I recently did business consulting with a medium sized business and helped their sales team improve their annual sales plans. Many sales teams, especially in small and medium sized businesses, don’t have an annual sales plan. Does yours?

We talked earlier about a written military planning format called the Operations Order or OPORD (see post #30 —https://www.thefivecoatconsultinggroup.com/the-coronavirus-crisis/the-opord ). Modifying the format of the OPORD is a great place to start to help your team build an annual sales plan. The four or five paragraphs ensure everyone thinks through the various aspects of the sales plan as they develop a roadmap to make more sales next year.

The most important part of the sales plan is actually putting one together. You can increase its impact by having each member of the sales team brief their plan in front of the other members of the sales team to the sales manager or the CEO at the beginning of the year. That way everyone can share best practices and see what works for others. You may want to add a mid-year azimuth check or quarterly azimuth checks to see how the team is executing the plan and make adjustments.

Here is an example of an annual sales plan:

Annual Sales Plan for ___________________

1. Situation:

• The Market (What’s your market outlook? What assumptions are you building the plan upon?)

• The Customer (What’s your customer doing?)

• The Competition (Who’s your competition? What are they doing?)

• Coronavirus (Current situation on travel, workplace, etc?)

• The Sales Team (What are they doing? What’s their mission?)

• The Company ((What are they doing? What’s their mission?))

• You:

  • Sales numbers from the last three years

  • Current pipeline

  • What three things worked last year?

  • What three things didn’t work last year?

  • Where in the company are we missing an opportunity?

2. Salesperson Mission: (Who, What, When, Where, Why — what are your goals?)

3. Execution:

• Leader’s Intent (see post #25 to learn more about Leader’s Intent — https://www.thefivecoatconsultinggroup.com/the-coronavirus-crisis/d-day )

• Purpose (A slightly broader why then the one used in the mission statement.)

• Key Tasks (The How — Could be several actions you plan to take to make your goal in 2021)

• End State (What does success look like on December 31, 2021?)

• Top 10 Prospects that your will pursue in 2021 who are not in your pipeline or customers (New business):

• Top 10 Sales that you will close in 2021 that are in your pipeline or current customers (Current business):

• Reoccurring actions to take (Emails, phone calls, social media, meetings, etc. This could be considered the sales operating rhythm (post #34 — https://www.thefivecoatconsultinggroup.com/the-coronavirus-crisis/operating-rhythm ):

  • Weekly

  • Monthly

  • Quarterly

• Actions to take by month (Trade shows to attend, webinars to host, in person sales calls to make, etc.):

  • January

  • February

  • March

  • April

  • May

  • June

  • July

  • August

  • September

  • October

  • November

  • December

• Coordination with:

  • Marketing

  • Operations

  • Other departments

• Obstacles that must be overcome (3 to 5):

• Personal goals for 2021 (3 to 5):

4. Admin and Logistics and Communications:

• Logistics:

  • CRM Requirements

  • Travel and Expense requirements

  • Trade show requirements

• Communications

  • To the Sales Director

  • CRM Requirements

  • To the Customer/Market (may be in conjunction with marketing)

Use the format to make more sales in the second half of 2020 and next year. Or if you have limited bandwidth, reach out to TFCG and see how we can help your team build their sales plans.