"If you don't know where you're going, any bus will get you there"

As the favoured quote above suggests, in the absence of a well thought-through sales strategy designed with sales growth in mind, a business is likely to lack direction, realistic objectives and, therefore, any real chance of improving sales performance – not without large doses of ‘luck’ and a heavy-weight team of full-time sales coaches tasked only with sales performance improvement.  

The key elements of your sales plan should include:

Product Mix

• What products do you have?
• Do any have more advantage in sales terms than others – ‘stickiness’, higher margin, longevity

Customer Mix

• Size of customers
• Potential
• No. Of customers
• New customers V Existing - win new business and / or grow sales of products and services to existing customers
• Key accounts - how to penetrate major customers

Market strategies

• Hunter / farmer / channel strategies
• By geography split / vertical markets / major and key client and the different approaches required for each

Remuneration / Commission plan – linked to…

• Expectation / targets 

%age of market share required - to what extent is there an opportunty to increase market share?

Sales strategies to support cross and up-sell opportunities

Direction – few large / many small – different servicing issues related to this

Clearly communicated customer offerings – your value propositions (differentiation)

Uniform sales methods in place – singing from the same ‘hymn sheet’

Pricing policy – what to charge, to whom and when

Promoting the business

• Personal selling - good quality strategic selling with pro-active sales support
• Network – face to face and via remote communication
• Direct (cold?) approach
• Website Articles / newsletter
• Testimonials / case studies / sales collateral
• Conference / seminars
• Third parties / channel strategy

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

--Benjamin Franklin