Driving sales and increasing the company’s revenue is challenging without a strategic sales plan.
According to IRC Sales Solution, a sales consulting company, only 2% of sales go through during the first contact. That means almost all of your sales go down the drain if you don’t follow up and take other essential measures that are part of a sales plan.
So, if you want to maximize the financial rewards and other benefits you’ll get from converting your target audience into clients, keep reading.
In this article, let’s discuss how to create a strategic sales plan. First, we’ll elaborate on what it is, why your company needs it, types of sales strategy and more.
This way, you can create a brilliant plan to make your sales process stand out.
A strategic sales plan is a streamlined roadmap of your sales process. It breaks down the steps you need to take to make a sale.
The goal of a strategic sales plan is to provide your company with clear objectives and tactics to generate revenue and meet or exceed targets.
An inbound sales strategy is where potential customers reach out to your company, while an outbound sales strategy is an approach where your sales team reaches out to potential customers.
A strategic sales plan should include the following elements: vision and mission statement, sales goals, revenue, ideal customer profile (ICP), buyer persona, value proposition and budget.
To develop a strategic sales plan, outline your sales pipeline, revise your ICP, do a SWOT analysis, sync with sales and marketing teams, define your sales processes and select the right tools.
Visme’s intuitive content tool empowers sales teams of all sizes to create and execute killer sales strategies, close more deals and drive revenue over the top.
What is a Strategic Sales Plan?
A strategic sales plan is a streamlined roadmap of your sales process. It breaks down the steps you need to take to make a sale.
The goal of a strategic sales plan is to provide your company with clear objectives. Without one, everyone will be all over the place and not know what to do.
Here’s what strategic planning for sales can do for your company:
Communicate value: The sales planning process enables your team members to understand your offerings, communicate your value proposition and increase their productivity.
Align your departments: If your team members aren’t on the same page, it can lead to poor work performance, confusion and unnecessary workplace drama.
Facilitate sales enablement: It improves how you manage time, data, and other resources. As a result, it helps your sales team produce better results.
Types of Sales Strategies
While all sales strategies can be effective. not all approach sales the same way.
There are two types of sales strategies. An inbound sales strategy is where potential customers reach out to your company.
Examples of inbound sales strategies include:
Thought leadership
Creating actionable goals (and following through)
Authoritative marketing
The second is an outbound sales strategy. This approach refers to the results of a salesperson reaching out to potential customers. Below are examples of outbound sales strategies:
Cold calling
Social selling
Guest post distribution
Build relationships with customers and drive sales growth
Reach out to prospects with impressive pitch decks and proposals that convert
Monitor clients' level of engagement to see what they are most interested in
Build a winning sales playbook to maximize your sales team's efficiency
A strategic sales plan is only effective because of the elements contained in it. Here, we’ll dive into the elements of a sales plan.
Mission Statement: Provide essential background information about your company. Here, you can include the history, people, founding figures, and more.
Sales Goals: List down goals that you want your sales team to achieve. Make sure they’re realistic and doable. For example, your goal is to sell 50 pieces of your product by the end of the month or 500 products at the end of the first quarter.
Company vision: Share your future outlook for the company. You can elaborate on this by discussing a hypothetical scenario of where you see your company in five years.
Revenue goals: When doing sales strategy planning, talk about how much money you want to make. Like how you approached your sales goals, these also have to be realistic and doable. For example, you want to make $5 million in quarterly revenue.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): You can’t possibly do sales strategy planning without identifying your sales ideal customer profile or establishing a buyer persona. This will help you market and sell better to your target.
Value proposition: Discuss the unique value you bring. Point out what sets you apart from your competition and how you can make lives better.
Budget: Be transparent about your company’s finances. Outline how much money you allocated to a specific project and discuss concrete ways you plan to spend it.
How to Build a Strategic Sales Plan
Building a sales plan or developing sales strategies takes time and effort. But how you build can make or break your sales process. Let’s look at how you can put together an effective strategic sales and marketing plan.
Outline Your Sales Pipeline
Your sales pipeline is a visual representation of your sales process.
If you don’t understand it, you won’t know how you make sales, who your customers are, what’s stopping potential customers from buying from you and more.
