sample sales business plan template

And if (or more likely when ) those goals change over time, you need to regularly communicate those shifts and the strategic adjustments that come with them to your team.

Your sales strategy keeps your sales process productive — it offers the actionable steps your reps can take to deliver on your vision and realize the goals you set. So naturally, you need to communicate it effectively. A sales plan offers a solid resource for that.

For instance, your sales org might notice that your SDRs are posting lackluster cold call conversion rates. In turn, you might want to have them focus primarily on email outreach, or you could experiment with new sales messaging on calls.

Regardless of how you want to approach the situation, a thoughtfully structured sales plan will give both you and your reps a high-level perspective that would inform more cohesive, effective efforts across the team.

An effective sales org is a machine — one where each part has a specific function that serves a specific purpose that needs to be executed in a specific fashion. That's why everyone who comprises that org needs to have a clear understanding of how they specifically play into the company's broader sales strategy.

Outlining roles and responsibilities while sales planning lends itself to more efficient task delegation, improved collaboration, overlap reduction, and increased accountability. All of which amount to more streamlined, smooth, successful sales efforts.

Sales planning can set the framework for gauging how well your team is delivering on your sales strategy. It can inform the benchmarks and milestones reps can use to see how their performance stacks up against your goals and expectations.

It also gives sales leadership a holistic view of how well a sales org is functioning as a whole — giving them the necessary perspective to understand whether they have the right people and tools in place to be as successful as possible.

Sales planning isn‘t (and shouldn’t) be limited to the actual sales plan document it produces. If that document is going to have any substance or practical value, it needs to be the byproduct of a thorough, well-informed, high-level strategy.

When sales planning, you have some key steps you need to cover — including:

• Gather sales data and search for trends.
• Define your objectives.
• Determine metrics for success.
• Assess the current situation.
• Start sales forecasting.
• Identify gaps.
• Ideate new initiatives.
• Involve stakeholders.
• Outline action items.

When putting this list together, I consulted Zach Drollinger — Senior Director of Sales at edtech provider Coursedog — to ensure the examples detailed below are sound and accurate.

Step 1: Gather sales data and search for trends.

To plan for the present and future, your company needs to look to the past. What did sales look like during the previous year? What about the last five years? Using this information can help you identify trends in your industry. While it's not foolproof, it helps establish a foundation for your sales planning process.

For the sake of example, let‘s say that I’m a new sales director for an edtech company that sells curriculum planning software to higher education institutions. My vertical is community colleges, and my territory is the East Coast.

Once I assume this new role, I‘m going to want to gather as much context as possible about my vertical and how my company has approached it historically. I would pull information about how we’ve sold to this vertical.

How much new business have we closed within it in the past five years? How does that compare to how we perform with other kinds of institutions? Are we seeing significant churn from these customers?

I would also want to get context about the general needs, interests, and pain points of the kinds of institutions I‘m selling to. I’d look for insight into figures like degree velocity, staff retention, and enrollment.

Ultimately, I would get a comprehensive perspective on my sales process — a thorough understanding of where I stand and what my prospects are dealing with. That will ensure that I can deliver on the next step as effectively as possible.

Step 2: Define your objectives.

How do you know your business is doing well if you have no goals? As you can tell from its placement on this list, defining your goals and objectives is one of the first steps you should take in your sales planning process. Once you have them defined, you can move forward with executing them.

To extend the example from the previous step, I would leverage the context I gathered through the research I conducted about both my and my prospect's circumstances. I would start setting both broader goals and more granular operational objectives .

For instance, I might want to set a goal of increasing sales revenue from my vertical. From there, I would start putting together the kind of specific objectives that will facilitate that process — like connecting with administrators from at least 30 community colleges, booking demos with at least 10 schools, and successfully closing at least five institutions.

Obviously, those steps represent a streamlined (and unrealistically straightforward) sales process, but you get the idea — I would set a concrete goal, supplemented by SMART objectives , that will serve as a solid reference point for my org's efforts as the sales process progresses.

Step 3: Determine metrics for success.

Every business is different. One thing we can all agree on is that you need metrics for success. These metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs). What are you going to use to determine if your business is successful? KPIs differ based on your medium, but standard metrics are gross profit margins, return on investment (ROI), daily web traffic users, conversion rate, and more.

I kind of covered this step in the previous example, but it still warrants a bit more elaboration. The “M” in SMART goals (“measurable”) is there for a reason. You can‘t tell if your efforts were successful if you don’t know what “successful” actually means.

The edtech sales example I‘ve been running with revolves mostly around me assuming ownership of an existing vertical and getting more out of it. So it’s fair to assume that sales growth rate — the increase or decrease of sales revenue in a given period, typically expressed as a percentage — would be an effective way to gauge success.

I might want to structure my goals and objectives around a sales growth rate of 20% Y/Y within my vertical. I would make sure my org was familiar with that figure and offer some context about what it would take to reach it — namely, how many institutions we would need to close and retain.

Step 4: Assess the current situation.

How is your business fairing right now? This information is relevant to determining how your current situation holds up to the goals and objectives you set during step two. What are your roadblocks? What are your strengths? Create a list of the obstacles hindering your success. Identify the assets you can use as an advantage. These factors will guide you as you build your sales plan.

Continuing the edtech example, I would use the historical context I gathered and the objectives I set to frame how I look at my current circumstances. I might start by considering my goal of increasing revenue by 20% Y/Y. In that case, I would look at the company's retention figures — ideally, that would give me a sense of whether that needs to be a major area of focus.

I would also try to pin down trends in the colleges that we've already closed — are there any pain points we consistently sell on? I might take a closer look at how we demo to see if we might be glossing over key elements of our value proposition. Maybe, I would use conversation intelligence to get a better sense of how reps are handling their calls.

Ultimately, I would try to identify why we're performing the way we are, the inefficiencies that might be resulting from our current strategy, and how we can best set ourselves up to sell as effectively as possible.

Step 5: Start sales forecasting.

Sales forecasting is an in-depth report that predicts what a salesperson, team, or company will sell weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. While it is finicky, it can help your company make better decisions when hiring, budgeting, prospecting, and setting goals.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, economics has become less predictable. Claire Fenton , the owner of StrActGro — a professional training and coaching company — states, “Many economic forecasters won't predict beyond three months at a time.” This makes sales forecasting difficult. However, there are tools at your disposal to create accurate sales forecasts .

In our edtech example, I would approach this step by trying to estimate how my sales org is going to fare with the specific vertical we‘re pursuing in the time window we’ve allotted.

The method I decide to go with will depend on factors like how many concrete opportunities we have lined up — in addition to elements like the kind of historical data we have handy, how the reps working these deals tend to perform, and the degree of insight we have about our potential customers.

Let's say I consider those factors and decide to run something called a multivariable analysis. In that case, I could start by taking stock of the opportunities my reps have lined up. Then, I could look at the reps working those deals, their typical win rates, and the time they have to close — among other factors.

For instance, I might calculate that a rep working with a particularly large institution has a 50% chance of closing within the window we‘ve allotted. Using that insight, we could attribute 50% of the potential deal size to our forecast — we’d repeat that process with all of the opportunities in question and ideally get a solid sense of the revenue we can expect to generate in this window.

Step 6: Identify gaps.

When identifying gaps in your business, consider what your company needs now and what you might need in the future. First, identify the skills you feel your employees need to reach your goal. Second, evaluate the skills of your current employees. Once you have this information, you can train employees or hire new ones to fill the gaps.

Continuing the edtech example, let‘s say my forecast turned up results that weren’t in keeping with what we need to reach our goals. If that were the case, I would take a holistic look at our process, operations, and resources to pin down inefficiencies or areas for improvement.

In my search, I find that our sales content and marketing collateral are dated — with case studies that don‘t cover our product’s newest and most relevant features. I also might see that our reps don‘t seem to have too much trouble booking demos, but the demos themselves aren’t converting due to a lack of training and inconsistent messaging.

And finally, I find that a lack of alignment with marketing has prospects focusing on unrealistic outcomes our sales team can‘t deliver on. Once I’ve identified those gaps, I would start to hone in on ways to remedy those issues and improve those elements.

Step 7: Ideate new initiatives.

Many industry trends are cyclical. They phase in and out of “style.” As you build your sales plan, ideate new initiatives based on opportunities you may have passed on in previous years.

If your business exclusively focused on word-of-mouth and social media marketing in the past, consider adding webinars or special promotions to your plan.

In the edtech example we've been running with, I would likely ideate initiatives based on the gaps I identified in the previous step. I would start a push to ensure that our sales content and marketing collateral are up-to-date and impressive.

I would also consider new training programs to ensure that our coaching infrastructure is prioritizing how to conduct effective demos. Finally, I would start to work on a plan with marketing to ensure our messaging is aligned with theirs — so we can make sure prospects' expectations are realistic and effective.

One way or another, I would take the gaps I found and find concrete, actionable ways to fill them. I would make sure that these initiatives aren't abstract. Just saying, " We're going to be better at demos," isn‘t a plan — it’s a sentiment, and sentiments don't translate to hard sales.

Step 8: Involve stakeholders.

Stakeholders are individuals, groups, or organizations with a vested interest in your company. They are typically investors, employees, or customers and often have deciding power in your business. Towards the end of your sales planning process, involve stakeholders from departments that affect your outcomes, such as marketing and product. It leads to an efficient and actionable sales planning process.

This step is sort of an extension of the previous two — once I‘ve identified the key issues and roadblocks obstructing my edtech startup’s sales org, I would start identifying the right people to fulfill the necessary initiatives I've put together.

In this example, I would tap some stakeholders in charge of our sales content and marketing collateral to produce newer, more relevant case studies and whitepapers we can pass along to the institutions we're working with.

I would also go to middle management and either offer more direction for coaching on demos or bring in a third-party training service to offer more focused, professional insight on the issue.

Finally, I would connect with marketing leadership to align on the benefits and outcomes we generally stress when pitching the schools we sell to. That way, we can ensure that the institutions we're connecting with have realistic expectations of our product or service that we can speak to more clearly and effectively.

Step 9: Outline action items.

Once you have implemented this strategy to create your sales planning process, the final step is outlining your action items. Using your company's capacity and quota numbers, build a list of steps that take you through the sales process. Examples of action items are writing a sales call script, identifying industry competitors, or strategizing new incentives or perks.

In our edtech example, some key action items might be:

• Revamp our prospecting strategy via more involved coaching and re-tooled sales messaging.
• Revamp administrator and college dean buyer personas.
• Conduct new trainings on demoing our software.
• See our new prospecting strategy from ideation to execution.
• Align with our sales enablement stakeholders for new, more relevant case studies and whitepapers.

Obviously, that list isn‘t exhaustive — but those are still the kinds of steps we would need to clarify and take to structure a more effective high-level strategy to produce different (ideally much better) results than we’ve been seeing.

One thing to keep in mind is that sales planning shouldn't end with creating the document.

You‘ll want to reiterate this process every year to maintain your organization's sales excellence.

Now that you‘re committed to the sales planning process, let's dive into the written execution component of sales planning.

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How to create a sales plan in 7 Steps

A sales plan is the first step toward defining your sales strategy , sales goals and how you’ll reach them.

A refined sales plan is a go-to resource for your reps. It helps them better understand their role, responsibilities, targets, tactics and methods. When done right, it gives your reps all the information they need to perform at their highest level.

In this article, we outline what a sales plan is and why it’s important to create one. We also offer a step-by-step guide on how to make a sales plan with examples of each step.

What is a sales plan and why create one?

Your sales plan is a roadmap that outlines how you’ll hit your revenue targets, who your target market is, the activities needed to achieve your goals and any roadblocks you may need to overcome.

Many business leaders see their sales plan as an extension of the traditional business plan. The business plan contains strategic and revenue goals across the organization, while the sales plan lays out how to achieve them.

The benefits of a sales plan

A successful sales plan will keep all your reps focused on the right activities and ensure they’re working toward the same outcome. It will also address your company's specific needs. For example, you might choose to write a 30- , 60- or 90-day sales plan depending on your current goals and the nature of your business.

Say your ultimate goal for the next quarter is $250,000 in new business. A sales plan will outline the objective, the strategies that will help you get there and how you’ll execute and measure those strategies. It will allow your whole team to collaborate and ensure you achieve it together.

Many salespeople are driven by action and sometimes long-term sales planning gets neglected in favor of short-term results.

While this may help them hit their quota, the downside is the lack of systems in place. Instead, treat sales processes as a system with steps you can improve. If reps are doing wildly different things, it’s hard to uncover what’s working and what’s not. A strategic sales plan can optimize your team’s performance and keep them on track using repeatable systems.

With this in mind, let’s explore the seven components of an effective sales plan

1. Company mission and positioning

To work toward the same company goals, everyone in your organization must understand what your organization is trying to achieve and where in the market you position yourself.

To help define your mission and positioning, involve your sales leaders in all areas of the business strategy. Collaborating and working toward the same goals is impossible if those goals are determined by only a select group of stakeholders.

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To get a handle on the company’s mission and positioning, take the following steps:

Collaborate with marketing: Your marketing teams live and breathe the positioning of your company. Take the time to talk to each function within the department, from demand generation to performance marketing to learn what they know.

Interview customer success teams: Customer support reps speak with your existing customers every day. Interview them to find common questions and pain points.

Talk to your customers: Customer insights are a foundational part of any positioning strategy. Speak directly with existing and new customers to find out what they love about your product or service.

Read your company blog: Those in charge of content production have a strong understanding of customer needs. Check out blog articles and ebooks to familiarize yourself with customer language and common themes.

Look for mentions around the web: How are other people talking about your organization? Look for press mentions, social media posts, articles and features that mention your products and services.

These insights can provide context around how your company is currently positioned in the market.

Finally, speak with the team in charge of defining the company’s positioning. Have a list of questions and use the time to find out why they made certain decisions. Here are some examples:

What important insights from the original target audience research made you create our positioning statement?

What competitor research led us to position ourselves in this way? Does this significantly differentiate us from the crowd? How?

What core ideals and values drove us to make these promises in our positioning statement? Have they shifted in any way since we launched? If so, what motivates these promises now?

How to communicate mission and positioning

In this section of the sales plan, include the following information:

Company mission : Why your company exists and the value you’re determined to bring to the market.

Competition: Who your direct competitors (those who offer similar products and services) and indirect competitors (brands who solve the same problem in different ways) are.

Value propositions: The features, benefits and solutions your product delivers.

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2. Goals and targets

Define your revenue goals and the other targets sales are responsible for.

As mentioned earlier, sales goals are usually aligned with business goals. Your boardroom members typically establish the company’s revenue goals and it’s your job to achieve them.

Revenue goals will shape your sales strategy. Use them to reverse engineer quotas, sales activity and the staff you need to execute them.

Break your big-picture revenue goal down further into sales targets and activity targets for your team. Activities are the specific actions you and your reps can control, while sales targets are the results provided by those activities.

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Use data on sales activity and performance from previous years to calculate sales targets. You should break this down by pipeline stage and activity conducted by reps across all functions.

For example, how many cold emails does it take to generate a deal? What is the average lifetime value (LTV) of your customer?

Breaking down these numbers allows you to accurately forecast what it will take to achieve your new revenue goal.

This part of your sales plan might include setting goals like the following:

200 total cold emails sent per day

200 total cold calls made per day

25 demos conducted per day

5 new sales appointments made a day

100 follow-up emails sent per day

Breaking down your goals into specific activities will also reveal the expertise needed for each activity and any required changes to your organizational structure, which will come into play in the next step.

How to communicate goals and targets

Within this section of the sales plan, include the following information:

Revenue goals : Reverse engineer the boardroom revenue goals to identify achievable sales goals and the number of staff needed to reach them. Sales targets : Use data on sales activity and past performance to define quotas and metrics for each stage of the sales pipeline.

Expertise needed for each activity: What qualities and attributes do your staff need to achieve these predefined activities? How much experience do they need vs. what can be learned on the job?

3. Sales organization and team structure

Identify the talent and expertise you need to achieve your goals.

For example, a marketing agency that depends on strong relationships will benefit more from a business development executive than a sales development representative (SDR) .

Use the targets established in the previous section to identify who you need to hire for your team. For example, if the average sales development rep can send 20 cold emails a day and you need to send 200 to achieve your goals, you’ll need around ten reps to hit your targets.

Include the information for each team member in a table in your sales plan. Here is an example.

Visualizing each role helps all stakeholders understand who they’re hiring and the people they’re responsible for. It allows them to collaborate on the plan and identify the critical responsibilities and qualities of their ideal candidates.

You want to avoid micromanaging , but now is a good time to ask your existing teams to report on the time spent on certain activities. Keeping a timesheet will give you an accurate forecast of how long certain activities take and the capacity of each rep.

How to communicate your sales organization and team structure

Team structure: These are the functions that make up your overall sales organization. The roles of SDR, business development and account teams must be well-defined.

Roles and responsibilities: These are the roles you need to hire, along with the tasks they’re responsible for. This will help you produce job descriptions that attract great talent.

Salary and compensation: How will the company remunerate your teams? Having competitive salaries, compensation schemes and sales incentives will attract top performers and keep them motivated.

Timeline: Attempting to hire dozens of people at once is tough. Prioritize hiring based on how critical each role is for executing your plan. Take a phased hiring approach to onboard new reps with the attention they deserve.

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4. Target audience and customer segments

A sales plan is useless without knowing who to sell to. Having clearly defined customer personas and ideal customer profiles will help you tailor your selling techniques to companies and buyers.

Whether you’re looking to break into a new market or expand your reach in your current one, start by clearly defining which companies you’re looking to attract. Include the following criteria:

Industries: Which markets and niches do you serve? Are there certain sub-segments of those industries that you specialize in?

Headcount: How many employees do your best accounts have within their organization?

Funding: Have they secured one or several rounds of funding?

Find out as much as you can about their organizational challenges. This may include growth hurdles, hiring bottlenecks and even barriers created by legislation.

Learn about your buyers within those target accounts, learn about your buyers. Understanding your buyers and personalizing your sales tactics for them will help you strengthen your customer relationships.

These insights will change as your business grows. Enterprise companies may wish to revisit their personas as they move upmarket. For small businesses and startups, your target audience will evolve as you find product-market fit.

It’s important to constantly revisit this part of your sales plan. Even if your goals and methodologies are the same, always have your finger on the pulse of your customer’s priorities.

How to communicate target audience and customer segments

Profile: Include basic information about their role, what their career journey looks like and the common priorities within their personal lives.

Demographics : Add more information about their age, income and living situation. Demographic information can help tailor your message to align with the language used across different generations.

Attributes: Assess their personality. Are they calm or assertive? Do they handle direct communication themselves or have an assistant? Use these identifying attributes to communicate effectively.

Challenges: Think about the hurdles this persona is trying to overcome. How does it affect their work and what’s the impact on them personally?

Goals: Analyze how these challenges are preventing them from achieving their goals. Why are these goals important to them?

Support: Use this insight to define how your product or service will help these people overcome challenges and achieve their goals.

Behavioral segmentation: What is it and how can it drive engagement and loyalty

5. Sales strategies and methodologies

Define your sales approach. This includes the strategies, techniques and methodologies you’ll use to get your offering out to market.

This part of your sales plan may end up being the largest. It will outline every practical area of your sales strategy: your sales stages, methodologies and playbooks.

Start by mapping out each stage of your sales process. What are the steps needed to guide a prospect through your deal flow?

9 essential sales stages

Traditionally, a sales process has nine sales stages :

Prospecting and lead generation : Your marketing strategy should deliver leads, but sales reps should boost this volume with their own prospecting efforts.

Qualification: Measure those leads against your target account criteria and customer personas. Ensure they’re a good fit, prioritizing your time on high-value relationships.

Reaching out to new leads : Initiate emails to your target customers to guide new leads into the sales funnel. This outreach activity includes cold calling and direct mail.

Appointment setting: Schedule a demo, discovery call or consultation.

Defining needs: After the initial meeting, you’ll understand your prospect’s problems and how your product or service can solve them.

Presentation: Reveal the solution. This can be in the form of a proposal, custom service packages or a face-to-face sales pitch .

Negotiation: Dedicate this stage to overcoming any objections your prospect may have.

Winning the deal: Turn your prospects into customers by closing deals and signing contracts.

Referrals : Fostering loyalty is an organization-wide activity. Delight your customers and encourage them to refer their friends.

Not all of these stages will be relevant to your organization. For example, a SaaS company that relies on inbound leads may do much of the heavy lifting during the initial meeting and sales demo . On the other hand, an exclusive club whose members must meet certain criteria (say, a minimum net worth) would focus much of their sales activity on referrals.

Map out your sales process to identify the stages you use. Your sales process should look something like this:

To determine your sales methodologies, break each sales stage down into separate activities, along with the stakeholder responsible for them.

With your sales activities laid out, you can do in-depth research into the techniques and methodologies you need to execute them. For example, if you sell a complex product with lengthy sales cycles , you could adopt a SPIN selling methodology to identify pain points and craft the best solution for leads.

Finally, use these stages and methodologies to form your sales playbooks . This will help you structure your sales training plan and create playbooks your reps can go back to for guidance.

How to communicate sales strategies and methodologies

Within this section of the sales plan, include the following:

Sales stages: The different steps required to convert prospects into paying customers.

Sales methodologies: The different practices and approaches you’ll adopt to shape your sales strategy.

Sales playbooks: The tactics, techniques and sales strategy templates needed to guide contacts throughout each stage of the sales process.

6. Sales action plan

You have the “who” and the “what”. Now you must figure out “when” to execute your sales plan.

A well-structured sales action plan communicates when the team will achieve key milestones. It outlines timeframes for when they’ll complete certain projects and activities, as well as the recruitment timelines for each quarter.

The order in which you implement your sales action plan depends on your priorities. Many sales organizations prefer to front-load the activity that will make a bigger impact on the bottom line.

For example, when analyzing your current sales process and strategy, you may find your existing customers are a rich source of qualified leads . Therefore, it would make sense to nurture more of these relationships using a structured referral program.

You must also consider how recruitment will affect the workload in your team. Hire too quickly and you may end up spending more time training new reps and neglecting your existing team. However, taking too long to recruit could overload your existing team. Either can make a big impact on culture and deal flow.

To complete your sales action plan, get all stakeholders involved in deciding timelines. When applying this to your sales plan, use GANTT charts and tables to visualize projects and key milestones.

A GANTT chart shows you the main activities, their completion dates and if there are any overlaps. Here is an example:

By prioritizing each activity and goal, you can create a plan that balances short-term results with long-term investment.

How to communicate your sales action plan

Key milestones : When do you aim to complete your projects, activities and recruitment efforts? You can map them out by week, month, quarter or all of the above. Let your revenue goals and priorities lead your schedule.

Short- and long-term goal schedules: With a high-level schedule mapped out, you can see when you will achieve your goals. From here, you can shape your schedule so that it balances both short- and long-term goals.

7. Performance and results measurement

Finally, your plan must detail how you measure performance. Outline your most important sales metrics and activities, how you’ll track them and what technology you’ll need to track them.

Structure this part of your plan by breaking down each sales stage. Within these sections, list out the metrics you’ll need to ensure you’re running a healthy sales pipeline.

Performance metrics can indicate the effectiveness of your entire sales process. Your chosen metrics typically fall into two categories:

Primary metrics act as your “true north” guide. This is commonly new business revenue generated.

Secondary metrics are those that indicate how well specific areas of your sales process are performing. These include lead response time and average purchase value.

The metrics you select must closely align with your goals and sales activities. For example, at the appointment setting stage, you might measure the number of demos conducted.

Each team also needs its own sales dashboard to ensure reps are hitting their targets. Sales development reps will have different priorities from account executives, so it’s critical they have the sales tools to focus on what’s important to them.

Finally, research and evaluate the technology you’ll need to accurately measure these metrics. Good CRM software is the best system to use for bringing your data together.

How to communicate sales performance metrics

Sales stage metrics : Identify the metrics for each specific sales stage and make sure they align with your KPIs.

Chosen sales dashboard: Explain why you chose your sales dashboard technology and exactly how it works.

Performance measurement: Outline exactly how and what tech you will use to measure your team’s activities and metrics.

How to track, measure and improve your team’s sales performance

Developing a sales plan involves conducting market research, assessing current sales performance , identifying sales opportunities and challenges, setting measurable goals, creating a sales strategy, allocating resources and establishing a monitoring and evaluation framework.

To write a sales business plan, include:

An executive summary

A company overview

A market analysis

A target market description

Sales strategies and tactics

Financial projections

A budget and timeline

Make sure that you clearly articulate your value proposition, competitive advantage and growth strategies.

Final thoughts

An effective sales plan is an invaluable asset for your sales team . Although you now know how to create a sales plan, you should remember to make one that works for your team. Writing one helps with your sales strategy planning and aids you in defining targets, metrics and processes. Distributing the sales plan helps your reps understand what you expect of them and how they can reach their goals.

Providing supportive, comprehensive resources is the best way to motivate your team and inspire hard work. When you do the work to build a solid foundation, you equip your reps with everything they need to succeed.

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How to create a sales plan (and 3 templates that do it for you)

There's a 25-year-old "South Park" episode I think about way too often. Working on a presentation with a coffee-addicted classmate named Tweek, the boys see a gnome stealing underpants from Tweek's dresser. They follow him to a cave, where they discover a network of gnomes executing a massive underpants-smuggling operation.

Explaining their business model, the underpants gnomes present this outline:

Phase 1: Collect underpants

Phase 3: Profit

In this post:

What is a sales plan?

A sales plan is a strategic document outlining goals and strategies for reaching predetermined sales targets. For the "South Park" underpants gnomes, it's the glaring question mark standing between their product and their profits.

What goes into a sales plan (including examples)

A sales plan has the information stakeholders need to establish sales goals, set strategies, allocate resources, collaborate across teams, track goal progress, and measure success. Basically, whatever the stakeholders need to make sound decisions about sales processes.

The specific elements of a business plan differ by factors like sales plan type, industry, product type, goal horizon, and organizational structure. Some may have just a few sections across a page or two, others a dozen or more over several pages.

While your sections may differ in number or phrasing, you can expect some version of these elements to go into most sales plans.

This section is where you set measurable sales goals. (In fact, this section is also called "Goals" in many sales plans.) Depending on your industry, common sales objectives include:

Total revenue growth

Market share expansion

Customer acquisition volume

Adoption rate increase

Obviously, you could just write "$100 billion" here and insert a Dr. Evil meme, then hope for the best. But the real objective of the objectives section is to come to attainable sales goals that align with broader organizational growth goals.

