces of strategic information.

1. Executive Summary and Scope of The Sales Plan

This section gives a short summary of the document, focusing on goals and the strategies to achieve them. It also states the specific period and other parameters covered by the plan.

2. Business Goals and Revenue Targets

This section clearly establishes revenue targets and may include associated business goals (e.g., optimize lifecycle value through customer success programs, etc). Classifying revenue figures based on different categories (such as line and territory) helps clarify the document.

3. Review of Prior Period Performance

This section presents a recap of the prior period’s performance, identifying mistakes as well as decisive actions that led to a positive outcome. The overarching goal is to optimize the sales plan by adopting inputs and techniques that work.

4. Market and Industry Conditions

This section provides a summary of the market trends that have a high likelihood of influencing sales performance.

5. Strategies, Methodologies, and Tactics

This section recommends the best selling techniques, communication sequences, and playbooks for the specific company.

6. Customer Segments

This section cites all the potential revenue-generating, omnichannel opportunities available for the brand, such as the following:

• Cross-sells
• New Prospects
• New Segments

The document should describe new segments of the addressable market when they arise.

7. Team Capabilities, Resources, and Upgrades

This section provides a summary and describes the current state of all production inputs (human resources, tech software, specialized sales team, etc.,) required to process and close sales details.

8. Action Plan For Teams and Individuals

This section assigns tasks, activities, and responsibilities to different teams and individuals. Tasks include prospecting activities, meeting appointments, and product demos/presentations.

9. Performance Benchmarks & Monitoring

This section lays out performance metrics to track the systems and processes that help monitor these metrics.

What usually comes to mind when you think about sales plans?

If you’re like most people, it’s the annual sales plan or weekly sales plan — broad strategic and tactical documents mapping out the plan for everything sales-related.

But there are as many different types of sales plans as there are needs for a sales plan.

We’ll go over a few sales plan examples to get you started in the right direction.

30-60-90-day Sales Plan

There’s the 30-60-90-day sales plan. This is designed to help a new salesperson or sales manager get up to speed quickly in their first quarter on the job. The plan includes milestones they’d need to achieve at the 30th, 60th, and 90th day of their ramp-up.

Generally, the  30-60-90-day sales plan  can be broken down into 3 sections:

Day 1 to 30: 

Learn and understand everything you can about a company from their processes, customers, products, the competition to procedures.

Day 31 to 60:

Evaluate and put your plan into action. Analyze their current processes and assess changes.

Day 61 to 90:

Optimize and make the plan better. It is time to take action. Initiate an action plan. Implement any new strategies and procedures you’ve come up with.

Sales Plan For Specific Sales

A sales process involves using different tactics to approach and convert a prospect into a paying customer.

Another type of sales plan you’ll see a lot is an individual sales plan for specific sales tactics, such as prescribed call sequences,  email follow-up  frequency, and meeting appointments. This type of plan is similar to an annual/weekly sales plan, but it focuses on measuring and improving results for just one goal or task.

Territory Sales Plan

Meanwhile, sales managers who oversee a geo-location or region often use territory sales plans to give sales directors and VPs more visibility into their sales efforts.

This is a workable plan used to target the right customers and implement goals to increase the income generated and sales over time.

A good territory sales plan will:

• Make your team more productive
• Reduce operational costs
• Increase the number of generated sales
• Improve your customer coverage
• Improve working relationships between clients and managers

Note: It is essential to work on your territory sales plan and avoid making constant changes. Unnecessary changes can tamper with your productivity and your ‘territory’ in general.

Sales Training Plan

And there are sales plans for every area of sales. Sales Enablement might have a sales training plan, for example, and  Revenue Ops  might have a sales compensation plan.

A sales training plan can be used as a roadmap for different sales training programs. It can be grouped according to positions held in an organization, assets, sales record etc.

A sales compensation plan is an umbrella for base salary, incentives and commission that make up a sales representative earnings.

Therefore, you can schedule a sales training plan to talk to your sales team about the importance of a sales compensation plan and how they can use it to increase revenue and drive performance.

Sales Budget Plan

Lastly, a sales budget plan gives you a  sales forecast  for a given period based on factors that could impact revenue — like industry trends and entry to a new market segment. Similar to a traditional sales plan, they cover the staff, tools, marketing campaigns, and other resources needed to generate the target revenue.

A good sales budget plan  should include the following:

Sales forecasting: 

The process of estimating future sales by predicting the number of units a salesperson or team can sell over a certain period, i.e. week, month, year, etc.

Anticipated expenses: 

Include the number of costs your team is likely going to incur. Remember to have even the smallest expenses to estimate the average sales.

Expect the unexpected: 

Always leave room for unforeseen circumstances in your sales budget. For example, new packaging expenses, new competitive market strategies etc.

A sales plan does deliver side benefits (such as promoting discipline and diligence), but it’s really about making sure your sales don’t dry up over time. Which means it’s not optional.

The reality is this: Most of us aren’t planners. We talk a good game, but nothing happens until we’re accountable.

Without a written plan, it’s just talk.

So the first benefit of a sales plan is that it helps you execute on all your best ideas. But that’s not all. A good sales plan will also help you:

• Keep your sales team on the same page, aiming for the same target and focusing on the same priorities.
• Clarify your goals and revenue objectives for a given period.
• Give your team direction, focus, and purpose.
• Adopt a unified set of strategies and playbooks to reach your business and revenue goals.
• Know what your team capabilities are and be able to isolate your needs, from tools to talent and other resources.
• Inspire and  motivate  stakeholders.
• Track your progress and optimize performance over time.

A sales plan is a pretty straightforward document. It doesn’t need to be written in a formal language or pass your compliance review. It just needs to outline your plans for the coming period, whether that’s a year, a quarter, or a month.

While there are 9 sections in the sales plan template, much of the document simply validates your ideas. The most important pieces of information are:

1. Your goals

Setting smart goals for you and your team  is an essential part of creating a sales plan. I believe the biggest mistake you can make when setting goals is solely focusing on numbers.

Smart sales goals should be actively focused on. If it helps, use goal-setting and planning frameworks such as SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). Create goals that stretch your capabilities, but that seems doable based on your new strategy.

2. Your SWOT analysis

SWOT — short for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats — is one of the best frameworks for analyzing your sales team’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and strengths. It helps you to build a bulletproof wall around your plan.

You’ll be able to address what you’re lacking, the areas that need improvement, identify your USP (Unique Selling Point),  come up with Value-Based Selling , and your most vital points and how you can exploit them to your advantage.

3. Your strategy

Your sales strategy should be documented to help position your products and services to differentiate your solution from competitors.

A good strategy will help you address your customers’ needs in every stage of your sales plan. For better sales, you can balance  inbound and outbound sales strategies  for even higher sales.

4. Your tactics

Be aware, though, it’s not just a wish list or a collection of ideas. Your sales plan should be based on actual field data and only use benchmarks and quantities that are measurable. Be clear. Be specific. Be actionable.

Which brings me to another point: A good sales plan is realistic.

It’s fine to have a 5-year goal of hitting $10B. But what about now? Figure out exactly what your current numbers are, and set your targets based on those numbers.

I already mentioned that your sales plan doesn’t have to be a formal document. But it does need to be clearly written, so all team members and stakeholders understand the plan.

Tip #1: Base it on in-depth and up-to-date research

You need relevant  statistics  and trends in your niche, industry, and ideal customers. Remember, markets and customers are in a constant state of flux. There’s nothing worse than stubbornly chasing prospects who aren’t a good fit anymore while ignoring entire market segments that show a rising demand for your solutions.

Tip #2: Use data and statistics

Use the data from your in-depth research to identify problem areas, find points of opportunity in your sales process, and validate your assumptions and ideas.

You can also use the data to come up with accurate metrics and figures to help predict your sales plan’s outcome.

Tip #3: Verify your facts

Accuracy matters!

Don’t rush! Facts and figures are essential, especially to stakeholders. One simple mistake and your entire plan come tumbling down.

Ensure you take time to review your facts, figures, and forecasts before finalizing the document.

Tip #4: Get tactical

Break the overall sales action plan into tactical plans for individual areas of sales:

• SDRs and account executives
• Sales operations
• Sales enablement
• Customer success

This may require collaboration with  cross-functional teams  such as marketing, customer support, and product teams.

Tip #5: Use Historical Performance Data

In sales, you can use the past to dictate the future. Historical data will help you set targets for the current period. For example, what were your previous revenue targets? Did you hit them? Why or why not? This information can help you set achievable goals for your current sales plan and know the mistakes to avoid.

Tip #6: List The Tracking Methods You’ll Use

Highlight the tracking methods you’ll use to keep your plan moving forward. That includes performance metrics, monitoring techniques, software, tools, and  selling strategies  for your business model.

Tip #7: Build a Strong Case For Your Proposed Budget

Stakeholders and superiors are impressed with cold-hard facts. Therefore, having a strong detailed case for your budget will help your sales plan smoothly sail through.

