Making a Sales Plan
Your customer research (Chapter 4) and your marketing plan (Chapter 5) will give you an excellent place to start developing a sales plan. Jumping haphazardly from one sales effort to the next is not the best way to go about selling your product or service. Instead, a sales plan helps you to further identify your target market, prioritize your leads, and track your success.
Your target market analysis includes who your customers are, where they are located, and demographic information (such as age, income, family size, and education), or your market analysis could cover defining characteristics for business or government clients (business or office size, location, customers, and services provided).
Your sales plan is simply a document that establishes goals for the number of leads or potential customers whom you want to reach and the number of actual customers that you want to attract. Those leads can be divided into strategies that will achieve them.
Sales Leads
Your sales plan should list the various sources of customer leads (these should come from your marketing plan strategies, such as word-of-mouth recommendations, drive-by inquiries, and phone directory inquiries), how many leads you expect to generate from each source, the percentage of those leads that you think will turn into actual customers, and how many customers that translates into.
For example, if you're in the pet grooming business, and you've set a goal of $30,000 in revenue for the year with the average revenue from a grooming session at $40, you need 750 grooming sessions a year. If your average customer has their pet groomed three to four times a year, you'll need approximately 200 different clients.
While all of this can be difficult to estimate when you're starting out, the advertising representatives from various media and your network contacts, such as other members of trade organizations, should be able to help you with some of the information you need. If you keep track of your leads and customers — including asking customers where they heard about you — in the first year, you'll be able to greatly improve the accuracy of your estimates.
Timing
Your sales plan also needs to schedule your sales efforts. The time you spend on selling will be affected by how busy you already are, any seasonal variations in your business, and the strategies that you plan to employ (trade shows may only happen a few times a year, for example, while telephone directories generally have an annual deadline for the print edition). Research these factors, to establish an annual calendar that shows which sales efforts you'll be making and when.
Ensure that you're ready to handle the workload that could be generated by your sales efforts. If you're just starting out, your major push could wait for a month or so after you open your doors to give you time to work out any bugs in your daily routine.
Keep in mind that your sales plan timing needs to be reflected in your business plan's revenue projections too. If you're planning a major promotional sales push in April and May, then your business should show a corresponding jump in revenue as a result of that push. If you're a retailer, the increase should be immediate. If you're a contractor, however, you may not see the revenue jump for several months after you make the sales.
Tracking Sales Effectiveness
The goal with any sales plan is to maximize the return on your efforts. To refine future efforts and keep costs in line, track the results of every promotion you try. How many calls did the ad in the local weekly generate? How does that compare with your radio campaign or your direct-mail special offer? Which seems to work best at bringing leads in and which offers the highest conversion rate of leads to actual paying customers?
In this way, you'll be able to compare the costs and the effectiveness of various sales efforts. As you plan your future sales, these past results can help you to put your time and resources to work where they'll create the best effect.