Increase market share by 5-10% this fiscal year

Target market

If your product is a massive eCommerce space with rock-bottom prices and free next-day shipping, write "Everyone" and move on. But since you're probably not Jeff Bezos, you'll need a detailed description of your ideal customer profile. 

Project managers of midsized technology companies with distributed teams seeking streamlined collaboration and task management

This is where you'll give the broad strokes of the approach you'll take to achieve your sales goals with your target market. Whether it's for entering new markets, expanding within existing markets, or launching new products, this generalized section communicates the stepping stones that will lead to your objectives.

Improved prospecting, generating more qualified leads, and tailoring sales processes to market research to make existing sales processes more efficient

These tactics are still theoretical and don't have to be set in stone at this phase. But this is a space to describe specifics like customer survey or beta testing methods, social media marketing campaign concepts, new sales techniques, or new ways of utilizing existing sales software and resources.

Leverage social media influencer outreach with influencer-specific promo codes

As anyone who's ever watched a heist movie knows, every great plan needs a crack team. In this section, you'll list either each member of your sales team or the team leads, depending on your team size. Beyond a simple list of names, here are some helpful elements to include about each:

Aptitudes or experience

Certifications or completed trainings

Hourly pay rate (for budgeting and forecasting)

Daily or weekly utilization limits

Associated accounts

This should help you outline a structure for assigning individual roles and responsibilities related to your strategies and tactics, ensuring you've got the people power to get the job done.

John Doe, UX specialist | $100/hour incurred expense | 20 hours/week floating utilization | Manager: Jane Doe | Responsible for analyzing survey data and making recommendations for UI updates

It's possible you may even need new hires, freelancers, additional trainings, certifications, or third-party agencies to do the things you need to do. List those here, so you can incorporate them into your time and expenses.

Stakeholders won't just want to know what you're going to do—they'll want to know how long it'll take. Outline your strategies by breaking them into key milestones and deadlines according to the personnel you have. This should also map to revenue projections as your strategies mature.

2/15: Complete market research | 3/1: Synthesize findings | 3/15: Schedule strategies for Q2 execution

The last thing you want is to create a beautiful, perfectly crafted sales plan and discover that you don't actually have the funds to execute it. Based on entries in the last few fields, you should have a good idea of expenses based on strategy resources, personnel utilization, timelines, and any purchases your team may need. 

Chart those here with estimates for any other potential expenses related to marketing, advertising, and sales promotion activities.

Sure, you've been making sales since you started executing your plan. But how do you know you're making enough sales to justify your efforts?

This is where key performance indicators (KPIs) come into play. By setting these during the sales planning stage, you allow stakeholders to measure the success of individual sales efforts, so you can report on how performance compares to sales targets over time. 

Potential challenges

If sales were easy, every company would be successful. Even at the planning stage, you should be able to see some possible roadblocks on the horizon.

The best plans are realistic enough to be actualized, so be realistic about what might stand in your team's way. Try to get ahead of challenges relating to things like target market sensitivities, general market conditions, internal resources, competition, seasonality, or campaign effectiveness. Then, come up with contingencies, so you're ready for these obstacles if they do arise.

Free sales plan templates

Here are three templates for the same general sales plan structure to choose from, depending on the level of granularity and presentation you're looking for.

Sales plan template 1: Comprehensive document

If you're looking to get buy-in for your sales plan from senior stakeholders, you'll need a document that can organize and communicate your research.

This comprehensive sales plan template includes fields for each of the sections outlined above. Just copy it, rename it to your liking, and then click into each field to start filling in the information outlined in this post. (For sections you don't need, just delete or fill with "N/A" and move along.)

Best for: Communicating every element of your sales plan in full detail with (virtually) unlimited space

Sales plan template 2: Summary document

Maybe you need a sales plan template that gets the point across quickly. This one distills the gist of a sales plan into six concise, actionable sections, so you can share the most important elements of every sales objective in one document.

If you need room for more objectives, just copy/paste an empty row.

Best for: Quickly sharing the fine points of a sales plan with only actionable takeaways

Sales plan template 3: Project workflow document

What does your sales plan look like on a day-to-day basis? If you're having a hard time translating that, use this template.

Just include your sequence of objectives and related tasks, include the person they're assigned to, and tweak the date ranges. You can even update the progress graph for each task as you progress through them.

Best for: Organizing tasks, roles, and timelines within a greater sales plan

How to start sales planning

Step 1: Start sales planning. Step 2: ? Step 3: Start selling.

Sales planning may not be that easy, but it doesn't have to be especially complicated, either. It should take enough time and resources to come up with a document that's persuasive and detailed but not so much that it cuts into the real money-making efforts themselves. 

Here are a few ways you can set your plan up for efficiency, success, and—maybe most importantly—stakeholder buy-in.

Start with competitor research

You may be tempted to start the sales planning process by outlining your objectives and tactics, but competitor research can go a long way in setting the stage for both. This can show you what works, how well it works, and what doesn't work. It can also show you opportunities to fill market gaps your competitors are missing.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel, but it can be very helpful to just reinvent what your competition is doing.

Don't shy away from established frameworks and methodologies

Here are a few benefits many of these can potentially bring:

Iterative internal processes

Improved collaboration

Predictable lines of communication between teams

More useful insights from stakeholders

More accurate internal data

More reliable goal-setting

Obviously, the benefits will depend on the types of frameworks and methodologies you use. But the real key to any of them is the ability to standardize some element of the planning process and make collaboration more efficient.

Collaborate with stakeholders to define success

You may have one definition of success, while your stakeholders have a completely different one. Remember that your objectives and KPIs need to have bases in two realities: the market's and your company's.

It's the job of senior stakeholders to align sales efforts with high-level goals that help keep the entire operation afloat. That means they may have goals in mind that conflict with your market research findings about sales potential. The sales team, on the other hand, may need to help align expectations with market realities.

Successful sales plans keep both parties on the same page. As such, it helps to collaborate before setting sales benchmarks to see what success can look like for all involved parties.

Don't forget about operations

S&OP helps align sales teams with operations teams to ensure they have the inventory needed to both keep up with demand and promote maximum stocking efficiency. Since inventory can take time and careful scheduling, it's best to get S&OP underway as early as possible. Demand forecasting, for example, is closely related to both sales and inventory projections, so combining these projections early is worthwhile.

Establish clear lines of communication

If all good plans require a team, then all good teams require sound communication.

Since sales campaigns require collaboration between multiple parties and teams, it helps to have open communication channels during the sales planning process. This could mean adopting an Agile workflow and establishing daily Scrum meetings, hosting regular "office hours," or even just checking in with team leads.

While you're setting up these channels, tap them to get more accurate insights into sales planning elements like budgets, assets, and resource needs.

Types of sales plans

While the sales plan templates in this post are somewhat generically designed for new product or feature launches, there are tons of other types of sales plans you can choose from. Many expand on specific elements already included at a high level in our templates, foregoing some of the other sections that aren't as relevant. 

If you know you want your plan to have a more granular focus on specific use cases, you could consider one of these options.

New product sales plan

This details the introduction and promotion of a recently launched or forthcoming product. Similar to the template and example in this post, it can be for a physical product, digital product, or service. It includes general information without getting too bogged down in details.

Best for: General sales planning for new products, services, or features

Milestone sales plan

Prioritizing timelines, this plan delineates sales objectives and targets to be achieved within specific timeframes. Typically, these timelines fall into weekly, monthly, and quarterly milestones. You can list these in a timeline section for any plan, but this plan is structured around those elements.

Best for: A bird's-eye view of the time a sales campaign will take

30/60/90 sales plan

This sales strategy outlines goals and priorities for the first three months of a new hire's tenure, typically focusing on short-term objectives. This can lean toward onboarding milestones to get the new rep up-to-date on sales processes.

Best for: Bringing on new sales reps

Sales budget plan

As a financial framework, this plan details allocated resources for sales activities and expenses to achieve revenue targets. This gets much more granular about the costs associated with sales, making that element of planning its primary focus.

Best for: Communicating nuanced expense figures

Sales tactics plan

Similar to a sales budget plan, a sales tactics plan is mainly concerned with one area of the sales planning process: the tactics. It takes a comprehensive approach to specifying the methods and techniques required to achieve sales goals and overcome challenges.

Best for: Communicating specific details about sales strategies

Sales territory plan

This one makes me think of classic mob movies—two families hashing out their territories in the Bronx over plates of spaghetti. It's a strategic outline of how you'll distribute sales resources within specific geographic areas or customer segments.

Best for: Segmenting sales efforts geographically

Sales focus area plan

This one highlights specific product lines, customer segments, or markets on which the sales team will concentrate their efforts. It helps align sales team members on their individual responsibilities.

Best for: Setting expectations for sales team roles

Market expansion plan

When you use this sales plan, you're taking a strategic approach to broadening the reach of a product or service by entering new geographical areas or targeting additional customer demographics. You can tailor it to go deep on a range of KPIs that suit your specific goals for saturation. 

Best for: Planning specifically for market growth KPIs

Marketing alignment plan

Marketing and sales—one hand (or team) washes the other. To help bump that cleaning sesh along, consider one of these plans. They help coordinate strategies, ensuring a solid connection between sales and marketing efforts.

Best for: Aligning sales and marketing teams

Growth action plan

This strategic roadmap details initiatives and steps to foster business expansion, increase market share, and achieve sustainable growth. It includes actionable strategies for making growth-oriented goals a reality.

Best for: Establishing actionable strategies for growth KPIs

Sales planning tips

As you build out your sales plan, you might find that you need a little help. Here are some of our top tips for sales planning:

Know your audience: The sales plan will either be for stakeholders, team members, or both. Write to their level and with the level of detail they need.

Start with SWOT: A SWOT analysis is a great way to get a quick, relevant picture of fundamental sales plan elements like aptitudes, challenges, and opportunities.

Budget carefully: Not every sales plan style includes budgets by default—but don't let this deter you. It's vital to know what you can afford before you start executing your plan.

Vary strategies: To reduce volatility, try to keep your sales tactics varied. This also helps you find the strategies that work best and back them with data.

Continue monitoring: You can't know if you hit your KPIs unless you monitor according to the benchmarks you're tracking.

Make a (sales) plan to automate

Hopefully this post has you pumped for sales planning—or at least finding a mysterious new three-step business model (or even just watching "South Park"). 

Related reading:

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Bryce Emley

Currently based in Albuquerque, NM, Bryce Emley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State and nearly a decade of writing and editing experience. His work has been published in magazines including The Atlantic, Boston Review, Salon, and Modern Farmer and has received a regional Emmy and awards from venues including Narrative, Wesleyan University, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Pablo Neruda Prize. When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry.

• Sales & business development

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How to Create a Sales Plan: Tips, Examples & Free Sales Plan Template

Tactics and strategies are great. But when you create a sales plan, you set a clear path to success, with each step mapped out ahead of you.

The Internet is full of people who will tell you all about the success they’ve found from their strategies, whether it's personalizing a newsletter subject line or changing the color of the 'Buy Now' button.

But, news flash—these tips and tricks aren’t actual sales strategies .

To create real, lasting growth for you and your company, you need to create your own grand strategy. And that starts with a solid sales plan .

So, what’s your plan? How do you build it (and stick to it)?

We’re about to take a deep dive into sales plans. By the end of this guide, you’ll be completely equipped to win the fight for business growth. And we can't recommend it enough—grab our free sales plan template here in the Sales Success Kit today:

GET THE SALES SUCCESS KIT →

What is a Sales Plan? (And What Makes for Successful Sales Planning?)

Armed with the information you'll compile within your sales plan, you can quickly identify any upcoming problems, sales droughts, or opportunities—and then do something about them.

If done correctly, the right sales plan template empowers you to spend even more time growing and developing your business, rather than responding reactively to the day-to-day developments in sales.

Sound exciting? Let’s jump right in.

Download Your Free Sales Plan Templates Today

Want to build your own sales plan template that'll clarify your business plan and accelerate your growth? Grab the Sales Success Kit , including...

...and more to help you set up strategic sales planning and quotas for your team.

Want to stand out in the competitive market? Explore the insights of challenger selling .

What’s in a Sales Plan? 6 Elements Every Sales Plan Needs

In basic terms, a sales plan template includes:

• Sales forecasting and goal-setting
• Market and customer research
• Prospecting and partnerships

Each part of the sales plan naturally works itself into the next, starting with your high-level goals, then considering market factors, and finally looking at who you know, and how to find more prospects to help hit your sales goals .

Here are the key elements to include in your plan:

1. Mission Statement

What gets your sales reps out of bed in the morning? What’s the clear mission that pushes your team to keep fighting for that win?

Your mission statement is a concise statement of the ‘big picture’—the main idea and goal you want to achieve. Think about your company mission and how the sales team forms part of that overarching goal.

2. Sales Goals and Revenue Targets

A sales plan must include achievable sales goals and the targets your sales reps will be working to reach. Use previous years' results to tell you what's reasonably possible for your team to do. Include specific metrics and KPIs , how these are performing currently, and what you plan to do to improve them.

This may also include information about your product’s pricing , planned discounts, and how your team can focus on the right customers to get the most revenue possible. Link these sales goals to the business goals your company is working to achieve.

3. Analysis of the Target Market

Your plan should clearly identify your ideal customer profile and information about the target market and demographic you plan to sell to. Are you breaking into a new market? Are you targeting small business or enterprise customers ? Give a concise description of your target audience and the stakeholders you’ll need to sell to.

4. Sales Strategy Overview and Methods to Reach Target Customers

This should include a brief overview of the customer journey , pain points , and how your salespeople will engage and follow up with new prospects throughout their journey to purchase. You'll likely outline specific sales activities you'll focus on, such as improving referral numbers, testing new cold-calling email strategies, or dipping your toe in social selling.

You may also include information about the marketing strategy and lead generation methods used to gather new leads and how sales managers will support the team.

5. Use of Resources and Sales Tools

How much does it cost your team to close a new deal? What is your budget for the sales team, or for sales tools ?

Inside your plan, list the resources you have available to you, and how you plan to use them during the year. This includes monetary resources, as well as human resources.

Next, show how your resources will be used. For example, how much will you spend on sales tools? Which CRM software is your team depending on? Briefly explain how you plan to use each tool and why you’ve allocated resources in that way.

6. Sales Team Structure

The structure of your sales team includes which reps are available during what times of the year, their specialties and skills, and where they focus in the sales process .

Also, include information about the sales managers, their teams, and the incentives you offer your reps.

The Benefits of Sales Planning: Why You Need a Sales Plan

Creating a sales plan from scratch can be daunting, even with the right sales planning template. So, why should you have your sales strategy written down and ready to act on?

Let’s talk about the benefits of sales planning to attract new business and grow your market share.

Clear, Time-Bound Goals Help You Reach Revenue Targets

There’s a reason they say, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

If you want your sales team to execute on and accomplish your sales goals, you need to have a plan in place. When targets are linked to specific timeframes and actions, your whole team will see how their individual work is involved in reaching your sales goals.

Prioritize Time and Resources

Without a specific action plan in place , your team won’t be able to prioritize their time with the right sales tactics and strategies to hit their targets.

With a clear outline of the tactics that bring the most significant ROI for your team, each rep can get the best results for the time they spend selling.

Clear Action Plan to Reach Your Goals

With an action plan in place, each team member knows what they’re supposed to be doing, and why they’re doing it. This keeps them motivated and helps them see how their individual efforts make a difference.

4 Types of Sales Plans (How to Choose Which Planning Style is Right for Your Sales Team)

It’s difficult to templatize a good sales plan since every plan is unique to the business and team it applies to. So, what are some examples of the types of sales plans you might create, and how can you choose between them?

• Revenue-based sales plan: If you’re aiming for a specific revenue goal, this type of sales plan will be focused on in-depth sales forecasting and specific actions to improve conversion rates and close more deals.
• Sales plan based on the target market: If you’re selling to vastly different markets, you may want to create a different sales plan based on the market you’re targeting. For example, your sales plan for enterprise companies would differ from your sales plan for selling to SMBs.
• Sales goals plan: A plan that’s focused on goals (other than revenue) may include hiring and onboarding, sales training plans, or plans to implement a new type of sales activity into your process.
• New product sales plan: When launching a new product, it’s a good idea to develop a specific business plan around its launch and continued promotion. This plan may include finding and contacting strategic partners, building a unique value prop in the market, and creating new sales enablement content for the team to use when selling this product. This type of sales plan can also apply to launching new features in your SaaS product.

How to Choose the Right Sales Planning Style

Ultimately, this will depend on factors such as:

• Your revenue goals
• The resources at your disposal
• Your sales team’s abilities and bandwidth
• Your personal commitment to seeing this plan through

When you’ve determined who is involved in sales planning, how committed they are, and the resources you can use to make this plan happen, you can start building your own sales plan.

9 Steps to Create a Sales Plan to 10x Your Sales Team’s Results

It may seem like a lot of work to develop a sales plan at this point. But once you do, you’ll be in a place to take your sales (and brand) to the next level.

Let’s break down this process, step-by-step, so you can start achieving greater results.

1. Define Your Sales Goals and Milestones

With a sales plan, we begin at the end: an end goal.

Start by choosing the sales metrics that matter most to your overall business. This could be:

• Annual or monthly recurring revenue (ARR or MRR)
• Retention or churn rates
• Average conversion time
• Average conversion rate
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)

It doesn’t matter so much which metric you choose —the important point is that it can tell you whether your work has succeeded.

Next, look at last year’s forecast and results . Were you being realistic? How did sales revenue increase annually? How does that compare your company to the industry standards? Use this information to determine what realistically you can bring in based on the size of the market, your company goals, and the experience and resources available to your sales team .

After setting clear sales goals, it’s time to set milestones . This involves breaking that big number down into smaller expectations with strict deadlines. These should challenge and motivate your sales team , without being so difficult they kill morale.

Lean on your sales team during this process. After all, they’re in the trenches with you and probably have the best knowledge about your customers. Learn about what they do during the workweek to close deals. Ask how much they’re currently doing, and how much bandwidth they have to do more. This will give you a real, frontline take on what goals and milestones to set in your sales plan template.

Finally, create specific targets with clear deadlines . For example, to achieve a sales goal of increasing revenue by 15 percent YOY, you might set the milestone of increasing your customer base by 20 percent, or increasing sales by 50% for a specific product.

Brought together, these milestones inform and support your overall sales plan, giving you a clear, actionable workflow to hit your overall goals for the year.

2. Clearly Define Your Target Market or Niche

You need to know the market you’re in and the niche you’re going to occupy so you can properly position your business for growth.

What’s a business niche? It’s more than just what your business specializes in—a niche is the space your business occupies with your products, content, company culture, branding, and message. It’s how people identify with you and search you out over the competition.

As serial entrepreneur Jason Zook explains: “ When you try to create something for everyone, you end up creating something for no one. ”

Don’t do that.

Instead, start by looking at a niche and asking yourself these questions:

• How big is the market?
• Is there a built-in demand for what you're selling?
• What’s your current market position?
• Who are your competitors? What are their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats?

If you’re stuck, start by going back to your own strengths . List out your strongest interests and passions. Pick a field where the odds are already in your favor—where you have a proven track record, more expertise to offer, an extensive contact base, and people who can provide you with intros.

These kinds of strategic advantages will help you clarify your buyer persona and amplify the results of your planning.

Start with one product in one niche—you can always branch out to a complementary niche later. Sell beautiful, handcrafted tea cups? How about a booming doily business? Or customizable teaspoons?

A niche doesn’t limit you. It focuses you.

3. Understand Your Target Customers

Chasing the wrong customers will only waste your time and money, so don't allow them to sneak into your sales plan.

Your best customers are the ones that are successful with your product and see the ROI of it. Talk to them, and find out what they have in common.

While defining ideal customers depends on your company and market, here are some basic characteristics you’ll want to identify:

• Company size (number of employees, number of customers, yearly revenue)
• Size of the relevant department
• Geographical information
• Job title of your POC
• Buying process
• The goal they’re trying to achieve with your product or service

Also, don’t forget to think about whether they will be a good ‘fit’. If this is a long-term relationship you’re developing rather than a one-night stand, you want to ensure you speak the same language and share a similar culture and vision.

Use this information to build out an ideal customer profile . This fictitious organization gets significant value from using your product/service and provides significant value to your company. A customer profile helps you qualify leads and disqualify bad-fit customers before you waste time trying to sell to them.

Once you know the type of company you want to target with your sales team, it’s time to get inside their head. Start by hanging out where they hang out:

• Are they on social media? What’s their network of choice?
• Are they members of any Facebook or LinkedIn groups?
• Can you answer industry questions for them on Quora or Reddit?
• What podcasts do they listen to, or what resources do they read?

Get in your customers’ heads, and you’ll be in a much better position to sell to them.

GET THE IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE KIT →

4. Map Out Your Customer’s Journey

The next part of an effective sales plan must address how that ideal customer becomes your customer. Do this by mapping out their journey, including actions and events during the different stages of the sales funnel :

• Consideration

Conduct a customer survey or chat directly with your current, happy customers to gather valuable sales planning insights. Ask them:

• When you became a customer, what did you want our product to do for you?
• What features were important to you? Why?
• What was your budget?
• How did you solve this problem before using our product?

To fully understand their journey as a customer, you can also ask about past buying experiences:

• When was the last time you bought something similar?
• Was that a good or bad experience? Why?
• What was the decision-making process like?
• How did you evaluate different offers?
• Which factors made you choose that particular solution?

Once you’ve identified the awareness, interest, and consideration stages, let your prospects and new customers build the rest of their roadmap by asking them: "What’s next?"

"What needs to happen to make you a customer?"

If, for example, they say they’ll have to get approval from the VP of Finance. Ask:

"Ok, and let's say he agrees that we're the right fit; what's next?"

We call this the virtual close , a way to put your prospect in a future-thinking state of mind that makes them imagine buying from you. Asking this question to several high-quality prospects will tell you those final few steps in the customer journey until they’ve signed on the dotted line.

Finally, piece together the post-sale journey. Once a prospect becomes a customer, what’s next? How do you enable them to use your product and be successful with it? What happened to create your most loyal customers? Understanding this piece of the sales process is essential to managing and increasing customer retention .

5. Define Your Value Propositions

You know your customers. You know their journey. Now, define where you fit in by looking at your competitive advantage . Fully articulating what sets you apart from the competition is a crucial element of your sales plan template.

Start by asking a few simple questions:

• Why do customers buy from us?
• Why do customers buy from our competitors and not us?
• Why do some potential customers not buy at all?
• What do we need to do to be successful in the future?

Remember that customers buy benefits, not features. When describing your value proposition , it’s easy to get caught up in talking about you. What you’ve made. What you do. Instead, flip the script and talk about what your product will do for your customers . A strong competitive advantage:

• Reflects the competitive strength of your business
• Is preferably, but not necessarily, unique
• Is clear and simple
• May change over time as competitors try to steal your idea
• Must be supported by ongoing market research

For example, the competitive advantage of help desk software has nothing to do with its social media integrations and real-time ticket tracking. It’s the fact that it allows its customers to focus on creating a great customer experience.

Here’s the point: Focus on value, not features, in your sales plan template.

Your competitive advantage will inform everything your company does moving forward, from marketing to product development. It’s a great example of where sales can influence the development of a product and the direction of a business.

6. Organize Your Sales Team

The way your sales team is organized can enable them to better serve their customers and bring new revenue into your business faster.

Here are three basic structures for your sales team :

• The island: Individual reps work alone.
• Assembly line: Each sales rep is assigned a specialized role such as lead generation, SDR (qualifier), Account Executive (closer), or Customer Success (farmer).
• Pods: Each sales rep is assigned a specialized role in a pod, or group, that’s responsible for the entire journey of specific customers.

Think about the strengths and weaknesses of your sales team members, and how they will truly thrive as part of the team.

7. Outline the Use of Sales Tools

Now it’s time to think about the tools you’re using. Building out your sales stack takes time and effort, but listing out that stack in your sales plan will help you avoid getting caught up with new tech that may or may not help your sales team.

Basically, you’ll need tools for these areas to cover all aspects of the sales process:

• CRM software (like Close )
• Lead generation and prospecting tools
• Internal communication software
• Engagement and outreach tools
• Documentation software
• Sales enablement stack

Think about how all of your sales tools work together through integrations and where automation comes into play to save your team time, and how you'll drive CRM adoption across your team members.

8. Build a Prospecting List

A prospect list is where we take all the theory and research of the last few sections of our sales plan template and put them into action.

At its core, a prospect list is a directory of real people you can contact who would benefit from your product or service. This can be time-consuming, but it's essential for driving your sales plan and company growth.

First, use your ideal customer profile to start finding target companies:

• Search LinkedIn
• Check out relevant local business networks
• Attend networking events and meetups
• Do simple Google searches
• Check out the member list of relevant online groups

Target up to 5 people at each organization. Targeting more than one individual will give you better odds of connecting by cold email outreach as well as a better chance that someone in your network can connect you personally.

Remember, this isn’t just a massive list of people you could sell to. This is a targeted list based on the research you’ve done previously in your sales plan.

Once you have your list, keep track of your leads and how you found them using a sales CRM. This will keep historical context intact and make sure you don’t overlap on outreach if you’re working with teammates.

9. Track, Measure, and Adjust As Needed

Just because you’ve made a solid sales plan template to follow, doesn’t mean you get to sit back and watch the cash roll in.

Remember what Basecamp founder Jason Fried said about plans:

“A plan is simply a guess you wrote down.”

You’re using everything you know about the market, your unique value, target customers, and partners to define the ideal situation for your company. But yes, try as we might, very few of us actually see anything when we gaze deep into the crystal ball.

Instead, remember that your sales plan is a living, breathing document that needs to account for and adapt to new features, marketing campaigns, or even new team members who join.

Set regular meetings (at least monthly) to review progress on your sales plan, identify and solve issues, and align your activities across teams to optimize your plan around real-world events and feedback. Learn from your mistakes and victories, and evolve your sales plan as needed.

Create a Strategic Sales Plan to Grow Your Business

You’ve just discovered the basics—but I’ll bet you’re ready to go beyond that. Here are some final ideas to take your sales plan from a simple foundation to a strategic, actionable one.

