An essential part of building a successful business is planning for it. A sales plan is a revenue-generating tool for your business. For your sales strategy to be effective, you need a proven and winning plan that includes realistic goals, sales tracking, future expectations, etc.
A sales plan is an effective tool for any business to drive revenue and reduce risks. This article is for business owners, entrepreneurs, managers, or team leaders who want to create a successful sales plan.
What is a Sales Plan?
A sales plan is a business strategy document outlining its goals, objectives, and strategies to achieve revenue or sales targets. It also defines and identifies a business’s target audience and potential obstacles. A business needs an effective sales plan to:
- Define the business’s revenue goals and objectives
- Create strategic direction
- Outline team members’ roles and responsibilities
- Track progress
A sales plan includes target audience, revenue goals, metrics to track performance and goals, tools, etc. In addition to that, a sales plan also has risks and pain points that might occur, as well as solutions to solve those.
How does it impact Business Goals?
Having a revolutionary product or providing excellent services is great, but it won’t promise sales unless you have implemented a winning sales and marketing plan. An ideal sales plan will help you define and build a roadmap toward your business goal.
A sales plan will help your business goal in the following way:
- It will help you understand your business’s current situation and future business goals and how to reach there.
- It helps you get clarity and avoid any disruptions by clearly defining objectives, roles, and responsibilities.
- It will help you justify your business model and goal in front of investors and lenders.
- It helps the team to stay focused and motivated on the business goals.
You are going to need a sales plan for different stages of your business or startup. If your business is pre-revenue, then a sales plan will help you validate ideas, find product market fit, know your target audience, and generate the first set of customers. I
f your business is in the growth or fundraising stage; then you need a sales plan to expand your team, scale your business, reduce churn rate, optimize processes, and validate spending to investors.
Importance Sales Plan
The following are the benefits of having an effective sales plan
- Increased Customer Satisfaction: Businesses that provide a high level of customer satisfaction experience a comparatively 20% increase in sales. A sales plan helps the team to create a strategy and implement them to improve customer satisfaction. Increased customer satisfaction leads to positive word-of-mouth referrals and increased sales.
- Better Team Performance: An outstanding sales plan helps the team outline their roles and responsibilities and helps them stay on track. It provides clear goals and guidelines for the sales team to follow. It helps them increase productivity by allowing them to follow a sales process and reach their targets.
- Resource Allocation: A sales plan helps team leaders and managers better understand what works and what doesn’t, which in turn help them to allocate resources effectively.
- Improves Decision Making: A sales plan provides relevant data and insights to help the business make informed decisions. It provides and helps track essential metrics like conversion rates to make data-driven decisions and create sales strategies.
- Increased Sales/Revenue: A clear sales plan and sales strategy result in increased sales in the long run. With an effective sales plan, you start tracking important metrics, making better decisions, creating a roadmap for sales effort, making sure resources are used effectively, etc., which results in a higher level of success.
Here’s a list of the best platforms to get your professionally designed and editable sales plan templates:
Template Lab
Template Lab provides simple sales templates that anyone can use to organize their sales goals. Download the sales plan templates and customize them per your goals and strategies to measure your progress in achieving your business goals effortlessly.
They offer Microsoft Office files containing sales plan tables, pie charts, graphs, diagrams, etc., to enable you to create a practical tracking sheet.
It makes it easy to create operation plans, analyze and determine the risk factors and create the most efficient method to overcome them, identify the ideal target market, meet financial goals, etc. Organizing pre-defined objectives and goals with proper marketing strategies with these templates will surely boost the organization’s profits.
Smartsheet
Smartsheet is an online platform that helps you with various templates designed for planning, tracking, automating, reporting on projects, and more. It offers an advanced spreadsheet-style tool that helps manage several business projects in one place.
This powerful tool provides many functionalities with robust collaboration features and a user-friendly interface to enhance productivity and project-management capacity. I
f you are already familiar with Google Sheets and Excel, Smartsheet can definitely level up your efficiency. Signing up on Smartsheet, you can get a free 30-day trial to check out this exceptional project-management solution.
Monday
Monday is an excellent choice for professionals looking to manage projects at business and want to bring everything, such as the goals and objectives of the company, roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders, the targeted market, and the roadmap to address that market in one frame.