Not only will you outline your plans for the coming period for your budget, but you’ll also need to detail the costs. Be sure to include an ROI analysis for any new tools or talent you think you’ll need.

Are you ready to write your own sales strategy? Here is a sales plan template to help you get started. Here’s how to use the sales plan template to make it useful to you:

Start by using the Sales Plan Template we’ll give you in the next section. Just follow the prompts in the template, so you know what information is needed in each section. Don’t try to be fancy. Use simple language. Focus on being specific and clear.

Then share information in whatever format works best. That may be text paragraphs, tables, lists, charts, graphics, or screenshots. You can also adapt it as needed to suit your business, your sales team, and your needs.

A sales plan should contain the following sections:

1. Executive Summary

This is your opening ‘statement’. It is a formal summary that sum ups the contents of your strategy.

When writing your executive summary , keep it short, and precise. It should be one page or two. Ensure it gives an overview of what is included in your plan. It should talk about:

• The strategies you’ll implement to achieve your goals
• The time-frame you expect to achieve your plan
• The scope of your plans

2. Business Goals With Revenue Targets

This section talks about the revenue target and associated business goals. You can  classify revenue figures  according to different categories to clarify the sales strategy.

For example, for each goal, you can enter the current outcome and targeted outcome as illustrated in the table below:

3. Review of Past Performance

Take a trip down prior period performance . Note the mistakes that negatively affected the outcome and their strengths which positively impacted the general outcome.

Your goal is to identify the strategies and tactics that work.

4. Specific Strategies, Methods, and Playbooks

List the  specific sales strategies,  methods, and playbooks you’ll use to achieve the goals listed above.

5. Customer Segments/ Buyers Persona

This section talks about potential  revenue-generating streams  and different opportunities available for the company and new markets. Remember to include upsells, referrals, and renewals.

6. Team Capabilities and Resources

Here, provide a summary and describe the current  production inputs required in the sales process , i.e., human resources, specialized software, sales team, etc.

7. Action Plan

The action plan requires you to set  specific strategies and supporting tactics  that will be used to achieve a particular goal, i.e. new acquisition. Assign different activities and responsibilities to teams who will run that particular action.

Below is an example of an action plan table:

8. Sales Tools

Go ahead and list the  tools you’ll use to ensure the sales plan runs smoothly  and all sales processes will be managed using these tools.

9. Performance Benchmarks

This is the last section of your sales plan. It  lays out the performance metrics  to track the process systems to help and monitor these metrics.

Also, list and provide links to used sources. Explain how the report will be generated and stored. Finally, talk about how the report will be used to review the progress made.

Okay, your sales plan is written. Great! But you’re not done yet.

Your next step is to present it to the sales team, management, and stakeholders. That’s because you need buy-in to make it happen.

When your sales team is on board, they’ll be pumped about doing their assigned tasks. When management is on board, they’ll be excited about giving you the budget you need to turn your plan into a reality. With buy-in as your top priority, it’s important to be prepared to give a solid presentation. In other words, sell it.

One final note: There are lots of reasons you may not get everything you ask for. There may be plans in the works you don’t know anything about yet. Or the budget may need to favor another initiative.

If you don’t get the budget you asked for, be sure to update your sales plan accordingly. The goal is to stretch your team’s capabilities, not do the impossible.

Sales don’t happen without a good sales plan. Fortunately, they’re not as hard as they might seem.

Take your time identifying your biggest challenges and problem-solving to overcoming them. Once that’s done, your sales plan is simply the document that organizes your ideas.

What’s your biggest hang-up when it comes to creating a sales plan? Have you found any tricks that help? Let me know in the comments below.

Max Altschuler

More like this..., the revenue orchestration category, gtm 96: the three pillars of a modern go-to-market strategy every revenue leader should know with kelly hopping, the stories behind how startup co-founders met, join us today, insider access to the gtm network and the best minds in tech., you may also like....

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How to create a sales plan (and 3 templates that do it for you)

There's a 25-year-old "South Park" episode I think about way too often. Working on a presentation with a coffee-addicted classmate named Tweek, the boys see a gnome stealing underpants from Tweek's dresser. They follow him to a cave, where they discover a network of gnomes executing a massive underpants-smuggling operation.

Explaining their business model, the underpants gnomes present this outline:

Phase 1: Collect underpants

Phase 3: Profit

In this post:

What is a sales plan?

A sales plan is a strategic document outlining goals and strategies for reaching predetermined sales targets. For the "South Park" underpants gnomes, it's the glaring question mark standing between their product and their profits.

What goes into a sales plan (including examples)

A sales plan has the information stakeholders need to establish sales goals, set strategies, allocate resources, collaborate across teams, track goal progress, and measure success. Basically, whatever the stakeholders need to make sound decisions about sales processes.

The specific elements of a business plan differ by factors like sales plan type, industry, product type, goal horizon, and organizational structure. Some may have just a few sections across a page or two, others a dozen or more over several pages.

While your sections may differ in number or phrasing, you can expect some version of these elements to go into most sales plans.

This section is where you set measurable sales goals. (In fact, this section is also called "Goals" in many sales plans.) Depending on your industry, common sales objectives include:

Total revenue growth

Market share expansion

Customer acquisition volume

Adoption rate increase

Obviously, you could just write "$100 billion" here and insert a Dr. Evil meme, then hope for the best. But the real objective of the objectives section is to come to attainable sales goals that align with broader organizational growth goals.

Increase market share by 5-10% this fiscal year

Target market

If your product is a massive eCommerce space with rock-bottom prices and free next-day shipping, write "Everyone" and move on. But since you're probably not Jeff Bezos, you'll need a detailed description of your ideal customer profile. 

Project managers of midsized technology companies with distributed teams seeking streamlined collaboration and task management

This is where you'll give the broad strokes of the approach you'll take to achieve your sales goals with your target market. Whether it's for entering new markets, expanding within existing markets, or launching new products, this generalized section communicates the stepping stones that will lead to your objectives.

Improved prospecting, generating more qualified leads, and tailoring sales processes to market research to make existing sales processes more efficient

These tactics are still theoretical and don't have to be set in stone at this phase. But this is a space to describe specifics like customer survey or beta testing methods, social media marketing campaign concepts, new sales techniques, or new ways of utilizing existing sales software and resources.

Leverage social media influencer outreach with influencer-specific promo codes

As anyone who's ever watched a heist movie knows, every great plan needs a crack team. In this section, you'll list either each member of your sales team or the team leads, depending on your team size. Beyond a simple list of names, here are some helpful elements to include about each:

Aptitudes or experience

Certifications or completed trainings

Hourly pay rate (for budgeting and forecasting)

Daily or weekly utilization limits

Associated accounts

This should help you outline a structure for assigning individual roles and responsibilities related to your strategies and tactics, ensuring you've got the people power to get the job done.

John Doe, UX specialist | $100/hour incurred expense | 20 hours/week floating utilization | Manager: Jane Doe | Responsible for analyzing survey data and making recommendations for UI updates

It's possible you may even need new hires, freelancers, additional trainings, certifications, or third-party agencies to do the things you need to do. List those here, so you can incorporate them into your time and expenses.

Stakeholders won't just want to know what you're going to do—they'll want to know how long it'll take. Outline your strategies by breaking them into key milestones and deadlines according to the personnel you have. This should also map to revenue projections as your strategies mature.

2/15: Complete market research | 3/1: Synthesize findings | 3/15: Schedule strategies for Q2 execution

The last thing you want is to create a beautiful, perfectly crafted sales plan and discover that you don't actually have the funds to execute it. Based on entries in the last few fields, you should have a good idea of expenses based on strategy resources, personnel utilization, timelines, and any purchases your team may need. 

Chart those here with estimates for any other potential expenses related to marketing, advertising, and sales promotion activities.

Sure, you've been making sales since you started executing your plan. But how do you know you're making enough sales to justify your efforts?

This is where key performance indicators (KPIs) come into play. By setting these during the sales planning stage, you allow stakeholders to measure the success of individual sales efforts, so you can report on how performance compares to sales targets over time. 

Potential challenges

If sales were easy, every company would be successful. Even at the planning stage, you should be able to see some possible roadblocks on the horizon.

The best plans are realistic enough to be actualized, so be realistic about what might stand in your team's way. Try to get ahead of challenges relating to things like target market sensitivities, general market conditions, internal resources, competition, seasonality, or campaign effectiveness. Then, come up with contingencies, so you're ready for these obstacles if they do arise.

Free sales plan templates

Here are three templates for the same general sales plan structure to choose from, depending on the level of granularity and presentation you're looking for.

Sales plan template 1: Comprehensive document

If you're looking to get buy-in for your sales plan from senior stakeholders, you'll need a document that can organize and communicate your research.

This comprehensive sales plan template includes fields for each of the sections outlined above. Just copy it, rename it to your liking, and then click into each field to start filling in the information outlined in this post. (For sections you don't need, just delete or fill with "N/A" and move along.)

