How to Create a B2B Sales Plan (a GTM Guide)
For sales managers, planning for the future can feel quite different from stomping out fires in the present. Efficiently structuring your market opportunities and deploying your sales team to match is how sales leaders translate high-level strategy into execution in the field.
销售计划很复杂，尤其是在B2B中。复杂性创造了机会。销售组织可以组织其客户和潜在客户，然后赋予其销售团队有效地提供这些机会的能力，他们就越成功地击败竞争对手。亚搏彩票手机版免费下载
Read on to learn what sales planning is, how to optimize it in B2B, and what best practices develop a successful sales planning process.
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What is Sales Planning?
Sales Planning is how a sales organization slices up the market and aligns its sales team to fit. Sales planningis the crucial linkthat connects high-level strategy—goals, markets, products—with execution in the field.
By optimizing its sales planning, a sales organization can make sure that it pairs the right salespeople with the right accounts and that it groups accounts most efficiently. It can ensure that the way it organizes customers and prospects remains in sync with the company’s overall sales goals. Good sales planning also puts a company’s salespeople in the best position to succeed.
Sales planning comprises the key building blocks of a sales strategy: sales quota planning, territory planning, account segmentation and scoring, and sales capacity planning. By optimizing these and connecting them to one another, a sales organization can increase the productivity of its sales force, reduce attrition and, ideally, raise its bottom line.
What’s the difference between Sales Planning and a Sales Plan?
销售计划是销售计划（或销售领导者团队）每年制造的一次，或者是一次。销售计划是一项持续的活动。这样，从制定销售计划转变为全年进行销售计划的公司将能够保持灵活性，并且可以更快地适应市场或其他业务变化。
The transition from making a sales plan to doing sales planning becomes more important the more a sales team grows and a company’s sales strategy matures. As the sales strategy integrates more and more moving pieces—which can be people, products, territories, customers, markets, currencies, geographies, or any other element—it’s critical that sales leadership be able to address changes as they happen.
Rather than seeing a sales plan as an inflexible framework that to be rigidly adhered to at all moments, sales leaders should view sales planning as an evolving set of modifiable guidelines that help a sales organization best fulfill its goals. Taking this approach helps a sales team to figure out the best way to address its key priorities, even if those priorities change.
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4 Steps to Create a Sales Plan in B2B
销售计划通常包括销售策略的那些方面，这些方面涉及组织潜在客户并协调销售团队，包括帐户细分和评分，销售配额计划，领土计划和销售能力计划。
Account Segmentation and Scoring
帐户细分和评分是销售组织如何对其机遇进行分类和分组。有效地进行销售团队了解他们应该针对的市场，产品和客户以最佳发展业务，哪些市场和销售的机会已经成熟，以及如何最好地部署公司的销售人员。
Both account segmentation and account scoring exert a downstream influence in the sales organization, helping determine how that organization plans its territories and quotas, how it makes its forecasts, and how it interacts with other parts of the organization, including marketing and HR.
The key steps for evaluating sales opportunities
There are three key steps for developing an initial understanding of sales opportunities:
Define account segments
A good segmentation strategy begins with knowing which attributes are most important to your company’s success, and which allow you to most efficiently group accounts by sales strategy. Accounts can be grouped by any number of criteria: industry, revenue, prior-year sales, employee headcount, wallet share, tenure, and more. Any of these may correlate with your product offerings (perhaps you have different products for different-sized companies, or companies in different industries), or with the salespeople in your company (perhaps your salespeople are better equipped to sell to companies in the same industry, even if those companies have different sizes. Perhaps the opposite is true.).
You can additionally segment accounts based on whether they are active or pipeline accounts that require further nurturing. Classifying accounts in this way can help you forecast revenues for the quarter or year.
评估帐户潜力
Sales managers are often lured by the rush of chasing after new business—but it’s often easier, faster, and cheaper to sell to an existing customer than to get a foot in the door with a new account. Take a look at prior-year sales and identify key active accounts with large expansion opportunity. Then calculate the potential ROI of devoting different resources to existing accounts versus potential new ones.
Collaborate with front-line salespeople but incorporate actual data
Make prioritizing and ranking accounts a collaborative process between sales leaders and front-line salespeople, like field managers and sales reps. Front-line teams work with your customers daily and often have valuable insights that can help calculate account growth potential versus exhausted accounts.
