What Is Sales Planning? And 10 Reasons Why You Need It for Your Business

Have you been looking to upscale your sales strategy and aren’t quite sure what can help? Or, better yet – have you been wondering what is sales planning and what it can do for your business?

In this article, we will shed light on what a sales plan is and just how important having a well-built one can be for your sales targets and team coordination.

Compiling sales data, understanding your target customers, and outlining clear goals for your sales reps are all imperative steps to successfully boosting sales. And with the right sales tools, this is incredibly easy to do.

Xara offers multiple sales plan templates to choose from to help you efficiently set goals and strategize how each team member will work toward achieving them.

Ready to find out why this is a must for your company? Read on!

What Is Sales Planning?

For sales managers, planning and forecasting are crucial tasks, and sales planning is a vital step in both of these processes. Sales teams can use multiple tactics to assist them in meeting their quota targets and the company’s overall sales objectives.

Sales planning lays out a strategy to assist the team in achieving their objectives while forecasting the sales level they wish to attain. Previous closed sales, challenges, target market trends, target personas, and strategies for prospecting and selling are all covered in a sales plan.

When Do We Plan?

The moment in the sales cycle when a company decides to make a sales plan varies. Businesses typically set monthly or quarterly sales objectives. A great example of a sales plan that sets monthly goals over the course of a quarter is the 30-60-90 plan:

Just because the sales manager sets goals doesn’t mean that a final purchase will naturally occur. A sales strategy outlined in a well-built sales plan is the best way for him to assist his team in hitting their goals.

Implementing The Sales Plan

The crucial component of successful implementation is using the sales plan to set expectations for the sales team based on the revenue goals and how your organization will reach those goals.

In sales, setting goals drives productivity. The fact that your sales plan becomes your scoring system and includes markers for how you are performing in following your plan makes setting precise targets efficient and easy.

With these indicators’ help, you may critically evaluate your sales and marketing efforts and regularly make changes. Your plan will remain relevant and on track if you do quarterly reviews to evaluate your performance and make improvements.

Because we know the importance of keeping track of progress during implementation, Xara offers a 100% customizable sales plan checklist template. All you have to do is download the template, set your goals, and review them with your sales team whenever you deem necessary.

What Should A Sales Plan Look Like?

A solid strategic sales plan outlines your company’s sales goals and methods and spells out the actions you’ll take to reach those goals. Most importantly, a strong plan supports all your company departments and reflects the company’s overall strategy.

You must acknowledge that a sales plan is more than just a paper, document, or folder. What matters is that the plan outlines a straightforward procedure for how your business will reach its objectives.

Creating a sales plan from scratch for the first time can be confusing and time-consuming. Because it is such a vital part of the sales strategy of a business, it takes a lot of attention to detail and preliminary analysis. The last thing that sales managers need is to have to worry about the structure and design of their sales plans.

Xara’s sales plan templates streamline the sales planning process tremendously by providing multiple options to choose from, depending on each company’s preferences and needs.

All you have to do is sign up, choose one of the many customizable sales planning templates, and start outlining your sales strategies!

7 Benefits Of A Sales Plan

We’ve established what is sales planning and that sales plans are an overall great asset for your company. However, why are they as great as we claim they are?

1. Strong Business Foundation

Similar to a business plan, a sales plan is a document that helps build the foundation of your company. It outlines its goals, revenue targets, its target market and customer personas, its strong points, and where improvements are in order.

Therefore, by creating a sales plan, you are essentially making an in-detail analysis of what your company truly aims to accomplish and how it can get to where it wants to go in terms of sales and customer satisfaction.

All of this data, as well as all the collaborative work that is necessary to put the plan into action, helps strengthen the foundation of your business and helps your entire sales team stay true to the company’s values and mission.

2. Achieving the Business’s Revenue Target

Planning and employing good selling strategies makes the difference between success and failure in terms of hitting revenue targets.

As a sales manager, having a good team to coordinate is the first step in boosting sales and implicitly revenue, but not the only one. You need to actually coordinate them successfully. This is where a sales plan comes in, detailing the role each team member has to take on in order to make sure that more deals are closed, and more sales are made.

In other words, the better the sales plan, the better the strategy, and the more sales made – it’s really that easy.

3. Resource Management

Having good tools and resources is a great asset for any sales team. However, everything is limited and comes at a cost.

A sales plan helps better allocate the budget toward different actions and steps of the sales strategy, thus also helping better manage all other resources that the team will need to meet their goals.

By sales planning, you are always aware of what, when, and how much each team member receives from the company’s resource pool and if any tweaks need to be made in the future in order to boost productivity.

4. Improved Collaboration

Departmental and sales goals can be coordinated with the aid of sales planning. It can help communication and efficiency if each department knows how its actions impact the others.

This is reflected in how the sales team members interact with each other, but also how they communicate with their manager. Collaboration becomes much easier and more pleasant when goals are clearer, and each salesperson feels they get the necessary guidance and resources.

This article can help you understand even better why collaboration is key for any company.

5. Increased Productivity

Planning your sales is essential for boosting efficiency in your company. You will increase sales in less time by streamlining procedures and allocating the proper resources to activities. As a result, this increases performance and overall output in addition to saving money.

A good marketing strategy involves properly directing sales representatives toward what their individual goals should be and how they should achieve them, aiding them in hitting revenue targets and sales goals in a reduced timeframe.