Best for: Communicating every element of your sales plan in full detail with (virtually) unlimited space

Sales plan template 2: Summary document

Maybe you need a sales plan template that gets the point across quickly. This one distills the gist of a sales plan into six concise, actionable sections, so you can share the most important elements of every sales objective in one document.

If you need room for more objectives, just copy/paste an empty row.

Best for: Quickly sharing the fine points of a sales plan with only actionable takeaways

Sales plan template 3: Project workflow document

What does your sales plan look like on a day-to-day basis? If you're having a hard time translating that, use this template.

Just include your sequence of objectives and related tasks, include the person they're assigned to, and tweak the date ranges. You can even update the progress graph for each task as you progress through them.

Best for: Organizing tasks, roles, and timelines within a greater sales plan

How to start sales planning

Step 1: Start sales planning. Step 2: ? Step 3: Start selling.

Sales planning may not be that easy, but it doesn't have to be especially complicated, either. It should take enough time and resources to come up with a document that's persuasive and detailed but not so much that it cuts into the real money-making efforts themselves. 

Here are a few ways you can set your plan up for efficiency, success, and—maybe most importantly—stakeholder buy-in.

Start with competitor research

You may be tempted to start the sales planning process by outlining your objectives and tactics, but competitor research can go a long way in setting the stage for both. This can show you what works, how well it works, and what doesn't work. It can also show you opportunities to fill market gaps your competitors are missing.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel, but it can be very helpful to just reinvent what your competition is doing.

Don't shy away from established frameworks and methodologies

Here are a few benefits many of these can potentially bring:

Iterative internal processes

Improved collaboration

Predictable lines of communication between teams

More useful insights from stakeholders

More accurate internal data

More reliable goal-setting

Obviously, the benefits will depend on the types of frameworks and methodologies you use. But the real key to any of them is the ability to standardize some element of the planning process and make collaboration more efficient.

Collaborate with stakeholders to define success

You may have one definition of success, while your stakeholders have a completely different one. Remember that your objectives and KPIs need to have bases in two realities: the market's and your company's.

It's the job of senior stakeholders to align sales efforts with high-level goals that help keep the entire operation afloat. That means they may have goals in mind that conflict with your market research findings about sales potential. The sales team, on the other hand, may need to help align expectations with market realities.

Successful sales plans keep both parties on the same page. As such, it helps to collaborate before setting sales benchmarks to see what success can look like for all involved parties.

Don't forget about operations

S&OP helps align sales teams with operations teams to ensure they have the inventory needed to both keep up with demand and promote maximum stocking efficiency. Since inventory can take time and careful scheduling, it's best to get S&OP underway as early as possible. Demand forecasting, for example, is closely related to both sales and inventory projections, so combining these projections early is worthwhile.

Establish clear lines of communication

If all good plans require a team, then all good teams require sound communication.

Since sales campaigns require collaboration between multiple parties and teams, it helps to have open communication channels during the sales planning process. This could mean adopting an Agile workflow and establishing daily Scrum meetings, hosting regular "office hours," or even just checking in with team leads.

While you're setting up these channels, tap them to get more accurate insights into sales planning elements like budgets, assets, and resource needs.

Types of sales plans

While the sales plan templates in this post are somewhat generically designed for new product or feature launches, there are tons of other types of sales plans you can choose from. Many expand on specific elements already included at a high level in our templates, foregoing some of the other sections that aren't as relevant. 

If you know you want your plan to have a more granular focus on specific use cases, you could consider one of these options.

New product sales plan

This details the introduction and promotion of a recently launched or forthcoming product. Similar to the template and example in this post, it can be for a physical product, digital product, or service. It includes general information without getting too bogged down in details.

Best for: General sales planning for new products, services, or features

Milestone sales plan

Prioritizing timelines, this plan delineates sales objectives and targets to be achieved within specific timeframes. Typically, these timelines fall into weekly, monthly, and quarterly milestones. You can list these in a timeline section for any plan, but this plan is structured around those elements.

Best for: A bird's-eye view of the time a sales campaign will take

30/60/90 sales plan

This sales strategy outlines goals and priorities for the first three months of a new hire's tenure, typically focusing on short-term objectives. This can lean toward onboarding milestones to get the new rep up-to-date on sales processes.

Best for: Bringing on new sales reps

Sales budget plan

As a financial framework, this plan details allocated resources for sales activities and expenses to achieve revenue targets. This gets much more granular about the costs associated with sales, making that element of planning its primary focus.

Best for: Communicating nuanced expense figures

Sales tactics plan

Similar to a sales budget plan, a sales tactics plan is mainly concerned with one area of the sales planning process: the tactics. It takes a comprehensive approach to specifying the methods and techniques required to achieve sales goals and overcome challenges.

Best for: Communicating specific details about sales strategies

Sales territory plan

This one makes me think of classic mob movies—two families hashing out their territories in the Bronx over plates of spaghetti. It's a strategic outline of how you'll distribute sales resources within specific geographic areas or customer segments.

Best for: Segmenting sales efforts geographically

Sales focus area plan

This one highlights specific product lines, customer segments, or markets on which the sales team will concentrate their efforts. It helps align sales team members on their individual responsibilities.

Best for: Setting expectations for sales team roles

Market expansion plan

When you use this sales plan, you're taking a strategic approach to broadening the reach of a product or service by entering new geographical areas or targeting additional customer demographics. You can tailor it to go deep on a range of KPIs that suit your specific goals for saturation. 

Best for: Planning specifically for market growth KPIs

Marketing alignment plan

Marketing and sales—one hand (or team) washes the other. To help bump that cleaning sesh along, consider one of these plans. They help coordinate strategies, ensuring a solid connection between sales and marketing efforts.

Best for: Aligning sales and marketing teams

Growth action plan

This strategic roadmap details initiatives and steps to foster business expansion, increase market share, and achieve sustainable growth. It includes actionable strategies for making growth-oriented goals a reality.

Best for: Establishing actionable strategies for growth KPIs

Sales planning tips

As you build out your sales plan, you might find that you need a little help. Here are some of our top tips for sales planning:

Know your audience: The sales plan will either be for stakeholders, team members, or both. Write to their level and with the level of detail they need.

Start with SWOT: A SWOT analysis is a great way to get a quick, relevant picture of fundamental sales plan elements like aptitudes, challenges, and opportunities.

Budget carefully: Not every sales plan style includes budgets by default—but don't let this deter you. It's vital to know what you can afford before you start executing your plan.

Vary strategies: To reduce volatility, try to keep your sales tactics varied. This also helps you find the strategies that work best and back them with data.

Continue monitoring: You can't know if you hit your KPIs unless you monitor according to the benchmarks you're tracking.

Make a (sales) plan to automate

Hopefully this post has you pumped for sales planning—or at least finding a mysterious new three-step business model (or even just watching "South Park"). 

Related reading:

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Bryce Emley

Currently based in Albuquerque, NM, Bryce Emley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State and nearly a decade of writing and editing experience. His work has been published in magazines including The Atlantic, Boston Review, Salon, and Modern Farmer and has received a regional Emmy and awards from venues including Narrative, Wesleyan University, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Pablo Neruda Prize. When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry.

• Sales & business development

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SALES PLAN PRESENTATION TEMPLATE

Download the Sales Plan Template with 100 PowerPoint slides of sales strategy storylines, initiatives, templates, frameworks, professional graphics, charts , and icons.

Designed by sales leaders and McKinsey consultants, the sales plan template covers sales strategies, performance, goals, account planning , territory expansion, sales compensation , marketing strategies , growth initiatives , sales org charts & design, sales budgeting, and more.

Get a headstart on your sales plan strategy and PowerPoint presentation by instantly downloading the sales plan template with great-looking and easy-to-edit slides and multiple color palettes.

PREVIEW OF THE SALES PLAN TEMPLATE

OR BUY THE VALUE PACK $150.00 – Purchase Checkout Added to cart

VALUE PACK INCLUDES: Sales Plan Template Plus...

Strategy Frameworks - 168 pages HR & Org Strategy - 186 pages Strategic Plan - 121 pages Market Analysis - 114 pages Business Model - 17 pages

THE SALES PLAN TEMPLATE DOWNLOAD INCLUDES 3 COLOR PALATTES

WHAT DOES THE SALES PLAN TEMPLATE COVER?

The Sales Plan Template has you covered in kickstarting your sales and marketing strategy and plan. The agenda starts with the Year in Review, highlighting the accomplishments over the past year, historical performance, customer funnel metrics and initiatives, and a KPI scorecard. Then the agenda covers Next Year's Goals with KPI targets and new initiatives. The next section covers the core sales initiatives to improve the customer funnel. The agenda covers launching of new products and services. Then the deck goes into Improving the Fundamentals covering sales funnel initiatives and projects , methodologies, IT strategy, and project plans. Then the agenda covers marketing initiatives including customer segments, messaging, campaigns, digital and social strategy, and a marketing calendar and budget. The last section is on Elevating the Team which covers the sales and marketing team budget, commission and compensation plans, people initiatives, territory coverage, and org chart . The template also includes a ton of bonus charts, icons, worksheets, framework slides, and more. And, you can use our free guides on Sales Strategy and Marketing Strategy to generate ideas for your presentation.

