Sales and Marketing Assistant

y includes:

- Pay (salary and commission)
- Sales training
- Sales tools and resources
- Contest prizes
- Team bonding activities
- Travel costs
- Food

Compare the sales plan budget to your sales forecastfor accurate budgeting.

If you want to take your plan to the next level, read on to learn some tips for creating a highly effective sales plan.

**Tips for Creating an Effective Sales Plan**

We've gone over what you should include in a sales plan, including some examples and mockups.

Learn some tips and tricks for creating a sales plan that helps you hit target numbers and exceed your higher-ups' expectations.
- Use industry trends to strengthen your plan. When presenting your sales plan to a stakeholder, use industry trends to highlight why your plan will be effective.
- Specify the technology you'll use to track success. You can do this for internal reference or let stakeholders know how you'll measure success. Some tools you can consider include CRMand dashboard software.
- Support your budget proposal with hard facts and data. If you're creating a budget as a part of your plan, support it with previous performance data and sales forecasts.
- Create different plans for each team. If you create a sales plan for business development, inbound sales, outbound sales, field sales, and so forth, you can get even more granular and specific in your goals and KPIs.
- Get marketing's input. Marketing and sales alignment is critical for the success of your sales plan. The more input you have from marketing, the more you can align your lead generation, prospecting, and nurturing efforts.
- Talk with your sales reps to understand their challenges. It might be easy to get lost in numbers and forecasts. But it's important to know your sales representative's day-to-day to understand what will and will not prove effective or feasible.
- Complete an in-depth competitive analysis. You must know what the competition is doing well to create a plan that nudges your company in that direction.

**Sales Plan Examples**

You can create a few different types of sales plans for your organization. Here are some examples.

**30-60-90-Day Sales Plan**

Download Now: Free Sales Training Template

This general sales plan is defined not by theme but by time frame. You'll create three goals: one for the 30-day mark, another for the 60-day mark, and the last for the 90-day mark. You can choose to focus on quotas or reduce customer churnby a certain percentage.

Consider this plan if you're new to the role since you can use it to track your progress during your first ninety days. A 30-60-90 day plan can also be useful for a new business that's still figuring out its sales goals.

Peggy Ratcliff McKee, an executive career coach at Career Confidential, describes the 90-day planas "a great starting point[where] you may end up speeding up your goals or extending them depending on the specific needs of your new company."

**Marketing-Alignment Sales Plan**

Download Now: Free Marketing & Sales Alignment Template

In many ways, a traditional sales plan is already aligned with marketing. Still, you can create a marketing-alignment sales plan if your organization has not yet aligned both of these departments.

The plan's focus will be on establishing ideal customer profilesand buyer personas and aligning marketing's messaging with sales' product pitch. A strong marketing-sales alignment ensures everyone within your organization is on the same page and reduces miscommunication down the line.

**Business Development Strategic Sales Plan**

Download Now: Free Strategic Business Planning Template

A strategic sales plan for business developmentwill focus on attracting new business to your company by networking with other companies, sponsoring events, and doing outreach. In your sales plan, you'll want to choose the right KPIs that best reflect performance for these specific outreach channels.

Business development is imperative for long-term success because it will help your organization better understand your industry's competitive landscape and strategize on how to stand out. Plus, it ensures that everyone at your company is working toward a common goal.

**Market Expansion Plan**

Download Now: Free Marketing Plan Template

A market expansion plan outlines a task list and target metrics when expanding into a new market or territory. This type of sales plan is specifically concerned with addressing a target market in a new geographical area.

You'll typically take into account distribution costs and, if applicable, time zone differences between your sales representatives and target buyers, as well as other logístical factors.

**New Product Sales Plan**

Download Now: Free Product Launch Kit

If you're launching a new product, create a sales plan specifically to generate revenue from the new launch. It'll be crucial to carry out competitive analysis, determine a sales strategy, strengthen your brand positioning, and secure channel partners if yo