Failing to Plan is… Planning to fail!
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Failing to Plan is… Planning to fail!
by jjjones2018 | Sep 17, 2018 | Sales |
Most people know this to be true but still they fail to plan.
It’s one thing knowing... but another thing actually doing!
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How to plan and organise YOU and YOUR TIME so that you will work easily and efficiently which has the effect of enables you to;
Get much more done in any day.
Removes stress from your life.
And creates a fantastic work/life balance.
But also keep in mind;
Old Yiddish proverb; Man plans, God laughs!
The point is that when you are working in sales to get the best and most out of your time you MUST plan what it is that you are doing and/or intending to do. A really good plan is a fairly solid guideline of what it is that you intend to do for achieving your targets but when making your plan you should always allow for the unexpected, build in some space for manoeuvre should your day, week or month go pear shaped because of some unforeseen circumstance or some unexpected catastrophic event.
NB. In case of any grey area while talking about Sales Reps;
Sales Reps are the sales professionals who are the representatives of a company, probably working on a journey cycle, weekly, monthly or depending on the business they represent, may call every week or even every six months or anything in between, selling the company’s products to their customers.
To create real, lasting growth for you and your company you need to create your own strategy, and that starts with a good solid sales plan.
A good sales plan is a strategy that sets out your direction and steps in targets and tactics (planning/prospecting/qualifying/closing and follow up) for your sales and identifies the steps you will need to take in order to meet your goals and targets.
A sales plan will help you to;
Define how best to use your time for achieving your goals and sales targets.
Choose the sales strategies that are suited to your market
Review your goals periodically and improve your approaches to sales.
Get the maximum reward (sales) for the best utilisation of your time.
Have less stress in your working 6 and allow you clearer focus which in turn will make your working life more rewarding.
Accurately plan weeks and months ahead.
A sales plan for a company ideally works in tandem with or alongside the company marketing plan.
Most businesses develop or update their sales plans periodically, however for many sales reps their targets are reviewed every 3, 6 or 12 months. For many sales reps the target is the simply the sales target/turnover, for other sales reps the targets also include things like getting displays in showrooms or getting a special offers moving, eg; must try to sell batches of sinks to hardware suppliers. With some product ranges selling to construction industries a large part of a sales professional’s time may be taken with talking to architects, specifiers and designers in order to have their product range specified for a particular project, this is time consuming and must also be planned in order to cover properly.
The very first sales job I ever had in repeat order business, I worked on a 2 x week journey cycle for a wholesaler, the target for week 1 was ￡19,000 and week 2 was ￡28,000. I remember the first day when I was being shown around and I met the sales manager, a very nice guy his name was Joe and he told me what my targets were, I do not know how I would have appeared to someone looking at me when he told me what my targets were in this new job, I nearly threw up, I felt sick in my stomach and inside I was thinking to myself “How the hell am I going to do that, is it even possible?” at the time week 1 was just touching ￡11,000 and week 2 was at about ￡19,000. Joe asked me if I thought I’d have any problem reaching my targets and I told him “Honestly, I don’t know, I’ve never worked in repeat order business before, I’ll do the best that I can, but any help or training that you can give me would be very helpful” his response to me was along the lines of… “Ah sure don’t worry, you’ll be grand, you’ll get the hang of it after a while” that night I did to sleep so good.
So I started my new job while learning from Joe, reading anything I could about sales and learning as much as I could as quickly as I could. Yeah I made many mistakes, I got many things wrong, under pressure I forgot to do some things, but I got through.
I do not remember who first introduced me to “The Pareto Principle” (known as the 80/20 Rule) but this was one of the first things I used to start improving turnover, another thing I did was to try and make it as easy as possible for the customer to order from me. I worked to a plan, some parts of the plan I treated as if the plan was written in stone and some parts fluid, my focus being on what was needed most. Slowly but solidly this increased the turnover in my area till after about four or five months I had week 1 at about ￡28,000 and week 2 was at about ￡42,000 which was a substantial increase on what the area was when I started.
The reason for telling you this is to let you know that;
If you work to a plan, it will help and guide you.
If you are ever given a sales target which makes you want to throw up, relax and pull back! If you plan how you are going to do it, it is achievable. If ever you have to go through a wall, just pull down one brick at a time, and keep on going.
Many things are possible if you know your plan and just break it down into simple steps.
Some basic steps to start execution of your own sales plan;
Depending on the profession and industry where you are servicing the following steps are a guideline which I hope will be useful to YOU!
Just for the moment let us assume that you are just starting a new job as a sales rep in repeat order business OR you have just been given a new territory OR you just want to improve your sales turnover in repeat-order business, you do not have a lot of new prospects from a good referral pipeline/funnel just yet, so where do we begin?
1) Make a simple weekly base plan for yourself, for example if you need to see 20 customers/prospects per week you might decide to see 5 every day Monday to Thursday and Friday work in your office taking care of phone calls, emails, quotes and sending brochures etc. If there are things which must be done a certain times of the week like company meetings etc. put these into your base plan. If you have some personal thing which has to be done every week (and it is ok with your employer) for example you need to collect children every Wednesday at 4pm for football training, put that into your base plan too. Your base plan is a template plan for EVERY week and will not change too much as it has all the constant things which you must address weekly, that way if you are talking with someone and they want to fix a meeting with you, thinking on your feet for example, you will already know that you are free on Monday afternoon or Wednesday mornings
2) When starting out in a new job or territory get a spreadsheet of the existing and dormant customers and see who are the top 20% who are giving you 80% of your turnover, keeping your base plan in mind you can start filling in the appointment slots with the customers who are most likely to start you sales figures improving.
3) You know already that every week you will need to do a bit of planning for appointments and follow up the following week so put that in your base plan too.
4) Depending on what kind of journey cycle and targets you are working once you have your base plan you can always elaborate it or change it, for example; when given a target that you need 4 new customers per month, if you average conversation is 4/1 it is simple for you to understand quickly that to achieve your target that you must at least contact one prospect per day Monday to Thursday, that will give you your target.
5) Whatever your basic plan is always know what it is that you plan on doing tomorrow, at the end of the week always know what it is that you will be doing on Monday. If ever it happens you where you are starting your day in sales and you don’t know where to start today, that’s not a very nice or productive feeling. When you know what you are doing the next day everything is so much easier, so much more efficient and rewarding.