ALL 100 POWERPOINT SLIDES IN THE SALES PLAN TEMPLATE

The 100-page Sales Plan PowerPoint Template includes:

1. Title Page 2. The Sales Team's Mission 3. Agenda Slide 4. Sales Team Wins 5. Historical Revenue Chart 6. Sales Breakdown Chart 7. Sales Goals & KPIs Scorecard 8. Sales Pipeline Metrics & Initiatives 9. Next Year's Goals Agenda Slide 10. High-level Sales Goals 11. Next Year's KPIs & Goals 12. Next Year's Sales Initiatives 13. Launch New Products Agenda Slide 14. New Product & Service Launches 15. Launch Initiatives 16. Geographic Expansion Plan 17. Improve the Sales Fundamentals 18. Sales Funnel Initiatives 19. Sales Methodology Improvements 20. Sales Technology Initiatives 21. Top Prospects & Accounts Plan 22. Sales Project Plan 23. Turn Up the Marketing Agenda Slide 24. High-level Marketing Strategy 25. Target Customer Personas 26. Marketing Campaign Overview 27. Media Mix Spend Chart 28. Channel Partner Strategy 29. Social Media Strategy 30. Media Mix Spend by Month Chart 31. Elevate the Team Agenda Slide 32. Sales Budget & Headcount Slide 33. Sales Team Org Chart 34. Sales Territory US Map

35. Sales Employee Journey Strategy 36. Sales Compensation Plan 37. Thank You & Questions 38. GENERIC SALES TEMPLATES 39. Sales World Map 40. Expanding Circle Framework 41. 5 Block Slide 42. Hexagon Slide 43. 3 Strategy Yin Yang Slide 44. 4-Part Puzzle Piece 45. Sales Roadmap Slide 46. 4-Part Flower Template 47. 8-Part Flower Template 48. Speedometer Slide 49. Pyramid Framework 50. 3-Ellipse Template 51. 3-Box Template 52. Staircase Slide 53. Downward Flow Template 54. 4-Piece Process Slide 55. Milestone Slide 56. 4-Box Framework 57. 3-Box Framework 58. 3-Box Segmented Framework 59. Sales Performance Slide 60. Sales Agenda Slide 61. Sales Priority Slide 62. SALES PLAN ICONS 63. Light Blue Background 1 of 3 64. Light Blue Background 2 of 3 65. Light Blue Background 3 of 3 66. Dark Blue Background 1 of 3 67. Dark Blue Background 2 of 3 68. Dark Blue Background 3 of 3

69. White Icons 1 of 3 70. White Icons 2 of 3 71. White Icons 3 of 3 72. Dark Blue Icons 1 of 3 73. Dark Blue Icons 2 of 3 74. Dark Blue Icons 3 of 3 75. SALES WORKSHEETS 76. SWOT Analysis 77. Porter’s 5 Forces Template 78. PESTLE Analysis Template 79. Prioritization Matrix Template 80. Competitive Advantage Template 81. Change Management Template 82. Change Management Worksheet 83. Sales SMART Goal Worksheet 84. Sales Strategy Overview 85. Marketing Campaign Template 86. Product Roadmap Example 87. Comprehensive SWOT Analysis 88. Service Benchmarking Template 89. Product Benchmarking Template 90. Sales Project Team Charter 91. Sales Images 92. CHARTS 93. Sales Pie Charts 94. Sales Stacked Column Chart 95. Sales Stacked Bar Chart 96. Stacked Column Chart 97. 100% Stacked Column Chart 98. Sales Waterfall Chart 99. Sales Bubble Chart 100. Sales Radar Chart 101. Terms & Conditions

Also, check out our other starter templates: strategy frameworks ,  market analysis , HR & org design , and business models .

Comprehensive Sales Plan Strategy Presentation Templates

1. sales team's mission.

Set the stage for your sales journey with a compelling mission statement that unites your team around a common goal and purpose.

2. Agenda Slide

Keep your presentation organized and focused with an agenda slide that outlines the key topics and flow of your sales plan.

3. Sales Goals and Performance

Monitor your team's progress and performance with in-depth insights into sales goals, KPIs, and a scorecard to track achievements.

4. Next Year's Goals and Initiatives

Prepare for the future by outlining the high-level sales goals, KPIs, and initiatives for the upcoming year.

5. Product and Service Launch

Maximize product and service launches with a dedicated agenda slide and detailed initiatives for successful market entry.

6. Geographic Expansion

Explore new territories and markets with a strategic plan for geographic expansion.

7. Sales Fundamentals and Methodology

Strengthen your sales fundamentals and methodology with targeted initiatives to enhance the sales process and technology.

8. Target Customer and Marketing Strategy

Understand your customers better and create effective marketing strategies with insights into target customer personas, campaign overviews, and media mix spend.

9. Sales Team Structure and Performance

Build a high-performing sales team with an org chart, budget allocation, and a well-defined sales employee journey strategy.

10. Sales Templates and Frameworks

Effortlessly communicate complex ideas with a variety of generic sales and marketing plan templates, icons, worksheets, and charts.

11. Miscellaneous

Conclude your presentation with a thank-you slide and provide any necessary terms and conditions.

12. Sales Performance Analysis

Dive deep into your sales team's performance with comprehensive analysis and insights, enabling data-driven decision-making.

13. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Integration

Explore how to leverage CRM systems to streamline sales processes , enhance customer interactions, and boost productivity.

14. Sales Training and Development

Invest in your team's growth by incorporating a dedicated section on training programs, skill development, and ongoing coaching.

15. Competitive Analysis and Market Research

Equip your team with valuable intelligence by including a section on competitive analysis and market research findings.

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Win Revenue With Our Updated Sales Plan (+ Free Template)

13 september 2021 by jaakko paalanen.

“I love writing sales plan templates!”…said no one ever. 

If writing a sales plan makes you want to pull your hair out, then I've got great news. It doesn't have to be complicated. 

Writing a B2B sales plan is simple when you use a sales plan template. 

If you’re struggling to write a productive B2B sales plan (or one doesn't put your salespeople to sleep 💤), you’re in the right place. 

I’m going to walk through what a B2B sales plan template is, why using one makes your life better, and how to create your own. 

I'll also share a few sales plan template examples to ensure you're on the right track. 

Even better, you can access the B2B sales plan template that the Leadfeeder sales team uses below. 

Note: Spend less time prospecting and more time selling with Leadfeeder. Leadfeeder identifies the companies visiting your site, how they got there, and what they did. Sign up for a free 14-day trial with Leadfeeder to start winning more revenue.

Free sales plan template

A B2B sales plan is more than a list of corporate goals your team barely glances at while entering the office.

It’s a detailed, custom playbook for sales success.

It unites your team, resources, and efforts under realistic objectives.

It creates the magic behind successful businesses: sales and revenue.

If you’re serious about generating leads and sales, invest the time into creating one. To help get you started, I made this sales plan template for you.

What is a sales plan?

A sales plan is a strategic document that outlines specific steps for increasing sales . But, it's more than a collection of sales goals and shallow steps.

Get your B2B Sales Plan Template

A detailed action plan to help you achieve your business goals by crafting a perfect sales strategy

It lists your sales strategy’s “who, what, where, and why” and explains who handles certain operations at different milestones. 

When done right, it’s the path to a well-oiled B2B sales machine that generates revenue.

So, where does a B2B sales plan template come into play? 

A sales plan template provides an outline for a sales plan. It makes it easier to describe your sales objectives, target audience, and specific steps, strategies, and tactics your business will use to hit sales and revenue goals .

Why do I need a B2B sales plan template?

A sales template makes it easier to create an effective sales template — which makes driving revenue attainable.

Here are a few additional reasons why creating a killer sales plan template is crucial to business growth.

A B2B sales plan helps highlight potential problems

Writing your B2B sales plan ensures your goals are realistic and achievable, and it helps you objectively compare your resources to the targets you’re trying to hit.

Identifying a problem allows you to adjust your strategy and goals accordingly.

Let’s say your top priority is landing 50 percent more enterprise leads by next year’s 2nd quarter. 

How do you do this? 

You might decide to ramp up your account-based marketing (ABM) game.

However, after reviewing your B2B sales plan , you realize that you don’t have the employee bandwidth or budget to focus on ABM.

Instead, you opt to focus on scoring and qualifying leads to improve lead quality. 

You’ve now saved your company precious time and money — and found an alternate way to reach the same goal.

A B2B sales plan increases motivation

Who knew that creating a sales plan could increase motivation?

According to a 2018 Forbes study, people who describe their goals are up to 1.4 times more likely to reach them . 

