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- In this video, I'm gonna teach you how to create a sales plan that gets your business looking right and ready to fight. You know what I'm saying? (chuckles) Creating a sales plan is a process for outlining the who, what, and how, and why of making money for your business. Lots of business owners think that a business plan is the same as a sales plan, but that isn't the case. A business plan defines every aspect of your company. That includes things like operations, marketing, HR and finance, as well as sales. A sales plan is a subset of your business plan that focuses on one thing, closing deals. If you wanna follow along, be sure to download the free template now from the link in the description. What's up? It's Jamal from HubSpot. Like I said earlier, creating your sales plan is a process of answering who, what, how, and why. In order to do this, you have to first define your business. Who are you as an organization, and who are the individuals involved? Start with your company's mission and vision, as well as a brief history of the business. Next, outline your sales team. If you don't already have these things clearly defined, the sales plan template has links to additional tools that will help you with each section. Once you've outlined who is doing the selling, there's a similar process to define who your buyers are. Start by highlighting the locations you wanna target as well as buyer personas of who you want to target in these locations. Why is this important? Well, we ask HubSpot Academy, Sales Training Professor, Kyle Jepson, to explain. - One of the most effective ways to empower your sales team to sell efficiently at a higher velocity is to help them focus on the people who are most likely to buy from you. - One example of an effective buyer persona. Let's imagine that my company sells a great new collaboration tool for graphic designs teams. So I created a buyer persona using HubSpot's free Buyer Persona Generator. Charles, name, is a Creative Director, title, at a technology startup, industry, who's looking for a software to improve team collaboration, goals. The buyer persona also highlights how you can reach Charles, mainly through industry blogs and newsletters. This is essential for when you start developing your sales and marketing strategies. You might also decide to target Charles's boss, Kim, the VP of Marketing, in your prospecting efforts. Your sales plan should also identify who you're not selling to, like Jenny, a junior graphic designer who works on Charles' team but doesn't have a say in what tools the team uses. After you summarize who's selling and who's buying, the next step is to define what it is you're selling. This isn't just a list of products or services, but an understanding of how those products or services are positioned in the marketplace. It's like I always say, no value property makes your business look sloppy. So do this by considering the value proposition of your product or service along with the pricing, market conditions, and your competitive advantage compared to others in your sector. Anyone reading this part of the sales plan should know what your strengths, weaknesses, and comparisons to competing companies are. And there's another what you'll need to answer at this point in the sales planning process. What tools will you need for your team? There is a ton of sales enablement technology on the market to choose from. Personally, I'm a big HubSpot Sales CRM guy, but that's just me. To help make you make the right decision, I ask Kyle for some insights. - So how do you go about figuring out which tools are the best fit for your company's sales enablement strategy? Here are two pieces of advice. First, start with the core and then move to the edges. The core is your foundational systems, your CRM, marketing automation platform, content management system, and so on. Take your time selecting your core because it's going to be where you centralize all of the data on your content, contacts, and customers. You want to choose a system that will work well for you and invest in keeping it long term. Once you have your core in place, you can start building on top of it with all of the specific tools you need to implement your processes and strategy, and that's the edges. Try things out, trade things in and out, mix and match until you get all of the functionality you need to fully implement your strategy. - That's a lot to think about. But before you make any final decisions about tools, you need to know how you're gonna sell your product or service. Will you focus on email marketing with its high ROI? Does your team need a LinkedIn sales navigator for prospecting? Or should you partner with some influencers to get your message out on social media? Maybe you'll need all three. And I'm sure you're thinking yourself, three? That's the number of wishes you get when you rub the lamp of a genie. Yes, and you just blew all of them. I hope you're happy. Now is the time to develop the strategies you'll use for driving sales. This usually needs to be done with the help of your marketing department. So consult with that team to outline the inbound and outbound strategies they plan on using to bring customers to your door. Remember, Charles, the Creative Director? Our buyer persona determined that an industry blog is an ideal way to reach him. So be sure to point that out to the marketing team as they build an inbound strategy. We also determined that Charles's boss, Kim, would be a strong prospect for our business. So in this section of the sales plan, lay out the strategy your sales team will use to reach out to VPs of Marketing that match Kim's buyer persona. Once all these strategies are in place, you'll be ready to write up an action plan that spells out the exact tactics you'll use to accomplish your strategic goals. And speaking of goals, I think it's time we discuss the why of every sales plan, as in why are you doing it? Now, the obvious answer is to make money, but that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is about setting specific goals for overall revenue, plus a number of deals, number of units sold, length of sales cycle, and other metrics you use to make sure the right amount of money is coming in at the right time. Whatever decisions you make in the who, what, and how sections of the sales plan should all relate to one of these goals. That's the why that I'm talking about. And also, it is about money. That's why there's a space for creating a budget. It will also help you with one of the hardest parts of sales planning, and that's forecasting. If you haven't already, now is the perfect time to download the free Sales Template, down in the description below. And at the very end, you'll find a way to get a free sales forecasting template to make sure your ledger stays in the black. I hope this video has you super excited to start on a sales plan for your business. And if you don't feel ready to try it out on your own, HubSpot Academy has a free course on sales enablement that you can take right now. The more you invest in learning these proven techniques for getting sales, the more confident you'll be in launching your own sales plan. And if you could do me a favor, if you found any part of this either interesting or helpful, please hit the Like button and consider subscribing. And until next time, I'll see you out there. You know what I'm saying? Peace out. - I can't find this client info. - Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better. (upbeat music)