Avoid Moving the Goalpost

Avoid making adjustments to the goals outlined in your sales plan—even if you discover you’ve been overly optimistic or pessimistic in your sales planning. When you're developing your very first sales plan template, it's natural to be wrong in some of your assumptions—especially around goals and forecasting .

Instead of letting it get you down, remember your plan serves as a benchmark to judge your success or failure. As you see places where your assumptions were wrong, carefully document what needs updating when it's time to revise your sales plan.

Invite Your Others to Challenge Your Sales Plan

Never finalize a plan without another set of eyes (or a few sets.) Get an experienced colleague—an accountant, senior salesperson, or qualified friend—to review the document before solidifying your sales plan.

Your sales team is another strong resource for reviewing your sales plan. Ask their opinions, give them time to think about how it relates to their daily work, and agree on the key points that go into your sales plan.

Set Individual Goals and Milestones for Your Sales Team

We talked about creating milestones for your business, but you can take your sales plan to the next level by setting individual milestones for your sales team as well.

These individual goals need to consider the differences in strengths, weaknesses, and skills among your salespeople.

For example, if someone on your team is making a ton of calls but not closing, give them a milestone of upping their close rate . If someone’s great at closing but doesn’t do much outreach, give them a milestone of contacting 10 new prospects a month.

Doing this will help your individual reps build their skills and contribute to their company and career growth.

Ready to Hit Your Sales Goals?

In most sales situations, the biggest challenge is inertia. But with a solid, detailed sales plan and a dedicated team with clear milestones, you’ll have everything you need to push through any friction and keep on track to hit your goals!

All jazzed up and ready to put together your own sales plan? Download our free Sales Success Kit and access 11 templates, checklists, worksheets, and guides.

They're action-focused and easy to use, so you can have your best sales year yet.

More articles from The Close Blog

Discover our latest free sales tools powered by AI

Learn from the sales pros with our free sales guides.

Free Sales Plan Template

Free Template

Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent plan by HubSpot and Aircall .

This template includes sections for:.

• Company History & Mission
• Team Structure
• Target Market
• Tools and Software
• Positioning
• Marketing Strategy
• Prospecting Strategy
• Action Plan
• Sales Cadence

Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent plan.

Sales departments are doubling down their efforts. Only  18% of buyers  trust salespeople,  meaning that sales teams need to work smarter, not just harder. How can sales leaders ensure this happens?

A sales plan is an actionable way to simplify and document your sales goals and your strategies to accomplish them. Budgets, marketing strategy, positioning, and other topics are explained in detail as well. 

Download this template from HubSpot and Aircall , and build your sales plan . Make it simple for your team, direct reports, and execs to understand what your goals are, how you'll accomplish them, and any support you'll need. 

How do I write a sales plan?

Set your targets and goals, create your sales strategies, choose sales tactics and train your sales staff, set your budget and implement your plan.

Why do I need to fill out the information requested?

We will always keep your personal information safe. We ask for your information in exchange for a valuable resource in order to (a) improve your browsing experience by personalizing the HubSpot site to your needs; (b) send information to you that we think may be of interest to you by email or other means; (c) send you marketing communications that we think may be of value to you. You can read more about our privacy policy  here .

How do you create an individual sales plan?

Creating an effective sales plan: define your objectives, assign roles and responsibilities to the sales team, create your strategy, find your sales tools, define your metrics for success, set your budget, outline our action plan.

Is this really free?

Absolutely . Just sharing some free knowledge that we hope you’ll find useful. Keep us in mind next time you have marketing questions!

What are the 7 steps to creating a sales plan?

Step-by-step guide to creating your sales plan: set your target, assess the situation, identify barriers to success, list your strengths and resources, develop your sales strategy, figure out what you will need for your strategy, make an action plan.

What are the 4 selling strategies?

Four basic sales strategies for B2B are solution selling, account-based selling, strategic selling, and social selling.

Over 32,000 sales leaders and entrepreneurs are already using this sales plan template.

Download the free sales plan template.

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Blog Graphic Design How To Write a Sales Plan That Converts (+ Templates)

How To Write a Sales Plan That Converts (+ Templates)

Written by: Letícia Fonseca Nov 17, 2021

Sales plans are often considered the foundation of any successful business plan.

A sales plan outlines an organization’s goals for its future operations and steers the sales team in the right direction.

Every successful business relies on a sales plan to reach its sales goals and pivot its strategy when necessary. 

Learn what you need to succeed in writing an impactful sales plan that boosts your conversions and increases customer loyalty.

Don’t know where to start? Create a sales business plan with Venngage’s templates and improve your growth strategy.

Click to jump ahead:

What is a sales strategy plan, what is included in a sales plan, what are the objectives of sales and operations planning.

• How do you write an excellent sales plan?

A sales strategy plan is a document that lists what a company is going to sell, how much the company intends to earn, and how the company plans to go about it.

The sales strategy helps the company determine how to maximize profit margins and stay competitive in the industry.

Here’s an example of a sales strategy plan that includes every action that the sales team is expected to perform.

This ensures that sales managers know what they are responsible for and how the desired output or deliverables for the sales process tie into the business plan.

Return to Table of Contents

A good sales strategy includes a sales plan for your product or service, as well as a plan to market it. Goals to reach your target customers make a sales campaign easy to create and follow.

Here are the most important points to include in a sales strategy plan:

• Product research
• Target audience
• Customer service and customer retention
• Product and service pricing
• Marketing and advertising plan
• Estimated budget for the entire campaign

This sales plan highlights measurable milestones for sales reps to aim for.

We’ve already touched on reasons why companies should use a sales plan, like this example, for their upcoming campaigns.

Below are the four main objectives of creating a sales plan and how they help with sales forecasting.

Align company departments and sales department goals

Different departments can have different perspectives on priorities and progress.

By aligning the company’s other departments with your sales team’s goals, you can ensure that all teams have a shared understanding of the sales plan’s objectives and their holistic contribution towards the business goal.

Create strategic direction for sales teams

A strategic direction plan establishes the company’s goals and objectives for the sales team.

You can formulate strategic direction plans by identifying the following:

• Target audience demographics
• Brand and product niche
• Actions that you want your customers to take
• The best channels to reach customers, such as social media and search engines

Once you’ve identified these, you can create an in-depth plan that can generate conversions in no time. Effective plans, like the one below, keep every customer detail in check.

Better customer-relationship management

A sales plan identifies the individuals and teams responsible for producing results that qualify as milestones for an upcoming business campaign.

With clear assignments, sales managers will easily know which individual or sales team member to approach for additional data.

Mark sales team milestones

Measuring plan milestones are important because they help assess a plan’s performance in a given period or by the end of its execution.

In doing so, team leaders can determine whether the project efficiently used every team member’s efforts and company resources to achieve the plan’s objectives.

The following are excellent examples of milestones for a sales plan:

• Completion of the research phase
• Development of the plan
• Approval of the plan
• Implementation of the plan

How do you write a sales plan?

Take a look at this sales plan. It’s fully detailed, sets deadlines, and keeps everyone updated with the most relevant and newest information so the team is aware of their responsibilities.

Here’s an overview of making an excellent and greatly convincing sales plan:

Compile data from the previous sales year

Create sales targets that meet your sales plan objectives, create a swot analysis, identify demand trends using sales data, look for existing market gaps.

• Appoint key roles for each of your objectives

So, let’s get to it!

Evaluating data from previous marketing campaigns could reveal helpful trends that can improve your upcoming sales plans.

Previous sales data can indicate accurate demographic data, such as lifestyle, age, income, and high sales activities in a given area.

With this data, your team can develop a detailed sales plan that includes your products while keeping in mind your demographic’s language, lifestyle, sensibilities, and more.

Here’s a great way to present this to your superiors and team members.

Related: 10 Demographic Infographic Templates to Share Population Data and More

Simple food sales action plan template

Take your reports from dull to comprehensively lively with this Venngage template. This is a great sales plan template when you have a significant amount of data to show.

You want to get to the point with your sales plan presentations. This fully customizable template makes it easy to share your sales plan data quickly and easily.

With Venngage, you can share your sales plan online with anyone. And when you upgrade to a business account, you can download your plan in a variety of formats, including PNG, PNG HD, PDF, Interactive PDF, and PowerPoint.

All sales targets must be clear, measurable goals that are specific and realistic with a defined deadline.

For example, ‘increase customer retention by 20 percent by the fourth quarter of this year’ is a specific, measurable, attainable, and timely goal.

Aligning your sales targets with the company’s general objectives is the best way to create sales plan objectives that incentivize customers to take action and make a purchase.

These sales KPIs or key performance indicators will keep the sales team aligned and on track with sales goals.

Light strategic sales action plan template

Organize your KPIs for measuring with this simple template. It’s easy to add to a project management interface. Alternately, it can be shared via email.

This helps to have everyone synchronized with the sales plan objectives.

All the colors in this template are neutral, and you can switch them out with your branding assets using Venngage’s convenient drag-and-drop editor.

A SWOT analysis is a tool utilized in the business world to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that a company’s business model may face.

Conducting a SWOT analysis is important for business owners to ensure that their company is as prepared as possible for the future. It can help businesses identify what strategies should be utilized for sales plans.

There are numerous reasons why businesses should use a SWOT analysis:

• A SWOT analysis makes forecasting easier when it is difficult to accurately predict the direction of an industry
• The SWOT analysis is a simplified view of the company’s situation and helps in reaching revenue targets
• It helps companies compare themselves to competitors and create a sales plan that is impactful 

It’s undeniable that the data a SWOT analysis produces is essential for any brand.

Blue competitor SWOT analysis template

Easily organize your thoughts with this simple but effective SWOT analysis template.

The grid format helps your team organize their thoughts and build an efficient sales pipeline.

Change the color scheme to suit your brand, or add a background or header image to make the text stand out.

Related: 15+ Business Plan Examples to Win Your Next Round of Funding

Demand trends are changes in the type and quantity of goods that consumers want to buy.

This is crucial data for sales plans because demand helps sales managers gauge if people identify the brand’s products as essentials or luxuries.

One way to identify demand trends is to use a scatter plot. This is what a scatter plot graph looks like:

This graph is an excellent way to find trends and correlations in your data. Here’s how:

• Plot two sets of data on the same graph
• Pick a line that divides the graph into two equal halves
• Compare the height of each data point on the left side of the line to the height of data points on the right side of the line
• Consider how many data points are on one side of the line than the other

If there are more data points on one side, there is likely a correlation between the two sides and possible causation.

Once you’ve identified these trends, you can include graphs and charts on a sales plan template during your presentation.

Visuals and well-made infographic designs are excellent ways to present your data without cluttering your documents or slides.

Revenue scatter plot chart

A great way to present prospective trends is by customizing this simple scatter plot graph.

This template fits perfectly into a presentation slide deck. There aren’t heavy visuals in this template. The layout is clean and simple, leaving nothing to the reader’s imagination.

You can make the chart more relevant by adding brand-related or relevant images. Or use an image from the 3 million+ stock photos available in the Venngage library.

Upload your own images, change the colors and fonts, and more with this template.

Related: How to Choose the Best Types of Charts For Your Data

A market gap is a space between supply and demand. It’s important because if there is a large market gap, it can indicate an economic opportunity for a company to capitalize on.

Market gaps can be as simple as solving a problem identified by an emerging group of customers.

For example, not every business has food delivery services because it’s expensive to make a fleet, and this gap helped create food delivery services.

A market team can find gaps based on three inputs:

• Forecasting models that help analyze data from the company’s previous-year data
• Qualitative research on lacking areas and industry expert reports identifying the target audience’s pain points
• Finding micro to small emerging trends that are already existing in the market

Market research mind map template

Display your research data with an easy-to-understand template, like the example below. You can present every single detail of your research without making it look like a cluttered report.

Using visuals and an easy-to-understand table, your readers can easily follow the strategic sales plan process from start to finish.

Appoint key roles for each of your sales objectives

With a strategic sales plan, you’ll need to appoint team members or departments to specific tasks. This is crucial for achieving the sales plan’s goals.

A good sales manager will assign roles according to each member’s specialty. For example, front-facing sales reps are better positioned to handle the CRM components of sales plans.

Appointing key roles can be as simple as using a table to align a team member’s position with their responsibilities.

However, you will need much more complex diagrams if you’re assigning tasks to projects with dozens of members.

Food Customer Sales Action Plan Template

Highlight every important detail with this free sales plan template that you can send to team members and other departments.

This sales plan template includes a dedicated section for your target market, customer profile, action plan, and task assignments. It’s a great briefing document for both internal and external use.

Fully customize this sales plan template for your brand with Venngage’s My Brand Kit feature.

Related: 9 Sales Infographics to Guide Strategy and Increase Sales

Now you can execute your sales plan with confidence and grow your customer base

Sales plans should be visually attractive as well as impactful. It isn’t always easy to create a sales plan without design experience.

Use the free sales plan template examples in this post to write a sales plan that is powerful and effective.

With these examples as inspiration, you can help team members and your business convince your target market about the dependability and quality of your products.

The Venngage sales plan templates will help you reach your sales goals faster and grow your business in the process.

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16 Sales Plan Templates to Plan Your Sales Strategy

Written by: Olujinmi Oluwatoni

Crafting an effective sales plan creates the stage for your sales team to exceed targets and secure those coveted wins.

But let’s face it, it demands hours of meticulous planning. On top of that, time is a luxury that can be hard to find amidst a whirlwind of meetings, pitches and follow-ups in sales.

That’s why sales plan templates come in handy. They streamline your sales planning efforts, enhance productivity and ultimately improve your team’s chances of achieving sales targets.

In this article, we’ve curated a collection of the finest templates out there, designed to rescue you from the time-consuming ordeal of creating your sales plan from scratch.

Let's get to it!

Table of Contents

Benefits of using a sales plan template, 16 sales plan templates you can use.

• How to Create a Sales Plan Template With Visme
• Utilizing a template when creating a sales plan is time-efficient, creates structure and organization, ensures consistency and facilitates communication and alignment.
• To create a sales plan template with Visme, sign up or login to Visme, choose a template, gather all the necessary information you need, customize the template and download or share the document.
• Visme offers a user-friendly interface with a wide range of customizable templates, advanced features and AI-powered tools to help you create stunning sales collaterals, sales enablement content and sales plans that will help you captivate your audience and accelerate your sales growth.

Using a template to jump-start your sales plan creation offers a number of benefits.

Let's take a look at some of the benefits:

• Structure and Organization: A sales plan template provides a structured format, guiding you through essential steps to create a comprehensive sales plan. With a template, you can capture all necessary elements, like setting goals, outlining the target market, sales strategies , timelines and lots more.
• Time Efficiency: Using a template saves time by eliminating the need to create your plan from scratch. You can focus on customizing the template to your specific business needs rather than starting from a blank page.
• Consistency: A standardized sales template ensures consistency across different sales teams or periods. This means you can easily track progress and compare results.
• Communication and Alignment: A well-structured sales plan template aids in communicating goals, strategies and expectations to stakeholders, ensuring everyone is aligned toward common objectives.

Build relationships with customers and drive sales growth

• Reach out to prospects with impressive pitch decks and proposals that convert
• Monitor clients' level of engagement to see what they are most interested in
• Build a winning sales playbook to maximize your sales team's efficiency

Sign up. It’s free.

There are so many ways Visme can help you close more sales . For a start, we've carefully selected these pre-made sales plan templates to jumpstart your process. Each template can be fully tailored to suit your business needs.

Here’s what one of Visme's clients had to say about our templates and service:

Now, let’s get to the templates!

1. Sales Business Plan One Pager

Looking for a way to efficiently communicate the critical information of your sales plan to stakeholders in a concise format without overwhelming details? This sales business plan template is your silver bullet.

It uses a mix of subtle and bold colors to emphasize content, making it visually impactful. You can utilize the template sections to capture your sales tactics, goals, target audience, key performance metrics and more.

Short on time? Try Visme's AI document generator to quickly create your business sales plan or any document. Just input your prompt, offer some context, choose a design and watch it generate your draft in seconds.

2. Sales Employee 30-60-90 Day Plan

Take advantage of this sales employee 30-60-90 day plan for efficient onboarding of your new sales team members. This minimalistic template features a clean white background with black and grey accents. Each page also boasts engaging visuals that complement the content.

Utilize the template’s sections to outline specific objectives, goals and actionable steps for the first 90 days, including growth strategies, sales targets and more.

Make your sales plan engaging by incorporating animations and interactive elements like animated text, graphics, hotspots, pop-ups and hover effects to reveal additional information. With these additions, your team members can go through the plan in a more engaging way.

3. Company Territory Sales Plan

Create a strategy to refine your sales efforts within specific territories with this sales plan. It features sections for defining territories, identifying target customers, setting sales objectives, implementing tactics and evaluating performance.

With a vibrant purple color scheme, impressive fonts, icons and a sleek minimalist layout, this template ensures your sales plan stands out.

Easily leverage Visme's AI Touch-Up Tools to fine-tune your visuals, whether it's sharpening, removing backgrounds, or replacing elements, ensuring your images are perfect for the template.

4. Sales Budget Plan

This sales budget plan template is an indispensable asset for businesses aiming to effectively manage finances while optimizing sales strategies .

The template comprehensively covers vital budgeting aspects, encompassing revenue objectives, cost of goods sold, sales expenses and allocation for marketing and promotional endeavors.

Its structured use of color schemes, typefaces, fonts and design elements ensures a coherent and engaging document.

Avoid the hassle of manually incorporating brand elements repeatedly. With Visme's brand design tool , simply input your website URL and watch as it automatically integrates your brand assets into your brand kit.

5. Business Development Sales Plan

Need to create a business plan that’ll drive business expansion? This template is your sure bet.

It not only employs a stylish fusion of colors but also integrates captivating visuals, icons and data widgets in each slide.

With sections spanning company overview, launch plan, target market, goals, plans, budget and more, this template simplifies sales planning processes.

Engage your team seamlessly through Visme's collaboration tool , fostering commentary, annotations and idea exchange for refining the plan collaboratively. With Visme's workflow feature, you can effortlessly manage roles, tasks, progress and deadlines in a unified platform.

6. Product Market Expansion Sales Plan

Seeking to introduce your products to new markets or expand within existing ones? This product market expansion sales plan template is your best bet.

It features a bold, modern design adorned with vibrant colors, compelling imagery and dynamic graphics, offering a visually engaging way to present your ideas.

This sales planning template features detailed sections covering market analysis, competitive landscape, marketing strategies, distribution channels, sales tactics and performance metrics.

Customize colors and fonts and leverage customizable charts and widgets. You can use Visme’s library of data visualization tools , including charts, graphs, maps, and widgets, to create concise sales pitch presentations .

7. Company Sales SOP Plan

This company sales SOP plan template is an essential asset for businesses seeking to efficiently standardize and streamline their sales procedures.

What sets the template apart is its incorporation of captivating visual elements. The images and graphics elevate the document's visual appeal, while the vibrant color palette sparks emotions and enthusiasm. The layout also ensures a clutter-free presentation and directs focus towards critical aspects of the content.

You can utilize the template’s sections to provide a detailed description of your goals, workflow and protocols for your sales activities.

Leverage Visme’s dynamic fields to effortlessly update information, data and dates across multiple projects with a single click. Dynamic fields enable swift adjustments to company details, results, or sales plan recipients, ideal for distributing multiple proposals to various stakeholders.

8. Consulting Revenue-based Sales Plan

This sales plan example is a specialized framework crafted specifically for consultants and consulting firms seeking to propel revenue growth through strategic sales initiatives.

Designed with a white background, balanced black tones and accents of orange and gray, this template offers a harmonious visual aesthetic that exudes vibrancy.

Dedicated sections within the template focus on client acquisition strategies, service offerings, pricing models, sales pipelines and performance metrics directed towards revenue targets.

Struggling with content creation? Visme's built-in AI writer simplifies the process. This sophisticated tool aids in text creation, modification and proofreading, saving valuable time and energy while ensuring the production of high-quality content. Just input your prompt and watch the tool perform its magic.

9. Sales Cloud Software Sales Plan

Tailored for software sales managers or sales teams in tech companies, this template is your compass for crafting an impactful sales strategy for your company.

The template features a color palette blending a white backdrop with accents of lemon and black tones. It also employs subtle shadows, clean lines and ample open spaces, which improves readability.

Use the template’s sections to highlight your market analysis, target audience identification, competitive positioning, sales strategies, customer acquisition tactics and lots more.

Your sales plan doesn’t have to be boring. Spice it up with visually appealing images and interactive icons. Simply browse through Visme's vast collection of stock photos, icons and more to choose the visual that suits your needs.

If you cannot find the exact you need, then utilize Visme's AI image generator. This feature allows you to craft unique photos, paintings, pencil drawings, 3D graphics, icons, abstract art and beyond. Just input a precise prompt and begin generating your personalized visuals effortlessly.

10. Sales Business Plan Infographic Template

Creating a comprehensive sales plan often entails complex steps, which might pose challenges when presenting to potential stakeholders. This template offers a concise yet thorough way to showcase your plan, emphasizing crucial elements while minimizing excessive text.

Its dynamic presentation, enriched with a captivating fusion of colors and visuals, offers an impactful way to convey information.

The template’s sections allow you to visualize your goals, timelines, market analysis, strategies, performance metrics and more.

You can utilize this template for your sales meetings, strategy sessions, or as a comprehensive reference tool for your sales team.

11. SaaS Product Sales Plan

Craft a high-impact sales approach for SaaS products effortlessly with this template. Whether you're a SaaS startup founder, a product manager, or part of a tech company's sales team, this template will help you create a concise plan.

This template has a sleek white background complemented by shades of green and nude tones. Its design elements, coupled with compelling charts and graphics, also make it a breeze to convey your sales insights.

The template’s section covers essential sections such as market analysis, target audience profiling, competitive assessment, pricing strategies and customer acquisition tactics.

What's more, you can download your design in JPG, PNG, or PDF formats for printing or easy sharing with team members for collaborative efforts.

12. Digital Marketing Agency Sales Plan

Designed for digital agency owners, sales managers, or marketing teams, this template offers a structured approach to craft a robust sales strategy.

With a sleek, contemporary design, user-friendly layout and engaging visuals, this template effectively conveys your vision and offers a detailed roadmap to accomplish your agency's objectives.

It covers sections on market analysis, target audience identification, service offerings, pricing strategies, lead generation tactics and performance metrics. Tailor the template to match your brand's style, ensuring a unified and visually appealing plan.

13. Real Estate Sales Plan

Tailored explicitly for real estate agents, brokers, or agencies, this template is a great tool to outline strategies to proficiently market properties and close deals. It employs captivating fonts, vibrant colors and graphics that’ll engage your sales team members.

You can utilize the template’s sections to outline your executive summary, sales goals and KPIs , revenue targets, target markets, marketing strategy, prospecting strategy, budget and lots more.

14. Marketing Agency Sales Plan

For your marketing agency's success, a well-organized sales plan is pivotal. This marketing agency sales plan is a great tool to craft a robust sales strategy that attracts clients effectively.

The modern design boasting a harmonious color palette, enriched with images and icons gives the plan a great visual appeal. It includes sections to detail your market analysis, target audiences, service offerings, pricing strategies, lead generation tactics, budget allocation and performance metrics.

For added flair, you can animate this annual sales plan template with illustrations, incorporate characters and integrate clickable interactive icons.

15. Health Insurance Sales Plan

This specialized health insurance template is crafted exclusively for insurance professionals aiming to optimize their sales strategies, specifically for health insurance products.

The template provides a refined layout while integrating vibrant and compelling imagery. It covers comprehensive sections on market analysis, identifying target audiences, competitive analysis, pricing strategies, lead generation tactics, regulatory compliance and performance metrics.

Effortlessly incorporate data from platforms such as Google Sheets, Excel and various tools directly into your charts and graphs. Once connected to your data sources, your charts and graphs will dynamically adjust to any changes in the external data, keeping your information organized and up-to-date.

This feature boosts the professional quality of your sales plan while simplifying data handling.

16. Customer Product Sales Plan

This Customer Product Sales Plan template offers a strategic framework designed for businesses seeking to enhance sales by prioritizing the customer's perspective. The striking combination of grey, black, and white gives it a great visual appeal.

From sections like customer segmentation, market analysis, product positioning, sales tactics and more, this template has everything you need to create a comprehensive sales plan.

For detailed tracking of data, leverage Visme analytics . Monitor views, engagement and interactions to gain insights into audience interaction with your visual content. You can easily track your audience’s activities by customizing and saving each document separately with the prospect's name.

How to Create a Sales Plan Template with Visme

With the wide variety of features and templates available in Visme, you can quickly whip up visually appealing and professional sales business plans.

Here’s how to write a sales plan using Visme.

Step 1: Register or Log in to your Visme Account

Create a new Visme account or sign in if you're already a user. Once logged in, you can dive into Visme's impressive array of features and tools.

Step 2: Choose a Suitable Template

Choose a sales plan template that matches your unique needs and objectives. Visme offers an extensive collection of professionally designed templates tailored to your project or initiative.

Step 3: Input Relevant Content

Once you’ve selected your template, the next step is to input relevant information into it. The information you’ll require here depends on the type of sales plan template you’ve chosen.

Simply replace the template’s placeholder content with yours. With Visme's user-friendly editor, you can quickly and easily add, edit, or remove pages and content to suit your needs.

Step 4: Input Your Sales Data By Integrating Visme With Your CRM

A sales plan typically includes various sales data such as target market analysis, sales strategies, product or service details, and lots more.

One of the perks of using Visme to create your sales plans is that it offers seamless integration with CRM tools like Salesforce and HubSpot. This connection enables direct input of your sales data and client information from your CRM into your visual content. This way, you can showcase up-to-date sales data within your sales plan.

The integration also allows easy export of projects created in Visme to your HubSpot or Salesforce storage. When you have all your sales data in one central place, you create a single source of truth for your sales team.

This will aid the effective execution of your sales activities.

Here’s how to set up Visme’s integration with Hubspot or Salesforce:

• Go to the Visme Apps section and click HubSpot or Salesforce
• Log in to your HubSpot or Salesforce account using your credentials to connect your account to Visme.
• Access your HubSpot or Salesforce files within Visme, then select the specific file you want to incorporate into your Visme project.
• When you are done with the project, select the dropdown next to the Download button to export the file directly to your HubSpot or Salesforce storage.

Step 5: Customize the Template

Once you've selected a template and gathered the necessary information for your sales plan, the next step involves crafting the content and personalizing the template to suit your needs.