Writing and visualizing goals boosts motivation to take action by helping store them in our long-term memory. 

This means something as simple as keeping your sales plan in plain sight can breathe a sense of purpose into your team’s daily activities .

Your new office decor:

A B2B sales plan unites your team

A study of sales and marketing employees found that the biggest threat to productivity is a misalignment between sales and marketing goals.

Not only is it demotivating, but it also forces sales reps to work harder and offer extra incentives (they otherwise wouldn’t need to provide) to close deals. 

Then, in turn, extra incentives are a marketing nightmare — the circle of misalignment continues.

Sales and marketing are notorious for their adversarial relationship. And no, a sales plan won’t qualm the beef between the two teams — not by itself anyway.

Working on project management together, let's say for a sales and digital marketing campaign, is a start for both teams to get good visibility of what is being planned. Getting everyone on the same page and being transparent can help unite them towards a common goal.

Examples of sales plan templates

In the next section, we'll cover how to create a functional sales template. But first, let's look at a few sales template examples. You might notice common themes you'll want to use on your own.

The one-page sales plan

Your sales plan doesn’t need to delve into exhaustive detail. If you’re an agile small business, a one-page sales plan template will help you hit the ground running and lead your small team.

A one-page template can cover any range of time, but consider a weekly sales plan template if you have a shorter, transactional sales cycle. Plus, a shorter length could help motivate your team if you’re just starting out with sales plans — meeting goals quickly leads to positive sentiment.

The 30-60-90 day sales plan template

The 30-60-90 day template is a standard choice for most teams. It helps you write a sales plan that covers short, medium, and long-term goals.

The 90-day sales plan template

If you have a product that requires demos, meetings, and runs through multiple decision-makers, using a 90-day sales plan for your long sales cycles is a good idea.  

How to write a B2B sales plan template that drives revenue

Your main goal should be to distill your overall business goals into actionable sales objectives, milestones, strategies, and tactics.

This means your B2B sales plan template should — at the very least — include:

Target customers and ideal customer profiles

Role and responsibilities in your team

Revenue goals and sales objectives

Budget and resources

Challenges and obstacles

Key strategies and tactics

Deadlines, milestones, and review periods

To turn that information into a powerful B2B sales plan, follow these steps. 

Step 1. Outline specific revenue and sales goals

In this step, having a birds-eye view of the sales plan is key. Within the revenue and sales goals, you should think about the conversion points along the sales funnel.

Making note of the points within the funnel that transition the potential customer from phase to phase down the funnel is useful as those will be focus points in the overall sales plan. If you’re aware of the conversion points, finding bottlenecks and optimizing the process is easier.

A Leadfeeder example of noting conversion points within the funnel would be:

Demo booked

Demo completed

If the Leadfeeder sales team was having issues closing meeting their targets, they would not only take a look at their revenue and sales goals, but they would also check on each conversion point to see where the disconnect was happening.

On a granular level, B2B sales goals should be anchored to revenue or volume targets. 

For example, your goal might be a revenue target of $30k in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by the final quarter.

Using a volume target might mean 18 new customers per month or 200 sales by the final quarter.

When creating a strong B2B sales plan, you'll want to use both. That gives you more data to play with. 

If you have to pick one metric in your sales plan over another, consider your:

Available resources (staff, budget, data)

Product type (SaaS, agency, physical retailer, etc.)

It’s easy to succumb to wishful thinking at this step. So review your goals against your resources to ensure they’re realistic. 

Setting goals you’re sure to miss isn’t fun for anyone on the team and creates a crying wolf situation over time.

Step 2. Outline your mission and B2B sales plan objectives

Hopefully, you already have your mission and vision statements on paper. If so, grab them. (If not, now is the time!) 

Then write down what you aim to achieve with the sales plan.

It doesn’t have to be lengthy Shakespearean prose that draws applause. This is just a summary of what’s ahead and why it’s included in your sales plan; that’s it.

Include a brief history of the business, too, if possible. This provides context as the plan matures in detail and complexity.

For example: 

Leadfeeder's mission is to help marketing and sales professionals identify site visitors, transform their traffic into qualified leads, and connect to key decision-makers. 

Our goals are to obtain 18 new customers per month, 200 sales by the final quarter, with a final revenue increase of 30 percent. 

This sales strategy plan will cover how we plan to increase salesperson efficiency and test new marketing strategies. 

Step 3. Map out key sales plan milestones, deadlines, and review periods

This is where we get into the details. Deadlines, milestones, and review periods are a key part of your sales plan template.

Your third step is to tie sales and revenue targets to 30-60-90 day goals and set a schedule to review performance with your team.

This gives your plan teeth and signals when you’re falling behind quota so you can stay on track. 

Step 4. Add an ideal client profile to your B2B sales plan

An ICP is a strict definition of an ideal customer .

Including your ICP in your sales plan helps align sales and marketing strategy. It gives insight into what lead generation approach to use.

Let’s say you’re a SaaS company that offers analytical tools to digital marketers. And some of your customers are freelancers and in-house teams.

But, large 50+ employee agencies who buy premium subscriptions are your ideal clients.

And, according to your historical sales data, the best way to reach them is through account-based marketing.

You can now invest in ABM tools like Leadfeeder and training for reps without wondering if it will generate a return. 

Here’s proof — AlertOps uses Leadfeeder to automatically qualify website visitors with over 100 employees. Then, Leadfeeder sends those leads to Pipedrive and the AlertOps reps call on every potential customer.

Within just 30 days of using Leadfeeder with the Pipedrive integration, AlertOps was able to increase their sales demo rate by 700 percent. BAM. 💥

Try it for yourself — sign-up for Leadfeeder  in less than 5 minutes with these simple steps:

Step 1: Begin a free 14-day trial by  signing up here .

STEP 2: Fill in your company name, website address, name, and contact information. We don't sell it, we just want to know who you are. :)

STEP 3: Tell us about your role on your team. This gives us a way to help customize Leadfeeder to your needs.

STEP 4: Select the CRM you use, if we have an integration for it we can let you know how to connect it. You don't need a CRM or any of the ones listed to use Leadfeeder.

STEP 5: Select your marketing tool! If we have an integration we will let you know! If not, we will see what you use and update you on any future integrations!

STEP 6: T ell us about your sales team. This will help us customize your training and support!

STEP 7: Let us know what your main goals are with Leadfeeder. We share this with the team to make sure we can help you attain them.

STEP 8: Get your Leadfeeder Tracker script and install it on your site. You can do this yourself, or select Send to a colleague if someone else on your team will be installing it. This article: How to install Leadfeeder Tracker can help with installation.

STEP 9: Give Leadfeeder Tracker an hour or so to begin reporting - and be sure to take the in-app tour! Once Tracker starts collecting you'll see leads listed like below.

NOTE: If Tracker isn't installed, won't be able to see any leads until the script is on your site! Until you have Leadfeeder Tracker installed you won't have new leads, so make sure you add it to your site as soon as possible when you sign up!

After the Leadfeeder Tracker script is installed properly, it takes about an hour to see the Leads funnel to your Leadfeeder dashboard. If you aren’t sure if it is ‘working’ check out this article for tips on how to verify or reach out to support!

Step 5. Take stock of your sales CRM, tools, and budget

Ever try shoveling snow with a garden spade? (I hope not.) 

The point is, using the wrong tool just makes your life harder. 

If you're attempting to close deals without the right tools and resources for the job, you will get frustrated and, possibly, fail. 

That’s why a summary of your main CRM software, sales tools, budget, and any other predictable expense should be included in your sales plan. 

This will include things like:

Budget allocation

Specific tools and resources

What CRM will be used

Salary, commission, and incentives

Make sure your team has access to the tools it needs to reach your goals. 

Step 6. Delegate roles and responsibilities

So now you know what you want to do, you've mapped out a specific sales strategy plan, and you've made sure you have the tools to get the job done. 

But who is going to do what? 

Next, list the members of your team and the roles they will play in reaching your goals.

Think about:

Who is responsible for prospecting or warming leads up?

Who will handle meetings and appointments?

Who will be presenting product demos/training?

Then, add those answers to deadlines, milestones, and KPIs.

If your sales strategy requires indirect sales activities — like creating content or developing sales material — write that into your sales plan template, too.7. Bring your sales plan template to life with an action plan

The final step is a goal-based action plan.

Carrying the weight of previous steps in your sales plan template, the action plan is where the rubber hits the road.

It brings your sales plan to life by explaining exactly how you’ll meet your objectives.

For example, if your objective is:

Objective: Increase premium subscriptions by 20 percent this quarter, and raise monthly recurring revenue by 2 percent.

Your sales plan will look like this:

Create 3 case studies that convey the benefits of a premium subscription.

Use paid ads and content marketing to promote premium subscriptions.

Create a lead scoring system to focus on leads with high purchase-intent.

Bump referral discounts to premium subscriptions up by 10 percent.

7. Bring your B2B sales plan template to life with an action plan

This is where the rubber meets the road. 

