How to Develop a Sales Business Plan
Business planning is a crucial step to sales success. A good business plan helps solidify your goals, focus your activities, and measure your success. Here's how to develop a sales business plan.
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Instructions
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Summarize your sales business. What is your business' mission? What is your product or service, and your sales process? What significant achievements have you made already, and what are your goals for the future? Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, and dated (for example, "sell 100 units by February").
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Analyze your market. Who buys what you're selling? What are their demographics (age, gender, special interests, etc.)? Are there other groups you haven't considered that can use your products or services? Where can your market be found? What groups do they belong to? What do they read? How do you plan to reach them? Via advertising? Referrals? Cold calls or walk-ins? Networking?
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Check out the competition. If you have a sales territory, you may not be competing with salespeople from your own company, but you'll still be competing with other companies that have similar products and services. You need to know about these companies so you can better outline your company's strengths to your prospects. Who offers products and services like yours? What are those companies' strengths and weaknesses? How is your product, service, or company different? How can you highlight those differences as a benefit to your prospects?
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Outline your day-to-day activities. What specific actions do you need to take every day to reach your sales goals? How many calls do you need to make? How many presentations? How many marketing tactics?
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Evaluate your progress. Even if you're having success and are reaching your goals, take time to look at your plan to identify what specifically is working. This can allow you to get rid of what's not working to focus on activities that are profitable, and therefore achieve even more success. Evaluating your efforts can also help you if things aren't working, because you can figure out what's going wrong and fix it quickly.
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