It offers a project management solution along with a dedicated sales CRM at a reasonable price.
Monday.com is easy-to-use and provides a seamless experience in automating the sales process, keeping communication in sync, managing leads, organizing deals, managing backlogs, and many more. Overall, the platform is absolutely suitable for businesses of any size.
Office Timeline
Office Timeline breaks down your complex project data into smaller parts in PowerPoint timelines; Gantt charts can create a clear roadmap for your business quickly.
It offers a clear project timeline to visualize sales targets, the most suitable approach for the target market, inspire the team, equip them with the best sales tactics, review the achievements and backlogs, etc.
This presentation software also allows you to create stylish, detailed, engaging project visuals for a high-level presentation that everyone will understand. Its flawless integration with Microsoft Excel, Wrike, and Smartsheet makes import and export easy. It is one of the best choices at a reasonable price for any level of user.
Hubspot
Hubspot is another strong contender in the areas of sales & marketing, CRM, and customer support. It has several valuable features that make it an excellent tool for managing and organizing a business’s sales operations.
With Hubspot, you can make a simple, actionable plan for your team that they can easily understand and have a clear idea of how to achieve it and what support they will need during the process.
To create intelligent plans on budgets, marketing strategies, positioning, and other topics, Hubspot becomes a solid application to use for sales professionals.
Venngage
Venngage is an excellent tool with a simple user interface that provides infographic templates that enables you to create a roadmap with organized steps to hit the targets in your own designs.
You can create eye-catching visuals for essential pieces of information like target breakdowns, process flows, etc., and outline them with icons and illustrations. You can customize your sales plan by adding your own photos too.
The templates provided by Venngage allow you to make the plan concise by keeping everything in order. These built-in features are surprisingly intuitive and easy to use; you also get outstanding customer support with Venngage.
ACT
ACT is a powerful, multifaceted CRM and marketing automation tool that can take your business revenue to the next level. ACT is an exceptional choice for small and mid-sized businesses trying to sell more and wanting to have a consumer base.
These free templates from ACT can help you pinpoint your target market and mark your company’s position in that market. Create a clear roadmap with these templates with your own strategies for upcoming months, quarters, or years effortlessly.
Slidebean
Check out Slidebean to make a short and sweet sales plan to maximize your potential. It is an easy-to-use, first and simple presentation tool. If you want to strategize the tactics for building a customer base, these sales plans can help you organize sales events for your company’s upcoming years.
You can create professional and visual presentations which may replace Powerpoint PPTs. These Slidebean templates can save up your time and still help you in making a to-the-point sales plan. You can easily share and collaborate with others; it allows exploring your plans in PDF formats.
Best Templates
Best Templates gives you access to 5000+ Powerful Templates, Forms, Documents & Designs. After subscribing, you can buy a single template too. These templates are professional-standard made by specialists.
All these templates are editable and customizable as per your need; you can decorate them as per your sales plans or outline your strategies.
You can download and edit these high-quality designs as needed on MS Word and Pages; it’s that simple. You’ll have lifetime access to these documents, and you can share them digitally over social platforms, or you can print them out.
Sample Templates
Sample Templates provide over 22 free sales plan templates in Google Docs, MS Word, PDF, and Excel format. The editable templates are available for various industries, such as real estate, software, retail, etc.
Some other types of sales plan templates provided by this platform are strategic sales plans, monthly sales plans, daily sales plans, weekly sales plans, sales development plans, etc.
It provides paid Pro and Business plan, which allows users to download unlimited templates and provide support through email, chat, and phone. The paid version also provides AI, document, and design editing tools. The templates provided by Sample Templates are for personal, client, and commercial use.
Final Words
Planning is the most crucial aspect of success, and sales planning will help you hit your sales target. A business needs an effective sales plan to build its roadmap to success. In this article, you will find the best templates to get your sales plan and customize it to your needs.
One thing to remember is that sales planning is not a one-time thing; you need to keep optimizing and updating the sales plan as your business progresses and dynamics change. Lastly, keep tracking your performance through the right metrics and KPIs.
You may also explore some best sales engagement platforms to transform your sales process.