Creating an action plan brings your sales plan to life by explaining exactly how you’ll meet your objectives.

Increase premium subscriptions by 20 percent this quarter, and raise monthly recurring revenue by 2 percent.

Your plan might look like this:

Create a lead scoring system to focus on leads with high purchase intent.

Make sure to link these action points to resources, deadlines, and milestones. 

Who is going to do what? Who will be responsible for managing each project? 

Make this part as detailed as possible so you know exactly how to move forward. 

Your sales plan template

Be sure to use our free sales plan template to create a sales plan. Make the template your own and even test our different versions.

You'll be closing deals in no time.

Note: If your sales plan counts on quality leads, look no further than Leadfeeder. Sign up for a 14-day free Leadfeeder trial today.  

Now that you're here

Leadfeeder is a tool that shows you companies that visit your website. Leadfeeder generates new leads, offers insight on your customers and can help you increase your marketing ROI.

If you liked this blog post, you'll probably love Leadfeeder, too.

Related articles

43 Best Sales Prospecting Tools for 2024

The 3 Best Practices in Sales Prospecting

4 B2B Sales Prospecting Techniques That Work

Leadfeeder knows the companies visiting your website.

Install today to start identifying new business opportunities.

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Strategic Sales Plan Examples: 13 Sales Plan Templates

Casey O'Connor

What Is a Strategic Sales Plan?

When you should implement a strategic sales plan, what to include in your sales plan, 13 sales plan template examples, put your sales plan into action with yesware.

A strategic sales plan is a must-have for any business looking to increase their sales, amp up their revenue, bring a new product to market, or branch into a new territory.

In this article, we’ll go over everything you need to know about strategic sales plans: what they are, when to create one, and exactly what they need to include. We’ll also show you a handful of real-life, tangible sales plan template examples and tips for implementation. 

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• When You Should Implement a Strategic Sales Plan 

A strategic sales plan is designed to guide a sales organization through their overarching sales strategy. It provides them with access to the resources needed to prospect, pitch to, and close new accounts.

Strategic sales plans can include any combination of the following:

• Ideas: If you utilize a certain sales methodology — consultative selling or target account selling , for example — you might outline its key principles and a few tactical examples of it in action in your strategic sales plan. Your strategic sales plan should also include an overview of your target customer.
• Processes: In order for your sales team to reach maximum productivity, it’s important that your sales processes are clearly defined and standardized. Your sales team — both new hires and seasoned vets alike — should be able to refer to your sales plan for a repeatable, scalable process that’s backed by solid metrics. The processes should provide direction to sales reps that allow them to contribute to the company’s goals.
• Tools & Tactics: The best strategic sales plans are more than just high-level strategy and goals. They also include specific, step-by-step strategies that sales reps can implement in sales conversations, as well as the specific tools and content that reps need to close more deals.

Sales plans also typically spell out the organization’s revenue and overall business goals, as well as the KPIs and benchmarks that sales managers and other stakeholders will monitor to determine whether or not those goals are being met.

They should also outline management’s strategic territory design and quota expectations, with specific indicators and data to back those decisions. 

Finally, these sales plans should take into account your current team’s sales capacity and specifically address the acquisition plan for any resources that are not yet available but may be necessary for future growth.

If your sales team doesn’t already have a strategic sales plan in place — that is, one that’s referenced and updated regularly and the product of careful data analysis and inter-team collaboration — you may want to consider creating one. 

Research shows that the majority of the highest-performing sales teams operate under a formalized, closely monitored sales structure. 

On the other hand, most underperforming sales teams lack this structure. 

It’s clear that a well-defined sales plan is one of the prerequisites to optimized sales productivity and success; every salesforce should strive to create and adopt one if they want to meet their sales goals more efficiently.

That being said, there are a few key indicators that signal a need for more urgency in putting a strategic sales plan in place. 

You’re Trying to Increase Sales

A strategic sales plan will help your sales and marketing teams align their processes so that your outreach efforts are tailored to your target audience. 

You’re Looking to Amp Up Your Revenue

For startups and small businesses, attaining as many new customers as possible is usually the name of the game.

For larger or more established businesses, however, the business plan may instead emphasize revenue goals. In other words, the deal size starts to matter much more than deal volume. 

A sales strategy plan can help salespeople target and nurture higher-value accounts. Sales planning can also boost your revenue by illuminating untapped potentials for revenue growth within your existing customer base through cross-selling, upselling , and referrals .

You’re Gearing Up to Launch a New Product

A sales strategy plan is crucial for businesses that are preparing to bring a new product to market.

One last note: for businesses that already use strategic business planning (or for those on their way after reading this article), be sure to update your plan at least yearly. Many businesses at least review their plan, if not update it more formally, on a quarterly basis.

Ultimately, your strategic sales plan will be unique to your company and its specific goals.

Consider including the following components in your strategic business plan. 

Mission Statement

Industry & Market Conditions

Great sales planning cannot be performed in isolation. Your plan must take into account the current market conditions, including any challenges, recent disruptions, or upcoming notable events.

Organization Chart

A sales org chart can range in scope from very simple, like the one above, to more complicated. Some go as far as naming individual employees and outlining their specific responsibilities. 

A detailed org chart is especially helpful for efficiently onboarding new hires.

Product Info & Pricing

No sales plan would be complete without a one-sheet that outlines the features, benefits, and value proposition of your product or service.

It’s also helpful to include information about pricing tiers, as well as any discounts or promotions available for leverage at a sales rep’s discretion.

Compensation Plan

While we have no doubt that you’ve hired only the most intrinsically motivated salespeople, remember the bottom line: cash is king.

Money is the primary motivator for most salespeople, regardless of how truly loyal and hard-working they may be.

With that in mind, it’s a good idea to include your company’s compensation plan and commission structure in your sales plan. This is a surefire way to motivate your team to continuously improve their sales performance. 

Target Market & Customer

Sales Enablement

With the tremendous rise in content marketing, it can be challenging for salespeople to keep track of the various materials available for generating new business.

Branding & Positioning

The strategic sales plan should offer at least a high-level overview of your brand and messaging specifics, including social media presence. Take the time to optimize your company’s LinkedIn presence — it’s a goldmine of new business opportunities.

Marketing Strategy

In today’s day and age, it’s unlikely that your sales and marketing team are working in isolation from one another. At a certain point, sales and marketing strategies start to flow together until they (ideally) perform in harmony.

Still, it’s important to outline the perspective of the marketing team within your strategic sales plan. This will help your salespeople fine-tune their sales pitch and speak more meaningfully to the needs of the customer. 

Prospecting Strategy

Most salespeople report that their number one challenge in lead generation is attracting qualified leads. 

Prospecting can certainly be daunting, but it’s worth the effort to get it right. Tweak and fine-tune the process until you’re sure it’s as efficient as possible. Make sure it’s repeatable and scalable, and map it out within your sales plan. 

Action Plan

Any good strategic sales plan will also include a step-by-step section, much like a playbook. Here, you’ll outline the specific tactics and processes — including scripts, demos, and email templates — that have been proven to move prospects through the sales funnel . 

Be as specific as possible here. This will act as a blueprint for the day-to-day sales activities for your team.

It can be tempting to leave the numbers with the finance department, but financial transparency can go a long way in creating a culture of trust among your sales team.

You don’t need to go through every line item in the spreadsheet, but it’s not a bad idea to include a high-level look at where the dollars are flowing. 

KPIs, Metrics, and Benchmarks

Be sure to give your team a snapshot of how they’re currently performing, with real numbers to back it up.

By doing so, you help them self-initiate regular SWOT analysis of their own sales actions and processes. This will give them an opportunity to right the course if things aren’t going according to plan. 

Tip: Looking to fuel your sales plan with data-backed findings? Grab our free ebook below.

Remember that your company’s strategic sales plan will be highly unique. It may take some time and tweaking to find the components and format that best meet the needs of your business.

Here are 13 sales plan templates to help you get started.

1. Product Launch Plan Template

Sales and marketing teams create a product launch plan when they’re preparing to launch a new product. 

A product launch plan should include your product’s positioning statement , a SWOT competitive analysis, detailed market analysis, sales strategies and tactics, and details about the target market. 

2. Ideal Customer Profile Template

One way to avoid wasting time on unproductive leads is to include an ideal customer profile (ICP) in your sales plan. Here’s a sample : 

This will help ensure your prospecting campaigns are targeted and attract only the most qualified leads from the get-go. 

3. Microsoft Word Sales Plan Template

Here’s a great example of a sales plan goals template , easily accessible through Microsoft Word. 

4. 30-60-90 Day Sales Plan Template

5. Buyer’s Guide Template

A buyer’s guide is a short, simple information sheet that describes your product or service, its features and benefits, and its use. Below is an example of a buyer’s guide from Wayfair . 

In many cases, this document is as useful internally as it is for the customer. 

6. Marketing Alignment Sales Plan Template

If your company hasn’t already formally aligned sales and marketing, start with this type of sales plan template (basic example below), as most traditional sales plans already assume that these two teams collaborate regularly. 