同时，请确保您有数据来加强人们可能拥有的销售人员。这样，帐户细分可以是一个双向过程：前线销售人员可以为您提供有关如何读取数据的见解，并且数据可以帮助前线销售人员更好地优先考虑其活动。
Sales Quota Planning
Did you know that 50 percent of organizations create five to ten iterations of their sales quota plans before rolling those quotas out to the field? Here are some tips for setting more effective sales quotas.
Weigh past performance against future opportunity
许多组织将根据他们的销售配额the historical performance of individual sales reps, but that can unintentionally discourage collaboration or penalize your best salespeople. Instead of simply upping last year’s quotas, take a closer look at the overall market opportunity and make sure your quotas are encouraging the behaviors that best fit the unique drivers in your market.
Use technology to monitor and measure the results
The key for setting better quotas is to use the right technology to evaluate effectiveness. “The right technology” means technology designed to do this sort of work.
For example, you’re probably using a CRM to monitor data for leaders and sales teams and to keep track of leads, calendars events, meetings, and deadlines. But this kind of technology doesn’t collect the information you need to design good quotas. Nor can it consolidate, reorganize, and track data in the forms you need.
Instead, you need technology that can collect and analyze sales data automatically, and that can supply this data when you need it.
Strike the right balance
设置销售配额全部有关。销售配额需要满足您的销售代表，您的销售经理和整个公司的需求，同时还可以同步您公司的整体业务策略。通过一个更透明的过程，您将获得销售代表的销售配额，这会导致他们更加努力地实现和超越这些目标，因为他们相信过程并了解产生这些配额的决策。
Create a consistent process
A recent Anaplan survey found that 38 percent of companies suffer from a “lack of effective processes” when setting quotas. At many companies, the process changes yearly. For example, different sales reps might be assigned higher or lower quotas based on their past performance. When these kinds of variables are arbitrary, reps tend to ignore them. To keep both your field and leadership happy, determine a consistent process and stick to year after year.
领土规划
A recent article inHarvard Business Reviewfound that by optimizing their sales territories, sales organizations can increase sales by two-to-seven percent without changing anything else about their strategy and without allocating resources any differently. Indeed, it’s crucial to evolve your territory and quota strategy to keep up as business priorities and objectives change.
Here are three tips for taking the guesswork out of territory planning and integrating your territory planning into your overall enterprise performance management strategy:
Use a data-driven approach
Territory and quota planning needs to be part of your team’s overall sales forecasting and sales analytics processes. Your organization likely has a massive amount of sales data. Look for ways to use this data to gain insights into where the biggest opportunities lie and how those opportunities are spread across your sales territories. Locate territories that show signs of growth and assign reps whose strengths best align with these opportunities. Make sure that your territory assignments and sales quotas are based on real data and solid trends, not just wishful thinking.
Listen to front-line sales managers and reps
与规格计划一样，创建销售领土应该是一个协作过程。与其与销售经理和销售代表合作，从顶线中获得最新的情报。哪些领土被视为特别有前途，哪些领土是没有人愿意工作的死水，为什么？销售人员对机会有很大了解，因此请利用他们的见解和直觉来建立更强大的销售绩效管理计划。
Make a “living” plan
In the business of sales, you often have to improvise and respond to unforeseen circumstances. A territory plan should be similarly flexible. Be willing to modify your territory plans based on shifts in the economy, changing business priorities, or headcount changes.
Like “sales planning” versus “a sales plan,” territory plans shouldn’t be fixed entities; they should evolve with your sales strategy.
It’s for this reason that cloud-based sales planning tools are crucial for maintaining your territory plans. They’re far more flexible than any other solutions. Massive spreadsheets and legacy systems do not offer flexibility or visibility into scenario-based planning. With a cloud-based tool that gives a view into the whole sales organization, sales leaders can foresee the affects a change in territory or account strategy will have and can focus their teams on the most profitable accounts and regions.
使用正确的数据驱动方法,增强胶原aboration, and the ability to do scenario-based planning, territory and quota plans can better align with overall revenue projections, as well as your organization’s big-picture business strategy.