Here are ways you can create a more effective outline:
Break down your sales process: Look into the necessary sales activities for closing deals. Simplify each activity and ensure they’re doable.
Note revenue targets: Factor in your goals. And detail how many sales you need to achieve the target.
List prospects: Focus on the people interested in your offer. Include their contact details.
Visualize your sales pipeline and track customer’s journey using this funnel chart template.
Not vibing with your sales and marketing teams can be problematic. It’s like the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
To get your sales and marketing teams in sync, here are things you should do:
Agree on a sales strategy: Conduct a survey and ask about the most liked sales strategy by both teams. Then, pick a winning approach and standardize it as the strategy to use.
Communicate often: Get your sales and marketing teams on the same page. Invite all members to a Slack group or similar so they can ask questions and resolve them before they escalate.
Encourage collaboration: Aside from talking, both teams should learn to work together. Use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool where your marketing team can send leads to your sales team for qualification. Both teams should share their feedback to get more qualified leads in the future.
Create an effective sales playbook to keep everyone in sync and increase productivity during the sales process. We’ve also got a wide range of sales playbook templates to help you get started.
Sales Management Association, a global professional association for managers, states that 90% of companies using a guided sales process are top performers.
But before you create a well-defined guided sales process, here are the steps you must follow first:
Understand your overall process: Identify different steps of your sales process. This way, you can determine which steps to get rid of and which ones to keep.
Review the facts: Focus on the numbers and figures. Find out which steps and tactics produced the most sales and why. Then replicate it on your upcoming guided sales process.
Conduct sales forecasts: Create an estimate of what you want to sell and the estimated profit. From here, figure out how your process can help meet your projections.
Brief & Assign Tasks to Your Team
Getting your team to perform at your desired level can be challenging. It may even be impossible, especially if they don’t have the proper knowledge, guidance and skills.
Below are the ways you can help your team finish the briefs assigned to them:
Offer training: Show your team how to approach things. You can train them on-site or create instructional materials and upload them on an e-learning system that everyone can access.
Use a mentor-mentee system: Partner a junior-level team member with a senior-level member. If there are no juniors and seniors, use a buddy system. This creates accountability and a sense of responsibility among team members.
Elaborate on your points: Discuss matters in complete detail and be open to questions. Most importantly, be patient while addressing all their concerns.
Select the Right Sales Tools & Software
Creating a strategic sales plan can be difficult. But you can automate certain tasks using the right software.
Below are ways to select the right tools to help develop and execute your sales plan:
Go with simple and easy-to-understand tools: Your chosen software must have a plain interface and an effortless navigational system. Ultimately, it depends on what your team is comfortable using, so be sure to test the best tools to find the right one.
Choose tools with CRM integration: They help transfer all your customer information seamlessly into the software, allowing cross-referencing of customers and sales data in a single dashboard.
Use programs with analytics features: Leverage analytics data to help you determine which steps in the process are the most and least effective. From here, make the necessary adjustments to improve performance moving forward.
Visme is an all-in-one platform for creating visual content and presentations, such as a strategic sales plan. Our drag-and-drop functionality and a wide assortment of features can help you design a masterpiece even without design experience.
Visme also allows you to add users and collaborate on a project. Your sales and marketing team can collaborate effectively and work on your sales plan together at the same time. Once the plan is complete, you can share and publish your sales plan for all to see.
Salesforce is one of the most popular sales platforms and is also big on customer service and marketing automation.
First, you can build personalized campaigns with it. Gather unique information about specific customers to deliver a memorable customer experience.
Also, if you have repetitive processes, use the tool to execute them. This helps you save more time which you can commit to more important tasks.
Finally, you can streamline your sales process by integrating tools in your current sales tech stack with Salesforce.
HubSpot
Here’s another tool that fits the bill if you’re looking to develop a sales strategy. HubSpot is a marketing and sales platform designed to elevate sales. It aligns both sales departments, implements a collaborative culture, fosters sales enablement and more.
The platform lets you address each potential customer uniquely via progressive profiling. This feature saves you time, avoids monotony and boosts sales as a result.
You can review customer accounts by collecting detailed explicit and implicit information about them. This allows you to profile each one more effectively.
Monday.com
Monday.com is a project management tool that provides no-code building blocks to shape your workflows.
