How To Create a Sales Plan in 10 Steps (+ Free Template)
Jess served on the founding team of a successful B2B startup and has used a wide range of sales and marketing tools over the course of her 15-year career. She uses her industry knowledge to deliver the best answers to your questions about sales tools and sales management.
This article is part of a larger series on Sales Management.
A sales plan lays out the necessary strategies, objectives, tools, processes, and metrics needed to hit your business’ sales goals. To create a sales plan, you first need to understand the purpose of your business, who your ideal customers are, and what the sales process looks like from start to finish. Download our free sales plan template and follow these 10 steps to learn how to create a sales plan to reach your company’s revenue goals.
Free Sales Plan Template
Sales plans don’t have to be particularly long, but they do require thought and research about your business, customers, and sales process. We’ve created a template that outlines all the information you need to establish sales goals and strategies for your company to ensure you don’t forget any step. Download our free sales plan template.
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💡 Quick Tip:
Once you’ve created a sales plan, give your sales team the tools to execute it effectively with robust customer relationship management (CRM) software.
Use a CRM like Pipedrive to help your sales team collaborate on deals, develop sales reports, track deals, and create custom sales dashboards
Once you have downloaded the template, you can then customize it for your business, or create your own sales plan from scratch using the following 10 steps.
1. Establish Your Mission Statement
A mission statement summarizing why you’re in business should be part of your sales plan. It should include a broad overview of what your business’s products or services encompass and reference your brand’s unique selling proposition. For example, you wouldn’t merely say “We provide customers with insurance policies.” Instead, you might frame it as “We provide customers with cost-effective financial risk management solutions.”
It’s essential to fully understand your unique selling proposition before creating a mission statement. This allows you to understand why you’re different from competitors in your industry. It also helps you determine how your unique proposition is suited better to a certain niche market.
For instance, using the same insurance example above, you may realize certain markets are easier to sell based on that selling proposition. Therefore, you may narrow in on your mission statement by saying “We provide startup businesses with cost-effective, financial risk management solutions.”
2. Set Sales Goals & Objectives
Once you have summarized why you’re in business in a mission statement, begin setting sales goals. Typically, goals will include one year, but may also include three- or five-year projections.
Here are a few options for how to set sales revenue goals for your business:
- Set sales amount: You may have a specific amount in mind for a sales goal. For instance, you may determine that $200,000 is a reasonable sales goal based on prior sales and your company’s ability to generate new business.
- Desired profitability: To set a sales goal based on how much profit you want your business to achieve, you first need to calculate total anticipated expenses for the set time period to find the break-even point. From there, you can calculate how much revenue your team needs to bring in to make a certain profit margin. For example, if annual operating costs are expected to be $100,000 and you want to make a 30% profit, your sales goal is $130,000.
- Projected sales forecast: Based on an industry standard or estimates you attained by running a sales forecast, you may find it’s better to use a projected sales forecast as your sales goal.
Pro tip: Projecting sales can be challenging when you don’t have the right sales forecasting model. Our free sales forecasts templates enable you to create simple, long-term, budget-based, multiproduct, subscription-based, and month-to-month sales forecasts for your business.
Five-year sales forecast template example (Source: Fit Small Business)
Sales goals need to reflect both new business revenue and sales from existing or recurring customers. Then, you also need to add specific sales objectives that identify and prioritize the sales activities your team needs to complete to meet sales goals. This creates an objective way to measure success in hitting goals at all levels: organizational, sales department, team, and individual sales rep, which is an essential part of sales management.
For example, you could have a total revenue goal of $200,000 in year two and $300,000 in year three. You can then add an objective such as stating you want your business’ revenue from existing customers to grow 15% in year three. This can be measured easily by evaluating your percentage of revenue from existing customers in year three compared to year two.
3. Determine Your Ideal Customer
Determining the ideal customer or target market is the next step of your sales plan. It may have been accomplished when you developed your mission statement, but also when you set your sales goals and discovered how broad your market needs to be to reach them. Describing your ideal customer helps dictate who you’re selling to and your selling approach.
One way to establish your ideal customer is by creating a series of unique customer profiles. Each profile specifies key demographics, behaviors, interests, job positions, and geographic information about one of your ideal buyer types. Based on your customer profiles, you can then develop more effective targeted marketing and advertising strategies for lead generation and nurturing to move leads through the sales process more efficiently and close more deals.
4. Develop Sales Strategies & Tactics
A sales strategy explains how you plan to outsell your competitors and accomplish your sales goals. Sales strategies define specific, detailed tactics you and your team will use to pursue those strategies, such as using Google Ads, cold calling, and drip email marketing campaigns as part of a lead generation strategy. Available strategies differ depending on your company’s resources, skill sets, sales operation, and product or service offerings.
