Sales Plan Template

Are you looking for a sales plan template?

Use this template to efficiently create a winning sales plan that leads to more customers, deals, and revenues.

Sales Plans

Every business needs a sales plan. From a brand new startup being born on the back of a napkin in a coffee shop to large Silicon Valley companies who have been around for decades, a relevant and up to date sales plan is absolutely vital to your survival and ability to thrive.

If you don’t plan for sales, don’t expect to have many sales.

In addition to acting as a guide and roadmap for everything that creates sales, revenues, and profits, a good sales plan enables your business and team to move faster, be effective, and operate more profitably.

It provides clarity across your organization so that everyone knows what they should be doing and what is being done while making it easy to fix and improve to boost sales. 

A Sales Plan Template is the easiest way to get this done. You have enough on your plate without trying to recreate a sales plan from scratch too. This template will help you sail through the process, make sure you aren’t neglecting important elements, and get down to business. 

If you’ve already done your business plan, marketing plan, and pitch deck, then you can use a lot of that information to simply fill in the blanks here. Or in the reverse, you can use your inputs in this document to speed up your efforts in creating those documents.

Also, keep in mind that sales is also something that you would apply in fundraising. In this regard for a winning pitch deck to help you here, take a look at the template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below.

Sales Plan Template

Fill in the blanks of this sales plan template to start selling. 

Overview

Begin your sales plan with a couple of sentences on the big picture vision and mission to keep everything else focused and guided by what’s most important. 

Then add your sales goals. You’ve already run some rough financial models, so how many sales do you need to hit your goals? How much in revenue does your sales team need to bring in? How is this expected to grow over each period?

SWOT Analysis

Inserting your SWOT analysis here will help anyone else collaborating on this plan, as well as to equip your salespeople with the best information.

You can simply insert your SWOT Analysis diagram here if you have already done one. Or briefly layout your findings with 3 or 4 bullet points for each category.

• Strengths: What do you have or can do better than the competition? What’s the USP?
• Weaknesses: What are your potential weaknesses in the face of competition or sales in general?
• Opportunities: What ripe opportunities are there you plan to seize on or explore?
• Threats: What are the potential threats to your business and sales?

Understanding your business model here well is a key element. You may find interesting the video below what is a business model where I cover the topic in detail.

Market Research

Layout your market. Define it, show the proof that it is there.

How are you defining your business?

What is your industry?

How big is this market annually?

What section or niche of this market are you targeting?

How large is this addressable and serviceable percentage of the market?

You can back this up with reference to existing authoritative market reports and data or reference your own fresh research.

Where there is a lack of existing and publicly available market data, you can supplement and include feedback from surveying potential market customers, your frontline sales and customer service team, and your consultants and advisors. 

Target Customers

Who exactly are your target customers? 

Whether you are a B2B or B2C company, who exactly are the individuals you’ll be selling to?

Insert your ideal customer personas here. 

This is a crucial guide to getting everything else right in sales, from where you market to when you message them and the language you use.

Customer Journey

What is your ideal customer’s sales and buying journey?

How do they find products and services like yours? What do they search and compare before making a decision? What do they base their buying decision on? What’s their process?

Understanding this will help you catch them at the right moments, lead them through to a sale, and even identify the best opportunities for out-marketing your competition and getting better returns on your sales efforts.

List out what you know about the steps in their journey in bullet point format. 

Sales Channels & Funnels

What 3-5 sales channels will you be using?

Knowing your customer journey, what steps will be in your funnel for taking them from awareness to paying customers?

Daily Actions

What daily actions should your sales team be taking to hit your goals? 

How many calls, messages, proposals, or meetings should they be hitting to make everything else work?

Materials Needed

What materials and assets do you need to facilitate this sales process?

For example; landing pages, ads, software (for tracking, prospecting, followup), content, sales scripts, and phone numbers and email addresses for your staff.

Who Will Do It

Whose job is it to manage or do all of these things. This part can make or break everything. The team needs to know what they are responsible for and who is working on what.

If you don’t have a team yet, bullet point the roles you need to fill and tasks assigned to that role. 

Timeline

What is the timeline for implementing this plan?

Put deadlines for hiring, creating materials and launching campaigns, and then evaluating the progress. 

Budget

What is your starting budget to facilitate this plan? 

Action Steps

What are the next 3-5 most important action steps to start boosting sales?