Simply replace the placeholder content in the template with your own. Visme's user-friendly editor allows you to seamlessly add, edit, or delete content and rearrange design elements across the canvas.

You have the flexibility to modify text by adjusting font size, style, color, alignment and even add animations. Easily tailor section headings, include or exclude sections and ensure the content aligns perfectly with your project or organization.

Earlier, we highlighted several features and design elements within Visme that will assist you in customizing your sales plan templates. Take advantage of these tools and features to craft visually appealing and professional sales plans tailored to your needs.

Step 6: Download and Share

Publish and share the completed sales plan with relevant team members and stakeholders. You can download designs in PDF, JPG, PNG, or HTML5 formats or easily share them via email or a shareable link. Plus, effortlessly publish your content anywhere online by generating a code within the Visme app.

Sales Plan FAQs

Q. what are the 7 steps to creating a sales plan.

Here are 7 steps to create a sales plan:

• Review Sales and Customer Data
• Set Clear Objectives
• Identify Gaps and Opportunities to Improve
• Define Sales Strategies
• Establish KPIs
• Create an Action Plan
• Allocate Budget and Resources:

Q. What Should a Good Sales Plan Include?

A typical sales plan includes the following sections:

• Executive Summary
• Sales Goals
• Target Market
• Competitors Analysis
• Action Plan
• KPIs to Measure
• Team Structure

Q. What Does a Sales Strategy Plan Look Like?

A sales strategy plan typically consists of several key components, including:

• Market Analysis
• Value PropositionTarget Audience
• Sales Objectives
• Sales Channels
• Sales Tactics and Techniques
• Resource Allocation

Q. How Do You Write a Sales Strategy Plan Template?

Follow these steps to write a sales strategy plan template:

• Analyze the Market and Persona
• Define Your Sales Goals
• Analyze Current Position and Opportunities
• Align Sales and Marketing
• Create Sales Strategies
• Define Sales KPIs
• Map Out Your Action Plan
• Evaluate Budget and Resource
• Create a Timeline

Easily Design Captivating & Data-Driven Sales Plans with Visme

A well crafted sales plan will help you focus efforts, allocate resources effectively and adapt to market changes, ultimately contributing to sustainable profitability.

Thanks to Visme, creating your sales plans doesn't have to be overwhelming.

Visme is a comprehensive tool for effortlessly creating engaging and data-driven sales plans. Its broad range of features, customizable options, AI-powered tools, and templates allow for the creation of professional-quality plans.

You can also utilize Visme's real-time collaboration tools and versatile sharing options to seamlessly engage all stakeholders in crafting and conveying your sales plan, irrespective of physical proximity.

Beyond sales plans, Visme can be used to create various business assets, such as sales presentations, infographics, e-books, whitepapers and more.

Ready to level up your company's sales game? Sign up or book a demo to discover how Visme can help your sales team drive tangible results.

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Olujinmi is a Content writer for Visme who creates human-first SEO content. She loves helping businesses smash their ROI goals with strategic content development and optimization. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her composing songs.

All about Sales Plans: Definitions, Tips, and Free Templates

By Kate Eby | July 27, 2018

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In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about sales plans: how they relate to sales forecasting and sales pipelines, as well as benefits, challenges, and tips for getting the most out of your sales plans.

Included on this page, you’ll find over 8 free sales plan templates , learn the difference between sales forecasting and sales planning , and find best practices for writing a sales plan .

Free Sales Plan Templates

In this section, you’ll find over 15 free sales planning templates in Microsoft Excel and Word formats.

Sales Plan Template

‌   Download Excel Template

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This template allows you to plan your sales goals with the flexibility and functionality of an Excel spreadsheet. This sales plan template is divided into 12 months and separate product lines. The template includes columns for the previous year’s performance, current sales goals, and outcome. Create a yearly sales plan, and compare data over time and across products.

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Sales Leads Template

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If you want to keep track of sales leads, but don’t need the full functionality of customer relationship management (CRM) software, this spreadsheet may be adequate for your business. The template has columns for detailed information about each sales lead, including contact dates and status — this allows you to keep track of communications with each customer, plan future contacts and follow-ups, and evaluate potential sales. You can also indicate lead sources on the spreadsheet to monitor your marketing efforts and track how customers are referred to your business.

Sales Tracker Template

This sales tracker template makes it easy to keep track of items sold, along with profit per item and total earned income. You can also track costs, including shipping charges and returns. This template is especially useful for a new business, online retail sales, or any small business that wants to track sales and profits.

Sales Pipeline Template

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This sales pipeline template is an alternative to CRM software and is designed with small businesses in mind, use it to keep track of contacts and estimated sales. It also provides a quarterly sales forecast, along with space to record deal status, projected closing date, and further actions. This simple template is easy to edit and serves as a management tool for your sales pipeline.

Sales and Marketing Plan Template

‌   Download Template in Word

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Creating an effective sales and marketing plan may involve market research and analysis, evaluating your competition, looking at your sales history, examining future sales projections, and more. Once you have adequate information to develop a sales plan, a template can help you organize the plan into steps that will drive sales. This sales and marketing plan template provides space for identifying your sales goal, target customers, strategies for attracting those customers, marketing tactics and messages, scheduled action steps, and results.

Sales Funnel Template

‌ ‌ Download Sales Funnel Template - Excel

This sales funnel template provides a visual representation of the sales process, along with whatever sales data you choose to include. The template can be used as a scorecard to evaluate sales progress, and the funnel makes it easy to visualize the steps in your sales process. This free template is a simple but effective tool for reaching sales and business goals.

Sales Report Template

‌ ‌ Download Sales Report Template

Track monthly, quarterly, and yearly sales activity with this free sales report template. Customize the template or use the existing columns to keep track of sales and pertinent data. This sales report template also includes a monthly forecast showing sales history and projections. Use this template to track progress, plan future goals, and create a sales report with pleasing visual design.

Sales Action Plan Template

Download Sales Action Plan Template

Create a sales plan with actionable steps and a scheduled timeline. This template features sections for listing clearly defined goals, methods for measuring success, action steps, ownership for each step, and deadlines. These are all important components of a sales action plan for reducing risk and increasing the probability that you will reach your sales goals.

Using a Sales Plan Template

Finding the right sales template provides easy organization and efficiency, which frees up resources and time that can go toward reaching business goals. A template can also be a powerful communication tool for sales and marketing teams to develop and track their progress against sales targets. Depending on the nature and scope of your company, some templates can be a component of an effective business plan.

The Basics of a Sales Plan

A sales plan outlines sale goals for a cycle, as well as the steps you will take to hit those targets. The sales plan document also defines tools, high-level tactics, target customers, competitors, obstacles, among other details. A strong plan will communicate company goals to the sales team, keep everyone focused on strategy, and delineate priorities.

What Is the Difference Between Sales Forecasting and Sales Planning?

While many people confuse the two terms, sales forecasting and sales planning are distinct concepts. A sales forecast is a future projection of sales based on business and environmental conditions, while a sales plan defines the concrete steps needed to achieve the sales forecast. You can create a sales forecast for your entire business or for a particular initiative over any period of time (examples include an economic forecast; an industry forecast; a company forecast; and a short-, medium-, or long-term forecast).

Sales plans are helpful tools when budgeting for advertising or travel costs, identifying new sales markets, planning for staffing needs, and creating a timeline to reach milestones. But a sales plan is just one piece of the business planning and management — and it relies on accurate sales forecasting. You can get free sales forecasting templates here .

Large organizations, small businesses, and startups can all equally benefit from sales planning. Sales forecasts and plans are most often used by the sales team, although marketers, executives, and even customers may interact with the documents as well.

What Is a Sales Pipeline?

A sales pipeline is a visual representation of where prospective buyers are in the sales process. A sales pipeline can quickly identify a prospect’s position in the buying journey; use that information to support them and respond to their needs appropriately.

While a specific buyer’s journey will vary based on the industry and type of products or services sold, there are three general phases of any sales pipeline:

A prospect initiates contact with a company and explains its needs.

A salesperson provides the prospect with a quote (including the product or service and price).

The prospect purchases a product or service (and thereby becomes a customer).

Use the targeted sales pipeline templates above to track potential customers’ journeys through the process.

What Is the Sales Funnel? 

The sales funnel is a visual representation of the average conversion rate of potential customers and qualified leads move through the sales process. Sales teams can use the sales funnel to help understand the volume of sales, as well as the percentage of each sale that has passed through each sales process stage.

The sales pipeline represents what the seller is doing during the sales process; the sales funnel shows the sales process conversion rates. The sales funnel feeds the sales pipeline; once a lead is converted into a prospect, they move into the sales pipeline.

Benefits of Using a Sales Plan

A high-quality sales plan is one of the key parts of the sales forecasting process as well as the operational plan and the marketing strategy. When done right, a sales plan can provide the following benefits:

• Guide and contribute to business growth.
• Communicate company sales goals, objectives, and strategic direction for the sales team and leadership.
• Expose new angles based on the research performed to fill out the items on the template. 
• Define needed actions during the sales cycle.
• Provide easy monitoring of sales team progress as linked to goals.
• Provide a high-level view of expenses, finances, and risks, as well as the competition and target customers. 
• Improve and track performance by keeping the team focused on the strategy, priorities and achieving shared milestones.
• Inspire and motivate stakeholders.
• Help keep customers and potential customers as the focus.
• Clarify team capabilities.
• Aid in comparison of targets and results.

Best Practices for Writing a Sales Plan

While creating the sales plan, take the following steps in order to create a quality and realistic plan:

• Perform a SWOT analysis.
• Review prior periods’ performance to gather data.
• Base the targets and goals on market research and historical data.
• Verify facts and data being used.
• Break down data by different sales groups (inside sales, outside sales, etc.).
• Make sure the sales team buys in to the plan.
• Identify patterns that can help reach target customers.
• Pick a time period that makes sense for your industry.
• Ensure that the budget is supported by the research.
• Ensure that sales objectives are linked to sales goals, and that sales goals are linked to business goals.
• Break down estimated expenses to meet sales goals into groups (commissions, sales training, sales tools and resources, contest prizes, team building, travel costs, food, etc.). 
• Use the SMART goals model (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). 
• Measure what you want to manage.
• Keep the plan updated throughout the sales cycle — it’s a living document.
• Keep the plan as simple as possible.
• Look for untapped market segments to target.
• Define the value proposition for potential customers.
• Map out the ideal customer journey.

Sales Plans Challenges

While a sales plan is a valuable tool, creating one does pose some challenges: 

• Creating a sales plan can be very time consuming.
• Inaccurate data will skew forecasts — verify your numbers before you finalize the plan. 
• It’s difficult to predict changing tastes, so forecasts may not be met.
• Rapid growth may increase the workload of the sales team, and throw off forecasts.
• Be careful not to move goalposts mid-cycle.
• Wishful thinking is easy to do, so be realistic and don’t ignore your own assumptions.
• Neglecting to consult with the sales team may prevent them from buying into the plan.
• Neglecting to get feedback from other groups can have a negative impact on the plan.

What Is Included in a Sales Plan?

The sales plan contains numerous sections that provide information to readers, and help guide decisions that will contribute to meeting sales goals.

• Mission and Executive Summary: Include a short history of the business for background.
• Team Structure: Provide a breakdown of the team by sales team, including each person’s role and capabilities. Also include plans for any future hiring.
• Target Customers: Break down the customer list into segments by products or product lines. Build a prospect list that includes referrals, renewals, upsells, and any new segments, and make sure to leverage existing customer relationships.
• Tools, Software, and Other Resources: Include a list of CRM packages or other sales tools (including training tools), and provide any relevant documentation.
• Positioning: Include competitor data, including a comparison of your products with theirs. Anticipate how market trends may impact your business.
• Marketing Strategy: Include pricing information, promotions, and any actions you have planned to increase brand awareness.
• Prospecting Strategy: List criteria for qualifying leads generated by marketing strategy. 
• Action Plan: Include a list of steps needed to hit revenue and sales goals.
• Revenue and Sales Goals: Include measurable, realistic goals that support the overall business. Additionally, supply information on how performance will be measured and monitored, and be sure to base projections off historical data.
• Budget: Include estimated costs (including training, sales tools and resources, team building activities, travel, food, contest prizes, etc.). Make a case for the budget you present.
• Schedule: Provide a timeline that addresses the length of the sales cycle covered by the plan (annual, quarterly, month, etc.).
• Other Items: Consider including a performance review of the prior sales cycle, as well as market and industry conditions that may impact sales.

Improve Sales Planning with Smartsheet for Sales

Sales planning is an activitiy to gain and retain customers, meet changing market demands, and ultimately, ensure business success. While premade templates can help you get started developing your plan, you need a tool to manage all of your sales processes and operations that is accessible to your team in real time and allows you to collaborate and track sales activity across multiple reps.

Smartsheet is a work execution platform that enables enterprises and teams to get from idea to impact - fast. Top performing sales organizations rely on Smartsheet to stay on top of leads, accelerate productivity, and exceed every quota.

Use Smartsheet to build a strong opportunity pipeline, reduce risks and identify blockers, and refine your sales forecast. Improve transparency to process and procedure, optimize operations with cross-department collaboration, and accelerate team output.

Discover how Smartsheet can help maximize your sales efforts, today. 

Try Smartsheet for Sales

Additional Resources

Operations management

Sales Operations 101: Roles, Duties, Headaches, and Pro Tips

Learn the basics of sales operations and how roles are evolving. Hear from the pros and find tips to remedy sales ops headaches.

Nov 18, 2021

Get the most out of your sales planning efforts with Smartsheet for Sales.

• TemplateLab

Sales Plan Templates

32 sales plan & sales strategy templates.

People involved in sales usually depend on a specific plan. One which would set their sales goals and establish the strategies they need. With the help of a sales strategy, they can also establish the budgets they need.

They can identify sale market prospects; plan the requirements of their staff and adapt a timeline in reaching their goals. But the sales plan is just one aspect of business management and planning.

Table of Contents

• 1 Sales Plan Templates
• 2 Main parts and purpose of a sales plan template
• 3 Sale Strategies
• 4 The benefits of using a sales plan template
• 5 Free Sales Plan Templates
• 6 Tips for creating your sales plan template

The design of a good sales tracking spreadsheet could be costly in terms of time, money, and effort. To facilitate this requirement, you can just download a template here. This can provide efficiency and easy organization.

Then you can use the resources meant for the design in achieving your business goals . Sales and marketing personnel can use the template as a tool to communicate their ideas. A sales plan template can be part of your business.

But it would depend upon the nature of scope of your business.

Main parts and purpose of a sales plan template

A sales strategy will be helpful for any organization. This is especially true when planning their activities in a structured manner. This will ensure that they achieve all their objectives and goals.

It’s paramount that you design the plan with meticulous care. Make sure to include all the necessary parts. To have an inkling of what and how a sales template looks like, you can go online. To help you out, here are some main parts of such a plan:

• Executive summary
• Elevator pitch
• Mission of the organization
• Analysis details
• Objectives and goals
• Relevant performance indicators
• End users and target audience
• Analysis of advantages and the competition
• Marketing strategy

There are good reasons why businesses invest a lot of money and effort in formulating a sales plan. Fortunately, you can simply download a template to make things easier for you. Such plan will serve varied purposes which we shall briefly enumerate:

• Setting up goals for each individual and for the business too.
• Creating an effective operational plan.
• Setting up the business expenses/finances.
• Analyzing the business’s financial statements.
• Determining and analyzing the potential risks.
• Devising an efficient marketing strategy.
• Creating an actual profile of customers who patronize the business’s products or services.
• Identifying target audiences and would-be customers.
• Getting more familiar with the sales cycle.
• The plan will play an important role in determining the financial goals of the business.

It’s important to have an efficient and effective sales plan. Then you’re expected to meet all your company’s predefined objectives and goals.

More importantly, it will enhance the organization’s profits. If you prefer to create your own templates, consider the following tips. These will prove beneficial to your endeavor:

• The customers take first consideration when creating the plan.
• Do intensive researches work on market trends before starting to plan.
• Consider the weaknesses and strengths of the competition.
• Give particular attention to details when creating the plan.
• Include all the relevant angles that are essential to the sales plan.

Sales plan templates are periodically made by businesses. They can have them monthly or even seasonal. In the case of small businesses , a two-week period is best to provide a better insight into market trends.

Sale Strategies

The benefits of using a sales plan template

Have you ever tried to plan an event without a plan? It certainly is a winning formula for chaos and disorganization. Some people take for granted the use of a plan. They may find it difficult or expensive and would rather not part with their money.

This situation can be bad because they are missing the advantages of good planning. Consider these benefits:

• You’ll be able to stay on your strategy. A sales strategy will provide you a synopsis of the most important aspects of your plan. It will also remind you of issues that you need to include. Interruptions may happen when people don’t know what issues should to prioritize.
• Your objectives will be clearer. A good plan should incorporate specific objectives. You need to establish then manage these objectives. These can include sales, website visitors, margins or the launching of new products . Make the achievement of objectives the measure of success.
• You’ll make better-educated guesses. With the progression of the plan, you’ll be able to predict the outcomes of certain issues. These include potential markets, lead processing, sales costs, and other business processes.
• Your priorities will become more sensible. A business definitely has some other priorities aside from its sales strategy. You can plan the company’s management, its growth, and financial health. These should all be part of the plan. Set the groundwork for your priorities and make changes as the business develops.
• You’ll be able to understand independencies more. You can define the plan as a schedule of events that should happen chronologically. Use the plan to determine what activities should occur and in what order. The plan will prove its value in making you organized and on time.
• Setting milestones will keep you right on track. The plan will provide you with target deadlines and dates for the goals you need to accomplish. This will apply to either a solo enterprise or for a team in a company.
• You’ll be able to delegate better. The plan will define the responsibility of each team and individual. There will always be a member who will be in charge of some important task.
• Team management and results tracking will be a lot easier. Businesses usually set review time for their employees . This is to determine their performances, particularly as team members. Many hate these reviews but they’re a gauge of performance. You can use them to commend, improve or correct the employee’s work . These reviews should be part of the plan. Also, you should put them in writing as part of the member’s record.
• You can manage and plan the cash flow better. A business that mismanages their cash flow will definitely fail. There’s a need for a cash-flow plan. Educated guesses based on market trends will be important. Use it to bring together what assets you need to purchase and what debts you need to pay .
• Course corrections will help keep your business going. The presence of a sales plan makes the business more proactive than reactive. Planning ahead makes for lesser mistakes. Constantly tracking activities could help predict better results and make corrections when needed. A prediction based on nothing is a myth. But predictions can eventuate if based on trends and facts. The plan should define and set expectations and establish assumptions. You can better manage what comes next and make course corrections if they happen.

Sales tracking spreadsheets and plans aren’t only for giant corporations. They can apply to small enterprises as well. No need to delve into complicated matters regarding your business. It’s a fairly straightforward document but it’s powerful enough to do a big job.

Free Sales Plan Templates

Tips for creating your sales plan template

In a business, a sales strategy is also important as this serves as a guide to the sales team of the company. A sales plan is specifically for sales personnel. It will guide them in attaining their objectives and goals.

The plan can be long-term which could last for years or short-term, such as an annual plan. In either case, the common ground is that the plan steers the members to their goals through sales.

• Set definite sales goals. Businesses usually have financial goals. After all, they are in it for the money. It’s important to set specific goals. Those which sales personnel must attain within a certain period of time. Specific goals can help the employees break them down into quantifiable objectives.
• Define your sales objectives based on sales goals. Write them down. Specific achievements can help you meet your sales goals. You can have a sales objective which will include an increase in sales by a specific number of units. You can hasten to reach the objective by cross-selling products during a period of time. This will undoubtedly incur an increase in expenditures. This is inevitable when doing promotions or advertisements.
• You need to identify three important aspects of your customer’s sales focus. First, there’s the customer profile. Salespersons will need some information about their customers so they can make predictions. From this information, they can target the products they can sell to their customers. Then, there’s the organization profile. You will have to explain the kind of organization you’re targeting. Finally, there’s the sales territory. This will refer to the region that you will be operating in. A list of accounts of each salesperson would be helpful as each would focus on a distinct market niche.
• Identify your target sales market. The sales plan should have a target sales market. This will include the research you’ve done on market trends. Consider the industry sales data associated with the products and services you offer. You should be aware of current developments in the industry. This will be important for your sales projections which you based on sales figures of the industry. Also, make mention of competitors in the market. These competitors offer the same goods or services. Make comparisons on each other’s market shares, customer base, and competitive advantages. You’ll spend the most hours of research and work on this section of the plan. What you intend to do will define your strategies and the tactics to execute them.
• The next thing to do is to identify the tools and systems. Here, enumerate the things that you’ll need to successfully implement your plan. The main systems to outline consist of regular weekly meetings on sales progress. Also, you need a CRM system. Use it to execute your plan and come up with sales plan metrics. Finally, list the communication equipment too.
• After you have formulated the sales objectives, you’ll now work on measures. These would keep track of your sales objective’s progress as against achieving them.
• Create a pipeline that can identify each stage of development. You need to identify the stages of your newly acquired business leads. You can also source out more sales opportunities within your customer accounts on-hand. The important metrics that you need to measure are conversion rates for every stage of your sales process. Name the reasons why sales opportunities are being lost for each stage. The percentage or win rate of all new leads that which you’ve converted into sales.
• The next thing to plan is your team. This section of the plan will list the members of your sales team. Also, identify their roles and responsibilities. In case you have a separate marketing agency team, include them in this section. Describe also the proper roles of this team. They are an essential part of your sales performances.
• Design a target date to accomplish all your goals. Also, include the calendaring of all milestones, task, and activities. All those required for you to achieve such goals. Be specific about time management methods. These will provide assistance in prioritization, delegation, and scheduling.
• Based on your financial resources, create a budget plan. One that’s required to accomplish your sales objectives. The budget for your team will be part of the bigger budget for the company. You will need to develop a system. Use it to track down and monitor the expenditures that are specific to your sales objectives. Always be aware that your team doesn’t exceed the budget. Some items may have allocations in your budget. These can include increased production, labor, advertising, equipment, travel, and supplies.
• Make an outline of the strategies and tactics that you’ll need. Everything required to successfully executing your sales plan. A top-down strategy would be great. One which allows you to communicate the goals to every salesperson in your team. Mention the HR personnel who provided assistance to execute the plan. To strengthen the capabilities of your people, they may need more training. Include this as a component of the sales plan.

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Professional Development Plans

How To Build a Strategic Sales Plan + 10 Examples

• March 28, 2024

Every sales team has some sort of plan, even if it’s just “sell more of the product/service that you’re employed to sell.”

A sales plan is a portfolio that includes a layout of your processes, target audience, objectives and tactics. It’s used to guide your sales strategy and predict cost and returns. 

Yet without a codified sales plan, it can be difficult to give a sales team the motivation and purpose they need to successfully engage customers and continue to generate revenue.

Not having a sales plan that’s written down and signed off on by stakeholders can lead to confusion around what sales reps should and shouldn’t be doing , which can be demotivating.

It might seem daunting or time-consuming to put together an entire sales plan, but it doesn’t need to be. Here’s how to create a thorough sales plan in 10 simple steps. 

What Is a Sales Plan? 

A successful sales plan defines your target customers, business objectives, tactics, obstacles and processes. An effective plan will also include resources and strategies that are used to achieve target goals. It works similarly to a business plan in the way it’s presented, but only focuses on your sales strategy. 

A sales plan should include the following three components: 

• Ideas: If you use specific business methodologies, you may choose to outline key principles and examples of them in action within your sales plan. An example could be conversation tactics when pitching your product to your target customer. 
• Processes: In order to streamline productivity and business strategy, you’ll want to make sure your processes are defined within your sales plan. Your sales team should be able to refer to the sales plan when they’re in need of direction. 
• Tools and tactics: The most effective sales plans include not only high-level business strategies, but also step-by-step approaches for your sales team to utilize. These tools can include key conversation pieces for your sales reps to use when pitching a product or content to close out a deal. 

Solidifying a sales plan is crucial for a strong business model. Taking the time to narrow in on the components above will set you and your business up for success down the road. 

Sales Planning Process

It’s important to keep in mind that sales planning isn’t just about creating a sales plan document. A sales plan should be a go-to item that’s used every day by your team, rather than sitting on your desk collecting dust. Creating an effective sales plan requires high-level strategy.

You should: 

• Decide on a timeline for your goals and tactics
• Outline the context
• Write out the company mission and values
• Describe the target audience and product service positioning
• Include sales resources
• Draw out an overview of concurrent activities
• Write an overview of your business road map
• Outline your goals and KPIs
• Outline an action plan
• Create a budget 

 Below we dive into each of these steps to create your ideal sales plan. 

1. Decide on Your Timeline

Setting goals and outlining tactics is not going to be productive if you’re not working toward a date by which you’ll measure your efforts.

Determining the timeline of your sales plan should therefore be your number one consideration. When will you be ready to kick-start your plan, and when is a reasonable time to measure the outcomes of your plan against your SMART goals?

Remember that you need to give the plan a chance to make an impact, so this timeline shouldn’t be too restrictive. However, you also want to make sure that you’re flexible enough to adjust your plan if it’s not producing the desired results.

Most sales plan timelines cover about a year, which may be segmented into four quarters and/or two halves to make it a little more manageable.

2. Outline the Context

Use the first page of your sales plan to outline the context in which the plan was created.

What is the current state of the organization? What are your challenges and pain points? What recent wins have you experienced?

Do you have tighter restrictions on cash flow, or does revenue appear to be growing exponentially? How is your sales team currently performing?

While you’ll discuss your business plan and road map later in the document, you can also outline the long-term vision for your business in this section. For example, where do you want to see the business in five years?

Tip: Comparing the current situation with your vision will emphasize the gap between where you are now and where you need to be. 

3. Company Mission and Values

It’s essential that you put your mission and values at the heart of your business. You need to incorporate them into every function – and this includes your sales plan.

Outlining your mission and values in your sales plan ensures that you remember what the company is striving for, and in turn helps ensure that your approach and tactics will support these objectives.

Remember: A strong brand mission and authentic values will help boost customer loyalty, brand reputation and, ultimately, sales.

4. Target Market and Product/Service Positioning

Next, you’ll need to describe the market or markets that you’re operating in.

What is your target market or industry? What research led you to conclude that this was the optimal market for you?

Who within this industry is your ideal customer? What are their characteristics? This could be a job title, geographical location or company size, for example. This information makes up your ideal customer profile .

