While many entrepreneurs recognize the importance of a written business plan, many fall short when it comes to creating sales plans for their new or existing businesses. A sales plan essentially discloses past performance, comes up with goals and strategies to increase sales and projects future sales; all while staying customer-centric. After all, a business can't effectively and efficiently increase sales if its' customers aren't satisfied with the products or services they're receiving.
Decide whether you're trying to get new business or grow old business or do both. Most often, companies keep both the old and new in mind to make progress with efforts. Decide on the product(s)/service(s) you plan to create the sales plan. Your research may reveal that one product is constantly producing low sales for your company, but it receives good feedback from the customers who do use it. So your sales plan may be based around increasing sales for this particular product.
Take a look at your company's current standing to get an idea of how the market is reacting to any current sales activities. Briefly review past performance as well, to get an idea of past sales and sales activities. Sometimes you can try things that worked in the past or take a past sales activity and tweak it to make it more relevant and useful in the current market.
Come up with a dollar amount or percentage you're trying to achieve in sales. Then, use that number to determine how many products you need to sell or how many clients you need to service to reach your sales goal. Along with the dollar amount and number of products you need to sell, come up with a time frame in which you'd like to reach the target. Remember to outline your sales goals so they're specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. This is also known as setting goals using the S.M.A.R.T. method.
Determine your businesses ideal client. Are they male or female? Are they within a certain age range or income bracket? In addition to understanding who your target client is, consider what they want from your business.
Come up with a list of staff and resources you need to put your strategies in motion. Then, develop a system for tracking projected vs. actual and reporting back to the team and delegate the responsibility to update the information.
Develop strategies for attaining your goal. For example, if your goal is to increase sales of your company's soft drink by 10% in three months, a strategy could be to set up a sampling display for two weeks at supermarkets that only generate 50 sales a month of your soft drink. The strategies you come up with should also follow the S.M.A.R.T. method.
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