Deliverable2lessonstrategicsales.docx

Strategic Sales Plans

In order to increase the likelihood of positive outcomes for a business, each business should have a strategic plan. Strategic planning is a management tool—a written document, which helps create a unified direction for decision makers, managers and the company employees as a whole. Stemming from the overall company strategic plan and in partnership with the marketing plan, the strategic sales plan focuses on the goals of the sales force as it relates to the overall strategy. The strategic sales plan may be structured by the whole company, a specific business unit or even a product line. Like most effective plans, and in particular when aligned with a marketing plan, a strategic sales plan should answer the following four questions: WHO, WHY, WHAT, and WHEN.

Who

· Who is the sales team trying to reach? Who is the customer? The answer to these two questions is one of the four foundation blocks to the strategic sales plan.
· The “who” can be a specific industry (e.g., Selling tires to the automotive industry), a specific product category (e.g., Selling shampoo and conditioner brands to health & beauty product buyers) or a specific company (e.g., Selling computers to Department of Defense).

Why

· “Why” reflects knowing the impact of your communication message to your customers and it is particularly interwoven with the marketing plan. The sales group should be prepared to know why their product or service is superior or a better solution for the customer. This is a great way to introduce your sales force’s expertise and creating a value-added, consultative approach to the sales strategy.
· For example: Imagine walking into a flooring storefront. The options seem to be endless: carpet, tile, wood, engineered materials. Different pads, different designs, different levels of care and wear. If you are a flooring sales manager, knowing about all the options puts you and your team in an expert position to be the “flooring consultant” to potential customers.

What

· The word “what” has multiple meanings. What is it that you are selling? What are you doing to make the sale? Here’s a classic story told in many business school classrooms:
· A woman walks into a hardware store and goes to the aisle with all the drill bits offerings hanging on a wall. After about 15 minutes, a salesperson approaches her and watches her for a minute or two. Then the salesperson asks, “What kind of drill bit do you need; diamond tipped? Are you drilling into wood, metal, concrete? What type of drill do you own?” The woman responds with, “I don’t need a drill bit, I need a hole.” (author unknown)

· This story can jumpstart a discussion about features and benefits. To continue our classic story, the woman is seeking a benefit, while the sales person is inquiring about features. It is important to know what you are selling are you selling drill bits or are you selling the service of hole-providers?

When

· The “when” centers on the sales cycle and the timing of the execution of a sales strategy. If you are a mitten company, your sales strategy will be hyper-focused on gaining as much market share in late fall and early winter. If you are part of an accounting firm, you may wish to organize sales efforts around common quarter-ends or year-end tax filing due dates.

Next Steps

After considering the What, Why, Who and When questions, a sales professional or a sales team should focus the answers as ways to strengthen their expertise and to encourage a consultative relationship between the sales force and the customer. In answering these questions, the sales group also needs to look how each aspect can be leveraged to added value to the relationship with the customer.

Regardless of your industry, your strategic sales plan should focus on what your business does best and better than your competition. Your target customer may be many small customers, or large conglomerates. You may wish to focus your sales season as it aligns to your industry or even specific days of the week. There may be an infinite amount of combinations for the answers to these four questions, and the way a specific strategic sales plan is structured will be determined by that combination.

It is always important to reach for value creation at every step of the sales strategy and to keep value creation in the forefront as tactics are developed and as benchmarking is evaluated.