If you’ve delved further into audience research and developed personas around your target market, then include them in here, too.

5. Sales Team and Resources

This step is simple: Make a list of your sales resources, beginning with a short description of each member of your sales team.

Include their name, job title, length of time at the company and, where appropriate, their salary. What are their strengths? How can they be utilized to help you hit your goals?

You should also include notes around the gaps in your sales team and whether you intend to recruit any new team members into these (or other) roles.

Tip: Communicate the time zones your team members work in to be mindful of designated work hours for scheduling meetings and deadlines. 

Then, list your other resources. These could be tools, software or access to other departments such as the marketing team – anything that you intend to use in the execution of your sales plan. This is a quick way to eliminate any tools or resources that you don’t need.

6. Concurrent Activities

The next step in creating your sales plan involves providing an overview of non-sales activities that will be taking place during the implementation of your sales plan.

Any public marketing plans, upcoming product launches, or deals or discounts should be included, as should any relevant events. This will help you plan sales tactics around these activities and ensure that you’re getting the most out of them.

7. Business Road Map

For this step, write up an overview of your business’s overall road map, as well as the areas where sales activities can assist with or accelerate this plan. You’ll need to collaborate with the CEO, managing director or board of directors in order to do this.

In most cases, the business will already have a road map that has been signed off on by stakeholders. It’s the sales manager’s job to develop a sales plan that not only complements this road map, but facilitates its goals. 

Tip: Highlight areas of the road map that should be touchpoints for the sales team. 

Ask yourself what your department will need to do at each point in the road map to hit these overarching company goals.

8. Sales Goals and KPIs

Another important part of the sales plan involves your sales goals and KPIs.

Outline each goal alongside the KPIs you’ll use to measure it. Include a list of metrics you’ll use to track these KPIs, as well as a deadline for when you project the goal will be achieved.

It’s vital to make these goals tangible and measurable.

A bad example of a goal is as follows:

Goal 1: Increase sales across company’s range of products and services.

A better goal would look something like:

Goal 1: Generate $500,000+ in revenue from new clients through purchases of X product by X date.

9. Action Plan

Now that you’ve laid out your goals, you need to explain how you will hit them.

Your action plan can be set out week by week, month by month, or quarter by quarter. Within each segment, you must list out all of the sales activities and tactics that you will deploy – and the deadlines and touchpoints along the way.

Tip: Organize your action plan by department – sales, business development and finance. 

While this is arguably the most complex part of the sales plan, this is where sales leaders are strongest. They know which approach will work best for their team, their company and their market.

Budgets vary from team to team and company to company, but whatever your situation, it’s important to include your budget in your sales plan.

How are you going to account for the money spent on new hires, salaries, tech, tools and travel? Where the budget is tight, what are your priorities going to be, and what needs to be axed?

The budget section should make references back to your action plan and the sales team and resources page in order to explain the expenditures.

6 Strategic Sales Plan Examples 

You can create different types of strategic sales plans for your company, depending on how you want to structure your sales plan. Here are a few examples.   

Customer Profile 

A customer profile outlines your ideal customer for your service or product. It will usually include industry, background, attributes and decision-making factors.  

Creating a customer profile helps narrow in on the target customer your sales team should focus on while eliminating unproductive leads.  

Buyer’s Guide

A buyer’s guide is an informational sheet that describes your company’s services or products, including benefits and features. This document is useful both for your sales team but also for a potential customer who requires more information on the product before purchasing. 

30-60-90-Day Plan

This plan is organized based on time periods. It includes outlines of goals, strategy and actionable steps in 30-day periods. This is a useful sales plan model for a new sales representative tracking progress during their first 90 days in the position or meeting quotas in a 90-day period. 

This type of sales plan is also ideal for businesses in periods of expansion or growth. It’s helpful to minimize extra effort in onboarding processes. 

Market Expansion Plan

A market expansion plan clarifies target metrics and list of actions when moving into a new territory or market. This sales plan model is typically used with a target market that resides in a new geographical region. 

You’ll want to include a profile of target customers, account distribution costs and even time zone differences between your sales representatives. 

Marketing-alignment Plan

Creating a marketing-alignment sales plan is useful if your organization has yet to align both your sales and marketing departments. The goal of the sales plan is finalizing your target customer personas and aligning them with your sales pitches and marketing messages. 

New Product/Service Plan 

If your organization is launching a new service or product, it’s best to create a sales plan to track revenue and other growth metrics from the launch. You’ll want to include sales strategy, competitive analyses and service or product sales positioning. 

Sales Plan Template

4 additional sales plan templates.

Here are some additional templates you can use to create your own unique sales plan. 

• Template Lab 
• ProjectManager

5 Tips for Creating a Sales Plan 

Now that you’ve seen and read through a few examples and a sales plan template, we’ll cover some easy but useful tips to create a foolproof sales plan. 

• Create a competitive analysis: Research what sales strategies and tactics your close competitors are using. What are they doing well? What are they not doing well? Knowing what they are doing well will help you create a plan that will lead to eventual success. 
• Vary your sales plans: First create a base sales plan that includes high-level goals, strategies and tactics. Then go more in depth on KPIs and metrics for each department, whether it’s outbound sales or business development . 
• Analyze industry trends: Industry trends and data can easily help strengthen your sales approach. For example, if you’re pitching your sales plan to a stakeholder, use current market trends and statistics to support why you believe your sales strategies will be effective in use. 
• Utilize your marketing team: When creating your sales plan, you’ll want to get the marketing department’s input to align your efforts and goals. You should weave marketing messages throughout both your sales plan and pitches. 
• Discuss with your sales team: Remember to check in with your sales representatives to understand challenges they may be dealing with and what’s working and not working. You should update the sales plan quarterly based on feedback received from your sales team. 

When Should You Implement a Strategic Sales Plan? 

Does your organization currently not have a sales plan in place that is used regularly? Are you noticing your organization is in need of structure and lacking productivity across departments? These are definite signs you should create and implement a sales plan. 

According to a LinkedIn sales statistic , the top sales tech sellers are using customer relationship management (CRM) tools (50%), sales intelligence (45%) and sales planning (42%) .

Below are a few more indicators that you need an effective sales plan. 

To Launch a New Product or Campaign 

If you’re planning to launch a new service or product in six months, you should have a concrete marketing and sales strategy plan to guarantee you’ll see both short- and long-term success. 

The sales plan process shouldn’t be hasty and rushed. Take the time to go over data and competitor analysis. Work with your team to create objectives and goals that everyone believes in. Your sales plan should be updated formally on a quarterly basis to be in line with industry trends and business efforts. 

To Increase Sales

If your team is looking to increase revenue and the number of closed sales, you may need to widen and define your target audience. A sales plan will help outline this target audience, along with planning out both sales and marketing strategies to reach more qualified prospects and increase your sales conversion rate. 

Now that you’ve seen sales plan examples and tips and tricks, the next step after creating your sales plan is to reach those ideal sales targets with Mailshake . Connect with leads and generate more sales with our simple but effective sales engagement platform.

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What Is A Sales Plan? | How To Create Your Own + Sample Sales Plan Template

Find out what a sales plan is and learn how to create your own sales plan template with this guide.

RELATED: Marketing and Sales: Why They Need Each Other

In this article:

What Is a Sales Plan?

• Who Creates and Benefits from the Sales Plan?
• Why Do You Need a Sales Plan?
• Where Does the Sales Plan Fit Within Your Business?
• When Should You Create and Update Your Sales Plan Template?
• Mission, Vision, and Background
• Goals and Timeline
• Team Members
• Target Market
• Market Position
• Marketing Strategy
• Prospecting
• Action Plan

Sample Sales Plan Template

Other sales plan templates, how to write a sales plan template.

A sales plan is a strategy wherein you lay out your objectives, tactics, potential challenges, and target market . Here, you also identify what steps you’ll execute to meet your objectives.

Typically, a sales plan template has the following parts:

• Target market
• Revenue and/or volume targets
• Deadlines and Directly Responsible Individuals (DRIs)
• Team structure
• Strategies and tactics
• Pricing and promotions
• Market conditions

What Is The Difference Between A Sales Plan And Business Plan?

A business plan describes the financial and operational objectives of a business. A sales plan is similar to a business plan, but it zeros in on the sales strategy. 

In other words, a business plan outlines the goals and a sales plan specifies how to reach those goals.

Who Creates a Sales Plan ?

Sales professionals are in charge of creating sales plans. Whatever position you hold, as long as you’re working within sales, it’s essential to be familiar with how to create a sales plan.

Ideally, sales reps should have the task of creating an individual sales plan as part of their training. This will give them an idea of how to write and work with a sales plan template.

Sales executives, sales managers, and entrepreneurs all benefit from having a sales plan. This is a very useful guide for your business, department, or sales team.

Why Do I Need a Sales Plan Template?

Having a sales plan template will help you:

• Identify your business’ sales targets
• Choose sales strategies that fit your target market
• Come up with tactics that will enable your sales team to execute your strategies
• Determine the budget you need for your sales efforts
• Activate and motivate your sales team
• Evaluate your goals regularly so you can improve your approach

Your strategic sales plan will keep your business and your sales team in check. This will also serve as your benchmark to assess your goals and accomplishments.

Perhaps the most important role of a sales plan is to act as your compass in terms of meeting your prospect and customers’ needs.

Where Does the Sales Plan Fit Within a Business?

Your sales plan template can be a part of your marketing plan, or it can also supplement it. As mentioned earlier, a sales plan is similar to a business plan, but it focuses more on strategy.

These three — the business, marketing, and sales plans — all serve the purpose of directing your sales team’s efforts. You map these out during the start of the fiscal year, for instance, and then build on them throughout the year.

When Should I Create and Update My Sales Plan Template?

A lot of businesses develop and improve their sales plan template when necessary. Some do it every 6 or 12 months. Generally, you’ll update your sales plan as new information becomes available. For example, your sales team has expanded or a competitor has left the market. You and your team should treat your sales plan as a live document that you can build and adapt when needed.

RELATED: 7 Ways to Boost Sales Effectiveness

How Do I Create My Own Sales Plan?

All good sales plans have one thing in common, it’s based on real data. Before you create a sales plan do research and collect updated information to base your plan on.

Do a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) to assess your current position and incorporate your findings into your sales plan.

Once you have done your research complete your sales plan with these basic elements:

1. Executive Summary and Scope

Not everyone will read every page of the sales plan. In this section, give an overview of the document.

The aim here is to provide context for your plan. Include the most important goals and strategies as well as the time frame specified in your plan.

2. Goals and Timeline

Next, it’s time to set your sales goals, which could be revenue or volume-based. Make sure you set realistic goals so that in turn, your sales plan is doable.

When goal-setting, you need to factor in the following:

• Product price
• Total addressable market (TAM)
• Market penetration

Most likely, you’ll have more than one goal. The key is to identify which ones are high-level, and which ones will enable you to achieve those high-level goals.

As you prioritize each goal, set a timeline to achieve them. This will let you know if you’re ahead, on track, or behind in meeting targets.

If applicable, identify who the directly responsible individuals (DRIs) are. For instance, set quotas for your individual sales reps so they can all contribute to a common objective.

In some cases, identifying the DRIs will let you avoid replicating work and shifting blame, as each person has a specific task relevant to the goal.

3. Team Members

Enumerate who your team members are and what roles they have. If you’re anticipating to add to that headcount, include the following as well:

• The number of employees you want to add
• Each employee’s job title
• When you plan to onboard them in the team

4. Target Market

Knowing who your target market is for every product or service is crucial. When working on this, imagine what your ideal customer would be like.

While it’s important to have a single buyer persona, be open as well to the possibility of having different buyer personas for each product or service you offer.

Your target market can change over time as your sales strategy and business solutions evolve. As you go along, you’ll eventually learn which market fits a product or service better.

This is why it’s important to be consistent in evaluating and updating your buyer personas.

5. Resources

Your sales plan template should also include the list of resources, tools, and software your sales team will utilize to achieve your goals.

This also means including what your salespeople will use to accomplish their jobs. Some examples of these are training, sales enablement tools, and sales reports , among others.

6. Market Position

In this section, you will list down who your competitors are. Explain here how your offers compare to theirs — both the pros and cons.

You should include the pricing comparison between you and your competitors as well. Also, don’t forget to discuss the current trends in the market, and try to predict what kind of impact they will have on your business.

7. Marketing Strategy

Here you will dive further on two marketing mix elements — price and promotion. Describe your pricing strategy and go into detail on the promotions you’re planning to run.

What tactics will you implement to increase awareness for your brand and to generate leads? While you digest on this, don’t forget to figure out how this will impact your sales.

8. Prospecting

What will be your strategy when it comes to prospecting ? List down the criteria that your sales reps need to look for in leads and prospects before they reach out.

Along with this, you should also identify the sales methods your sales team will employ to close more deals.

9. Action Plan

You now have your goals, so it’s time to come up with action plans that will help you reach them. This is basically your game plan to hit the revenue targets you set.

To create an action plan, follow this simple process:

• Set an objective
• List down the tasks that will help you accomplish the objective

Lay out the costs that will come with hitting your sales goals. To make sure that your sales plan budget is accurate, compare it with your sales forecast.

Tips To Keep In Mind When Writing Your Sales Plan 

• Set practical and reasonable goals.
• Look at historical performance data to help set achievable targets.
• Do in-depth research and use this to identify problems and opportunities.
• Get input from your sales team.
• Be specific and concise.
• Don’t forget to monitor the progress of your sales plan. Your plan should adapt and evolve to fit the current situation (Unexpected changes in the market, new sales members etc.)

Here’s a handy sales plan template based on the elements mentioned above. Fill in each part as a starting point in creating your own template.

Name of Company:

Prepared by: 

I. Executive Summary and Scope

Write 3-4 lines to summarize the rest of the document.

II. Goals and Timeline

Sample Sales Goals and Timeline

• April 2020: $10,000
• May 2020 $10,000
• June 2020: $12,000

III. Team Members

• Name — job title

Describe the role, including tasks and expectations. Also, include information about onboarding. 

IV. Target Market 

Buyer Persona 

Thoroughly describe who this person is — basic demographics, what their lifestyle is like, interests, etc. 

V. Resources 

Make a list of resources, tools, and software employees need to perform their tasks and for the team to achieve the sales goals

VI. Market Position 

Competitors

Similarities and Differences Between Products/Services

Pricing Comparison 

Current Market Situation

Include information about any market or industry trends that may impact you or your competitors. 

VII. Marketing Strategy 

Sample Pricing and Promotional Strategy:

• Pricing Strategy: Lower price from $500 to $450 on June 1.
• Sales Impact: Increase monthly sales by 10%
• Promotional Strategy: Run a customer referral incentive from June 15-30.
• Sales Impact: Increase monthly sales by 15%.

VIII. Prospecting 

Prospecting Strategy

Identify sales methods reps will use to close deals. 

Criteria to Qualify Leads:

IX. Action Plan

Objective #1: 

Sample Costs:

• Salary/Commission
• Sales Tools and Resources
• Travel Expenses

If you’re stuck with your own sales plan template, try going by any of these templates:

• One-Page Sales Plan by The Balance
• Free Sales Plan Template by Fit Small Business

There is no one-size-fits-all sales plan. Take your time to identify opportunities and ways to overcome challenges.

Lastly, remember to monitor your progress and to update your strategic sales plan to optimize performance.

What challenges do you experience when creating a sales plan? Tell us in the comments section below!

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Win Revenue With Our Updated Sales Plan (+ Free Template)

13 september 2021 by jaakko paalanen.

“I love writing sales plan templates!”…said no one ever. 

If writing a sales plan makes you want to pull your hair out, then I've got great news. It doesn't have to be complicated. 

Writing a B2B sales plan is simple when you use a sales plan template. 

If you’re struggling to write a productive B2B sales plan (or one doesn't put your salespeople to sleep 💤), you’re in the right place. 

I’m going to walk through what a B2B sales plan template is, why using one makes your life better, and how to create your own. 

I'll also share a few sales plan template examples to ensure you're on the right track. 

Even better, you can access the B2B sales plan template that the Leadfeeder sales team uses below. 

Note: Spend less time prospecting and more time selling with Leadfeeder. Leadfeeder identifies the companies visiting your site, how they got there, and what they did. Sign up for a free 14-day trial with Leadfeeder to start winning more revenue.

Free sales plan template

A B2B sales plan is more than a list of corporate goals your team barely glances at while entering the office.

It’s a detailed, custom playbook for sales success.

It unites your team, resources, and efforts under realistic objectives.

It creates the magic behind successful businesses: sales and revenue.

If you’re serious about generating leads and sales, invest the time into creating one. To help get you started, I made this sales plan template for you.

What is a sales plan?

A sales plan is a strategic document that outlines specific steps for increasing sales . But, it's more than a collection of sales goals and shallow steps.

Get your B2B Sales Plan Template

A detailed action plan to help you achieve your business goals by crafting a perfect sales strategy

It lists your sales strategy’s “who, what, where, and why” and explains who handles certain operations at different milestones. 

When done right, it’s the path to a well-oiled B2B sales machine that generates revenue.

So, where does a B2B sales plan template come into play? 

A sales plan template provides an outline for a sales plan. It makes it easier to describe your sales objectives, target audience, and specific steps, strategies, and tactics your business will use to hit sales and revenue goals .

Why do I need a B2B sales plan template?

A sales template makes it easier to create an effective sales template — which makes driving revenue attainable.

Here are a few additional reasons why creating a killer sales plan template is crucial to business growth.

A B2B sales plan helps highlight potential problems

Writing your B2B sales plan ensures your goals are realistic and achievable, and it helps you objectively compare your resources to the targets you’re trying to hit.

Identifying a problem allows you to adjust your strategy and goals accordingly.

Let’s say your top priority is landing 50 percent more enterprise leads by next year’s 2nd quarter. 

How do you do this? 

You might decide to ramp up your account-based marketing (ABM) game.

However, after reviewing your B2B sales plan , you realize that you don’t have the employee bandwidth or budget to focus on ABM.

Instead, you opt to focus on scoring and qualifying leads to improve lead quality. 

You’ve now saved your company precious time and money — and found an alternate way to reach the same goal.

A B2B sales plan increases motivation

Who knew that creating a sales plan could increase motivation?

According to a 2018 Forbes study, people who describe their goals are up to 1.4 times more likely to reach them . 

Writing and visualizing goals boosts motivation to take action by helping store them in our long-term memory. 

This means something as simple as keeping your sales plan in plain sight can breathe a sense of purpose into your team’s daily activities .

Your new office decor:

A B2B sales plan unites your team

A study of sales and marketing employees found that the biggest threat to productivity is a misalignment between sales and marketing goals.

Not only is it demotivating, but it also forces sales reps to work harder and offer extra incentives (they otherwise wouldn’t need to provide) to close deals. 

Then, in turn, extra incentives are a marketing nightmare — the circle of misalignment continues.

Sales and marketing are notorious for their adversarial relationship. And no, a sales plan won’t qualm the beef between the two teams — not by itself anyway.

Working on project management together, let's say for a sales and digital marketing campaign, is a start for both teams to get good visibility of what is being planned. Getting everyone on the same page and being transparent can help unite them towards a common goal.

Examples of sales plan templates

In the next section, we'll cover how to create a functional sales template. But first, let's look at a few sales template examples. You might notice common themes you'll want to use on your own.

The one-page sales plan

Your sales plan doesn’t need to delve into exhaustive detail. If you’re an agile small business, a one-page sales plan template will help you hit the ground running and lead your small team.

A one-page template can cover any range of time, but consider a weekly sales plan template if you have a shorter, transactional sales cycle. Plus, a shorter length could help motivate your team if you’re just starting out with sales plans — meeting goals quickly leads to positive sentiment.

The 30-60-90 day sales plan template

The 30-60-90 day template is a standard choice for most teams. It helps you write a sales plan that covers short, medium, and long-term goals.

The 90-day sales plan template

If you have a product that requires demos, meetings, and runs through multiple decision-makers, using a 90-day sales plan for your long sales cycles is a good idea.  

How to write a B2B sales plan template that drives revenue

Your main goal should be to distill your overall business goals into actionable sales objectives, milestones, strategies, and tactics.

This means your B2B sales plan template should — at the very least — include:

Target customers and ideal customer profiles

Role and responsibilities in your team

Revenue goals and sales objectives

Budget and resources

Challenges and obstacles

Key strategies and tactics

Deadlines, milestones, and review periods

To turn that information into a powerful B2B sales plan, follow these steps. 

Step 1. Outline specific revenue and sales goals

In this step, having a birds-eye view of the sales plan is key. Within the revenue and sales goals, you should think about the conversion points along the sales funnel.

Making note of the points within the funnel that transition the potential customer from phase to phase down the funnel is useful as those will be focus points in the overall sales plan. If you’re aware of the conversion points, finding bottlenecks and optimizing the process is easier.

A Leadfeeder example of noting conversion points within the funnel would be:

Demo booked

Demo completed

If the Leadfeeder sales team was having issues closing meeting their targets, they would not only take a look at their revenue and sales goals, but they would also check on each conversion point to see where the disconnect was happening.

On a granular level, B2B sales goals should be anchored to revenue or volume targets. 

For example, your goal might be a revenue target of $30k in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by the final quarter.

Using a volume target might mean 18 new customers per month or 200 sales by the final quarter.

When creating a strong B2B sales plan, you'll want to use both. That gives you more data to play with. 

If you have to pick one metric in your sales plan over another, consider your:

Available resources (staff, budget, data)

Product type (SaaS, agency, physical retailer, etc.)

It’s easy to succumb to wishful thinking at this step. So review your goals against your resources to ensure they’re realistic. 

Setting goals you’re sure to miss isn’t fun for anyone on the team and creates a crying wolf situation over time.

Step 2. Outline your mission and B2B sales plan objectives

Hopefully, you already have your mission and vision statements on paper. If so, grab them. (If not, now is the time!) 

Then write down what you aim to achieve with the sales plan.

It doesn’t have to be lengthy Shakespearean prose that draws applause. This is just a summary of what’s ahead and why it’s included in your sales plan; that’s it.

Include a brief history of the business, too, if possible. This provides context as the plan matures in detail and complexity.

For example: 

Leadfeeder's mission is to help marketing and sales professionals identify site visitors, transform their traffic into qualified leads, and connect to key decision-makers. 

Our goals are to obtain 18 new customers per month, 200 sales by the final quarter, with a final revenue increase of 30 percent. 

This sales strategy plan will cover how we plan to increase salesperson efficiency and test new marketing strategies. 

Step 3. Map out key sales plan milestones, deadlines, and review periods

This is where we get into the details. Deadlines, milestones, and review periods are a key part of your sales plan template.

Your third step is to tie sales and revenue targets to 30-60-90 day goals and set a schedule to review performance with your team.

This gives your plan teeth and signals when you’re falling behind quota so you can stay on track. 

Step 4. Add an ideal client profile to your B2B sales plan

An ICP is a strict definition of an ideal customer .

Including your ICP in your sales plan helps align sales and marketing strategy. It gives insight into what lead generation approach to use.

Let’s say you’re a SaaS company that offers analytical tools to digital marketers. And some of your customers are freelancers and in-house teams.

But, large 50+ employee agencies who buy premium subscriptions are your ideal clients.

And, according to your historical sales data, the best way to reach them is through account-based marketing.

You can now invest in ABM tools like Leadfeeder and training for reps without wondering if it will generate a return. 

Here’s proof — AlertOps uses Leadfeeder to automatically qualify website visitors with over 100 employees. Then, Leadfeeder sends those leads to Pipedrive and the AlertOps reps call on every potential customer.

Within just 30 days of using Leadfeeder with the Pipedrive integration, AlertOps was able to increase their sales demo rate by 700 percent. BAM. 💥

Try it for yourself — sign-up for Leadfeeder  in less than 5 minutes with these simple steps:

Step 1: Begin a free 14-day trial by  signing up here .

STEP 2: Fill in your company name, website address, name, and contact information. We don't sell it, we just want to know who you are. :)

STEP 3: Tell us about your role on your team. This gives us a way to help customize Leadfeeder to your needs.

STEP 4: Select the CRM you use, if we have an integration for it we can let you know how to connect it. You don't need a CRM or any of the ones listed to use Leadfeeder.

STEP 5: Select your marketing tool! If we have an integration we will let you know! If not, we will see what you use and update you on any future integrations!

STEP 6: T ell us about your sales team. This will help us customize your training and support!

STEP 7: Let us know what your main goals are with Leadfeeder. We share this with the team to make sure we can help you attain them.

STEP 8: Get your Leadfeeder Tracker script and install it on your site. You can do this yourself, or select Send to a colleague if someone else on your team will be installing it. This article: How to install Leadfeeder Tracker can help with installation.

STEP 9: Give Leadfeeder Tracker an hour or so to begin reporting - and be sure to take the in-app tour! Once Tracker starts collecting you'll see leads listed like below.

NOTE: If Tracker isn't installed, won't be able to see any leads until the script is on your site! Until you have Leadfeeder Tracker installed you won't have new leads, so make sure you add it to your site as soon as possible when you sign up!

After the Leadfeeder Tracker script is installed properly, it takes about an hour to see the Leads funnel to your Leadfeeder dashboard. If you aren’t sure if it is ‘working’ check out this article for tips on how to verify or reach out to support!

Step 5. Take stock of your sales CRM, tools, and budget

Ever try shoveling snow with a garden spade? (I hope not.) 

The point is, using the wrong tool just makes your life harder. 

If you're attempting to close deals without the right tools and resources for the job, you will get frustrated and, possibly, fail. 

That’s why a summary of your main CRM software, sales tools, budget, and any other predictable expense should be included in your sales plan. 

This will include things like:

Budget allocation

Specific tools and resources

What CRM will be used

Salary, commission, and incentives

Make sure your team has access to the tools it needs to reach your goals. 

Step 6. Delegate roles and responsibilities

So now you know what you want to do, you've mapped out a specific sales strategy plan, and you've made sure you have the tools to get the job done. 

But who is going to do what? 

Next, list the members of your team and the roles they will play in reaching your goals.

Think about:

Who is responsible for prospecting or warming leads up?

Who will handle meetings and appointments?

Who will be presenting product demos/training?

Then, add those answers to deadlines, milestones, and KPIs.

If your sales strategy requires indirect sales activities — like creating content or developing sales material — write that into your sales plan template, too.7. Bring your sales plan template to life with an action plan

The final step is a goal-based action plan.

