Building a Sales Plan for 2020!

With 2020 right around the corner, you’re probably finalizing your sales plan for 2020. Whether you are in the finance, insurance, travel or telecom industries, various questions are bouncing around your head right about now. Questions like:

Am I even going to hit our quota this year? Is our quota realistic with the team I have today? Which sales team leaders or sales reps need to go or stay? Is our compensation program driving the right behaviors?

Of course, none of these have easy answers and it can take hours of planning, research and evaluation to answer them. In preparation for the upcoming business planning season, we thought we could help you think about your sales plan for 2020, with some insights regarding the key sections of your plan. Here are a number of things to consider when finalizing your sales plan for the new year:

Revenue Plan:
As the balance of the categories will be affected by the revenue, it makes sense to start with the revenue plan. Once you get handed your revenue number from your CEO for the year you need to break it down and figure out what your revenue mix is going to look like. How much revenue can you drive from net new or existing clients? And then, how can you reduce churn from existing clients?

Market Coverage
Once you have an idea of how much revenue you can drive by revenue mix you will now need to figure out your market coverage. How will you build your direct and indirect selling machine to achieve your revenue targets and how will you equip your selling machine to achieve the right results? In terms of your new acquisition team, how can you equip them to succeed? Which selling tools are needed? What does your client success team and strategy look like?

Customers
Without customers, there really isn’t a business. Review major customers to determine if they are susceptible to competitors. For your large customers, it’s worth doing quarterly, semi-annual, or yearly reviews with them. It’s much easier to keep a good customer than to find a new one. This may also be an opportunity to pitch them a new service or solution.

People
The whole plan will fall apart if you don’t have the right sales reps on your teams. It’s a truism, but still: a company’s employees are their most important resource. They will be the ones doing the selling, marketing, providing customer support, and dealing with prospects and customers. Do you have the right sales reps to be successful? What hires do you anticipate needing for the year? You may need to add a new type of sales rep to the team.

Quotas & Compensation
Plan carefully how you break up the quotas and compensation models. Otherwise you could be incentivizing the wrong behaviors or could be creating a mass exodus of sales reps due to ineffective compensation plans. Are sales reps going to be motivated by your compensation plan? Is your compensation plan competitive in the marketplace? Does your plan incentivize the right behaviors for each individual sales rep in a way that is truly motivating?

Set Goals
The output of the sales planning cycle should be a set of goals and targets. These targets should be quantifiable and most of them should be able to be broken down for the year. Don’t forget about the activity goals that can build towards the revenue goals and can be divided by individual sales team members.

Bonus: Get Enerjoy!
Enerjoy can help you achieve your goals. Enerjoy helps empower and elevate each and every rep in your sales or customer support team with personalized incentivization and gamification. Powered by a machine learning engine, Enerjoy’s smart sales achievement platform generates tasks, challenges and assignments based on the cognitive profile of each one of your employees. It helps increase sales and performance, improve performance of the middle tier, while helping you manage your sales team better. Find out how we do it here!

This blog was designed to give a high-level overview to help get you into the right frame of mind as you finalize your sales plan. Remember to start with the revenue plan. Then figure out your market coverage and do a customer review. Make sure you have the right sales reps and are compensating them properly. Once you’ve set your goals you’re good to go!