Developing a Sales Plan That Will Work

When we are developing a sales plan with our clients, we are trying to understand a few things.

1) What type of growth is desired? 10%,20%, 50%?
2) How big is their market?
3) What segment of the market do they want to go after?
4) What is this segment of the market looking for?

The first three steps are fairly self-explanatory and can be accomplished with some research and a few meetings. The 4th step is the difficult one.

When we start interacting in a market it is important to remember that we and often our clients do not have a good understanding of what the market is looking for. This understanding begins to happen when we start going to meetings with good prospects/customers. Through these meetings and rigorous discussions afterwards, we as a team begin to develop an idea of how we can compete. From this understanding, we develop a sales plan.

The difference between our planning process and a typical one is our plan is developed from actual input from the market. We know that our plan is not 100% correct. It will be tweaked and re-tweaked as we gather more input from the market and throughout execution.