6. Great Customer Service

When a salesperson is aware of the entire selling process, they can communicate and plan with customers more effectively. Additionally, salespeople can avoid overpromising to a client on the business’s capabilities by using sales planning. Instead, they can precisely assess how well the business will be able to fulfil an order.

You may establish your brand’s reputation and distinguish yourself from your competitors by providing your clients with top-notch client service.

Long-term customer retention depends on keeping them satisfied. Maintaining existing consumers should be a top priority because it is between 5 and 25 times more expensive to attract new consumers than to retain previous buyers. Moreover, customers that are happy with a product or service are also excellent brand advocates.

7. Inventory Planning

Cash shortages will arise fast if a business has high stocks of unsold goods. Without effective stock management, a company will collapse. If you can’t deliver what the customers want and in the quantities they want, they will be angry, and your reputation will suffer. However, if you overproduce whatever you sell, you’ll have a lot of extra products and financial difficulties.

Therefore, a company may better manage its stock levels and make sure it can satisfy customer demand by looking at what and when customers buy. By planning ahead and carefully analyzing previous data, the company will know how to best align production with the sales process.

Sales forecasting can be the best friend of a company that wants to stock up more efficiently and avoid unnecessary losses.

8. Better Product Quality

The quality of your goods won’t be harmed by increasing the productivity of your sales crew. In fact, it will raise the caliber of your merchandise. The key is efficiency.

Because the sales team will keep such a close eye on customer data, they will gain more relevant insight into what works and what needs improvement in terms of the product. The feedback will then reach those in charge of creating it, helping them make necessary changes.

Furthermore, a well-run business will reduce the possibility of mistakes, creating goods of superior quality. Lower costs will also come from higher-quality products.

When a product has flaws, it must be redone, using up resources and time.

9. Clear Goals

This is one benefit of sales planning that makes almost all other benefits possible. It’s the driving factor for productivity, and collaboration, which determines better inventory management and higher quality customer service.

Sales executives can more effectively develop KPIs (key performance indicators) and goals related to KPIs when they use a sales plan. KPIs define performance success inside a company – therefore, KPIs for sales could be attaining overall revenue targets, retaining clients, and bringing in new clients.

In short, sales planning aids executives in creating goals for staff members that are clearly outlined, well-budgeted, and, most importantly, attainable.

10. Better Understanding Of The Company

When you create a sales plan and recurrently evaluate its implementation and progress, you also keep a close eye on your company’s strengths and weaknesses. This will contribute to a better understanding of not just your sales process but also how other departments of your company are operating and affecting revenue.

A successful sales planning process will broaden the view you have over your company overall, what it’s doing right and where it’s time to make some improvements or adjustments.

3 Tips For Better Sales Planning

A strategic sales plan is a must-have for multiple reasons. But just having it shouldn’t be enough. To truly reap all of its benefits, it’s important to remember some valuable tips on improving your sales planning process.

You can check out this article to find out all the necessary steps in creating the best sales plan for your business.

1. Use A Good Tool

What is sales planning without a proper tool that can help with the creation of the plan? Choosing and customizing a sales plan template from Xara is as easy as it gets in terms of your sales planning process.

The templates aren’t the only thing your sales and marketing teams can benefit from with Xara. By giving your sales reps access to this platform, you are helping them:

• Track promotional content performance through the Analytics Dashboard, where they can see how their audience engages with their content and where further optimization needs to be done

• Visually represent data about sales and market trends by efficiently designing different types of charts and infographics with the Vizzlo integration.

• Seamlessly collaborate with all team members by easily sharing documents and collectively editing them – they will see edits in real-time, leave comments and request feedback, all in one place, their Team Files.

2. Be Prepared To Make Changes

It doesn’t mean you can relax and watch sales happen just because you’ve created a good sales planning template to follow.

To establish the perfect circumstance for your business, you are utilizing all the information you have regarding the market, your distinctive value, target clients, and partnerships. However, on very few occasions, that is enough to get it right on the first try.

Instead, keep in mind that your sales strategy is a dynamic, ever-evolving document. It must take new products, marketing initiatives, or even new team members into account and adapt.

3. Don’t Switch Goals

While adjusting the strategy is necessary, switching out the end goals will do more harm than good.

After all, most of the time, you want your forecast completed and accepted within the context of your sales plan on a specific timeline, so you can move on to business.

Therefore, even if you find that you were excessively positive or negative in your sales planning, don’t change the objectives listed in your sales strategy. It’s normal to make some incorrect assumptions while creating your very first sales plan, especially regarding goals and projections.

Keep in mind that your sales plan should be a measure to determine your success or failure rather than allowing it to bring you down. When it comes time to revise your sales plan, thoroughly detail the areas where your assumptions proved to be incorrect.

Ready To Start Planning?

So, what is sales planning? In short, a sales plan is a crucial tool for a sales team that aims to better their performance and increase the company’s revenue. It outlines strategies and goals and helps all members keep track of their strong suits and things that need improvement.

With a good sales plan in place, you can strengthen your business’s foundation by clearly outlining your mission and goals while also keeping track of your resources and progress. In simple terms, a sales plan is a dream come true for any sales manager or company owner who wants to streamline their sales processes and boost revenue.

Are you ready to create your own sales plan? It’s time to get started with Xara Cloud; pick your preferred template, and get to work!

The best part? You can try Xara for free and convince yourself this is the best tool for your sales team!