Sales Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is the exercise that organizations struggle with in defining their sales strategies plans and the future direction of the company. This article addresses a few ideas to assist you in the sales part of the overall sales strategies plan.
A great series of starter questions should be answered right at the start.
What do you want to do?
Run the business
Or
Grow the business
Or
Transform the business
Run the business: Status quoi, business as usual, just like before, keep the lights on. No big
changes.
Grow the business: Increase revenues/sales, grow markets, and add resources, facilities and people, expand.
Transform the business: Big changes, risk, new stuff, different markets, products, channels, skills and resources.
Now keep these three questions in mind through the process, write them out on a flip chart or white board.
1 What is it that we do?
2 Who is our target, who do we do it for?
3 How do we do it better, how do we excel over others that we compete with?
Where to start:
If you have recently had a detailed assessment of the sales group done great if not I suggest you get one done to establish a true baseline for all of your decisions. The sales strategies plan should be done by the senior management team and within reason should be completed without consideration of the ability to execute. (I will explain later) It is important to get buy in with the entire team for all parts of the sales strategies plan. Start by establishing a time frame for the sales strategies plan. There is a ton of information on the web regarding details that will help you through this sales strategies process. Outline the sales strategies plan, establish strategic objectives and goals identify key strategic projects and stack rank them in order of importance to the overall sales strategies plan and then for each ask yourself the following two questions about each.
1 How important is this to the business
2 What is our ability as an organization to execute?
If it's very important to the business and you can execute with ease then it should go to the top of the list. If it is not so important and very difficult to execute on then it should go to the bottom of the list ..
Now what can you expect from the current sales group to do their part. There will probability be a gap between what you need and what they can deliver.
The model is simple and if you spend a few minutes understanding its power it will explain what you have to do. It goes on to explain the steps required to complete a sales strategies plan
Dealing with the gap: You will recall that I asked you to develop the sales strategies plan without constrengths. That is because I believe that you should be able to dream, vision what the future should hold without always being concerned that the sales group may not be capable of delivering. We can fix that; you can fix that...close the gap and manage the business towards those goals without being weighted down by doubt and uncertainty.
Keep it simple; check out Google see strategic planning and good luck!
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