One key component of a marketing alignment sales plan template is the presence of an ideal customer profile and buyer personas. 

The marketing alignment sales plan template should also focus on cohesive, on-brand messaging between marketing campaigns and sales conversations . 

This type of sales plan template helps keep everyone on the same page, increases efficiency, and improves sales effectiveness. 

7. Battle Card Template

8. Territory Design Template

Well-designed sales territories see a 10% – 20% increase in sales productivity. Be low is a basic example of a territory design map.

9. Market Expansion Plan Template

A market expansion plan outlines the strategies, tactics, metrics, resources, and more that teams will use when expanding into a new market or (more commonly) a new geographical territory. 

Market expansion plans also need to include details about distribution expenses and timelines, time zone variations, industry notes or important compliance information, local/cultural expectations and laws, and sometimes more. 

10. Compensation Plan Template

Your compensation plan (including a specific commission structure) is one way to motivate your sales reps.

While it may seem controversial or sensitive, the compensation plan is an important component of a strategic sale plan.

11. Sales Funnel Template

The sales funnel is a visual representation of the sales process. 

12. Marketing Plan Template

Your salespeople should be extremely familiar with the marketing strategies your company is using to attract new leads. Here’s a great example of a template you can use in your sales plan that outlines the different campaigns at work.

This kind of resource will help your reps know who to contact, when, and with what kind of content throughout the sales cycle .

13. B2B Sales Strategy Template

A B2B sales strategy template helps sales teams outline their goals, as well as the specific methodologies and tactics they will use to achieve them. Here’s an example :

The B2B sales strategy plan will vary widely depending on your team’s specific goals and strategies, but most teams include at least the categories highlighted in the template above. 

Yesware is the all-in-one sales toolkit that helps you win more business. It can be an invaluable resource for putting your sales plan into action in a way that’s streamlined, productive, and intuitive.

Communication

Yesware’s meeting scheduler tool helps you skip the back-and-forth when scheduling meetings.

Meeting Scheduler integrates with your Outlook or Gmail calendar and helps your clients automatically schedule meetings with you during times of availability. New events will automatically sync to your calendar. 

​ It can also create meeting types for common calls, like a 30-minute intro call or a 60-minute demo call. These templates can be automatically saved and generated with custom descriptions and agendas so everyone can come prepared. 

Prospecting

One of Yesware’s most popular features is its prospecting campaigns .

This feature enables salespeople to create automated, personalized campaigns with multi-channel touches. 

The tool tracks communication and engagement throughout the process and helps move prospects through the pipeline with little administrative effort from the sales team.

Yesware’s attachment tracking feature helps you find your winning content by tracking which attachments are most often opened and read by your prospects.

You can use these insights to sharpen your content and increase your engagement.

The reporting and analytics tools are also extremely valuable in optimizing your sales plan.  These reports enable salespeople to use data to win more business. The feature generates daily activity, engagement data, and outcomes to show you what is/isn’t working across the board.

Try Yesware for free to see how it can help your team carry out your sales plan today.

This guide was updated on March 6, 2024.

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Free PowerPoint Strategic Planning Templates

By Courtney Patterson | May 30, 2024

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We've collected the top dynamic, editable strategic planning templates in PowerPoint for business strategists, project managers, and executives. 

Included in this article, you’ll find the following:  

• Basic strategic plan template
• 3-year strategic plan template  
• 5-year strategic plan template
• Annual strategic plan template
• Strategic plan progress review template
• Growth strategic plan template

PowerPoint Basic Strategic Plan Template

Download the Basic Strategic Plan Template for PowerPoint

When to Use This Template:  Use this template when you need to communicate a clear strategic plan on a single slide. It's perfect for startup pitches, team meetings, or any scenario that requires a straightforward, impactful presentation of your strategy. 

Notable Template Features:  This template helps small business owners and startup founders distill complex strategic concepts into a digestible, one-page format. Its streamlined design ensures that essential information is conveyed clearly and succinctly, making strategic planning accessible and actionable. 

Dive into this collection of  free strategic planning templates , where you'll find helpful frameworks to implement your strategic vision.

PowerPoint 3-Year Strategic Plan Template

Download the 3-Year Strategic Plan Template for PowerPoint

When to Use This Template:  Use this template when your business is ready to map out the next three years with specific goals and plans. It's great for use when you step into a new phase of growth and need a clear path forward. 

Notable Template Features:  This template’s straightforward layout makes it easy for midsize businesses to track their progress and adjust plans over a three-year period. Each section is designed for clarity, helping you break down goals into yearly milestones and actions. 

Explore these  free nonprofit strategic plan templates , featuring resources for crafting and executing strategic plans in the nonprofit sector.

PowerPoint 5-Year Strategic Plan Template

Download the 5-Year Strategic Plan Template for PowerPoint  

When to Use This Template:  Use this template when deciding where you want your business to be in five years. It's perfect for use when you're setting big goals, such as expanding your company or launching new products.

Notable Template Features:  This five-year strategic plan template is packed with features to help you lay out every step of your journey to success, including an easy-to-follow implementation roadmap. It also features sections for an executive summary and key objectives and initiatives, as well as detailed instructions to help users outline annual goals, actionable steps, and key performance indicators (KPIs). 

See these  free workforce planning templates for help navigating the workforce planning process.

PowerPoint Annual Strategic Plan Template

Download the Annual Strategic Plan Template for PowerPoint

When to Use This Template:  Use this template at the start of the year or any time your team needs to reset and focus on what's coming up in the next 12 months. This template can also be useful at the end of a fiscal year to evaluate progress and set new goals. 

Notable Template Features:  This template simplifies yearly planning, featuring sections for establishing distinct goals, actions, and deadlines. The visually engaging slides include space to write a detailed introduction, vision and mission statements, market analysis, SWOT analysis, year-over-year strategic focus, and more. 

Explore our detailed  guide to using strategic planning frameworks and models for a wide range of complimentary resources and advice from experts.

PowerPoint Strategic Plan Progress Review Template

Download the Strategic Plan Progress Review Template for PowerPoint    

When to Use This Template:  This template is perfect for strategy updates or project milestone assessments. It’s specifically suited for strategy officers, project managers, or team leaders aiming to provide a snapshot of progress and plan for the future. 

Notable Template Features:  This template includes easy-to-understand visual aids, such as charts and progress indicators. It enables quick identification of successes and challenges, streamlining the decision-making process so that you can keep all teams strategically aligned.

PowerPoint Growth Strategic Plan Template

Download the Growth Strategic Plan Template for PowerPoint  

When to Use This Template:  Use this template for strategic planning sessions focused on scaling your business, especially when you're eyeing new markets or aiming to boost your company's footprint. Growth strategists and business development managers will find this template particularly useful when plotting the course for expansion and revenue growth. 

Notable Template Features:  This template includes dedicated sections for mapping out market opportunities, defining growth strategies, and setting clear, measurable targets. Designed for clarity and impact, it includes visual aids such as growth trajectory charts and action plan timelines, making it a powerful tool for teams driving business expansion.

Visualize Business Goals and Strategies with Real-Time Work Management in Smartsheet

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When teams have clarity into the work getting done, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time.  Try Smartsheet for free, today.

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Access our collection of user-friendly templates for business planning, finance, sales, marketing, and management, designed to assist you in developing strategies for either launching a new business venture or expanding an existing one.

You can use the templates below as a starting point to create your startup business plan or map out how you will expand your existing business. Then meet with a  SCORE mentor to get expert business planning advice and feedback on your business plan.

If writing a full business plan seems overwhelming, start with a one-page Business Model Canvas. Developed by Founder and CEO of Strategyzer, Alexander Osterwalder, it can be used to easily document your business concept.

Download this template to fill out the nine squares focusing on the different building blocks of any business:

• Value Proposition
• Customer Segments
• Customer Relationships
• Key Activities
• Key Resources
• Key Partners
• Cost Structure
• Revenue Streams

For help completing the Business Model Canvas Template, contact a SCORE business mentor for guidance

From creating a startup budget to managing cash flow for a growing business, keeping tabs on your business’s finances is essential to success. The templates below will help you monitor and manage your business’s financial situation, create financial projections and seek financing to start or grow your business.

This interactive calculator allows you to provide inputs and see a full estimated repayment schedule to plan your capital needs and cash flow.

A 12-month profit and loss projection, also known as an income statement or statement of earnings, provides a detailed overview of your financial performance over a one-year period. This projection helps you anticipate future financial outcomes by estimating monthly income and expenses, which facilitates informed decision-making and strategic planning. 

If you’re trying to get a loan from a bank, they may ask you for a personal financial statement. You can use this free, downloadable template to document your assets, liabilities and net worth. 

A Personal Financial Statement is a

Marketing helps your business build brand awareness, attract customers and create customer loyalty. Use these templates to forecast sales, develop your marketing strategy and map out your marketing budget and plan.

