Building Your Sales Plan Doesn’t Have to be Rocket Science

4 Questions for Building a Powerful Sales Plan

Ok, so last week I looked at 2 Things That Keep You Out of a Sales Crisis.  This week let’s look at how a sales plan can keep you from CREATING as sales and marketing crisis.

Sometime ago I wrote an article where I showed you how to calculate your company’s operational capacity.  This is a critical metric to understand before you build a sales plan.  If you don’t know how much you have to sell, you can sell too much which will cause MAJOR delivery problems.

Calculating the Number of Sales You Need

Once you understand how much capacity you have to sell, it’s easy to determine how many sales you need to make to sell that excess capacity.  Once again, just do some simple arithmetic.

Start by determine your average number of units you sell per order. Analyze your past orders or invoices from a past month, quarter, or year to get this average. Based on this units per sale, divide this number into your maximum capacity.  You now know your sales target volume, which is more important that your revenue target.

How Many Leads Does Your Sales Plan Need

Now you can look at how may leads you need to close those deals.  This comes from your lead count and how many of those become quotes or proposals.  If you’re not tracking this you should be.  I recommend just a simple weekly tick sheet to get started, or go back through your CRM system to see when leads were entered.

Now you know why keeping track of where leads came from (marketing campaigns) is so important. This information tells you which campaigns to increase to generate more leads.

Most small businesses don’t do a good job of tracking this marketing data.  Once you know why you need it, then you can better predict your revenue and make proactive decisions about growing your topline.

What I just quickly laid out for you here is how to tune revenue engine.  You can make it more complicated, but why?  Building a powerful sales plan is simple. You just need to ask the right 4 questions:

1. What capacity do you have to sell?
2. How many deals does it take to sell it all?
3. Do you have enough leads to find those deals?
4. What marketing tactics do you need to increase to generate more leads?

If you can’t get this figured out quickly for your business?   I recommend a Revenue Engine Performance Checkup.  Click the button below and get $100 off on the path to creating a powerful sales plan to increase you topline revenue!