Carrying the weight of previous steps in your sales plan template, the action plan is where the rubber hits the road.

It brings your sales plan to life by explaining exactly how you’ll meet your objectives.

For example, if your objective is:

Objective: Increase premium subscriptions by 20 percent this quarter, and raise monthly recurring revenue by 2 percent.

Your sales plan will look like this:

Create 3 case studies that convey the benefits of a premium subscription.

Use paid ads and content marketing to promote premium subscriptions.

Create a lead scoring system to focus on leads with high purchase-intent.

Bump referral discounts to premium subscriptions up by 10 percent.

7. Bring your B2B sales plan template to life with an action plan

This is where the rubber meets the road. 

Creating an action plan brings your sales plan to life by explaining exactly how you’ll meet your objectives.

Increase premium subscriptions by 20 percent this quarter, and raise monthly recurring revenue by 2 percent.

Your plan might look like this:

Create a lead scoring system to focus on leads with high purchase intent.

Make sure to link these action points to resources, deadlines, and milestones. 

Who is going to do what? Who will be responsible for managing each project? 

Make this part as detailed as possible so you know exactly how to move forward. 

Your sales plan template

Be sure to use our free sales plan template to create a sales plan. Make the template your own and even test our different versions.

You'll be closing deals in no time.

Note: If your sales plan counts on quality leads, look no further than Leadfeeder. Sign up for a 14-day free Leadfeeder trial today.  

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How to Create a Sales Plan in 8 Steps: Guide + Free Template for 2023

It can happen to the best of us. We start off the year with big ambitions, certain our sales team is gonna crush it. We’re making lots of calls, selling to new customers, and getting our product out there. 

But soon, we wonder: how are we actually doing? Are we on track to meet our revenue goals for the year? Should we focus on building outreach or closing more deals? 

This is where a sales plan can make all the difference. Goals and objectives are clearly stated, day-to-day tasks are aligned with company priorities, and sales reps are working towards individual goals. It’s a beautiful thing. 

And it doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, we’ve put together this guide to make the sales planning process as easy as following a template. Let’s get started. 

What’s a Sales Plan?

A sales plan is a forecast of the sales you expect to achieve and how you’re going to get there. It typically covers important elements like:

• Past performance numbers
• Sales operations strategies
• Sales forecasting
• Current goals and objectives
• An action plan for finding and selling to new customers

Having an action plan in place for your sales process aligns your team’s day-to-day actions with your company’s priorities and business goals.

So, for example, if you’re trying to sell to a very specific target market, your team should focus on account-based selling as opposed to lead generation. If you’re looking to generate new business or break into a new market, you should focus sales activities more on outreach and prospecting. 

An action plan also empowers you to spend more time intentionally working towards your revenue targets, rather than getting stuck in reactionary mode dealing with daily hiccups and distractions.

What’s Inside a Typical Sales Plan? (Plus a Free Sales Plan Template)

While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for developing a strategic sales plan, a good plan usually includes the following: 

• Company mission and vision statements
• Realistic, time-based goals with action steps to achieve them
• Purposeful tasks and daily activities for your sales reps to achieve
• Proven sales strategies to improve outcomes and get results
• Lead generation tactics for finding new customers
• Metrics you’ll use to see how your team is progressing

Download Your Free Sales Plan Templates Today

Want to build your own sales plan that kick-starts growth? Grab our Sales Success Kit. You won’t only get a sales strategy , you’ll get:

• Templates for sales planning
• Checklists for things like sales calls and hiring
• Worksheets for overcoming objections
• Guides for writing sales scripts

…and more to help you set up strategic sales planning and goals for your team.

8 Steps to Build a Sales Plan that Drives Revenue

In this section, we’ll go over the steps you need to take to build a strategic sales plan that gets the kind of results you’re looking for. 

1. Determine Your Primary & Secondary Sales Goals & KPIs

A successful sales plan begins with setting goals. These goals will be the targets your sales reps are working to reach—so it’s important to define them carefully.

When determining your goals, keep the S.M.A.R.T. system in mind. Company goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. Here’s an example: 

• Bad goal: “Grow sales.”
• SMART goal: “Hit $100k in revenue by the end of the 1st quarter.”

Also, keep in mind that the right sales goals are those at the edge of achievable and challenging. If a goal is too easy or too hard, your team’s motivation will probably plummet. 

For example, if you’re a small business or startup that just reached $50k in revenue last year, shooting for $500k is a bit of a stretch, while $60k is probably too easy. 

That said, you’ll also want to determine specific metrics and KPIs in this step, including how they’re currently performing, and how you plan to improve them. 

Author’s note: If you’re using a tool like Close to manage your sales team and processes, you get a KPI dashboard that looks something like this—so your team can better align and track progress:

But remember this golden rule when choosing key performance indicators:

You don’t need to track every sales KPI. You just need to track the right ones.

Here are ten benchmarks and KPIs worth tracking that are commonly used by sales teams: 

• Monthly sales growth
• Calls and cold emails per rep (daily, weekly, monthly)
• Sales opportunities created
• Monthly onboarding and demo calls booked
• Lead conversion rate
• Sales by contact method
• Average conversion time
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Customer lifetime value (LTV)
• New and expansion monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

2. Find Your Target Customers’ Needs

One of the best ways to find the needs of your target audience is to develop an ideal customer profile (ICP). An ICP is an example of the perfect customer for your business. 

Normally used by B2B companies, this profile defines the characteristics of a company that would buy your product or service. 

Here are some of the traits to look out for in them:

To get started, think of your top ten to twenty customers. These should be customers who say your solution is so valuable, it outweighs the cost. 

Then, gather information about each customer and identify traits they have in common. Write a description of your ideal customer that includes data like what we’ve shared earlier: 

• General information about the company or customer, such as size, demographics, and industry
• Typical budget and revenue
• Location, if it’s applicable to what you’re selling
• Main challenges and pain points the customer is looking to solve
• Common objections that are raised during the sales process
• Typical purchase process, including decision-makers
• Timelines and deadlines to purchase

By identifying these common traits, you can better target the market that is best suited for your product and really hone in on their needs. 

3. Define Your Value Proposition

Now that you know what your customers need, it’s time to explain how your company meets that need. Enter: the value proposition . 

A value proposition describes the specific value your company provides to your customers. It should focus on benefits, not features. And it should explain how you stand out from the crowd. For example:

• What problem does your product solve? Is it a new product? 
• What does your product do for your customers? 
• How does your product stand out? 
• What makes you different from the competition? 

One of the best ways to nail down your value proposition is to talk to actual customers or prospects. Ask them how they would describe your product to a colleague. How would they sell it to them if asked for a recommendation? 

You can also look up reviews on websites like G2 and read what your customers are raving about online. Is there a common thread? What benefits do your customers keep bringing up, especially as it relates to the competition? Is there something your company is doing that others aren’t? 

4. Choose a Structure for Your Sales Team

Just as there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to creating a sales plan, there isn’t one right way to structure your sales force. What works best depends on your product, team, and sales processes. Here are three common sales team structures to choose from: 

• Island: Individual reps work through the sales process alone. This means they handle everything from cold calling and outreach to closing major deals.

• Assembly line: Each sales rep is assigned a specialized role such as lead generation, SDR (qualifier), Account Executive (closer), or Customer Success (farmer).
• Pods: Each sales rep is assigned a specialized role in a group that’s responsible for the entire journey of specific customers.

No matter what structure you choose, determine which reps are available during what times of the year, their specialties and skills, and what they’re responsible for in the sales process. It’s also important to include information about the sales managers, other team members, and the incentives you offer your reps.

5. Create a Plan For Execution

At this point, you know what you want to get done. You know your goals, you know your customers, and you know how your sales team will be organized. Now it’s time to come up with a specific plan of attack. 

To do this, take a look at your overall goals and figure out how to create milestones. This involves breaking down that big number into smaller expectations with strict deadlines. Milestones should challenge and motivate your sales team , without being so difficult they kill morale.

Involve your sales team during this process. Learn what they do during the week to close deals. Ask how much they’re currently doing, and how much bandwidth they have to do more. This will give you a real, frontline take on what your team can execute.

Then, create specific milestones with clear deadlines. For example, to achieve a sales goal of increasing revenue by 15% YOY, you might set the milestone of increasing your customer base by 20% at the end of Q1, or increasing sales by 50% for a specific product during Q3.

Finally, break these milestones down into action items. If you’re trying to increase your customer base, for instance, your sales team will need to increase prospecting and lead generation activities. How will your team approach this? Assign specific tasks to team members with daily, weekly, or monthly targets.  

Here’s an example to show how your goals, milestones, and action items are related to each other: 

Goal: Increase revenue by 15% YOY

Milestone: Increase customer base by 20% by the end of Q1

Action items: Each sales rep makes 10 new prospecting calls per week and spends 30 minutes qualifying leads

6. Evaluate Your Existing Sales Tools

In this step, take a look at your existing sales tools. Ask your team the following questions about each one: 

• How are we using this tool? What sales tactics does it help with? 
• Do we have another tool that does the same thing? 
• How much does this tool cost? 
• What’s the learning curve with this tool in the short term? 
• How easy is it to onboard new team members? 
• Is there anything we wish this tool did better? 
• What’s customer support like when we have issues? 
• Does this tool integrate easily with our other tools? 
• How does this tool make our lives easier? 
• How does this tool help us close more deals? 
• Where does it fit in the sales funnel? 

Once you’ve answered these questions for all of your sales tools, decide if there are any you don’t need in your stack anymore. Also, make note of any gaps in your capabilities or areas you feel could be improved with a better tool. 

Then, list the resources you have available and how you plan to use them. For example, how much will you spend on your sales tools? Which CRM software or prospecting tools are your sales professionals lost without? Briefly explain each tool’s value and why you’ve allocated resources towards it.

7. Build a List of Dream Clients 

If you could close the deal with anyone you wanted, who would it be? Write it down. Then, go back to your ideal customer profile and find more companies that fit the bill. 

Using this strategy is called target account sales or account-based selling. It’s a sales strategy where every prospect is handpicked and matched to your ICP. This means you know their pain points , their competitors, and how you’ll sell to them—long before you pick up the phone. 

Using the target account method will help you fill your pipeline with high-value leads that are a perfect fit for your product. It’s also a great way to build confidence with your reps since they can do a lot of legwork before making a call. 

8. Schedule Progress Checks 

A sales plan is a living, breathing document that needs to adapt to the dynamic world around it. New features, new marketing campaigns, new team members—all of these things can change the game. 

With that in mind, the last step in creating your sales plan is to set regular meetings (at least monthly) to review progress towards hitting your sales targets. At each meeting, plan to identify and solve any new issues and re-align activities across teams to adapt to real-world events and feedback. 

That said, try to avoid moving the actual goalposts—even if you discover you’ve been overly optimistic or pessimistic in your forecasting . Instead, carefully document what needs updating so you’re prepared when it comes time to make your next sales plan. 

5 Best Practices for Creating a Profitable Sales Plan

Now that you know how to build your plan, here’s a list of best practices to make sure you’re successful. 

1. Touch Base with Existing Customers  

Existing customers can be a huge source of knowledge when building your sales plan. After all, they’re using your product and can provide valuable feedback on what’s working and what’s not. 

But knowledge isn’t the only thing existing customers have to offer. They’re also a goldmine for generating new leads. In fact, according to SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin , “At least 20% of your new customers should come from referrals and word of mouth.”

If you’re still in the early stages of business development, use your sales plan to show your team how to leverage their own network to get introductions to new prospects. If you’re at a later stage, build a referral program for customers that refer new leads. 

2. Get Input From Colleagues Outside of Sales

It’s easy to get caught up in our little sales bubble and forget the outside world. But you’d be doing yourself and your company a disservice if you don’t get input from people on the outside. 

Getting a different point of view can open doors you didn’t even realize were there. Or keep you from wasting time going down a road to nowhere. 

So reach out to colleagues in other departments (i.e. marketing, tech support, human resources, etc.) Ask them to look over your sales plan and give you feedback. What have they heard from customers? Is there a marketing strategy that could work in tandem with your efforts? You may be surprised at what they have to offer. 

3. Include Your Sales Team in the Planning Process

As we mentioned earlier, your sales reps can be super helpful during the planning process. They know your customers and they know the daily grind. So they usually have valuable insight in terms of realistic goal-setting, how customers may respond to certain strategies, and more. 

Plus, including your sales team in the process is a great way to get buy-in. People are way more likely to get on board with a plan if they were involved in its creation. On the flip side, if you just drop a plan on your team without getting their input, you’ll likely face some pushback. 

So get your team involved early in the process. Schedule planning meetings and quick brainstorming sessions. Explain why the plan matters and why you want their participation. 

4. Compare Plans with Strategic Partners

Strategic partners or stakeholders are usually other businesses that benefit in some way from your success. These can be suppliers, retailers, or companies with complimentary products or services (also known as Complementary Service Providers, or CSPs). 

If you have a good working relationship, ask them to compare notes. You take a look at their sales plan and have them look at yours. After all, you’re typically targeting the same type of customers. 

Maybe they’ve tried something you’re planning to implement and can give you feedback on how it went. Or maybe you’re planning similar strategies and can piggyback off each other or refer leads. 

5. Set Individual Goals for Your Sales Team

Finally, take your overall goals and break them down into individual goals for your sales team. Not only will this make your plan more actionable but it’s a great opportunity for professional development if you take into account the differences in strengths, weaknesses, and skills among your salespeople.

For example, if someone on your team is making a lot of calls but not closing many deals, set an individual goal of upping their close rate . On the other hand, if someone’s great at closing but doesn’t do much outreach, give them the goal of contacting ten new prospects a month.

Create a Sales Plan That Drives Growth 

Taking the time to create a solid, effective sales plan (or business plan) is always worth it. It gives you the roadmap you need to push through the inertia and stay on track to meet your goals. 

We’re here to help. Download our free Sales Success Kit and get access to 11 different templates, checklists, worksheets, and guides. All are action-oriented and easy to use, so you can have your best sales year yet.

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Strategic Sales Plan Examples: 13 Sales Plan Templates

Casey O'Connor

What Is a Strategic Sales Plan?

When you should implement a strategic sales plan, what to include in your sales plan, 13 sales plan template examples, put your sales plan into action with yesware.

A strategic sales plan is a must-have for any business looking to increase their sales, amp up their revenue, bring a new product to market, or branch into a new territory.

In this article, we’ll go over everything you need to know about strategic sales plans: what they are, when to create one, and exactly what they need to include. We’ll also show you a handful of real-life, tangible sales plan template examples and tips for implementation. 

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• When You Should Implement a Strategic Sales Plan 

A strategic sales plan is designed to guide a sales organization through their overarching sales strategy. It provides them with access to the resources needed to prospect, pitch to, and close new accounts.

Strategic sales plans can include any combination of the following:

• Ideas: If you utilize a certain sales methodology — consultative selling or target account selling , for example — you might outline its key principles and a few tactical examples of it in action in your strategic sales plan. Your strategic sales plan should also include an overview of your target customer.
• Processes: In order for your sales team to reach maximum productivity, it’s important that your sales processes are clearly defined and standardized. Your sales team — both new hires and seasoned vets alike — should be able to refer to your sales plan for a repeatable, scalable process that’s backed by solid metrics. The processes should provide direction to sales reps that allow them to contribute to the company’s goals.
• Tools & Tactics: The best strategic sales plans are more than just high-level strategy and goals. They also include specific, step-by-step strategies that sales reps can implement in sales conversations, as well as the specific tools and content that reps need to close more deals.

Sales plans also typically spell out the organization’s revenue and overall business goals, as well as the KPIs and benchmarks that sales managers and other stakeholders will monitor to determine whether or not those goals are being met.

They should also outline management’s strategic territory design and quota expectations, with specific indicators and data to back those decisions. 

Finally, these sales plans should take into account your current team’s sales capacity and specifically address the acquisition plan for any resources that are not yet available but may be necessary for future growth.

If your sales team doesn’t already have a strategic sales plan in place — that is, one that’s referenced and updated regularly and the product of careful data analysis and inter-team collaboration — you may want to consider creating one. 

Research shows that the majority of the highest-performing sales teams operate under a formalized, closely monitored sales structure. 

On the other hand, most underperforming sales teams lack this structure. 

It’s clear that a well-defined sales plan is one of the prerequisites to optimized sales productivity and success; every salesforce should strive to create and adopt one if they want to meet their sales goals more efficiently.

That being said, there are a few key indicators that signal a need for more urgency in putting a strategic sales plan in place. 

You’re Trying to Increase Sales

A strategic sales plan will help your sales and marketing teams align their processes so that your outreach efforts are tailored to your target audience. 

You’re Looking to Amp Up Your Revenue

For startups and small businesses, attaining as many new customers as possible is usually the name of the game.

For larger or more established businesses, however, the business plan may instead emphasize revenue goals. In other words, the deal size starts to matter much more than deal volume. 

A sales strategy plan can help salespeople target and nurture higher-value accounts. Sales planning can also boost your revenue by illuminating untapped potentials for revenue growth within your existing customer base through cross-selling, upselling , and referrals .

You’re Gearing Up to Launch a New Product

A sales strategy plan is crucial for businesses that are preparing to bring a new product to market.

One last note: for businesses that already use strategic business planning (or for those on their way after reading this article), be sure to update your plan at least yearly. Many businesses at least review their plan, if not update it more formally, on a quarterly basis.

Ultimately, your strategic sales plan will be unique to your company and its specific goals.

Consider including the following components in your strategic business plan. 

Mission Statement

Industry & Market Conditions

Great sales planning cannot be performed in isolation. Your plan must take into account the current market conditions, including any challenges, recent disruptions, or upcoming notable events.

Organization Chart

A sales org chart can range in scope from very simple, like the one above, to more complicated. Some go as far as naming individual employees and outlining their specific responsibilities. 

A detailed org chart is especially helpful for efficiently onboarding new hires.

Product Info & Pricing

No sales plan would be complete without a one-sheet that outlines the features, benefits, and value proposition of your product or service.

It’s also helpful to include information about pricing tiers, as well as any discounts or promotions available for leverage at a sales rep’s discretion.

Compensation Plan

While we have no doubt that you’ve hired only the most intrinsically motivated salespeople, remember the bottom line: cash is king.

Money is the primary motivator for most salespeople, regardless of how truly loyal and hard-working they may be.

With that in mind, it’s a good idea to include your company’s compensation plan and commission structure in your sales plan. This is a surefire way to motivate your team to continuously improve their sales performance. 

Target Market & Customer

Sales Enablement

With the tremendous rise in content marketing, it can be challenging for salespeople to keep track of the various materials available for generating new business.

Branding & Positioning

The strategic sales plan should offer at least a high-level overview of your brand and messaging specifics, including social media presence. Take the time to optimize your company’s LinkedIn presence — it’s a goldmine of new business opportunities.

Marketing Strategy

In today’s day and age, it’s unlikely that your sales and marketing team are working in isolation from one another. At a certain point, sales and marketing strategies start to flow together until they (ideally) perform in harmony.

Still, it’s important to outline the perspective of the marketing team within your strategic sales plan. This will help your salespeople fine-tune their sales pitch and speak more meaningfully to the needs of the customer. 

Prospecting Strategy

Most salespeople report that their number one challenge in lead generation is attracting qualified leads. 

Prospecting can certainly be daunting, but it’s worth the effort to get it right. Tweak and fine-tune the process until you’re sure it’s as efficient as possible. Make sure it’s repeatable and scalable, and map it out within your sales plan. 

Action Plan

Any good strategic sales plan will also include a step-by-step section, much like a playbook. Here, you’ll outline the specific tactics and processes — including scripts, demos, and email templates — that have been proven to move prospects through the sales funnel . 

Be as specific as possible here. This will act as a blueprint for the day-to-day sales activities for your team.

It can be tempting to leave the numbers with the finance department, but financial transparency can go a long way in creating a culture of trust among your sales team.

You don’t need to go through every line item in the spreadsheet, but it’s not a bad idea to include a high-level look at where the dollars are flowing. 

KPIs, Metrics, and Benchmarks

Be sure to give your team a snapshot of how they’re currently performing, with real numbers to back it up.

By doing so, you help them self-initiate regular SWOT analysis of their own sales actions and processes. This will give them an opportunity to right the course if things aren’t going according to plan. 

Tip: Looking to fuel your sales plan with data-backed findings? Grab our free ebook below.

Remember that your company’s strategic sales plan will be highly unique. It may take some time and tweaking to find the components and format that best meet the needs of your business.

Here are 13 sales plan templates to help you get started.

1. Product Launch Plan Template

Sales and marketing teams create a product launch plan when they’re preparing to launch a new product. 

A product launch plan should include your product’s positioning statement , a SWOT competitive analysis, detailed market analysis, sales strategies and tactics, and details about the target market. 

2. Ideal Customer Profile Template

One way to avoid wasting time on unproductive leads is to include an ideal customer profile (ICP) in your sales plan. Here’s a sample : 

This will help ensure your prospecting campaigns are targeted and attract only the most qualified leads from the get-go. 

3. Microsoft Word Sales Plan Template

Here’s a great example of a sales plan goals template , easily accessible through Microsoft Word. 

4. 30-60-90 Day Sales Plan Template

5. Buyer’s Guide Template

A buyer’s guide is a short, simple information sheet that describes your product or service, its features and benefits, and its use. Below is an example of a buyer’s guide from Wayfair . 

In many cases, this document is as useful internally as it is for the customer. 

6. Marketing Alignment Sales Plan Template

If your company hasn’t already formally aligned sales and marketing, start with this type of sales plan template (basic example below), as most traditional sales plans already assume that these two teams collaborate regularly. 

One key component of a marketing alignment sales plan template is the presence of an ideal customer profile and buyer personas. 

The marketing alignment sales plan template should also focus on cohesive, on-brand messaging between marketing campaigns and sales conversations . 

This type of sales plan template helps keep everyone on the same page, increases efficiency, and improves sales effectiveness. 

7. Battle Card Template

8. Territory Design Template

Well-designed sales territories see a 10% – 20% increase in sales productivity. Be low is a basic example of a territory design map.

9. Market Expansion Plan Template

A market expansion plan outlines the strategies, tactics, metrics, resources, and more that teams will use when expanding into a new market or (more commonly) a new geographical territory. 

Market expansion plans also need to include details about distribution expenses and timelines, time zone variations, industry notes or important compliance information, local/cultural expectations and laws, and sometimes more. 

10. Compensation Plan Template

Your compensation plan (including a specific commission structure) is one way to motivate your sales reps.

While it may seem controversial or sensitive, the compensation plan is an important component of a strategic sale plan.

11. Sales Funnel Template

The sales funnel is a visual representation of the sales process. 

12. Marketing Plan Template

Your salespeople should be extremely familiar with the marketing strategies your company is using to attract new leads. Here’s a great example of a template you can use in your sales plan that outlines the different campaigns at work.

This kind of resource will help your reps know who to contact, when, and with what kind of content throughout the sales cycle .

13. B2B Sales Strategy Template

A B2B sales strategy template helps sales teams outline their goals, as well as the specific methodologies and tactics they will use to achieve them. Here’s an example :

The B2B sales strategy plan will vary widely depending on your team’s specific goals and strategies, but most teams include at least the categories highlighted in the template above. 

Yesware is the all-in-one sales toolkit that helps you win more business. It can be an invaluable resource for putting your sales plan into action in a way that’s streamlined, productive, and intuitive.

Communication

Yesware’s meeting scheduler tool helps you skip the back-and-forth when scheduling meetings.

Meeting Scheduler integrates with your Outlook or Gmail calendar and helps your clients automatically schedule meetings with you during times of availability. New events will automatically sync to your calendar. 

​ It can also create meeting types for common calls, like a 30-minute intro call or a 60-minute demo call. These templates can be automatically saved and generated with custom descriptions and agendas so everyone can come prepared. 

Prospecting

One of Yesware’s most popular features is its prospecting campaigns .

This feature enables salespeople to create automated, personalized campaigns with multi-channel touches. 

The tool tracks communication and engagement throughout the process and helps move prospects through the pipeline with little administrative effort from the sales team.

Yesware’s attachment tracking feature helps you find your winning content by tracking which attachments are most often opened and read by your prospects.

You can use these insights to sharpen your content and increase your engagement.

The reporting and analytics tools are also extremely valuable in optimizing your sales plan.  These reports enable salespeople to use data to win more business. The feature generates daily activity, engagement data, and outcomes to show you what is/isn’t working across the board.

Try Yesware for free to see how it can help your team carry out your sales plan today.

This guide was updated on March 6, 2024.

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Create a Sales Plan That Actually Works (Tips + Template)

• January 21, 2021

True success always starts with a plan. And for sales success, nothing beats a strategic sales plan.

Designed specifically to help your sales team drive more sales, a sales plan can show you where you’re at, where you want to be, and even more important, how to get there.

The question, of course, is how to create a sales plan that actually impacts sales. Keep reading for tips and a template to quickly and confidently create a strategic sales plan for your business.

Table of Contents

What is a sales plan, what is included in a sales plan, sales plan examples: there’s no one right way, the benefits of a sales plan, how to write a sales plan, 7 tips to help you create a sales plan, sales strategy template, selling your sales plan, final remarks.

A sales plan is a strategy document that lays out a company’s plan for improving sales results in a specified time period. A sales plan makes it possible for everyone on the sales team to see the big picture, share the same overall objectives, and work the same plan to achieve them.

It usually includes:

• Specific revenue and performance goals for a given period
• The strategies for achieving them
• The resources and activities required to carry out those strategies

A sales plan covers a lot of important aspects of business growth: revenue goals, selling methods and metrics, target customers, current sales force capabilities, and more.

Specifically, it covers 9 pieces of strategic information.

1. Executive Summary and Scope of The Sales Plan

This section gives a short summary of the document, focusing on goals and the strategies to achieve them. It also states the specific period and other parameters covered by the plan.

2. Business Goals and Revenue Targets

This section clearly establishes revenue targets and may include associated business goals (e.g., optimize lifecycle value through customer success programs, etc). Classifying revenue figures based on different categories (such as line and territory) helps clarify the document.

3. Review of Prior Period Performance

This section presents a recap of the prior period’s performance, identifying mistakes as well as decisive actions that led to a positive outcome. The overarching goal is to optimize the sales plan by adopting inputs and techniques that work.

4. Market and Industry Conditions

This section provides a summary of the market trends that have a high likelihood of influencing sales performance.