Sales Capacity Planning
在所有销售领土上部署的人数适当的销售量和分配的配额目标对于捕获所有市场机会并满足收入目标至关重要。
Sales Capacity Planning allows Sales and HR professionals to plan, model, and optimize the sales capacity and resource requirements, ensuring that the sales organization has complete coverage in all territories, eliminating the risk of unassigned quotas.
Top-down vs. bottom-up capacity planning
- 自上而下的销售能力计划：采用目标并建立一个列出您当前团队及其配额的模型，然后添加“要雇用”资产以获得足够的配额覆盖范围来达到目标。
- Bottom-up Sales Capacity Planning: Look at your past performance, new information pertinent to the coming year, and your rate limiting factors, and build a model that will predict how much you can do.
Three steps to successful capacity planning
- Align sales capacity and resource requirements with territory and quota plans. Ensure that the sales team is leveraging every opportunity to meet revenue and quota targets.
- Connect sales capacity plans with HR hiring and recruitment plans. Make sure HR is recruiting and hiring the right number of sales reps at the right time for sales onboarding and training.
- 快速确定销售能力和资源差距。了解覆盖所有销售领土并实现配额目标的影响。
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How should you prepare for the Sales Planning process?
According to SiriusDecisions, preparation should begin at least 30 days before sales leadership gets together. To prepare, stakeholders should assemble the previous year’s sales and productivity data: customer counts, channel information, revenue by product, revenue by geography or business units, overall profits, costs, and anything else that can help with the processes described above. It’s key that sales leadership validate the data to ensure that it’s trustworthy.
Once sales leaders have collected data, they should comb through it to locate problem areas. Observing data in different time dimensions (yearly, quarterly, monthly) can help isolate trends, and potential areas of future success.
在销售计划会议，从数据中得出的趋势和结论之前，应以读者友好的格式打包，并分发给所有利益相关者，并有足够的时间使决策者内部化结果。
What are some best practices for Sales Planning?
Making sales planning easier can sometimes be a matter of adopting best practices and maintaining them as goals change. For example:
- Cross-organization collaboration
Because sales planning is about aligning the nuts and bolts of a sales strategy to corporate goals and objectives, sales planning needs to be viewed as a collaborative and interactive process. Planning meetings should involve stakeholders from across the organization. Be sure to include:
- 销售:CSO, Sales Operations, Sales Enablement
- Marketing: CMO, Marketing Operations
- Product: Head of Product, Product Marketing
- Gain a clear line of sight
为了获得竞争优势，销售领导者需要将清晰的视线保持在其销售代表的行为以及这些行为的原因中。例如，在许多公司中，销售代表发现他们的时间大部分时间都用于管理任务。Opensymemetry指出，有65％的销售负责人报告说，在非销售活动上花费太多时间是来年销售的主要业务问题。另一方面，当公司投资一流的销售绩效管理解决方案时，他们的周转率降低了25％，销售周期较短的36％以及销售代表的销售额增加了7％。
- Use metrics that matter
The sales organization’s ability to collect valid data over multiple years is critical to sales planning. Advanced technology can help extract nuggets of insight from vast amounts of data.
- Integrate your tools
工具为销售计划过程提高了效率，并使所有内容都更准确，但是只有当它们属于集成工具套件的一部分时。为了正确完成，销售计划需要营销，金融，劳动力以及您组织使用的任何商业智能工具的数据。通过采用更好的工具，您可以更快地计算领土和配额。
- Retain top talent
According to the BMS Quarterly Sales Index, 56 percent of sales leaders report that retaining good performers will be a big problem for them in the coming year. Adding to the problem is the fact that different companies lose talent for different reasons, which makes it hard to develop a universal solution. Because of this, many sales leaders simply increase salaries, hoping that this will retain the best people. Although this may work in the short term, retaining talent in the long term requires sales leaders to create a culture in which salespeople are able to do their best work.
What is the future of Sales Planning?
As sales organizations develop their sales planning, the more successful ones will adopt the practices described above: turning the yearly sales plan into ongoing sales planning; coordinating stakeholders from across the organization; adopting advanced technology to automate sales planning processes; using modeling capabilities to plan out new territory and quota scenarios.
As the sales world continues to develop, companies who can plan most effectively will be those who continue to beat their competitors. We encourage you to learn more about howsales planning softwarecan help you meet these goals.