You can buy and hire all the resources to build a house. But without blueprints, you’ll end up with a stack of boards, piles of nails, and construction workers twiddling their thumbs.
Sales teams need a blueprint, too. It’s called sales planning. Like a construction blueprint, sales planning ensures your resources are put to their best use, and team members are focused on what’s most important.
“If you’re not looking at the sales data and making a plan, you might be giving equal weight to all of your products when there are a few that are really the workhorses,” says Shawn Khemsurov, cofounder of strategic design and development agency Electric Eye. “Those are the products you should invest in and focus on.”
Learn how to create an effective sales plan that aligns with your business objectives, and keeps your sales team driving growth.
What is sales planning?
Sales planning is a set of processes to drive sales for a business—specifically, setting sales goals and outlining the actions needed to achieve them.
The sales planning process helps leaders understand market conditions, analyze customers and trends, allocate resources effectively, and set realistic sales targets.
Sales plan template
Sales planning templates can provide a good framework for you to get started with sales planning. Shopify’s free sales plan template makes it easy to visualize your goals for the year or quarter and keep your team on track.
Sales planning process
- Analyze market conditions and historical performance
- Identify and understand your target audience
- Determine sales goals
- Set strategy
- Allocate budget and resources
- Create action plans
- Monitor sales performance and adjust accordingly
Create a sales plan by following these steps:
1. Analyze market conditions and historical performance
To position your products well and set appropriate goals, you’ll first need to understand what’s going on both inside and outside of your company.
Pull data from your preferred ecommerce analytics tools to analyze your company’s past performance and your customers’ behavior, looking at key performance indicators (KPIs) like conversion rate, session length, and average order value (AOV). This will help you identify areas of strength and opportunities to improve within your sales process.
Also, perform external market research to understand trends, evolving customer needs, and the competitive landscape. Shawn recommends asking yourself a series of questions to help dig deeper into the market and your brand’s place within it.
“Who else is selling in this category? How much are they charging?” says Shawn. “Is the market saturated? If so, what’s our differentiator that we can play up? Or is there a niche that isn’t being served that we can develop something around?”
2. Identify and understand your target audience
Once you’ve identified some overall business and market trends, you can use the same analytics reports to learn more about your target customers. You can divide your target market into smaller customer segments based on details like geography, preferences, and pain points.
Deeply understanding these different audiences can help you market effectively and identify your best customers, both of which can fuel sales and, ultimately, business growth.
3. Determine sales goals
Armed with both internal and market data, you can set clear goals for your sales reps. Consider using the SMART goals framework to ensure your sales objectives are strategic, measurable, actionable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (i.e., SMART).
Most sales teams have revenue goals, but you might set sales goals that involve market share, the number of new customers acquired, a reduction in customer churn, or channel-specific sales.
4. Set strategy
Identify specific methods and sales techniques that your team will leverage to achieve sales goals. Depending on your business, you can leverage a variety of sales tools and marketing strategies including:
- Email marketing campaigns
- Influencer partnerships
- Search engine optimization
- Retargeting ads
- Content marketing
- Social media advertising
- Sales automation
- Website redesigns
Your data analysis and market research can help guide you to the best techniques for your needs. For example, you might find that your average order value is solid, but you need to market more widely to draw more people to visit the site. Or perhaps your site traffic is good, but people drop off rather than convert with a purchase—suggesting an update of your product page or checkout process may be in order.
5. Allocate budget and resources
Focus is important not only to avoid being overwhelmed, but to allocate resources accordingly. Sales teams rarely have unlimited budgets, so you’ll need to decide how much to invest in each of your sales activities, including marketing campaigns, promotions, partnerships, and staffing.
6. Create action plans
Outline and assign the specific actions required to execute each sales strategy. A successful sales plan lays out clear timelines and expectations.
For example, a set of sales representatives may be called on to contact 25 leads and set 10 sales appointments by the end of the month. Or, sales managers could assign them to check in with all existing customers on their accounts to ensure retention and attempt to upsell with new complementary services.
Depending on your strategies, action plans may include delegating tasks to people outside the sales organization. For example, an email newsletter or content marketing strategy requires looping in the marketing team to create these assets. Marketing and sales alignment is crucial in this example to ensure sales messaging is maintained.
7. Monitor sales performance and adjust strategies accordingly
Effective sales planning involves keeping track of what works and what doesn’t to inform future plans.
Define the metrics you’ll use to measure the effectiveness of each sales strategy you choose, and identify data sources and tools to help you track sales success. You may find one strategic process isn’t as successful as others, or that you need to swap strategies over time.
Tips for sales planning
- Set realistic goals
- Focus on what’s most impactful
- Allocate resources to get the most bang for your buck
- Align planning and goals to overall business objectives
Here are a few tips sales leaders can use to create effective sales plans:
Set realistic goals
Dream big, yet not too big. “Reach” goals can help your team strive to achieve more, but be careful to strike a balance.
There’s a fine line between aspirational and unrealistic, and if you’re on the wrong side of things, your sales team will end up frustrated.
Setting impossible revenue targets and other goals helps no one. Ensure your objectives are realistic based on past sales efforts, historical performance, and market research.
Focus on what’s most impactful
Dig enough, and you’ll find seemingly endless tools, strategies, and potential ways to boost future sales. But not every method is right for your business, right now.
“It’s easy to get overwhelmed,” Shawn says. “Simplify your focus to the few key areas that have the biggest impact on your sales, and figure out how you can attack those hard.”
Allocate resources to get the bang for your buck
Monitor your sales and strategies to see which efforts have the greatest impact, and put your resources into them.
For example, you may find promotions or abandoned-cart email campaigns tend to bring customers to the site. In other cases, factors like supply chain issues and low inventory might be denting your sales.
“Some shops are surprised to find it’s a small number of products that are really pulling the weight—so in that case, you want to make sure you’re always in stock,” Shawn says.
“If a customer on your site can’t make that purchase, it’s frustrating for them and a lost sale for you. Fixing that problem can have a massive effect on your sales, because even the best marketing messaging doesn’t help if you don’t have a product to ship.”
Align planning and goals to overall business objectives
As you perform sales planning activities—whether it’s conducting an in-depth competitive analysis, reorganizing the sales team structure, or forecasting sales—never lose sight of the overall business plan.
Not every company is necessarily focused on how much revenue they can generate or increasing the sales quota. Instead, they may be looking to break into new geographic areas, reach new target markets, or overcome the sales team’s challenges in explaining the product’s differentiators. You define what sales success means, based on your company’s overall goals right now.
Sales planning FAQ
What is the first step in the sales planning process?
Analyze internal data and external market trends to better understand sales opportunities and your customers. This will help you develop informed, clear, realistic sales forecasts and goals.
Why is sales planning important?
Sales planning is important because it provides a structured approach to achieving sales goals. It helps companies set data-based goals, select appropriate sales techniques, allocate resources effectively, track progress toward sales goals, and adjust strategies over time.
What should be included in a sales plan?
A sales planning template often includes an executive summary, sales goals, market trends and historical sales data, audience data, sales strategies, budget and allocations, action plans, and monitoring.