5. Strategies, Methodologies, and Tactics

This section recommends the best selling techniques, communication sequences, and playbooks for the specific company.

6. Customer Segments

This section cites all the potential revenue-generating, omnichannel opportunities available for the brand, such as the following:

• Cross-sells
• New Prospects
• New Segments

The document should describe new segments of the addressable market when they arise.

7. Team Capabilities, Resources, and Upgrades

This section provides a summary and describes the current state of all production inputs (human resources, tech software, specialized sales team, etc.,) required to process and close sales details.

8. Action Plan For Teams and Individuals

This section assigns tasks, activities, and responsibilities to different teams and individuals. Tasks include prospecting activities, meeting appointments, and product demos/presentations.

9. Performance Benchmarks & Monitoring

This section lays out performance metrics to track the systems and processes that help monitor these metrics.

What usually comes to mind when you think about sales plans?

If you’re like most people, it’s the annual sales plan or weekly sales plan — broad strategic and tactical documents mapping out the plan for everything sales-related.

But there are as many different types of sales plans as there are needs for a sales plan.

We’ll go over a few sales plan examples to get you started in the right direction.

30-60-90-day Sales Plan

There’s the 30-60-90-day sales plan. This is designed to help a new salesperson or sales manager get up to speed quickly in their first quarter on the job. The plan includes milestones they’d need to achieve at the 30th, 60th, and 90th day of their ramp-up.

Generally, the  30-60-90-day sales plan  can be broken down into 3 sections:

Day 1 to 30: 

Learn and understand everything you can about a company from their processes, customers, products, the competition to procedures.

Day 31 to 60:

Evaluate and put your plan into action. Analyze their current processes and assess changes.

Day 61 to 90:

Optimize and make the plan better. It is time to take action. Initiate an action plan. Implement any new strategies and procedures you’ve come up with.

Sales Plan For Specific Sales

A sales process involves using different tactics to approach and convert a prospect into a paying customer.

Another type of sales plan you’ll see a lot is an individual sales plan for specific sales tactics, such as prescribed call sequences,  email follow-up  frequency, and meeting appointments. This type of plan is similar to an annual/weekly sales plan, but it focuses on measuring and improving results for just one goal or task.

Territory Sales Plan

Meanwhile, sales managers who oversee a geo-location or region often use territory sales plans to give sales directors and VPs more visibility into their sales efforts.

This is a workable plan used to target the right customers and implement goals to increase the income generated and sales over time.

A good territory sales plan will:

• Make your team more productive
• Reduce operational costs
• Increase the number of generated sales
• Improve your customer coverage
• Improve working relationships between clients and managers

Note: It is essential to work on your territory sales plan and avoid making constant changes. Unnecessary changes can tamper with your productivity and your ‘territory’ in general.

Sales Training Plan

And there are sales plans for every area of sales. Sales Enablement might have a sales training plan, for example, and  Revenue Ops  might have a sales compensation plan.

A sales training plan can be used as a roadmap for different sales training programs. It can be grouped according to positions held in an organization, assets, sales record etc.

A sales compensation plan is an umbrella for base salary, incentives and commission that make up a sales representative earnings.

Therefore, you can schedule a sales training plan to talk to your sales team about the importance of a sales compensation plan and how they can use it to increase revenue and drive performance.

Sales Budget Plan

Lastly, a sales budget plan gives you a  sales forecast  for a given period based on factors that could impact revenue — like industry trends and entry to a new market segment. Similar to a traditional sales plan, they cover the staff, tools, marketing campaigns, and other resources needed to generate the target revenue.

A good sales budget plan  should include the following:

Sales forecasting: 

The process of estimating future sales by predicting the number of units a salesperson or team can sell over a certain period, i.e. week, month, year, etc.

Anticipated expenses: 

Include the number of costs your team is likely going to incur. Remember to have even the smallest expenses to estimate the average sales.

Expect the unexpected: 

Always leave room for unforeseen circumstances in your sales budget. For example, new packaging expenses, new competitive market strategies etc.

A sales plan does deliver side benefits (such as promoting discipline and diligence), but it’s really about making sure your sales don’t dry up over time. Which means it’s not optional.

The reality is this: Most of us aren’t planners. We talk a good game, but nothing happens until we’re accountable.

Without a written plan, it’s just talk.

So the first benefit of a sales plan is that it helps you execute on all your best ideas. But that’s not all. A good sales plan will also help you:

• Keep your sales team on the same page, aiming for the same target and focusing on the same priorities.
• Clarify your goals and revenue objectives for a given period.
• Give your team direction, focus, and purpose.
• Adopt a unified set of strategies and playbooks to reach your business and revenue goals.
• Know what your team capabilities are and be able to isolate your needs, from tools to talent and other resources.
• Inspire and  motivate  stakeholders.
• Track your progress and optimize performance over time.

A sales plan is a pretty straightforward document. It doesn’t need to be written in a formal language or pass your compliance review. It just needs to outline your plans for the coming period, whether that’s a year, a quarter, or a month.

While there are 9 sections in the sales plan template, much of the document simply validates your ideas. The most important pieces of information are:

1. Your goals

Setting smart goals for you and your team  is an essential part of creating a sales plan. I believe the biggest mistake you can make when setting goals is solely focusing on numbers.

Smart sales goals should be actively focused on. If it helps, use goal-setting and planning frameworks such as SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). Create goals that stretch your capabilities, but that seems doable based on your new strategy.

2. Your SWOT analysis

SWOT — short for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats — is one of the best frameworks for analyzing your sales team’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and strengths. It helps you to build a bulletproof wall around your plan.

You’ll be able to address what you’re lacking, the areas that need improvement, identify your USP (Unique Selling Point),  come up with Value-Based Selling , and your most vital points and how you can exploit them to your advantage.

3. Your strategy

Your sales strategy should be documented to help position your products and services to differentiate your solution from competitors.

A good strategy will help you address your customers’ needs in every stage of your sales plan. For better sales, you can balance  inbound and outbound sales strategies  for even higher sales.

4. Your tactics

Be aware, though, it’s not just a wish list or a collection of ideas. Your sales plan should be based on actual field data and only use benchmarks and quantities that are measurable. Be clear. Be specific. Be actionable.

Which brings me to another point: A good sales plan is realistic.

It’s fine to have a 5-year goal of hitting $10B. But what about now? Figure out exactly what your current numbers are, and set your targets based on those numbers.

I already mentioned that your sales plan doesn’t have to be a formal document. But it does need to be clearly written, so all team members and stakeholders understand the plan.

Tip #1: Base it on in-depth and up-to-date research

You need relevant  statistics  and trends in your niche, industry, and ideal customers. Remember, markets and customers are in a constant state of flux. There’s nothing worse than stubbornly chasing prospects who aren’t a good fit anymore while ignoring entire market segments that show a rising demand for your solutions.

Tip #2: Use data and statistics

Use the data from your in-depth research to identify problem areas, find points of opportunity in your sales process, and validate your assumptions and ideas.

You can also use the data to come up with accurate metrics and figures to help predict your sales plan’s outcome.

Tip #3: Verify your facts

Accuracy matters!

Don’t rush! Facts and figures are essential, especially to stakeholders. One simple mistake and your entire plan come tumbling down.

Ensure you take time to review your facts, figures, and forecasts before finalizing the document.

Tip #4: Get tactical

Break the overall sales action plan into tactical plans for individual areas of sales:

• SDRs and account executives
• Sales operations
• Sales enablement
• Customer success

This may require collaboration with  cross-functional teams  such as marketing, customer support, and product teams.

Tip #5: Use Historical Performance Data

In sales, you can use the past to dictate the future. Historical data will help you set targets for the current period. For example, what were your previous revenue targets? Did you hit them? Why or why not? This information can help you set achievable goals for your current sales plan and know the mistakes to avoid.

Tip #6: List The Tracking Methods You’ll Use

Highlight the tracking methods you’ll use to keep your plan moving forward. That includes performance metrics, monitoring techniques, software, tools, and  selling strategies  for your business model.

Tip #7: Build a Strong Case For Your Proposed Budget

Stakeholders and superiors are impressed with cold-hard facts. Therefore, having a strong detailed case for your budget will help your sales plan smoothly sail through.

Not only will you outline your plans for the coming period for your budget, but you’ll also need to detail the costs. Be sure to include an ROI analysis for any new tools or talent you think you’ll need.

Are you ready to write your own sales strategy? Here is a sales plan template to help you get started. Here’s how to use the sales plan template to make it useful to you:

Start by using the Sales Plan Template we’ll give you in the next section. Just follow the prompts in the template, so you know what information is needed in each section. Don’t try to be fancy. Use simple language. Focus on being specific and clear.

Then share information in whatever format works best. That may be text paragraphs, tables, lists, charts, graphics, or screenshots. You can also adapt it as needed to suit your business, your sales team, and your needs.

A sales plan should contain the following sections:

1. Executive Summary

This is your opening ‘statement’. It is a formal summary that sum ups the contents of your strategy.

When writing your executive summary , keep it short, and precise. It should be one page or two. Ensure it gives an overview of what is included in your plan. It should talk about:

• The strategies you’ll implement to achieve your goals
• The time-frame you expect to achieve your plan
• The scope of your plans

2. Business Goals With Revenue Targets

This section talks about the revenue target and associated business goals. You can  classify revenue figures  according to different categories to clarify the sales strategy.

For example, for each goal, you can enter the current outcome and targeted outcome as illustrated in the table below:

3. Review of Past Performance

Take a trip down prior period performance . Note the mistakes that negatively affected the outcome and their strengths which positively impacted the general outcome.

Your goal is to identify the strategies and tactics that work.

4. Specific Strategies, Methods, and Playbooks

List the  specific sales strategies,  methods, and playbooks you’ll use to achieve the goals listed above.

5. Customer Segments/ Buyers Persona

This section talks about potential  revenue-generating streams  and different opportunities available for the company and new markets. Remember to include upsells, referrals, and renewals.

6. Team Capabilities and Resources

Here, provide a summary and describe the current  production inputs required in the sales process , i.e., human resources, specialized software, sales team, etc.

7. Action Plan

The action plan requires you to set  specific strategies and supporting tactics  that will be used to achieve a particular goal, i.e. new acquisition. Assign different activities and responsibilities to teams who will run that particular action.

Below is an example of an action plan table:

8. Sales Tools

Go ahead and list the  tools you’ll use to ensure the sales plan runs smoothly  and all sales processes will be managed using these tools.

9. Performance Benchmarks

This is the last section of your sales plan. It  lays out the performance metrics  to track the process systems to help and monitor these metrics.

Also, list and provide links to used sources. Explain how the report will be generated and stored. Finally, talk about how the report will be used to review the progress made.

Okay, your sales plan is written. Great! But you’re not done yet.

Your next step is to present it to the sales team, management, and stakeholders. That’s because you need buy-in to make it happen.

When your sales team is on board, they’ll be pumped about doing their assigned tasks. When management is on board, they’ll be excited about giving you the budget you need to turn your plan into a reality. With buy-in as your top priority, it’s important to be prepared to give a solid presentation. In other words, sell it.

One final note: There are lots of reasons you may not get everything you ask for. There may be plans in the works you don’t know anything about yet. Or the budget may need to favor another initiative.

If you don’t get the budget you asked for, be sure to update your sales plan accordingly. The goal is to stretch your team’s capabilities, not do the impossible.

Sales don’t happen without a good sales plan. Fortunately, they’re not as hard as they might seem.

Take your time identifying your biggest challenges and problem-solving to overcoming them. Once that’s done, your sales plan is simply the document that organizes your ideas.

What’s your biggest hang-up when it comes to creating a sales plan? Have you found any tricks that help? Let me know in the comments below.

Max Altschuler

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30 free sales plan templates: Download these PDF, Excel, Word Doc, Google Docs examples

These free sales plans will see your revenue skyrocket

1. Basic sales plan

2. sales and marketing plan, 3. sales strategy guide, 4. sales project plan, 5. sales action plan, 6. b2b sales strategy plan, 7. retail sales action plan, 8. sales leads template, 9. sales tracker template, 10. sales pipeline template, 11. sales funnel template, 12. sales report template, 13. sales one-pager, 14. 30-60-90 day plan, 15. company territory sales plan, 16. sales budget plan, 17. business development sales plan, 18. product market expansion sales plan, 19. company sales sop plan, 20. consulting revenue-based sales plan, 21. cloud sales plan, 22. business plan infographic, 23. saas product sales plan, 24. real estate sales plan, 25. new product sales plan, 26. sales training plan, 27. health insurance sales plan, 28. customer journey roadmap, 29. pricing options, 30. analytics dashboard template.

There are many different ways to boost your sales figures but one thing is for certain: sales simply cannot be neglected. You might hope for passive sales or you may employ a team of cold-callers but either way, sales will ultimately determine how much money you are able to bring in and whether your business is sustainable. 

The importance of sales is underlined by the host of digital sales solutions on the market today. You could flick through a list of the  best sales CRMs , the  best sales management software , and the  best sales pipeline software  and still be unclear regarding what the next steps should be for your sales strategy.

If that’s the case, it might be time to employ a sales plan template. Fortunately, there are a number of free plans available to download in either  PDF ,  Excel ,  Word , or  Google Docs  formats. Deciding on the right one for your sales strategy will depend on a number of factors, including your products, market and customer base. 

Keep reading to discover 30 of the best free sales plan templates available to download now. Whatever your approach to sales, there’s bound to be one that’s right for you.

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30 free sales plan templates to download today

A basic sales plan template provides some structure to your sales process. The template is usually split into different sections, including task titles, deadlines, task assignees, approval status, and a visual progress bar. There may also be space to include details of your business goals, plan strategies, and tactics.

Download the ClickUp Sales Plan Template here .

Sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin. Without a robust marketing plan, your sales figures will undoubtedly suffer. If your company would prefer to foster greater collaboration between its sales and marketing teams, then this template may help. Tasks that are relevant to both operations can be listed, as can KPIs - all in a single view.

Your sales are likely to be a little underwhelming if you don’t have an overarching goal you’re aiming at. And for that, a sales strategy is required. A sales strategy guide will put your organization on the right path by prompting you to answer key questions, such as “What is a sales strategy?” and “Why do you need a sales strategy?” By forcing you to consider the answers to these questions, you’ll ensure that your sales process remains on target at all times.

Within your overall sales strategy, there are likely to be individual projects contributing to your success. It’s a good idea to use a template to keep track of all these projects, providing a quick visualization of due dates, progress, and impact level. This will be a huge help for prioritization, allowing managers to identify the tasks that should be focused on immediately. 

Having a clear idea of how you want your sales to go is one thing, but taking concrete action to achieve your sales goals is another. A sales action plan can help you take the tangible steps you need to boost your sales figures, including ways to record and monitor specific tasks and visualizations for sales forecasting and goals.

Download the ClickUp Sales Action Plan Template here . 

Selling to consumers and selling to businesses require different skill sets, so it stands to reason that there would be specific templates for B2B sales. A B2B sales strategy plan will provide space for you to outline your B2B sales objectives and revenue targets, as well as prompts to ensure you create the type of sales content that really speaks to business customers.

No two industries are the same but luckily if you work in retail, there’s a sales plan template designed just for you. It will help you track inventory, monitor sales metrics, and negotiate with suppliers. It’s also worth taking a look at the best POS systems for retail and the best ecommerce platforms on the market for further technological support.

It may be more comforting to track your conversions, but it’s still a good idea to monitor your sales leads too. Templates for this purpose are available and are especially helpful if you don’t require the full functionality of a CRM . However, these templates will still allow you to include contact dates and status for potential customers so you can plan future engagement project potential sales. 

You won’t be able to see what items are flying off the shelves or where improvements to your inventory could be made unless you track your sales. A sales tracker template provides much-needed visibility, allowing you to keep track of items sold, the profit per item and your total earned income. It also becomes easier to track costs, including shipping charges and returns. 

Download Smartsheet’s sales tracker template here .

Standing as a useful alternative to CRM solutions, which obviously come in a range of shapes and sizes, including the best cloud CRM software , the best open-source CRM , and the best CRM for small businesses . It’s also definitely worth looking at a sales pipeline template, which can help you organize a host of useful information like quarterly sales forecasts, projected closing dates, and further actions 

A sales funnel is a great way to visualize the customer journey as they make their way to conversion - and the right template can prove a great help here. A sales funnel template can help you evaluate your sales process, providing a scorecard so you can give each stage a ranking.

In addition to making predictions about future sales, it’s worthwhile recording previous sales as part of a sales report. This template is great for that and lets you track sales activity by month, quarter or year. It’s also customizable so you can adjust the columns to meet your needs.

Download Smartsheet’s Sales report template here .

Sometimes, you want to strip away all the unnecessary information to leave you with the top-level direction needed to move forward. If that’s the case, you may find that a sales one-pager is just what you’re after. This is a concise template containing your sales tactics, goals, target audience, and key performance metrics but may not include the fine details. A great template for sharing with external stakeholders. 

This sales plan revolves around the time your sales personnel have been at the company and so represents a great tool for onboarding or general employee experience . This template comes with three sections of one month each, with corresponding targets and actionable steps. 

Download the Visme 30-60-90 day plan here .

Different markets will require different approaches if you are to optimize your sales. If you’re a multinational company, this template can streamline your sales process for different geographies, utilizing dynamic fields that mean you can reuse territory sales presentations and change the location information as required. 

For some businesses, keeping a close eye on budgets may be more important than others. Smaller businesses and start-ups, for example, are unlikely to have substantial resources that they can put towards sales and marketing gambles that may not pay off. A sales budget plan can help you keep on top of your finances even as you look to optimize your sales. Often, it will include a variety of budgeting aspects, such as revenue objectives, cost of goods sold, sales expenses and more.

Rising sales aren’t usually seen as the ultimate goal but a means to some other businesses target. This could involve sustainable growth, which is why many companies employ a business development sales plan to keep sight of the overarching target. Various stakeholders can all play a part, with many templates allowing commentary, annotations and the exchange of ideas.

Perhaps you’ve already conquered one market with your product(s) and are now looking to expand into another. That’s when a product market expansion sales plan na be put to good use with its market analyses, competition landscapes, marketing strategies, and distribution channels.

Download Visme’s product market expansion sales plan here .

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are particularly useful for businesses that have had to deal with fragmented or siloed approaches to their projects. Look for a sales template that’s clutter-free so that the sandardization of your sales processes is made clear for all departments to see.

Consultancy firms can derive massive revenues but only if they can convince businesses that there services will be useful. You’ll need a template full of high-quality content and boasting a visually-appealing design. Consultant don’t come cheap, so make sure your consulting sales plan looks good enough to convince internal and external stakeholders that you’re worth the expenditure.

The cloud computing market is extremely competitive these days, boasting cloud storage , cloud backup services, cloud hosting providers and more. In this crowded market, vendors have a job on their hands to maximize cloud sales. This template, outlining your competitive positioning, can help you stand out during your next sales call.

They say a picture can tell a thousand words, which is why you should consider if an infographics is better for your sales plan than a word document. This business plan infographic contains is ideal for presentations to external stakeholders. It looks great, while still containing all the info you need like goals, timelines, market analysis, performance metrics and more.

Software-as-a-service sales are fundamentally different to physical sales. You want recurring, subscription plans, rather than one-off purchases. As such, you’ll want to adopt a slightly different approach to sales, A data-focused approach is likely to be key in a fast-moving market.

Download Visme’s SaaS sales plan template here .

Real estate purchases are likely to be some of the biggest that any individual (or, indeed, company) is ever likely to make. As suvh, it’s essential you get your real estate sale plan right. Make sure your agents and marketing team are aligned in their messaging and goals. A template can really help ensure this is the case.

Starting from scratch? Issuing a new product can be daunting, but a new product sales plan can take some of the fear away. Make sure your template outlines how other similar products have fared initially and include growth projections to help monitor how the product is performing over time.

You can’t expect your sales team to perform to their best ability if they haven’t had the requisite training. This sales training plan template can ensure consistency when delivering onboarding for new sales personnel and explain your expectations for performance in the medium and long term.

Committing to health insurance is a big decision - but there are few more important. A health insurance template will ensure your sales team has access to all the necessary statistics around health and demographics so they can convince prospects to convert.

Conversions don’t just happen. In reality, sales take time and customer journeys can be far from direct. Prospects can take time to become leads. And leads can take time to become customers. The hard sell may work sometime and at other times is likely to push potential customers into the arms of your competitors. Use your template to outline the typical customer journey and give your sales team a helping hand. 

Princing may be crucial for sales but it’s not always straightforward. Depending on your industry, market and time, your pricing may change frequently. Using a table that clearly outlines various pricing options for your customer can be a great way of clearly detailing your product or service. It can also be a great help when upselling.

Data underpins many great sales strategies but data is only truly useful if it can be transformed into insight. Having a clear, visualization of your sales analytics can ensure that you are looking at something your sales team can really use - not just a a jumble of statistics.

Download a free analytics dashboard template here .

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Barclay has been writing about technology for a decade, starting out as a freelancer with ITProPortal covering everything from London’s start-up scene to comparisons of the best cloud storage services.  After that, he spent some time as the managing editor of an online outlet focusing on cloud computing, furthering his interest in virtualization, Big Data, and the Internet of Things. 

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• Sales Templates

How to Create a Sales Plan: 11 Templates to Use Now

Jul 27, 2022

As a business leader, salesperson, or executive in a sales company, it’s important to recognize the importance of planning for success. A sales plan is arguably the most crucial tool that will enable you to prepare for the future of your business and how you can hit your business targets and goals. 

In this article, you’ll learn what a sales plan is, how to write one, and tips for creating an effective sales plan. This post also highlights the best sale plan templates for your company or business.

• What are the best sales plan templates?
• 1. Sales Plan Template by Hubspot
• 2. Sample Sales Plan by BestTemplates
• 3. Asana Sales Plan
• 4. 1 Page Sales Plan by BestTemplates
• 5. Online Sales Plan Marker Map by Venngage
• 6. Small Business Sales Plan by FitSmallBusiness
• 7. Sales Strategy Diagram from Creately
• 8. Sales Action Plan by BestTemplates
• 9. 30-60-90 Day Sales Plan by Template.Net
• 10. Microsoft Word Sales Plan from TemplateLab
• 11. 90-Day Sales Play by Template.Net
• What is a Sales Plan?
• What is included in a sales plan?
• How to Write a Sales Plan
• What Goes in a Sales Plan Template?
• Tips for Creating an Effective Sales Plan
• Key Takeaways

Creating your sales plan from scratch can be an intensive and time-consuming process, which is why you should consider using sales plan templates. The following are the best sales plan templates to get you started!

This free sales plan template by Hubspot is a detailed plan with multiple sections that allow you to outline your sales strategy in a simple, coherent manner. The template includes sections for your team structure, target market, company history, goals, budget, action plan, and many more. This simple template simplifies your sales plan for your team and execs. 

Best Templates provides a 9-page sales plan that you can download and edit to customize to your specific needs. The template is designed to do all the work for you since all sections are already highlighted, and your job is to fill them in. 

Asana’s sales plan promises to help you build a solid sales foundation and empower your team to achieve company goals. With Asana, you can create various sales plans, including a territory plan, a 30, 60, or 90-day sales plan, or a simple sales action plan. Moreover, you can use Asana and Salesforce together to improve your sales process.

Finally, a sales process that gives you the freedom to sell.

Build a repeatable, winning sales process with Dooly's powerful note templates.

Another sales plan by Best Templates can help you work out effective strategies to boost sales. It’s also customizable, so all you need to do is open and edit it using your preferred software app or program, provided it is compatible with MS Word or Pages file formats. 

The Sales Plan Maker by Venngage enables you to create and organize your sales plan. To get started, you need to create a Venngage account and pick the sales plan template that suits you best. Venngage allows you to add images, edit text, or develop pictographs and custom charts. 

This compact and easy-to-use sales plan template contains all the information you’ll need to set clear sales goals and objectives and the tactics and strategies to employ. Simply download the template, and customize it for your business. 

Creately offers multiple customizable professional templates designed to ensure synchronicity across your entire team. You can create a dashboard to monitor the progress of your strategies. The Creately viewer also allows you to embed multiple diagrams in your blogs or business website. 

This affordable action plan template by Best Templates has a minimalistic and professional layout for unmatched structure and organization. It’s a fully customizable template that supports MS word and iPages, so editing shouldn’t be a hassle. Download the template from their official website, and get started with your action plan. 

This is a comprehensive sales plan that can help you boost your company sales within 90 days. It’s an effective sales plan template outlining all the strategies and tactics you should employ during the 90 days. The template is fully customizable and can be downloaded using your preferred software. 

Microsoft Word provides multiple free sales plan template options from TemplateLab . The templates are designed to help organizations plan their sales activities in a structured manner. The plans have sections including an executive summary, goals and objectives, analysis details, organization mission, key performance indicators, marketing strategy, and many more. 

This easily editable template is designed to help you plot the activities that should be done over a 90-day period to enable you to meet your organization’s set goals and objectives. The 90-Day Sales Action Plan template is perfect for companies trying to achieve specific goals within a specified timeframe. 

A sales plan is a document that features your company’s sales activities, including tactics and strategies to achieve set objectives within a given time frame. One major challenge stunting the growth of companies is a lack of a formal action plan. The executives come up with goals and objectives and leave it at that. Now you know what you’re aiming for, but HOW do you get there? 

A sales plan outlines the strategies and tactics that will get you there. It highlights specific step-by-step actions your team will take to achieve business targets. Since it is a dynamic document, it is continually updated to reflect market changes, so you’re always one step ahead of the competition. 

A good sales plan is exhaustive in that it establishes the goals, priorities, necessary resources, and timetables. The sales plan should set measurable, precise, and motivating goals. There needs to be a logical order to the steps highlighted in the plan. Additionally, an effective sales plan is a formal document. If you don’t write down your plan, then it is a dream you simply hope to achieve someday. A formally documented sales plan is a firm commitment to reaching your goals and targets. 

Sales plans typically differ from company to company. However, specific segments must be included in a sales plan. These are key to your strategic business development, and they include the following: 

Executive summary

A good sales plan starts with an executive summary, laying the foundation for the information. This is where you state your company’s vision and mission. The executive summary tells the story of how your company got there and what the company hopes to achieve in the coming years. 

Business goals

This is arguably the most crucial segment in a sales plan. The set goals should be measurable and time-specific. Include revenue targets, which can either be revenue-based or volume-based and the sales effectiveness metrics that will be used to measure them. It’s also vital to ensure the revenue target is achievable by the set time to motivate the sales staff. 

