Sales planning is a fundamental component of sound selling. After all, you can‘t structure an effective sales effort if you don’t have, well, structure. Everyone — from the top to the bottom of a sales org — benefits from having solid, actionable, thoughtfully organized sales plans in place.
This kind of planning offers clarity and direction for your sales team — covering everything from the prospects you‘re trying to reach to the goals you’re trying to hit to the insight you're trying to deliver on.
But putting together one of these plans isn‘t always straightforward, so to help you out, I’ve compiled this detailed guide to sales planning — including expert-backed insight and examples — that will ensure your next sales plan is fundamentally sound and effective.
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The purpose of your company's sales plan is to:
Goals and objectives are the lifeblood of successful sales efforts. You can‘t know what you’re working for or whether you‘ve achieved anything meaningful if you don’t have them in place.
Your sales reps need to have a solid sense of what‘s expected of them — you can’t go to your team and just say, "Sell." You have to establish clear benchmarks that reconcile practicality with ambition.
And if (or more likely when) those goals change over time, you need to regularly communicate those shifts and the strategic adjustments that come with them to your team.
Your sales strategy keeps your sales process productive — it offers the actionable steps your reps can take to deliver on your vision and realize the goals you set. So naturally, you need to communicate it effectively. A sales plan offers a solid resource for that.
For instance, your sales org might notice that your SDRs are posting lackluster cold call conversion rates. In turn, you might want to have them focus primarily on email outreach, or you could experiment with new sales messaging on calls.
Regardless of how you want to approach the situation, a thoughtfully structured sales plan will give both you and your reps a high-level perspective that would inform more cohesive, effective efforts across the team.
An effective sales org is a machine — one where each part has a specific function that serves a specific purpose that needs to be executed in a specific fashion. That's why everyone who comprises that org needs to have a clear understanding of how they specifically play into the company's broader sales strategy.
Outlining roles and responsibilities while sales planning lends itself to more efficient task delegation, improved collaboration, overlap reduction, and increased accountability. All of which amount to more streamlined, smooth, successful sales efforts.
Sales planning can set the framework for gauging how well your team is delivering on your sales strategy. It can inform the benchmarks and milestones reps can use to see how their performance stacks up against your goals and expectations.
It also gives sales leadership a holistic view of how well a sales org is functioning as a whole — giving them the necessary perspective to understand whether they have the right people and tools in place to be as successful as possible.
Sales planning isn‘t (and shouldn’t) be limited to the actual sales plan document it produces. If that document is going to have any substance or practical value, it needs to be the byproduct of a thorough, well-informed, high-level strategy.
When sales planning, you have some key steps you need to cover — including:
When putting this list together, I consulted Zach Drollinger — Senior Director of Sales at edtech provider Coursedog — to ensure the examples detailed below are sound and accurate.
To plan for the present and future, your company needs to look to the past. What did sales look like during the previous year? What about the last five years? Using this information can help you identify trends in your industry. While it's not foolproof, it helps establish a foundation for your sales planning process.
For the sake of example, let‘s say that I’m a new sales director for an edtech company that sells curriculum planning software to higher education institutions. My vertical is community colleges, and my territory is the East Coast.
Once I assume this new role, I‘m going to want to gather as much context as possible about my vertical and how my company has approached it historically. I would pull information about how we’ve sold to this vertical.
How much new business have we closed within it in the past five years? How does that compare to how we perform with other kinds of institutions? Are we seeing significant churn from these customers?
I would also want to get context about the general needs, interests, and pain points of the kinds of institutions I‘m selling to. I’d look for insight into figures like degree velocity, staff retention, and enrollment.
Ultimately, I would get a comprehensive perspective on my sales process — a thorough understanding of where I stand and what my prospects are dealing with. That will ensure that I can deliver on the next step as effectively as possible.
Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent sales plan.
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Many industry trends are cyclical. They phase in and out of “style.” As you build your sales plan, ideate new initiatives based on opportunities you may have passed on in previous years.
If your business exclusively focused on word-of-mouth and social media marketing in the past, consider adding webinars or special promotions to your plan.
In the edtech example we've been running with, I would likely ideate initiatives based on the gaps I identified in the previous step. I would start a push to ensure that our sales content and marketing collateral are up-to-date and impressive.
