How To Create Your Sales Action Plan (Free Template!)

What’s more frustrating than attempting to achieve large long term goals without ever seeing progress?

Nothing!

That’s why having daily activities that build towards your long term goals is the only sure way to see results. 

Needless to say, writing a sales action plan is crucial since it will be the guidelines for your entire sales process.

Psst. if you don't want to read the whole post, here is the sales action plan template.

What Is A Sales Action Plan? 

This acts as the guidelines for your sales team to accomplish a specific goal by a certain date. It also includes all of the information for how the team can achieve this. 

Typically, this plan revolves around weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual timeframes (sometimes even longer). 

Not only that, but it includes all of the necessary information for how the team can achieve the goal.

The point of a sales action plan is to create consistency within your company and to better your sales process. This can have a serious impact on your bottom line. 

Listen to this: “The 60% [of companies] that do have a well-defined sales process in place are 33% MORE likely to be high performers. The win rate exceeds 50% for two-thirds of companies that have a defined process in place.”

Source

These higher-performing results come from having clarity and consistency that your sales action plan creates. 

Planning Your Sales Action Plan

The first step of any plan is to start with the end in mind. And if you don’t have a clear end goal for your sales action plan, then find someone who does.

What I mean by this, is that you should study someone else’s plan that is already proven to work. 

But don’t worry, I went ahead and made you a sales action plan template so you can easily implement it into your business. Here's a blank version:

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And here's a filled out example:

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You can grab both versions here.

But if you want to create your own plan by filling out the template, keep on reading as I will explain the steps to do so.

Creating An Effective Sales Action Plan 

Here is each individual section for creating your own plan.

Look at past data to identify what needs to be improved

I sure hope you have been tracking the best sales metrics during your journey this far. If not you need to start!

Now it is time to sit down, and fully understand ‘What has been going on in the past, and why?’

Key aspects to analyze are:

• What actions have produced the most revenue so far?
• Which team members performed the highest and why?
• If there were months where you hit quota and some months where you did not, what was done differently?
• Can you narrow down your target audience by looking at commonalities between the kind of customers who are responding frequently? 
  

The only sure way to create an amazing plan is to analyze your results from the past and understand how you accomplished them. 

This will give you insights into what key results you should be focusing on, and how you can do it again or even accomplish more in the near future. 

Action Step: Identify what needs to be improved to determine what new key results you should focus on.

Outline how you plan on achieving your key results

After you identify what needs to be improved, it is time to figure out how you will actually improve it. 

Set key initiatives/strategies that revolve around the specific key results you wish to improve. 

Let’s say you want to increase your revenue, but you noticed that your total demo meetings booked were lower than they should be. 

Instead of setting a goal like increase revenue by 30%, you should set the goal of booking 100 demo meetings this quarter.

The 100 demo meeting’s book goal would be specific around the key results you’re going towards.

Action Step: Create a list of key strategies that lead to your desired key results. 

Understand what will help and hurt you

Think about the possible obstacles that you might face. There are plenty of obstacles out there so just focus on the biggest blockers that have the potential to slow you down. 

On the other side of things, think about the type of resources that will help you with your key initiatives. 

Understanding both of these will help you leverage what is available to you and avoid what can slow you down the most. 

Action Step: List out what you believe your biggest potential blockers and key resources/drivers will be.  

Create a timeline and milestones

List out 3 milestones to strive towards. 

Start with the last milestone, and make it long term (1 year or more) to envision the future. Then from your long-term milestone, build out the other 2 milestones that add up to it.

Let’s say for example that your long-term milestone is to close 30 deals this year, and your close rate is 10%. Then you will need to send 300 proposals to potential clients after their demo meeting. Keep working this math backward from each stage in your pipeline until your key strategy adds up.

Make sure that each daily activity is reasonable, otherwise your long-term goals will likely need to be changed.

Don’t forget to describe what metrics you will use to judge your performance. 

Action Step: Determine 3 milestones and the timeframe for each.

Take Action

This is the most important step in any plan.

Now it is time for you to sit down and grind it out. Make it the best you can -- but don’t focus on making it perfect. It will continuously evolve with your business. I highly recommend you utilize the sales action plan template I made for you to save yourself time. 

Next on the agenda is to make sure that your sales team is inspired. That said: if you don’t have a sales team yet, you’ll need to hire the best sales reps available. 

Action Step: Literally sit down and start to fill out this sales action plan template right now to build momentum. 

Action Step Summary

1. Identify what needs to be improved to determine what new key results you should focus on.
2. Create a list of key strategies that lead to your desired key results. 
3. List out what you believe your biggest potential blockers and key resources/drivers will be.  
4. Determine 3 milestones and the timeframe for each.
5. Literally sit down and start to fill out this sales action plan template right now to build momentum. 

That’s a wrap! 

I sure hope you can now write your own sales action plan after this post! In the meantime, you can grab our free sales resources below:

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