So you’ve put together your sales plan in December or January – time to get selling, right? Gotta hit those KPIs!
But how often do you consult that sales plan? When do you reflect and review? When do you make edits?
We set our goals and do our best, and hopefully – if we’re good at what we do and we’re lucky – we hit those targets easily and don’t look back. We put that sales plan in a drawer and never think about it again.
But you should be thinking about it again. You should have it out and open in front of you, and you should review your progress against it regularly.
Your sales plan should be your roadmap, and you should be using it as one.
Full Steam Ahead
We talked a little bit about setting goals and creating KPIs in our previous blog, and your sales plan is where you should be sprinkling some of that in. It should be a gathering of your sales and pipeline goals, any additional outreach plans, and don’t forget your pledge to track more data!
(Data is your gold, your new oil, your guiding star – love the data. Gather it close. Put it in the CRM. You will thank us later.)
Now hit the phones, or email, or snail mail, or social media, or streets (or however it is you do your prospecting and sales) and get going on that sales plan.
Don’t shove it in the drawer this time, though. We’re going to walk through how you can use the plan you’ve put all this time into to be the best you that you can be.
Keep On Track
The sales plan is your roadmap. You will use it to orient yourself, every step of the way, and check your progress against it. If we’re on a roll, sometimes we can get a little overzealous. We’re all susceptible to tunnel vision, but when we pop back out on the other side, we need to look at where we are. Are we meeting our pipeline goals but way behind on our social media outreach KPIs?
When we created these KPIs, we had an overall goal in mind. For BDPros, social media is all about brand engagement and influence growth. Our end-goal is, of course, driving leads and conversion to clients, but cultivating our following and growing our thought leadership gets our name out there, strengthens our brand, and gives us more tools to use as we make outreach.
If one of your goals is to grow brand engagement, then meeting pipeline goals and sales goals is fantastic, but you’re only going halfway. Your sales plan and the goals you’ve outlined can help you keep on track to hitting your other KPIs.
It’s your reminder to consider your progress more thoughtfully and to really look to future brand success and growth.
If your goal isn’t to grow brand engagement and your social media strategy is entirely to drive leads, use your sales plan to evaluate how you spend your time and resources on social media. Is there a better strategy? Should you even be spending time on social media if you’re meeting and exceeding your goals without it?
Resources are finite. Using your sales plan as a roadmap helps you evaluate how you spend your time, money, effort, or other resources.
Recalculating Route…
Keeping on the roadmap analogy, sometimes in your journey you find you might need to get to your destination another way. Maybe roads are out and there’s a detour, or maybe you found a shorter route, so you re-evaluate the map you are using and chart out a new course.
You want to hit your goals in the most efficient manner possible.
Your sales plan needs to guide you, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make revisions when necessary. We’re not saying revise it all willy-nilly, but if you really hit a bump in the road that is impeding you, take that sales plan you put together and reroute your trip.
Maybe you need to slash the social media budget and put those resources into more email marketing. Maybe you’re not meeting your data tracking goals and need to figure out how to reallocate resources towards that. Regardless of what needs to be done, having your sales plan in front of you means you keep your ultimate goals in mind as you revise your strategy.
Don’t Get Lost
Consulting your sales plan regularly is how you stay on the road and make it to your destination. It is a tool to re-orient yourself, to keep yourself on track, and to make sure you’re making the best use of your time.
Keep it, consult it, revise it, and make it to your destination successfully.