I would also consider new training programs to ensure that our coaching infrastructure is prioritizing how to conduct effective demos. Finally, I would start to work on a plan with marketing to ensure our messaging is aligned with theirs — so we can make sure prospects' expectations are realistic and effective.
One way or another, I would take the gaps I found and find concrete, actionable ways to fill them. I would make sure that these initiatives aren't abstract. Just saying, "We're going to be better at demos," isn‘t a plan — it’s a sentiment, and sentiments don't translate to hard sales.
Stakeholders are individuals, groups, or organizations with a vested interest in your company. They are typically investors, employees, or customers and often have deciding power in your business. Towards the end of your sales planning process, involve stakeholders from departments that affect your outcomes, such as marketing and product. It leads to an efficient and actionable sales planning process.
This step is sort of an extension of the previous two — once I‘ve identified the key issues and roadblocks obstructing my edtech startup’s sales org, I would start identifying the right people to fulfill the necessary initiatives I've put together.
In this example, I would tap some stakeholders in charge of our sales content and marketing collateral to produce newer, more relevant case studies and whitepapers we can pass along to the institutions we're working with.
I would also go to middle management and either offer more direction for coaching on demos or bring in a third-party training service to offer more focused, professional insight on the issue.
Finally, I would connect with marketing leadership to align on the benefits and outcomes we generally stress when pitching the schools we sell to. That way, we can ensure that the institutions we're connecting with have realistic expectations of our product or service that we can speak to more clearly and effectively.
Once you have implemented this strategy to create your sales planning process, the final step is outlining your action items. Using your company's capacity and quota numbers, build a list of steps that take you through the sales process. Examples of action items are writing a sales call script, identifying industry competitors, or strategizing new incentives or perks.
In our edtech example, some key action items might be:
Obviously, that list isn‘t exhaustive — but those are still the kinds of steps we would need to clarify and take to structure a more effective high-level strategy to produce different (ideally much better) results than we’ve been seeing.
One thing to keep in mind is that sales planning shouldn't end with creating the document.
You‘ll want to reiterate this process every year to maintain your organization's sales excellence.
Now that you‘re committed to the sales planning process, let's dive into the written execution component of sales planning.
A typical sales plan includes the following sections:
Once again, I consulted Zach Drollinger — Senior Director of Sales at edtech provider Coursedog — to ensure the examples detailed below are sound and accurate.
Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent sales plan.
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Click this link to access this resource at any time.
Your team structure often depends on the size of your company. Smaller businesses tend to have a small team, and that can potentially exacerbate issues with overlap and confusion. As your company grows, you will need to hire new employees. The more employees you have, the harder it can be to manage these different members. Your sales plan needs to outline the members of your team and what their specific role is to provide clarity.
Here's a cursory overview of what a team structure might look like in the context of our edtech example:
The people on your team are the most influential tool for implementing your sales plan, but to do so, they need resources. These are the tools your team will use to reach revenue targets. Your company could use project management resources like Monday or Asana to keep track of deadlines. Programs like Adobe Photoshop and Canva are resources for designing graphics to send to prospects. While your team is essential, their function becomes obsolete without the tools to do their job.
In our edtech example, I might take stock of the org‘s resources and find we’re leveraging:
Since we are on the topic of sales software, it might also be worth talking to your customer service and marketing teams to identify their needs. All of these departments heavily rely on customer data to conduct their activities.
So a unified platform that makes this data readily accessible by all teams, and includes the features necessary for each department to manage its own specific processes, can significantly improve productivity and boost ROI.
Market conditions are pertinent information about your industry and its competitive landscape. What's trending? Where are customers losing interest? Have there been any competitors gaining traction in the industry, and why? The way your market is fairing should guide how you approach your sales plan.
Now let‘s walk through how to write a sales plan. Don't forget to follow along with HubSpot's free Sales Plan Template to make the most of this blog post.
Create a mission statement. Define your team's roles and responsibilities. Identify your target market. Outline your tools, software, and resources. Analyze your position in your industry. Plan your marketing strategy. Develop your prospecting strategy. Create an action plan. List your goals. Set your budget.