Strategies and tactics should be personalized for your ideal customers based on their unique interests, behaviors, and the best ways to connect with them. For example, if a customer profile shows your ideal buyer generally only makes purchases based on trusted referrals, you could implement a referral strategy that offers incentives as a tactic to generate more referrals from customers.
Plus, different sales strategies will be needed to acquire new business vs keeping existing customers. When selling to existing customers, for example, your strategy could include cross-selling tactics where additional products are recommended based on prior purchases. The short-term tactics for cross-selling could be requiring customer service reps to send 30 emails per week recommending a complementary product to existing customers.
For a new business strategy, then, sales reps might rely on emotional selling methods when using cold calling as a tactic. Instead of product features, cold calling scripts would be geared to evoke feelings that lead to buying decisions. Tactics could reflect the objective of having reps making 15 cold calls each week using a script that opens with a story about how a purchase made a customer feel or how someone felt because they didn’t purchase the product.
Pro tip: Ensuring that your strategies are properly executed requires excellent sales leadership and a healthy environment for sales reps to operate in. Our how-to guide for building a positive sales culture shows you how to create an environment that promotes high job satisfaction, low employee turnover, and profitability.
5. Implement Sales Tools
Your sales plan should reference the software, hardware, and materials you use to manage the sales operation and make each team member more efficient. One of the most notable tools to include is the customer relationship management (CRM) system your team uses to organize contact information, streamline sales tasks, and facilitate communication with customers and leads.
HubSpot, for instance, makes it easy to organize information about leads, contacts, and deal opportunities. Additionally, from a HubSpot lead profile, you can initiate a conversation with that contact by calling, emailing, or scheduling an appointment.
HubSpot lead profile (Source: HubSpot)
CRMs are also used to monitor and report sales progress. For example, many have dashboards and functionality, such as alerts, which make it easy to identify where your team may be underperforming or which leads are most likely to convert (and should be focused on). Sales information such as deals closed, revenue generated, and leads created can be presented in a detailed report.
These types of insights can also be shown on the CRM’s system dashboard. Pipedrive is an example of a CRM that has a customizable dashboard that displays both activity information like emails sent, received, and outstanding tasks to be completed as well as performance-based data like deals lost or average value of won deals.
Other sales enablement tools that can make your sales team more effective include voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) phone systems, lead generation platforms, email campaign tools, content creation platforms, and task automation software. Some of these tools can be found within CRM software or through CRM integrations and standalone applications.
In addition to technology tools, sales and marketing templates should be used to streamline outreach initiatives. Scenario-based, premade sales email templates, for instance, allow salespeople to have an email already crafted for their specific situation.
Creating and storing business proposal templates in your CRM also streamlines the contact procurement and proposal generation process. This way, any time a prospect says they’d like to receive a quote or you’re responding to a request for proposal, you already have a customizable template ready to go.
Pro tip: Effective cold calling scripts sales reps can use as a guide when placing calls to new leads is a tremendous sales tool to include in your sales plan. Get started using our guide for writing a cold calling script, which includes examples and free cold calling script templates.
6. Develop Your Sales Funnel
Setting up a sales funnel within your sales plan lets you visualize the stages of the customer journey from becoming aware of your business to purchasing from it. By creating and understanding the different statuses of your leads, you can track progress and determine how effective you’re at converting leads to the next stages in the funnel.
Using a sales funnel with conversion rates also makes it easier for you to adjust your sales strategies and tactics based on how effective you’re at getting leads through the funnel. For instance, let’s say you have 100 leads in the awareness stage of the funnel. You decide to cold call 50 of them and write a sales email to the other 50 to qualify leads by setting up a product demonstration.
After each campaign, you find you were able to qualify seven of the leads that were cold-called and only two of the leads you had emailed. Based on these funnel conversion rates of 14% (7/50) from cold calling and 4% (2/50) from emailing, you would likely adjust your tactics to focus more on calling instead of emailing.
Do you need help creating a sales funnel for your business? Our guide to creating a sales funnel shows the step-by-step sales funnel creation process and provides free templates and specific examples.
7. Create Your Sales Pipeline
Once your sales process’ sales funnel stages are identified, develop sales pipeline stages. In these stages are the sales activities your team uses to move leads through the funnel. For example, to get a lead from the sales funnel stage of brand awareness to showing interest in learning more about one of the services your business offers, one sales pipeline activity could be setting up a demo or presentation appointment through a cold call.
