What???
Jack, "The Planning Guy", who relentlessly talks about planning, making a religion about planning everything, every process, every marketing and sales activity now headlining today's blog about not planning results? Maybe just a bit too much sun on the NH beach over the long weekend! What gives?
what gives is that none of us, including the Celtics, can "plan" results.
- We can define the results we want, and hope for those results.
- We can create sales and marketing strategies which are only initiatives and directions.
- We can detail objectives, metrics and KPIs, often in way too much detail.
But when it comes down to the men and women who are at the tip of the spear specifically as salespeople, who are on the phone, on the street, and in their offices touching and reaching out to real customers and prospects, although "strategies" and KPIs may be important guidelines, they are somewhat meaningless without a 30-60-day action plan.
- I can talk about, hope and pray for results.
- I can use objectives and KPIs as boundaries.
- But I can only plan actions!
Too often, we surround our salespeople with too much. Good intentions, all aimed at the common objective of making our number, but too often we leave out the requirement of action planning at the detail level.
We attempt to teach them about strategy, and too often end up just creating confusion. We surround them with sales theories, new systems and out-of-date sales books.
We love to have weekly team meetings, which are important, of course, but then waste 50% of that time telling them stuff that could have been better handled in a pre-meeting video prepping everyone for a more productive meeting to discuss go-forward 30-day action plans and sharing best practices.
In our own work, we ask for week-by-week 30-day plans for 60 days built on a uniform, easy-to-complete template which then becomes part of our tool set kept in our Hubspot CRM so that there is only one source of truth. This also makes everything accessible by everyone since what we are really looking for is the sharing of best practices and best tools among all of the sales team whether that's 5 or 50 people.
One of our very best and most successful heads of sales that we've worked with, Colleen Honan simply calls it "Planning the Plan". We term it "30-60's" where we want to see the following bullets in a template that should take 30 minutes a week to complete and discuss with the manager.
- Weekly schedules for 2 weeks
- Weekly KPIs on the critical sales process numbers of calls, visits, discoveries and closed deals
- Short action-based text of a paragraph or two related directly to that month's objectives
- Additional resources in people or expense that are needed to meet the objectives
HAVE A GREAT DAY SELLING TODAY as we kick off June!
2023 SALES PLANNING
Check out our updated sales productivity site page. Just page down to get our new edition of Writing the Winning Sales Plan for 2023. Or you can just email me, and I will send you a free copy. Connect with me at any time for some quick ideas and feedback. There's never a cost for a call or two, plus I love listening and talking about Sales & Marketing.
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Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.