As I did with the previous sections, I consulted Zach Drollinger — Senior Director of Sales at edtech provider Coursedog — to ensure the examples detailed below are sound and accurate.
Start your sales plan with a mission statement — a concise, straightforward distillation of what your business hopes to accomplish from a fundamental, more idealistic perspective. You don't want to get too hung up on detailing the “how” behind your business here.
Offer your vision — not your “About Us” page.
In our edtech example, the company's mission statement might say something like, “Our mission is all about empowerment. We empower higher education institutions to empower their students — maximizing schools' abilities to help their students realize their full potential by facilitating timely graduation and simple, seamless class scheduling.”
Next, describe who is on your team and what their roles are. Perhaps you manage five salespeople and work closely with a sales enablement professional and a sales ops specialist. If you‘re planning on adding headcount, include the number of employees, their job titles, and when you're planning to bring them on the team.
I touched on this in the previous section, but to reiterate, here's what part of this section would look like in the context of our edtech example:
Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent sales plan.
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In this section, describe your pricing and any promotions you're planning on running. What key actions will you take to increase brand awareness and generate leads? Note the impact on sales.
Here's a mock version:
For our edtech example, let's say we intend to lean heavily on an inbound marketing strategy. In that case, leadership at the company would want to invest in a company blog that covers trends and concepts in the education industry. Ideally, that resource will produce a steady stream of leads while simultaneously establishing our business as a trusted authority in the space.
How will your sales team receive and qualify the leads generated by your marketing strategy? Don't forget to include the criteria prospects should meet before sales reps reach out.
Let‘s say that our hypothetical edtech company’s inbound marketing infrastructure development pans out. We're able to maintain a reputable blog about the education industry that brings in a steady stream of leads. That could provide the basis for an effective prospecting strategy.
Our content marketing department could produce and qualify warm leads to pass to our sales team. Ideally, we'll have more effective, focused criteria to determine whether and how to reach out to those leads. From there, we might elect to focus primarily on email outreach — a plan that could be complemented by a more conventional cold-calling strategy.
Once you‘ve outlined where you want to go, you must figure out how you'll get there. This section summarizes your game plan for hitting your revenue targets. Try to be thorough but concise when detailing these steps — and try to support any items you detail with a clear, viable timeline.
Here's what part of the action plan might look at our hypothetical edtech company:
Objective: Increase revenue in our East Coast community college vertical by 20% Y/Y.
We would flesh this plan out to cover the key actions that are going to shape our high-level strategy and guide the more granular aspects of its implementation. Committing plans to writing is crucial in sales — including action items in your sales plan gives you a definitive forum for that.
Most sales goals are revenue-based. For example, you might set a total target of $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Alternatively, you can set a volume goal. That could be 100 new customers or 450 sales. Make sure your objective is realistic; otherwise, your entire sales plan will be largely useless.
Factor in your product's price, total addressable market (TAM), market penetration, and resources (including your sales headcount and marketing support).
Your goal should also be closely tied to your high-level business goals. For example, suppose the company is trying to move upmarket. In that case, your goal might be “Acquire 20 Enterprise logos” rather than “Sell X in new business” (because the latter will encourage you to solely chase deals rather than focus on the right type of customers).
Of course, you'll probably have more than one goal. Identify the most important, then rank the rest by priority. If you have territories, assign a sub-goal to each. That will make it easier to identify over- and under-performers.
Lay out your timeline too. Having regular benchmarks lets you know if you‘re on track, ahead, or behind in meeting your targets. Suppose your sales goal for the first quarter of the year is selling $30,000. Based on last year’s performance, you know January and February sales are slower than March.
With that in mind, your timeline is:
You should also write in the DRIs if applicable. For example, maybe Rep Carol‘s January quota is $5,000. Rep Shane, who‘s still ramping, has a $3,000 monthly quota. On a smaller team, this exercise helps people avoid replicating each other‘s work and shifting blame around if targets aren’t met.
Describe the costs associated with hitting your sales goals. That usually includes:
Compare the sales plan budget to your sales forecast for accurate budgeting.
If you want to take your plan to the next level, read on to learn some tips for creating a highly effective sales plan.
We've gone over what you should include in a sales plan, including some examples and mockups.
Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent sales plan.
