Are you a sales leader with your head down planning the sales strategy for 2024?
As you review results this year and look for growth in 2024, you know you can’t leave this planning to chance.
Your competitors will be doing the same and no doubt looking to take your market share.
Simply put many companies are doing their planning wrong.
Here are 5 keys areas to create a powerful business plan.
- No Customer Involvement – the critical person in the success of your plan is your customer.
- Have you discussed with them where you are adding value?
- How can you best support their growth next year?
- What existing or new service do they really need?
- Not a live working document – most business plans even the good ones are not referred to or adjusted frequently enough. Often only being revisited annually or bi-annually with little impact on the day-to-day priorities. You need a one-page document that links results, objectives, activities, and metrics you can refer to frequently to monitor success.
- No Sales Objectives – the business plan only outlines the business results desired; it does not link them to specific sales objectives that show ‘ how ‘ these results will be achieved. This leaves the sales focus vague and the salesperson to formulate their own individual approach instead of having a united cohesive approach.
- No Sales Activities – the business plan does not include the specific sales activities that need to be performed each week and are directly related to achieving the selected sales objectives.
- No Sales Metrics – the business plan only has result based metrics, sales, revenue, turnover, or margin. There are no metrics designed to measure the key sales activities to ensure accountability and implementation of the sales strategy.
Including these 5 elements will create a business plan focused on adding real value to the customer. And it will engage the sales team with a clear action plan.
Plus providing management with visibility and control over how the results are being achieved month by month.
If you would like to chat over any aspect of your business planning drop me a line at peter.holland@linearstructure.com and let’s, make 2024 your best year ever!
Dedicated to Your Sales Success
Peter