For instance, you can use the Date Column to sync tasks with popular calendars. You can sync the tool with Microsoft Outlook, iCal, and Google to keep you on track with your schedule.
To declutter your project board, use the Batch Actions feature. This lets you deploy, archive and delete a group of items with a click of a button.
It doesn’t matter what your favorite sales tool is or whether you use a combination of different tools, Visme’s got you covered. Our library of native integrations lets you connect to and make the most of any tool you already use.
Best Practices for a Strategic Sales Plan That Wins
Creating a strategic sales plan increases your odds of making a sale. And if you want to double your chances, refer to the discussions below:
Document Your Sales Plan in a Presentation
Documenting your sales plan allows you to analyze it. It’s how you can identify the winning and losing elements of your plan and correct them.
Here are tips to help you present your sales plan:
Clarify objectives and goals: Communicate your value. Inform the audience of what, how, and why you’re selling.
Use templates: In this article, we've shared compelling sales plan templates to help you plan your sales strategy. You can also dive into our extensive template library to find the perfect template for your needs.
Talk less - Focus on the data in your presentation and minimize your discussions. Feel free to entertain questions, too.
According to a study by Brevet, a sales consulting firm specializing in revenue growth, 80% of sales need five follow-ups.
So, if you don’t initiate a follow-up (and more follow-ups), you’re losing a big portion of your sales.
Here are ways you can follow up with leads:
Provide value - Send exclusive content to them that isn’t included in the original sales proposal. If you’re selling software to leads, create a short personalized video on how they can use your tool to help them achieve their goals faster. Going the extra mile shows your dedication to cater to their needs.
Use variety - Email the lead if you captured them by phone or vice versa. Contact them on social media networks, too.
Space it out - Understand the lead’s schedule. Know when they’re busy and the best times they’ll say yes to your offer. Follow-up every other week, for example.
Get Feedback from Customers & Team Members
Getting feedback is vital. It’s how you can learn about your selling points and what people think you should do for improvement.
Below are ways you can get feedback:
Conduct interviews - Approach your customers and ask them for a quick chat. Take their feedback in stride and use it to improve your sales plan.
Distribute surveys - Reach out to your customers and team members. Then, share a link to a survey with relevant questions.
Check social media - Sometimes, customers express their thoughts about you even if you don’t ask them. If you have a social media page, make sure to engage users and find out how they feel about your brand.
Analyze Results & Data
See how well you’re doing. If your plan is effective, you can only know about it based on the actual results.
Below are ways to analyze results and data.
Use analytics tools - You can use Visme’s Analytics if you want to see how many people viewed or interacted with your sales plan.
Measure results in line with goals - Review your goals. Then, use the results as the basis to find out how close you are to achieving them.
Set Sales KPIs - Like top-performing sales teams, track your progress using impactful key performance indicators (KIPs). They include customer acquisition costs, average profit margins and monthly sales growth.
Pivot & Adjust Your Plan
If your plan seems problematic, make changes. Things may not go as planned, and that’s okay.
Below are ways you can make changes to your plan:
Communicate the need to pivot and adjust - Show honesty and transparency. Share the reason you need to make changes.
Increase customer engagement - Adapt to the medium customers are most convenient in communicating with you. For example, include Zoom in your sales approach for those who prefer video calls. Also, make live chat and phone options available to encourage customers to contact you regarding their issues. Conversely, take the proactive approach by asking them for their concerns via email.
Re-invent your methods - Adapt to current trends and best practices, such as inbound selling, muti-channel personalized experiences and customer success. Implementing these strategies allows you to modernize your approach so you can target better leads and increase your conversions.
Add Visme to Your Sales Team Toolbox
Making a sale may not be simple. But you should know what to do from the get-go if you follow the advice from this post.
With a strategic sales plan, you can prime your organization for increased sales and conversions!
But to get there, creating an effective sales plan is your best bet. Start by signing up to use Visme, then take advantage of our rich template library to jumpstart your creativity. Also, use the platform to create other compelling sales materials.
Christopher Jan Benitez is a freelance writer who specializes in digital marketing. His work has been published on SEO and affiliate marketing-specific niches like Monitor Backlinks, Niche Pursuits, Nichehacks, Web Hosting Secret Revealed, and others.
