Success with modern strategic sales planning
Sales is the growth engine of a company. To ensure the sustainability of success, it is not enough to look at sales only from an operational or transactional perspective. A long-term, well thought-out, strategic sales planning with long-term and short-term business goals is key.
Whether strategic, operational, or tactical – most companies manage their sales planning with self-developed tools that have been adapted. But often, they are still handled in spreadsheets or in other isolated, siloed compartments. Cloud-based platforms or integrated, automated solutions provide valuable strategic insight in tandem with conventional CRM systems. They support sales planning, add another dimension of efficiency, and also promote increased collaboration within the company. Let’s look at how to build successful strategic sales planning.
Strategic sales planning as a foundation
Not only for the go-to-market approach, but also for a top-down approach, structured, strategic sales planning is essential. It forms the foundation for further operative and tactical planning. Whether it’s a general analysis, the competition or the current market situation – many different factors are evaluated during strategic sales planning. Based on this, you can create a holistic concept for sales with concrete measures for operationalizing your defined sales strategy. This also includes keeping an eye on possible risks, defining any needed countermeasures and identifying target groups with corresponding requirements. As a result, you can develop a targeted approach to customers.
The impact of goals on strategic sales planning
With established long-term and short-term goals in mind, aligning strategic sales planning with those goals, you’re not only positively influencing the strategic planning component, but you’re also helping your team do the best they can, because when you can easily spot potential obstacles to your plans, you enable your organization to achieve goals.
A key impact of strategic sales planning is being able to clearly see the road ahead. Derive exactly where your organization is headed in alignment with sales goals. The division into short and long term business goals can help to precisely define the corresponding priorities. Regardless of size or industry, strategic sales planning enables faster, more accurate planning based on a more complete picture of your data.
Establish long-term and short-term business goals
As a first step, formulate long-term sales goals based on overall business objectives. It is important that you focus on the big picture: What do you want to achieve? Where do you want your company to be in, say, five years? You may want to set a goal of increasing sales by a certain percentage, achieving a specific revenue target, or expanding into a new market segment. Once you’ve established your long-term goals, then break them down into realistic sub-goals. A popular strategy for this is the “SMART” method: goals that are considered specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely.
For example, if one of your long-term goals is to increase sales by 20%, you could then set short-term goals of acquiring six new, high-yield customers (specific) while keeping accurate customer records (measurable). New customer acquisition could be distributed among a set number of employees (achievable) to target potential, industry-relevant customers (relevant). The timeframe could also be defined, for example, by committing to acquire the targeted six new customers in the next twelve months (timely).
Measure progress
Plan to measure your progress at regular intervals. This is often done by comparing your plans vs. actual data. A modern, collaborative sales planning solution provides needed support for strategic sales planning that offers seamless integration for fully automated sales processes. This gives you the opportunity to make swift adjustments to your short-term goals, if necessary. Don’t forget to acknowledge when goals are met or even exceeded, which becomes much easier to do with balanced, unified sales planning.
Goals and strategies also occasionally need adjusting. Ensure that you can easily do things like reforecast with data that draws from all relevant sources across the organization that may impact your sales planning. Draw inspiration from results to ensure they are realistic and achievable, especially for your sales organization. No matter the industry, modern strategic sales planning supports driving better decisions now and in the future.
