A sales plan, would help overcome all of these pitfalls.

• It gives Direction
  providing visibility on the opportunities; clearly prioritizing them, based on attractiveness and ability to compete; defining the resources allocation to pursue them and assuring everybody is on the same page and the rest of the company works to get the orders, together with the sales force.
• It fosters accountablity
  making targets, quotas, and success rate clearly visible and measurable, shared accross the organization, and therefore allowing to adjust the activities and make the eventual necessary improvements.

Sales people, but also Distributors, Commercial agents, Export Managers are the first to benefit from a sales plan.

If your sales model involves third party organizations, like local commercial agents or distributors, a sales plan will help a lot in transferring key information to them and assuring they can rump-up their sales activities quickly and effectivelly. On the contrary, without a sales plan, they will rely on their judgment, follow their priorities, giving precedence to those company that offer them a clearer and more effective sales strategy.

Start where you are. Start understanding the key elements of your business, or reviewing them, if you know-it-all. As a minimum you may want to check out:

1. High level business model
2. Competitive market and pricing
3. Differentiating communication
4. Sales action enablement

It is not a case that these four areas of investigation are the same of our Business Exploration Workshop.

There are 3 questions you want to be able to answer:

1. How many opportunities are out there?
2. How many can I bring home?
3. It is worth the money?

To answer them you have to define Entitlement, Capability and Profitability of your sales actions.

• Entitlement
  means identifiying all the business opportunities. Indipendently if some of the are unreachable or fall prey of competition. Think you have infinte resources and that resources are not a problem.
• Capability
  Then you want to focus your attention on those that you can take away from competition, given the resources you have and how well your sales process works; still without considering if it is worth or not bring those deals home.
• Profitability
  Finally you have to shrink your attention to those opportunities that are worth pursuing: those that allow a meaningful return of investiment.

Your sales plan may also check that the way you do business is consistent and scalable:

• Reproducibility
  The actions that your sales force does in order to win an order should be replicable. You do not want to reinvent the wheel every time.
• Repeatibility
  You will probably end up having more than a way to land an order. You should prioritize the way that is repeatible for more times.
• Scalablity
  Among the opportunities, you should give precedence to those that allow your business to scale: do more with same or lower resources. This means that you prefer those deals that bring customer loyalty, that let you exploit economy of scale or the learning curves of your organization

Finally you may rise your head and look at your opportunities in their scenario's context:

• Defensibility
  A deal that brings in a customer that next year is prey of competition, is not a priority deal.
• Innovability
  A deal that can lead to expand your value proposition or change it, may be worth your attention as a game changer.
• Expandilbility
  A deal that can open the door of a new market may be a great investment.

At the light of your Strenghts and Weakness you can now compare all the opportunities and evaluate them on the basis of:

• Attractiveness
  or: how much is worth pursue them
• Ability to Compete
  how easily you could bring them home from competition.

and look for opportunities and threats.

We should rank the targets in order of priority:

• What are those 20 deals that make 80 percent of the business?
• Can we concentrate on the ones that are strategic and doable with the resources we have?
• Is there any deal that must be pursued with urgency, and other that are of high importance?

Once the target are defined, we will have to make some adjustment to our organization and our way to operate.
First we will need to identify the tactics with whom we will contact and engage the prospects. At large there are 3 types of sales tactics: Inbound, Outbound and Partnerships, depending if you contact the customer, the customer contacts you, or you sell through a third party.

It's highly improbably that your existing organization would perfectly fit the task, so you may want to make some adjustment. Some immediatelly. Some with a dedicated program that enables your organization to deliver the tactics chosen.

• Identify the Sales Tactics.
• Execute the Quick Fixes
• Program the strategic changes

All the above should have given all the elements to create your Sales Plan. Despite each business has unique needs, a Sales Plan would contain at least the following chapeters, that will instruct your team to bring home the business:

• Commercial Target
  What are the expected results in terms of Revenues and Margins
• Commercial Tools
  From software to brochures, all what is needed to close a deal
• Commercial Training
  Training, coaching and mentoring to learn what to do
• Commercial Tests
  Initial field tests to prove the plan assumptions ( some test could be perfomed also in the steps above.)
• Commercial Tasks
  Activities program to tackle the deals
• Commercial Tracking
  KPI dashboards to track the progresses of the plan and highlight the need of corrective actions

Most companies struggle to prepare a Sales Plan. Some drown into analysis, other create fluffy documents that bring no value to the Salespeople.
My recommendation is to proceed through iterative converging approximations. The first version of the Sales Plan, should be the results of a handfull of small group sessions, where just the CEO and the commercial direction could summarize the information by memory, following the structure proposed here above. This first draft will highlight the points where a deeper level of analysis should be done in a second iteration.
After just a couple of versions, the plan would contain 90% of the information needed. It will never be perfect. So…

It's time to start selling!