This book is full of lots of great ideas and within it I share my top 8 sales disciplines which I encourage everyone to adopt and put into practice.
You will not be surprised to hear that 2 of these disciplines relate to Plans and Processes.
I am a big believer in consistent sales success being achieved through these 2 P's.
The plan is how you will achieve what you want. The process is the detail to make it happen. You need both to get real sales success.
Let's take an example to show you what I mean.
Sales Plan
You have say set yourself a goal to achieve £30,000 in new revenue over the next 6 months. This is your goal, or you might call your main objective. Without further details this is just a target and without further plans is likely to just be a number on a spreadsheet. I talk to a lot of companies who live in 'spreadsheet fantasy land'.
They put in place big numbers as targets and then carry on as they were without putting in place the plan to turn that target into a reality.
Put bluntly, this is a daft way to operate but it happens a lot.
The sales plan outlines how we will move from where we are now to achieving our £30,000 target.
It works out that your average order value is for £5,000 and so therefore to hit the target you need to bring in 6 new customers to hit the goal.
It would be great to think we win new business with every prospect we engage with but we all know that doesn't happen. Some of our prospects will drop off at different stages and our plan needs to accommodate that. Let's say, there are 3 steps in our sales process (stage 1 enquiry, stage 2 meeting and stage 3 proposal) and let's say we offer a really good service so we get a 33% conversion rate at each stage.
The plan knows that if we want to get 6 of our prospects to become customers, we will need 18 prospects at the stage 3 proposal stage. It knows that if we want to get 18 of our prospects to stage 3, we will need 54 prospects at stage 2 and yes, you've guessed it, if we want 54 prospects at stage 2, we need 162 prospects at stage 1.
This is not rocket science, it is just basic maths based on the goal we want to hit and the average sale value. Of course, these numbers can be ripped up if one customer brings in £15,000 alone but remember this is a plan and I was always told to 'plan conservatively and execute optimistically'.
Through planning in this way, it allows you to see how many prospects you need to speak with initially. If in the above plan we are currently bringing in 40 leads a month, then there is further lead generation or prospecting work needed to be done to find the other 120 odd prospects needed to hit our goal. The image below describes perfectly why you need a plan if you have a goal!