How healthy is your business? Are you missing out on potential growth opportunities or ignoring areas of weakness? Do you need to hire employees to reach your goals? The following templates will help you assess the state of your business and accomplish important management tasks.

Whether you are starting your business or established and looking to grow, our Business Healthcheck Tool will provide practical information and guidance.

Learn how having a SCORE mentor can be a valuable asset for your business. A SCORE mentor can provide guidance and support in various areas of business, including finance, marketing, and strategy. They can help you navigate challenges and make important decisions based on their expertise and experience. By seeking out a SCORE mentor, you can gain the guidance and support you need to help grow your business and achieve success.

SCORE offers free business mentoring to anyone that wants to start, currently owns, or is planning to close or sell a small business. To initiate the process, input your zip code in the designated area below. Then, complete the mentoring request form on the following page, including as much information as possible about your business. This information is used to match you with a mentor in your area. After submitting the request, you will receive an email from your mentor to arrange your first mentoring session.

Copyright © 2024 SCORE Association, SCORE.org

Funded, in part, through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.

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Success From the Start: Developing a Powerful Realtor Business Plan

12 Minute Read

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The Ultimate Guide for Real Estate Agents to Create a Realtor Business Plan Template

Antonio Del Cueto, CPA

May 14, 2024

"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail," Benjamin Franklin's famous words ring especially true in the high-stakes world of real estate. This timeless piece of wisdom underscores the undeniable importance of a structured approach to any ambitious endeavor, particularly in crafting a realtor business plan .

In the competitive real estate market, success often hinges not just on what you do, but on how well you plan your actions. In this blog, you will unleash the essentials of creating a powerful realtor business plan that aligns your ambitions with actionable strategies, setting you on a path to success.

Further reading: Charting Your Course: Crafting a Winning Real Estate Business Plan

Why You Need a Real Estate Business Plan

Standing out isn't just an option. It's a necessity. A well-crafted business plan isn't merely paperwork. It’s your guide to discovering a successful niche in this competitive field.

Are you a broker or an agent? A solid plan serves as your roadmap, helping you navigate challenges and seize opportunities efficiently. It keeps you focused, ensuring every decision and marketing effort propels you towards your goals.

Set Your Real Estate Business Goals

Setting clear, achievable goals is fundamental in shaping your real estate career. It’s about knowing your destination before you start the journey. For a new real estate business, common goals might include:

• achieving a certain income goal through average commission per sale
• expanding client reach through strategic lead generation
• enhancing brand visibility with open houses and robust social media content.

These targets not only keep you on track but also ensure that you’re aligned with your clients’ needs and local market demands. As you create your plan, remember to consider listing expenses and other costs that could impact your financial milestones.

Realtor Business Plan Template

Using a real estate business plan template can make this process more efficient. A good template will guide you in structuring your plan to cover all necessary aspects, such as developing a client avatar, managing listing photos, and crafting strategies for buyers and sellers.

Key components of the template should help you identify what makes the biggest impact, such as referral systems, new listing strategies, and relationship management . To ensure you’re on track, don’t forget to include a vision statement and a review schedule.

Crafting Your Real Estate Agent Business Plan

Creating a robust real estate agent business plan is vital. It's time to create a comprehensive blueprint that not only guides you through daily tasks but also helps you grow into a successful real estate agent.

Your plan should encompass various strategies to help expand your reach and meet financial goals. You'll need to include a detailed marketing plan , identify key price points, and outline anticipated expenses to consider.

Calculate Your Budget and Resources

Start by estimating all startup costs, including office space, licensing, and technology. These are key investments that lay the foundation for your business. Allocate your budget strategically to areas that drive client acquisition, like marketing, ensuring you prioritize effectively.

Develop realistic financial projections to guide your business, helping you understand when you’re on track or need to pivot. This process is vital for any real estate broker aiming to reach financial goals and expand their business. Don’t panic and take the time to review your finances regularly.

Leveraging Local Demographics for Niche Targeting in Your Real Estate Business Plan

Identifying niche markets through demographic analysis.

Identify your niche market through thorough demographic analysis. Gather and analyze local demographic data to spot emerging lifestyle and consumer trends.

This insight allows you to match property types with the specific needs of different demographics, pinpointing untapped or growing niches. This helps create a focused and effective brokerage that caters to specific client segments.

Customizing Marketing Strategies to Reach Your Ideal Client

In crafting marketing strategies for your real estate brokerage, develop messages that resonate with your target demographic. Select appropriate marketing channels that ensure maximum reach and engagement with your ideal clients.

Engaging actively with the community and leveraging client testimonials are powerful ways to build trust and a strong reputation. This tailored approach will enhance your brokerage's visibility and appeal within your chosen niche.

Enhancing Services to Meet Demographic-Specific Needs

To better serve your target market in real estate, offer specialized services tailored to their specific needs. Build strategic partnerships that enhance your service offerings and create added value for your clients. Continuously update your knowledge and certifications to stay relevant and informed.

Adjust your business strategies based on market conditions and client feedback to ensure you’re always aligned with their needs. This approach helps you grow your real estate business and positions you as a trusted advisor who can make it happen. Remember to review your strategies periodically.

Integrating Technology and Real Estate

Virtual reality (vr) home tours.

VR home tours significantly boost client engagement by allowing potential buyers to explore properties remotely. This saves time and reduces business expenses, making it an integral part of creating a real estate business plan. By integrating VR tours, you successfully transform how you showcase homes.

Drone Photography

Drone photography showcases unique property features, elevating listing attractiveness and potentially boosting conversion rates. Investing time to identify the best tools is essential for any agent looking to improve their sales strategy. This method helps you craft listings that stand out in a competitive market.

AI-Driven CRM Systems

AI-driven CRM systems are revolutionizing how many agents manage their relationships and lead generation. These systems automate routine tasks, allowing you to focus more on personalized service and less on admin. They help you craft a strategy that integrates personal and business goals, keeping you flexible and informed about your progress.

Financial Strategies Beyond the Basics

Leveraging real estate investment trusts (reits).

REITs provide a straightforward path for investing in real estate through collective funds. These funds own and manage properties, returning profits as dividends. By understanding REITs, you can enjoy benefits like steady income and capital appreciation without the complexities of direct property management. These benefits make REITs an attractive option for diversifying your portfolio and gaining exposure to different real estate sectors.

Integrating REITs into your financial plan can create a roadmap to success. Invest the time to identify which REITs best align with your financial goals and track your progress annually. REITs offer flexibility and require less capital than buying property directly, making them a practical choice for many investors.

Sustainable Practices in Real Estate

Understanding the value of sustainable real estate.

Sustainable real estate is not just a trend. It's a smart investment. These properties offer long-term benefits such as reduced energy costs and maintenance savings. They often have regulatory advantages, including tax incentives and easier compliance with building codes, increasing their value. As environmental standards tighten, these green features significantly boost property values, making them highly desirable in the market.

Marketing Green Homes Effectively

In marketing green homes, it's vital to highlight key sustainable features clearly. Create a plan that uses educational marketing to explain the benefits and potential savings associated with features like solar panels and energy-efficient appliances.

Showcasing relevant certifications can also enhance credibility. As you learn strategies on effectively promoting green properties, your marketing efforts can lead to generating more leads—so stay flexible and adapt your strategies as needed.

Further reading: Learn How Real Estate Accounting Services Streamline Property Management

Building a brand in real estate, setting goals for your brand.

First, take the time to identify clear objectives for your real estate brand. Calculate expected returns to understand the impact of your strategies and conduct a thorough year-end review to know if you’re meeting your targets. This step is fundamental in crafting a guide to creating a successful business plan for real estate. It helps pinpoint areas you need to focus on to enhance your brand's growth.

Effective Storytelling in Marketing

Effective storytelling is key to engaging your audience. Craft relatable stories that resonate, incorporating client testimonials to build credibility. Always ensure your stories reflect the true essence of your brand. Certainly, don’t exaggerate or mislead.

Content Marketing Strategies in Real Estate

Elevate your content marketing by hosting informative podcasts and producing engaging videos. These lead-generating tools help establish you as a knowledgeable source in the real estate market.

Utilize visual platforms to showcase the unique aspects of properties you’re marketing. As a relationship manager, it's important to continuously adapt and innovate your strategies to stay relevant and appealing to your audience.

Key Takeaways

• Download the 2024 business planning guide : Make sure to access the latest resources tailored to your industry for informed decision-making and strategic planning.
• Year in real estate : Reflect on the trends, challenges, and successes of the past year to inform your business strategy for the upcoming months.
• Word of warning : Be cautious of potential pitfalls or market shifts and integrate contingency plans into your business strategy to mitigate risks.
• Connect with people : Network with a diverse group of professionals, including clients, fellow realtors, lenders, and industry experts, to expand your knowledge and opportunities.
• Know in the comments : Engage with your online community by encouraging feedback, questions, and discussions to build relationships and foster trust in your expertise.

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