Description of strategies and tactics

If you aim to increase your customer base, what specific steps should be taken to achieve it? This segment of the sales plan will include touching base with your marketing team because they’re familiar with the marketing strategy that works best. Working with your sales team to develop the strategies and tactics also helps boost employee productivity and engagement. 

Customer segments

Your sales team should have a clear picture of who they’re selling to. Build an ideal customer profile that will be used for your sales pipeline . A good sales plan includes the target audience and the target industries serviced by your company.  

Your budget for the year is another key element of the sales plan. How much will be spent on achieving the goals? Clarifying salaries, commissions, bonuses, resource spending, and even miscellaneous costs is important. 

The sales plan is not a solitary document. For your sales plan to be effective, it must be an integral part of your sales planning process. You’re not just typing up a document and sending it to your team. You want it to be a guide for your sales staff, which is why you need a strategy. 

So what steps should you follow when writing your sales plan? 

Start by gathering sales data

Your sales planning needs a foundation, and sales data for the previous couple of years can help you get started. What tactic or strategy has worked for you in the past? What wasn’t so effective? Do you need to improve your cold outreach ? You’ve probably heard the phrase, “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Collect as much data as possible and use the information to identify some of the trends in your industry.  

Determine your objectives

The reason you have a sales plan is to help you achieve your business goals. As such, it is one of the top priorities in the sales planning process. Clearly defining your objectives will enable you to develop strategies to reach them. You have to know the what before the how . 

Outline your metrics for success

How will you know whether your strategies are working? Success metrics differ based on the industry and the business, but common key performance indicators (KPIs) include ROI, conversion rate, gross profit margins, and more. 

Begin sales forecasting

Sales forecasting , loosely speaking, is predicting the future. It is the preparation of an in-depth report that uses historical data, sales activity data, and predictive analysis technology to predict what your sales team will sell over a given period.

Sales forecasting is crucial for the growth of your business. The information from sales forecasting helps answer essential questions that will guide your business approaches.

Develop sales tactics and strategies

Your sales plan also needs to highlight the tactics and strategies you plan to employ to accomplish the set objectives. This section of the plan should be highly detailed, outlining the specific campaigns, such as cold calls and email marketing campaigns, to generate leads for your sales funnel. 

The tactics and strategies outlined should be customizable to different customers based on their consumer behavior, interests, and specific needs. You could also implement cross-selling as a way to generate more revenue. 

Outline actionable steps

The final step in creating your sales plan is to outline action items. Consider your company’s quota numbers and its capacity when building the specific steps to be followed in the sales process. This can include organizing a daily sales schedule for your sales team to maximize efficiency.                            

A good sales plan is not too long or too short. It contains detailed information without being unnecessarily lengthy and complicated.

As mentioned earlier, sales plans differ from company to company, but they should generally include the following segments:

• Revenue and sales goals
• Target customers
• Marketing strategy
• Market conditions
• Resources (sales tools and software)
• Action Plan

Creating a sales plan is one thing. Getting your sales team to implement it is another. The following tips will help you create an effective sales plan that will engage all the stakeholders and team members. 

Utilize data and statistics

Using relevant data from in-depth research, you can identify key problem areas and opportunities in your sales process that you should tap into. Statistics validate the key assumptions you make in the process. This way, your plan is meticulously thought out and not a spray and pray effort. 

Verify all your facts

There are several facts and figures in a sales plan, and you should take the time to verify them all. They need to make sense to the stakeholders and all the team members. Misquoting or using an unverified fact could render your entire plan unusable. 

Specify tools and resources

Your plan should also highlight the technology you plan to use at different stages of the sales process. This includes CRM or dashboard software that you can use to track success. It is helpful for both your internal team and the stakeholders. 

Align your teams

The success of your sales plan will depend on the alignment of your sales and marketing teams. Getting input from marketing dramatically improves the accuracy of your strategies and tactics. Steps in the sales process, including lead generation, prospecting, and nurturing, should work together harmoniously. 

Get your team’s input

It is essential to work with your team in the process. Talk with all your reps to understand any challenges they might be facing. At the top, it’s easy to focus on the numbers and forecasting without considering the rep’s day-to-day activities and whether or not the plans you have are feasible. Working with your team enables you to determine problems that need fixing before the sales plan can be affected. 

Failing to plan is planning to fail is a common saying. It’s undeniable that implementing a sales plan will significantly benefit your business, based on the goals you set out to achieve.

The sales plan is not a static document. To improve its effectiveness, it is vital to keep upgrading based on industry shifts and trends or changes within your organization. This will fast-track the growth of your business and set you ahead of your competition.

Join the thousands of top-performing AEs who use Dooly every day to stay more organized, instantly update their pipeline, and spend more time selling instead of mindless admin work. Try Dooly free, no credit card required. Or, Request a demo to speak with a Dooly product expert right now.

Diego Pineda

Diego Pineda is the author of two novels, 9 non-fiction books, and hundreds of articles and blogs as a science writer, a business writer, and a sales and marketing writer. He's passionate about thought leadership and his latest book is "The Solo Author: How Solopreneurs Earn Money and Authority with a Book Ecosystem."

Table of Contents

Move deals forward faster with these 15 Sales Templates

Deal And Account Health: A Public Service Announcement From Dooly

The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Repeatable Sales Process

Sales Process Management: A Roadmap to Improving Sales Deal Quality

Sales Cycle Management

Post Sales Customer Management

Deal Reviews

Process Adoption

Team Handoffs

Account Executive

Sales Leader

Sales Enablement

Customer Success

Product Overview

AccountSpace

Deal & Account Vitals

Chrome Extension

Integrations

Subprocessors

Customer Stories

Help Centre

Customer Love

9 X-Factors

Sales Happiness Index

State of Sales Productivity

Sales Process Report

State of Sales Leadership

Finish the Quarter Strong

Salesforce Notes

Sales Pipeline

Sales Management Software

Sales Forecast

Log a Call in Salesforce

Find Hot Opportunities

Close the Quota Gap

Sales Time Wasters

Why Reps Quit

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WTO / Business / Planners / 23 Free Sales Plan Templates | How to Create – Examples

23 Free Sales Plan Templates | How to Create – Examples

A sales plan is used by businesses and companies to document target sales and outline sales strategies required to realize the set sales objectives.  

Business success can be directly attributed to good planning within the organization.

A strategic sales plan is usually designed to assist the company in driving sales to facilitate growth in the company’s revenue.

It is a month-to-month plan. The plan will cover the objectives, target audience/customers, high-level sales and marketing tactics , and potential obstacles. It also outlines the roles and responsibilities of the sales team members.

Free Sales Plan Templates

Components of a Sales Plan

Developing a sales plan that impacts sales in a company should be the primary objective. The set goals should be specific, realistic, measurable, and attainable. Generally, a plan can be categorized into market and customer research, sales forecasting and goal setting , and prospecting and partnerships.

Below are the fundamental components of a plan.

Executive summary and scope

An executive summary is a brief outline of the contents of the sales plan. The scope is the depth that the plan shall cover in terms of sales. An executive summary and scope introduce the reader to what they should expect to find in the document by concisely discussing the sales goals and strategies and stating the specific period in which the plan is to be implemented.

Target customers

Target customers are the people the company aims to cater to with its products and services. Identifying the target customers ensures the company may not spend time and resources on the wrong customers who would not buy their products. Target customers should be defined by any traits common amongst most existing and projected customers – customer profile. 

Revenue targets

A good sales plan will have an end goal. This will be either of the two things, sales or customers. These two factors influence the revenue generated by a business. Therefore, the plan should have target sales that are to be realized at different stages of the strategic plan implementation and after a specified period, say one year or three years. After that, revenue will usually mean profits for the company.

Review of prior period performance

Before forecasting, it is essential to check previous sales. Previous sales help a company avoid relying on wishful thinking when making projections, and thus realistic goals can be set. The plan should include data and decisions from the previous recording period used to develop the new figures and set goals. Previous mistakes should also be noted.

Pricing and promotions

The plan should outline the pricing of products and any promotional campaigns the company runs to keep existing customers and attract new ones. The pricing should reflect the value of the product or service conveyed to the customers.

Deadlines and directly responsible individuals (DRIs)

The plan should outline any deadlines that should be met and the individuals or teams responsible for making this happen. Setting deadlines ensures each goal is realized on time so as the plan and the end goal can be realized. In addition, it helps the company actualize the plan (deliverables) within the set period. Finally, assigning individuals or teams specific roles and responsibilities ensures the order is maintained and enhances accountability. 

Action plan for teams and individuals

The plan should have a quantifiable action of what is to be done and the specific goals they should achieve.  The action plan should detail the actions/activities that should be done to realize the set goals. An action plan is fundamentally a summary of the company’s game plan (strategy).

Every output requires an input. The plan should outline what is needed to achieve the objectives of the strategy/plan. Resources are tools that the sales team will utilize in the process of implementing the plan. Resources include labor (sales team, specialists), technology (software, online ads), stationery (banners, flyers), and compensation for the team. Including the resources in the plan ensures the plan balances costs and sales to avoid a situation where the sales costs exceed sales revenue reducing profit margins to an unsustainable level.

Market and industry conditions

Market and industry conditions are essential factors about the company’s sector that should be considered. Market conditions will determine the position of the company as a business and a competitor. Regarding market conditions , the plan will indicate the niche in the market (size of market, demand for product, opportunities), key competitors (strengths and weaknesses), market trends that directly influence sales performance, government policies, and social behaviors of customer decisions.

Customer segments

The plan should show the target customers’ demographics. Understanding the different customer segments influences the approach to be taken to reach out to them. Standard customer segments are referrals, renewals, new prospects, upsells, cross-sells, and new segments.

Performance benchmarks & monitoring

A measurable sales plan implies that the plan’s performance can be quantified. The plan must indicate the set benchmarks and metrics used to assess performance and progress. Monitoring helps identify skews in the plan, and thus timely corrective measures can be implemented. The plan must also indicate which systems and processes will be used to monitor the mentioned metrics.

How to Create a Sales Plan

Each part of a sales plan serves a specific purpose towards the plan’s end goal. Creating an effective plan will involve an in-depth assessment of the sales of a company.

The steps below can be used to come up with an up to standard plan.

Mission and background

First and foremost, the document ought to state the company’s mission and vision. In addition, it should provide a background of the company by providing a summary of its history. Finally, the overall goals or objectives of the strategic plan should also be declared.

SWOT analysis 

Secondly, a SWOT analysis on the sales team should be carried out to determine where they are strong (strengths), opportunities, and where they can improve on (weaknesses and threats). These strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities should then be stated in the document.  

Team and their roles

Thirdly, indicate the individuals making up the sales team and each individual’s roles in the team. The team must reflect the current and projected number of team members. For projected members, indicate their job title, headcount, and when they are expected to join the team.

Target market

Next, indicate the company’s target market . First, the document should show the target market’s demographic. Then, transparent information to show the growth and projections of the size and diversity of the customers should be given.  

Marketing strategy & personal tactics

After indicating the target market, include a sales strategy and the tactics adopted to achieve the set sales goals. Tactics can revolve around pricing products and services and promotion campaigns. However, the tactics proposed must be realistic and based on field data and measurable by specified benchmarks and metrics.

Tools, software, and resources 

Then include the tools and resources such as training , software, sales budget, and documentation that the sales team will require to execute the laid-out strategy. Again, be descriptive as possible for clarity.

Positioning 

The following section should state the company’s position in comparison to its competitors by listing its competitors. Positions can also be described in terms of technology advancement, market trends, pricing, etc. this section should discuss how these factors influence the company’s sales.

Prospecting strategy

The prospecting strategy should then follow. First, the plan should illustrate the strategies to be adopted to acquire inbound and outbound sales. Inbound sales are sales initiated by the customer, for instance, when enquiring about a particular product or service. Outbound sales are generated from the prospecting efforts of the company,

Contacting customers who have not expressed interest in a product or service.

Sales objectives

Then state the company’s sales goals. Sales objectives are vital considerations in business growth, and as a result, specificity is essential in this section. Often, sales goals are in terms of revenue.

A $50 million turnover.

Alternatively, sales goals can be volume-based such as 1000 sales.  Factors to consider are pricing, resources, total addressable market (TAM), and market penetration. Although a company can have more than one sales goal, list them all in order of priority.

Ensure to include the timeline and the DRI,

Shop A to increase sales by 1500 which will amount to $300,000 in the 1 st Quarter of 2021 (January to March). Harry’s team will be in charge and will report to the Head office.

Action plan 

After, the plan should state the action plan to be followed by the sales team. The action plan should have broken down steps that outline how the sales goals/objectives will be achieved.

Goal: Increase market share from 20% to 35%, equivalent to 10,000 sales.

• Offer a 10% discount for purchase orders above ten items.
• Give away coupons for all purchases every Friday.

Lastly, provide a budget for the plan . The budget should outline the costs associated with the plan, such as salary and commission of the sales team, sales tools and resources, travel costs, food, sales training, and team bonding activities. A comparison should be drawn between the associated costs and projected revenue for a more wholesome budget. Ordinarily, it should include sales forecasting, anticipated expenses, and miscellaneous.

Sales Plan Examples

A company can decide to use one of the different plans available that best suits their needs. Below are examples of the types of sales plans.

30-60-90-Day sales plan

It is time-based and used by a new salesperson to bring them up to speed about the sales in a company within their first three months. It is segmented into three timeframes.

• Day 1-30 : In the first thirty days, the new salesperson gets to learn the intricacies of the company in terms of the customers, products, processes, procedures, and competition.
• Day 31-60: A new action plan is developed by carefully assessing the existing processes while identifying necessary changes incorporated into the new action plan.
• Day 61-90 : The new action plan is optimized and improved before it is implemented.

Sales plan for specific sales

A company can also use a plan that addresses a specific customer or tactic towards improving sales – one sales goal or task. In addition, the company can focus on a specific sales tactic.

E-mail follow-up frequency, etc.

Marketing-alignment sales plan

A company can create this plan to align marketing and sales to foster sales growth. Primarily, it focuses on establishing ideal customer profiles and customer persona to align marketing strategies with sales’ product pitches.

Territory sales plan

These plans are meant for sales plans limited to a specified geo-location or region. The goals of a good territory sales plan usually are to increase productivity, increase sales, improve customer coverage, reduce operational costs and improve the customer-client relationship.

Business development strategic sales plan

This plan is meant to attract new business opportunities by fostering networking with other companies, events sponsorship, and outreach.

Market expansion plan

A market expansion plan is developed when a company intends to expand into a new market in terms of a new target market or geographical area. It details the list of activities and target metrics the company intends to use for this expansion.

Sales training plan

A sales strategy will sometimes involve training programs for the sales team to facilitate the implementation of the action plan. A sales training plan outlines different sales training programs to be executed and can be broken down to address different positions in the company, sales records, assets, etc.

New product sales plan

When a company launches a new product, this plan is the go-to guide. A new product sales plan analyzes the competition, the brand positioning of the company, secure channel partners for the new product, and synthesizes a sales strategy to be adopted to ensure the new product becomes a revenue-generating source.

Sales budget plan

A sales budget plan forecasts sales, expenses, and revenue. A sales budget plan includes marketing campaigns, sales staff, tools, and other resources to raise the target revenue. It should accommodate the predicted sales the team is predicted to sell in a given period, the expenses they are expected to incur in that same period, and unforeseen expenses.

Tips for an Effective Sales Plan

To ensure that the plan effectively communicates to the intended audience (sales team and shareholders), certain things can be considered when preparing one.

They include:

Requires in-depth and up-to-date research

The plan should reflect a deep and up-to-date understanding of data and market trends associated with the niche, industry, and target customers. Markets and customers are ever-changing, and as a result, the plan should focus on where the benefits are highest.

Specify tracking technology

Tracking progress is crucial to ensuring the plan is adopted and actualized as intended. Therefore, ensure all tracking methods and technology such as monitoring techniques, software, tools, performance metrics, and any other ways of tracking progress are listed.

Use data and statistics

When identifying a problem, opportunity, or validating assumptions or ideas, data and statistics should be used. Also, predictions of sales should be data-based.

Get tactical

Overall action plans should be broken down into tactical plans focusing on specific areas of sales such as sales operations and enablement, customer access, and SDRs and account executives. Then, collaborate with other cross-functional teams like marketing, customer relations, and production to realize the goals.

Each team should have a different plan and a specific objective

Sale is a vast department that assigns duties to different teams. Therefore, each team should have different plans, specific goals, and performance metrics that address their roles, such as business development, field sales, outbound sales, etc. 

Get the marketing team’s input

Aligning the company’s marketing and sales is crucial to a plan’s success. Get marketing input to facilitate processes such as prospecting.

Consult the sales reps to understand their challenges

Remember that sales reps are doing the actual legwork. Therefore, understanding their day-to-day operations can help develop an inclusive plan that is effective and feasible to the people at the bottom of the pyramid.

A sales plan should grow with the Business

A plan should grow as the business grows. Periodic review and updating should be done as implementation progresses. This helps keep the team focused and on track, and improvements and adjustments can be made promptly. A plan should be unique to the company.

Benefits of a Sales Plan Template

A template serves distinct purposes within a company. Therefore, it should be structured to fit the overall company objectives supplementary to its business plan.

Below are ways in which a plan is used to benefit a company.

• A sales plan template allows the company to develop novel ideas to strategize and implement in its sales operations.
• The plan communicates the goals and objectives of the company’s sales team this way, the team is on the same page and is working towards an expected end.
• By outlining the sales goals, target market, and target revenue, the team can know the team’s expectations in a given period.
• The template indicates data-based revenue goals set by the company. Consequently, it is a source of inspiration and motivation to the shareholders, for it helps them see the trajectory the company is predicted to take towards profitability.
• A template details the specific steps involved in the strategic plan and therefore acts as a guide to the sales team by giving them direction and purpose.
• By outlining DRIs and their roles and responsibilities, a plan enhances accountability and helps the team to focus.
• A template is an adequate baseline to monitor progress and enhance the performance optimization of a company within set timeframes.

  A sales plan is an effective way of finding new ways to improve sales and increase revenue generation in a company. A company can set its sales goals and objectives and communicate them to the sales team and shareholders through a sales plan. The template should be detailed to show the actual tasks carried out to realize the set sales goals and objectives. A standard sales plan will include the company’s vision and mission, an executive summary, target market, revenue targets, marketing strategies and tactics, deadlines and DRIS, resources, market and industry conditions, performance benchmarks, and a sales budget.

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Free Business Plan Template for Small Businesses (2024)

Use this free business plan template to write your business plan quickly and efficiently.

A good business plan is essential to successfully starting your business —  and the easiest way to simplify the work of writing a business plan is to start with a business plan template.

You’re already investing time and energy in refining your business model and planning your launch—there’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to writing a business plan. Instead, to help build a complete and effective plan, lean on time-tested structures created by other  entrepreneurs and startups. 

Ahead, learn what it takes to create a solid business plan and download Shopify's free business plan template to get started on your dream today. 

What this free business plan template includes

• Executive summary
• Company overview
• Products or services offered
• Market analysis
• Marketing plan
• Logistics and operations plan
• Financial plan

This business plan outline is designed to ensure you’re thinking through all of the important facets of starting a new business. It’s intended to help new business owners and entrepreneurs consider the full scope of running a business and identify functional areas they may not have considered or where they may need to level up their skills as they grow.

That said, it may not include the specific details or structure preferred by a potential investor or lender. If your goal with a business plan is to secure funding , check with your target organizations—typically banks or investors—to see if they have business plan templates you can follow to maximize your chances of success.

Our free business plan template includes seven key elements typically found in the traditional business plan format:

1. Executive summary

This is a one-page summary of your whole plan, typically written after the rest of the plan is completed. The description section of your executive summary will also cover your management team, business objectives and strategy, and other background information about the brand. 

2. Company overview

This section of your business plan will answer two fundamental questions: “Who are you?” and “What do you plan to do?” Answering these questions clarifies why your company exists, what sets it apart from others, and why it’s a good investment opportunity. This section will detail the reasons for your business’s existence, its goals, and its guiding principles.

3. Products or services offered

What you sell and the most important features of your products or services. It also includes any plans for intellectual property, like patent filings or copyright. If you do market research for new product lines, it will show up in this section of your business plan.

4. Market analysis

This section includes everything from estimated market size to your target markets and competitive advantage. It’ll include a competitive analysis of your industry to address competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Market research is an important part of ensuring you have a viable idea.

5. Marketing plan

How you intend to get the word out about your business, and what strategic decisions you’ve made about things like your pricing strategy. It also covers potential customers’ demographics, your sales plan, and your metrics and milestones for success.

6. Logistics and operations plan

Everything that needs to happen to turn your raw materials into products and get them into the hands of your customers.

7. Financial plan

It’s important to include a look at your financial projections, including both revenue and expense projections. This section includes templates for three key financial statements: an income statement, a balance sheet, and a cash-flow statement . You can also include whether or not you need a business loan and how much you’ll need.

Business plan examples

What do financial projections look like on paper? How do you write an executive summary? What should your company description include?  Business plan examples  can help answer some of these questions and transform your business idea into an actionable plan.

Professional business plan example

Inside our template, we’ve filled out a sample business plan featuring a fictional ecommerce business . 

The sample is set up to help you get a sense of each section and understand how they apply to the planning and evaluation stages of a business plan. If you’re looking for funding, this example won’t be a complete or formal look at business plans, but it will give you a great place to start and notes about where to expand.

Lean business plan example

A lean business plan format is a shortened version of your more detailed business plan. It’s helpful when modifying your plan for a specific audience, like investors or new hires. 

Also known as a one-page business plan, it includes only the most important, need-to-know information, such as:

• Company description
• Key members of your team
• Customer segments

💡 Tip: For a step-by-step guide to creating a lean business plan (including a sample business plan), read our guide on how to create a lean business plan .

Benefits of writing a solid business plan

It’s tempting to dive right into execution when you’re excited about a new business or side project, but taking the time to write a thorough business plan and get your thoughts on paper allows you to do a number of beneficial things:

• Test the viability of your business idea. Whether you’ve got one business idea or many, business plans can make an idea more tangible, helping you see if it’s truly viable and ensure you’ve found a target market. 
• Plan for your next phase. Whether your goal is to start a new business or scale an existing business to the next level, a business plan can help you understand what needs to happen and identify gaps to address.
• Clarify marketing strategy, goals, and tactics. Writing a business plan can show you the actionable next steps to take on a big, abstract idea. It can also help you narrow your strategy and identify clear-cut tactics that will support it.
• Scope the necessary work. Without a concrete plan, cost overruns and delays are all but certain. A business plan can help you see the full scope of work to be done and adjust your investment of time and money accordingly.
• Hire and build partnerships. When you need buy-in from potential employees and business partners, especially in the early stages of your business, a clearly written business plan is one of the best tools at your disposal. A business plan provides a refined look at your goals for the business, letting partners judge for themselves whether or not they agree with your vision.
• Secure funds. Seeking financing for your business—whether from venture capital, financial institutions, or Shopify Capital —is one of the most common reasons to create a business plan.

Why you should you use a template for a business plan

A business plan can be as informal or formal as your situation calls for, but even if you’re a fan of the back-of-the-napkin approach to planning, there are some key benefits to starting your plan from an existing outline or simple business plan template.

No blank-page paralysis

A blank page can be intimidating to even the most seasoned writers. Using an established business planning process and template can help you get past the inertia of starting your business plan, and it allows you to skip the work of building an outline from scratch. You can always adjust a template to suit your needs.

Guidance on what to include in each section

If you’ve never sat through a business class, you might never have created a SWOT analysis or financial projections. Templates that offer guidance—in plain language—about how to fill in each section can help you navigate sometimes-daunting business jargon and create a complete and effective plan.

Knowing you’ve considered every section

In some cases, you may not need to complete every section of a startup business plan template, but its initial structure shows you you’re choosing to omit a section as opposed to forgetting to include it in the first place.

Tips for creating a successful business plan

There are some high-level strategic guidelines beyond the advice included in this free business plan template that can help you write an effective, complete plan while minimizing busywork.

Understand the audience for your plan

If you’re writing a business plan for yourself in order to get clarity on your ideas and your industry as a whole, you may not need to include the same level of detail or polish you would with a business plan you want to send to potential investors. Knowing who will read your plan will help you decide how much time to spend on it.

Know your goals

Understanding the goals of your plan can help you set the right scope. If your goal is to use the plan as a roadmap for growth, you may invest more time in it than if your goal is to understand the competitive landscape of a new industry.

Take it step by step

Writing a 10- to 15-page document can feel daunting, so try to tackle one section at a time. Select a couple of sections you feel most confident writing and start there—you can start on the next few sections once those are complete. Jot down bullet-point notes in each section before you start writing to organize your thoughts and streamline the writing process.

Maximize your business planning efforts

Planning is key to the financial success of any type of business , whether you’re a startup, non-profit, or corporation.

To make sure your efforts are focused on the highest-value parts of your own business planning, like clarifying your goals, setting a strategy, and understanding the target market and competitive landscape, lean on a business plan outline to handle the structure and format for you. Even if you eventually omit sections, you’ll save yourself time and energy by starting with a framework already in place.

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Business plan template FAQ

What is the purpose of a business plan.

The purpose of your business plan is to describe a new business opportunity or an existing one. It clarifies the business strategy, marketing plan, financial forecasts, potential providers, and more information about the company.

How do I write a simple business plan?

• Choose a business plan format, such as a traditional or a one-page business plan. 
• Find a business plan template.
• Read through a business plan sample.
• Fill in the sections of your business plan.

What is the best business plan template?

If you need help writing a business plan, Shopify’s template is one of the most beginner-friendly options you’ll find. It’s comprehensive, well-written, and helps you fill out every section.

What are the 5 essential parts of a business plan?

The five essential parts of a traditional business plan include:

• Executive summary: This is a brief overview of the business plan, summarizing the key points and highlighting the main points of the plan.
• Business description: This section outlines the business concept and how it will be executed.
• Market analysis: This section provides an in-depth look at the target market and how the business will compete in the marketplace.
• Financial plan: This section details the financial projections for the business, including sales forecasts, capital requirements, and a break-even analysis.
• Management and organization: This section describes the management team and the organizational structure of the business.

Are there any free business plan templates?

There are several free templates for business plans for small business owners available online, including Shopify’s own version. Download a copy for your business.

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