Adding your sales pipeline to your sales plan is essential because it describes all of the activities your sales reps need to do to close a sales deal. CRM systems like Freshsales allow you to create and track the stages of the pipeline for each lead or deal within the lead record.
Freshsales Sales Pipeline (Source: Freshworks)
Listing each pipeline stage also helps you identify tools and resources that are needed to perform the activities for each stage. For example, if you use phone calls to initiate contact with or introduce a product to a lead, you could develop outbound sales call scripts for your team to use.
After the initial contact by phone, you may use email to follow up after a call and then nurture leads throughout the sales process. As part of your follow-up, you would want to create and automate a sales follow-up email template to get them to the next pipeline stage.
Both the sales funnel, which indicates where a lead is in the sales process, and sales pipeline, which lists activities needed to move leads to the next stage in the sales funnel, should be used in your sales plan when defining the repeatable steps needed to generate leads and close deals. Check out our article to learn how to create a winning sales process with insights on both creating a sales process and measuring its success.
8. Assign Roles & Responsibilities
Regardless of the size of your business or sales operation, your sales plan should include the role and responsibility of each person in the sales team. Each role should have a name, such as someone being a sales development representative (SDR), and a summary of their responsibilities, such as “the SDR is responsible for setting up sales appointments using the activities listed in the sales pipeline.”
Measuring the performance of any sales position is simple through key performance indicators (KPIs). Specific KPIs should be used to measure performance for each role and should be included in a sales plan. Below are some examples of KPIs that can be used by sales role and its respective responsibility:
- Sales development representative: Responsible for introducing products and services, qualifying leads, and setting up appointments for the account executive. Performance is measured by calls placed, emails sent, and appointments generated.
- Account executive: Responsible for nurturing qualified leads, delivering the sales pitch, sending quotes, and closing deals. Performance is measured by proposals sent, the average time in the proposal consideration stage, deals closed, and deal closing rate.
- Customer service representative: Responsible for managing customer needs, handling billing, and managing service tickets by assisting customers. Performance is measured by customer satisfaction, retention rates, and total tickets resolved.
- Sales manager: Responsible for the entire sales operation or the sales team for a specific region or product/service line. Performance is measured by job satisfaction rates of sales reps, pipeline and funnel conversion rates, team sales deals closed, and team revenue growth.
While assigning roles in your sales plan, a sales rep’s territory could be based on geography, industry, potential deal size, or product/service line, creating more specialization for better results. Our six-step process on proper sales territory management is a great resource for segmenting, creating, and assigning sales territories.
This section of the sales plan is also a prime spot for individually setting sales quotas for each rep or team that are needed to hit your organizational sales goals. Sales quotas should be a specific KPI for that sales role and be set based on the experience, skill level, and resources for that individual or team, as well as organizational, department, and team goals and objectives.
9. Set Your Sales Budget
The last section of the sales plan will be the budget for your sales operation. It should account for salaries, commissions, travel expenses, and the cost of any software tools or service providers used to help with sales and marketing. While these are meant to be estimates, research and due diligence should be done to avoid financial errors.
One way to set your sales budget, particularly for software tools and services you may be interested in, is to create and issue a request for proposal (RFP). Issuing an RFP allows you to post a summary of your needs to solicit proposals on potential solutions. In addition to providing accurate budget estimates from a variety of qualified vendors and contractors, it may also help you discover cost-effective or high-performing options you were previously unaware of.
10. Monitor Progress and Adjust Accordingly
Once the sales plan is in motion, monitor its progress for the purpose of making any required adjustments. For instance, while your sales operation is running, you may find certain sales tactics are working far better than expected, and vice versa. Your sales plan should account for using that tactic more as well as any new sales tools associated with that tactic, budgetary changes, new roles added to the sales team, and possibly even a new sales goal.
As in the earlier example, if you found that cold calling was significantly more effective than emailing, you would reduce or abandon the email method in favor of cold calling. You could also invest in sales tools especially useful for cold calling such as power dialing using a VoIP phone system, or hire additional staff to place calls, all of which will be part of your updated sales plan.
Pro tip: Being able to focus on the big picture by creating, executing, and adjusting a sales plan is one of the most critical traits of being an effective sales leader. For more insights on what it means to be a sales leader and how to become one, check out our ultimate guide to sales leadership.
Bottom Line
While any business can set a bold sales goal, creating a sales plan outlines how your team will achieve them. By following the best practices and 10-step process laid out above, your sales plan defines what your sales process will look like, establishes baselines for accountability, and identifies optimal strategies and tactics as well as the tools needed to make your team as efficient as possible.
