Sales Planning Strategy – Your Ultimate Guide
Your sales planning strategy (also known as account targeting sales strategy), is one of the more important parts of your marketing and sales efforts.
The reason it’s so important is because it’s crucial to get your product in service in front of the right prospects and potential clients – as well as forming the foundation and basis behind the kinds of sales activities you’ll be doing to win clients.
In this article we’ll look at what a sales planning strategy is, the types of sales targets to monitor, and how to find your market.
Sales Planning Strategy – Your Complete Guide
What Is A Sales Planning Strategy?
A sales planning strategy is the process used to find out who your potential clients are, and how you can reach them in a way to bring awareness to your product or service.
Depending on your product or service, there are many different ways in which you could potentially reach them (which we’ll cover in this article).
Your sales planning strategy is important because it allows you to formulate a way to get the right type of exposure for your business; in which you can then connect with prospects and win sales.
Related article: Using A SWOT Analysis For Sales Planning
How Do You Find Your Ideal Customers Or Clients?
When you’re selling a product or service, you first need to niche out what kind of people will benefit from it.
This should be the first part of your sales planning strategy.
Thinking anyone will benefit from it, and that everyone is your potential customer is one of the quickest ways at failing at this task.
The reason being is you’re only going to have so much advertising spend, and time to reach people. By trying to reach everybody, the chances of burning your advertising spend greatly increases, and you won’t correctly resonate with one type of ideal client.
If you try to serve everybody – you’ll end of serving nobody.
By creating a niche, it allows you to focus and hone in your efforts on serving one type of prospect, so your messaging and brand aligns and resonates with that person. Secondly, it allows you to focus your time, effort and ad spend on getting more exposure within that niche.
The first exercise is to understand – who would ideally benefit from this product or service and secondly; who would pay for this product or service?
Many people may love what you’re selling; but if you fail to target people who would actually buy it, you’ll be no better than prospecting to people who don’t qualify.
Related article: The Art Of Targeted Selling
Next – List Your Ideal Prospects
Once you have an understanding of the types of people or businesses that will buy what you’re selling, the next part of your sales planning strategy is to list down who you’d want to have as ideal clients.
Once you have your list, you’ll then need to work out where they hang out.
They may be on Facebook.
Perhaps the qualified decision maker may be on LinkedIn?
Once you understand where your potential clients are hanging out, you can start putting together what kind of campaign to use to create brand awareness and reach them.
Outreach In Your Sales Planning Strategy
Depending on what you’re selling and what kind of client you’re trying to attract; you may need to use inbound marketing efforts, or outbound efforts in your sales planning strategy.
Inbound marketing is the process to attract leads to you; using a sales funnel and marketing system.
Outbound marketing is the process of reaching out to your prospects directly, using either cold calling, email, or direct messaging efforts.
To learn more about prospecting, click the related article below.
Related article: Two Types of Sales Prospecting Methods For More Sales
Setting Your Targets
An important step in your sales planning strategy, is knowing the following information:
- Profit do you make per product sold
- How many people do you need to speak with/ contact to get a meeting
- The number of meetings you need to attend, to win a sale
- What is the lifetime value of a client
To increase your ratio of winning sales for every person you meet, you’ll need sales training; particularly on following a consistent sales process.
The lifetime value of a client is important to know, because this will inform you how much a customer is potentially worth.
If they buy from you once, it may be expensive acquiring that person and not profitable.
However, if they continue buying from you again and again – it gives you more room to budget your advertising spend to acquire a customer.
Once you understand the above metrics, you can now set your sales targets.
Depending on what you have come up with numbers and metrics wise; the following may apply to you.
- Daily sales target
- Weekly sales target
- Your monthly sales target
- How many sales per quarter
- The number of sales per year/ annum to hit your goals
Sales Planning Strategy – Final Thoughts
Your sales planning strategy is crucial for your business to succeed, because if your potential clients don’t know you exist, you won’t remain in business.
You’re better off having less people to speak with who are qualified for your offer, versus speaking to many people who don’t qualify for your offer.
Keep it simple, yet focused. By doing so, it’ll be easy to communicate to your sales team, and it will be easier to stay focused on what you need to do to win more clients.
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