Five Essential Components for a Winning Sales Plan

A Sales Plan is key to acheiving your revenue goals and meeting and exeeding your growth plans. Based on our experience we would like to call out these 5 top elements that you must have as part of your Sales plan. Here are our Top 5.

1. Market Segmentation. This is a key, often first step, to building a plan. Know what segments are best suited for adoption of your product or service. There are several models that one can use to do this, depending on the type and nature of business including Demographic, Geographic, Behavioral and Value-based to name a few.

   
   

2. Value Proposition & Messaging. Identifying the key benefits to the customer, the core value drivers. Developing your message of benefits rather than features, creating use case based narratives, economic value propositions and so on,

   
   

3. Go-to-Market. This step often decides the fate of your product sales. Many a good product or service fails to take off because of ill-designed GTMs. Inbound vs Outbound, Direct vs Indirect, Generic vs Vertical (specially in tech services) and many such aspects must be looked into.

   
   

4. Lead generation & Demand Creation. Push vs pull, campaigns, identifying and connecting with influencers, decision-makers, advisors et al. Understanding funnel ratios and setting up a system that will continuously feed prospects into the top of the funnel.

   
   

5. Teams, Compensation & Rewards. Last but not least have a team of sales people that match your requirements based on all of the above. They should be compensated fairly and rewarded for their achievements as individuals. Clarity of expectations and benefits are going to be key to building and retaining such individuals.

   
   

There are a few more aspects to put into place but in our experience if you get these five elements right you are well on your way to continued success.

The author of this has 35+ years of experience including having played roles of CEO, CRO, CMO and advised and mentored several companies and their senior executives on creating and implementing their Sales Plans.