Supercharge Your Sales (#77)
As we head into December and close out 2020, your company’s sales may have been flat or even declined over the year. How do you supercharge your sales team to perform better in 2021? The first place I would start is to make sure each member of the sales team has an annual sales plan. And even if you are a sole proprietor, it is worth developing a game plan for your sales in 2021.
I talked earlier about a written military planning format called the Operations Order or OPORD (see post #30). 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 plan as they develop a roadmap to make more sales in 2021.
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 ___________________
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:
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):
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
Priority of Communications (see Post #69)
To the Customer/Market (may be in conjunction with marketing)
For my company, TFCG, in 2021 my marketing/sales leader’s intent is:
Purpose: Help to forge better leaders and exceptional organizations
Key Tasks:
(Marketing) Continue blogging twice a week; publish the book Build Your Band of Brothers and Sisters: The Currahee Mountain Leadership Experience
Make ten contacts and one proposal per week
Develop both leadership training opportunities and business consulting contracts from current clients
Expand my leadership training business in the health care and agri-business markets
Make the first sale of the in-person Currahee Mountain Leadership Experience
End State: On December 31, 2021, TFCG has increased its sales by 100 percent from 2020.
Go on the offense and supercharge your sales team by developing sales plans for each of them to use in 2021. Or if you have limited bandwidth, reach out to TFCG here and see how we can help your team build their sales plans.