A sales plan is an essential tool for any business, especially in B2B. It provides a roadmap for achieving your sales goals. By clearly outlining your strategies and tactics, a well-crafted sales plan will keep you on track and help you measure your progress along the way.
Creating a sales plan can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. This article lays out a structure for a sales plan. We will extend this article over time.
In this post, we’ll cover
- What Is a Sales Plan?
- What Is the Sales Planning Process?
- What are typical elements of a sales plan?
- Structure of sales strategy / quarterly sales plan
- Sales plan in one sentence
- Sales plan examples
What Is a Sales Plan?
A sales plan is a document that encompasses goals, target customers, and sales strategy aimed at attaining necessary results. It enables a company’s leadership and sales team to plan concrete measures and initiatives to achieve the defined business outcomes as well as predict business-related risks and steps to avoid them.
What Is the Sales Planning Process?
- Gather historic sales data
- Define your objectives including existing business plans
- Define your assumptions going into sales planning
- Determine metrics for success
- Determine current situation
- Start sales forecasting based on current performance
- Identify gaps to success metrics and business plan
- Ideate new initiatives to close gaps
- Involve stakeholders for feedback
- Outline action items and determine ressource requirements
What are typical elements of a sales plan?
A typical sales plan includes the following sections:
- Executive summary
- Key assumptions
- Target customers and related products / services
- Revenue Targets, Business Plan
- Strategies and Tactics (incl. Marketing initiatives)
- Pricing and Promotions, marketing and sales channels
- Deadlines and responsibiliites
- Team structure
- Resources
- Market Conditions
Structure of sales strategy / quarterly sales plan
A structured sales plan provides clarity and guidance in a turbulent environment. Based on over 100 projects, we provide you with a suggested structure to map out specific goals, action items, and target dates for progress.
Executive summary
- What targets will you hit
- Which measures are you taking
- Which (incremental) ressources do you need
Key assumptions for this sales plan (examples)
- Focus on product A and region B to generate the revenues
- Keep existing product mix
- Product improvements / innovation
- Other departments plans / confirmed actions
Target customers and related products / services
- Overview
- Customer segments, ABC-analysis
- Products
- Geographical split
- Market size and penetration today and in future
Business Planing
- Triangulation of plans
- Performance based on previous performance (“bottom-up 1”)
potentially: variance analysis of actual results vs. plan of previous timeframe
- Performance based on realistic & ambitious estimates from managerial experience (“bottom-up 2”)
- top-down targets from business plan (communicated towards shareholders) (“top-down”)
- Gap analysis between today “bottom-up 1”, “bottom-up 2” and “top-down”
- Performance based on previous performance (“bottom-up 1”)
- Decision, which plan (named “sales plan“) will be basis for next timeframe
- Potentially: sensitivity analysis for baseline (goal: understand how much initiatives are relying on these factors)
- number of resources / seller
- avg. revenue per deal
- ramp-up time per seller
- target achievement per seller
- product / country / margin mix
- Employee churn
- Customer churn
- As needed: “sales plan” breakdown to quarters, months, weeks and days.
- As needed: breakdown “sales plan” to teams and individuals incl. 10-20% buffer for every hierachy level
- Prepare: Development of measures to fill gap to get to “sales plan”
Initiatives and measures
- 3-5 key initiatives to deliver the “sales plan” as outlined above
- Each initiative is linked to 3-7 specific measures linked to metrics and financial outcomes
- Per initiative: sensitivity analysis (goal: understand how much initiatives are relying on these factors )
- number of resources / seller
- avg. revenue per deal
- ramp-up time per seller
- target achievement per seller
- product / country / margin mix
- employee churn
- customer churn
- Each measure is linked to one person responsible and has a clear timline
- Ideally: every initiative can be measured by specific KPIs (to see if progress is made)
Required resources
- FTE resources Marketing
- FTE resources Sales
- Budgets (team, budget for marketing, new tools or incentives / SPIFFs)
- Resources of other teams (examples)
- IT support for implementation of new sales tools
- Product management for changes to product / services
- Customer Success / Account Management
- Operations
Channels
- Which marketing channels will be used
- Which sales channels will be used
Overall outcome of a sales plan
- Overview: which team approaches what type of customers through which channel and which product / service offering
- Planning of all initiatives and tasks for upcoming timeframe incl. responsibilities
- Financial planning sales / P&L in collaboration with controlling department
- Overview of all requirements to other departments / companies and shareholders to achieve the plan
- Outlook for timeframe following the planned timeframe (t+1)
Sales plan in one sentence
We will achieve an overall goal of 1,3 m€ in net new ARR in Q1/23. For this I need 500 k€ (in budget and headcount, 100 k€ incremental budget required) and the defined support from the organization / shareholders.
Sales plan examples
Over time, we will link examples of sales plans in this section.
