Sales Plan:

After SWOT has been documented, sales leaders may apply this information to address specific competitors with sales battle cards.

Creating battle cards for each competitor can be useful in sales conversations to address objections and effectively position strengths in relation to the industry.

There are many examples of sales battle card templates, here is one:

At the end of this process, having regularly updated SWOT analysis and battle cards accessible can keep sales teams up to date when selling against specific competitors.

Chunking out the sales process like this also allows sales leaders to build a sales model, both qualitative and quantitative. Both of these tools will help you optimize your sales system and produce more results. We’ll cover these in the next section.

For now, establish protocols and playbooks for each step of the sales process.

For example, at the meeting stage, there is likely a series of meetings that ladder up to the final scoping call where you send over the contract. Perhaps there is first a discovery call where the sales rep qualifies the prospect, and then a scoping call where an account executive hones in on the details of the engagement, followed by a contract call where the customer signs a deal.

At each step of this process, sales leaders can outline a loose playbook for reps to follow. One particularly useful artifact here is to compile a list of common objections with your answers to them:

These documents will help new sales hires onboard more quickly as well as prevent deals from falling through. It should be updated regularly.

It’s helpful to keep a general sales FAQ document that can be used to predict and preempt common questions:

The documents, strategies, and sales tactics will differ depending on your business model and sales approach.

Some companies, for example, will have a large SDR function with many outbound emails. This will require not only content and marketing alignment, but a clean database of prospects and constant quantitative optimization.

Other companies may be higher touch, running tables at tradeshows and having a more qualitative relationship with their sales process.

What’s important is to outline this in advance, as it will help establish a cogent approach to the sales program and procure the right tools, budget, and personnel to run it.

This model shows the sales team exactly which steps are involved in the sales process, and it’s often broken out by sales channel or customer segment.

Then, take each step of the process and add it into a spreadsheet to build a quantitative forecast for the whole system. This will include baseline assumptions as well as any opportunities for improvement in the system.

The above example shows a company’s numbers from last year to establish baseline assumptions for the future forecast.

In sales forecasting, sales leaders can assume certain channels will grow (such as more inbound leads and more referrals) and other channels will stagnate or shrink. These are hypotheses, but they inform a reality-based plan.

The main utility of this quantitative forecast is to calculate the volume of incremental revenue needed to hit the macro goal.

Sales leaders may need to make an educated guess as to what conversion rates and lead volume will be for new sales channels and efforts, but this will provide a foundation for how many leads need to be generated, how many meetings have to be booked, and what resources will be needed to get there. This helps to procure the right tools, budget, and resources to accomplish sales goals.

From there, sales leaders can create sales milestones. This is usually done on a quarterly basis.

Creating milestones is a great way to break down goals into smaller, more manageable pieces. By setting milestones in the sales plan, leaders can track their progress and ensure that they're on track to achieve their goals. For example, if the goal is to increase revenue by 10% over the next 12 months,  increasing revenue by 2.5% every quarter would be a reasonable milestone.