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[Music] today i'm going to talk about how to build an actionable sales plan and i'm going to tell you the story about how we built this plan for ascend but the principles that i'm going to talk about can be applied to any kind of business whether you have a service based business or a product you sell i tried to organize this presentation in such a way that everybody can get something out of it so i'm going to start with our story and then move on from there but just to give you guys a little bit of background on ascendant male marketing we are a marketing agency but we we primarily focus excuse me on inbound marketing which is basically internet-based marketing but the principles around inbound are to attract customers to your business using methods like search engine optimization social media blogging video content etc and so if you want to learn more about inbound i'd be happy to talk to you at length about inbound but that's not what the session is about so um just wanted to give you a little bit of background on that so we started ascend we're a division of next up technology services which is an i.t services company here in valdosta and i worked for nextup for many many years and was their marketing director somewhere along the way i started building websites for our clients it was something that i enjoyed doing but we found that once we built the websites for our clients they just kind of took them and nothing else happened and so that was frustrating from our standpoint because we wanted to watch their businesses grow and we knew that there were inbound marketing methods like the ones that we were using at nextup that could help them and so um in late 2015 we decided to really go all in and and develop this inbound marketing agency um that's when stephen carter he's sitting in the back he came along and we officially started to send inbound marketing um and you know when stephen and i were first starting out um we set some pretty aggressive revenue goals and and we were like fired up we were ready to hit the ground running and just bust our tails to win a lot of new business and a lot of new projects and a lot of new clients um and so you know we we really took on any project that came along any client that came along and we were extremely busy and so with that it would seem like you know that um oh steven did you change that no it's not supposed to look like that oh well that's supposed to be like a money face emoji just fyi so just envision that in your head so is it is it oh it is not supposed to be a sad face but that we're getting to that part but anyway um so yeah so that's supposed to be a money face emoji because you know we we really did generate a lot of revenue a lot of clients a lot of projects that year but unfortunately we didn't turn a profit and you know we were pretty surprised by that because it just seemed like we were super busy we had a lot going on that's the thinking face emoji so just picture that and uh and and so we had to do some soul searching to figure out you know how can we take on all this work and not make any money like that's it was very disheartening uh and and by that point um we had john fuller with us he's sitting up front and he is our front end developer and so uh john and steven and i really sat down for a day and then had longer meetings after that to really define what was going on you know what we needed to do and so we took our our clients um and we evaluated them we basically categorized them in terms of which clients were the most profitable for us and the best to work with and usually those went hand in hand and then which ones which projects didn't do so well and which ones you know were not helping us make money and we were able to come up basically with with a list of characteristics that our best clients fit and really what this strategy is is the development of buyer personas and being an inbound marketing agency this is what we get our clients to do all the time but you know we had to take some time to to build our agency to understand really what our buyer personas were before we could define them and you know that's taking these lessons from the first year that we had to learn the hard way and figure out okay who do we really want to go after now um what which clients are not a good fit which ones are are costing us the most money which ones don't really um value what we do and and which ones do and so from that we were able to come up with a set of buyer personas um so you know we have one that might be a smaller mid-sized business owner maybe he is um the owner of a law firm we have one that is a marketing manager of a larger company and you know we have several others from there but there are some resources out there if you if you look up buyer personas in google there's some templates and things like that that you can go through this exercise to identify the demographics the behavior patterns the motivations etc that make up the audience that you're trying to target now it's a very useful exercise for us um not just because it helped us define who we wanted to target but it also helped us define who we didn't want to target and you know in terms of our service offerings we realized hey we've taken on a lot of projects um and and you know we we have basically two types of work that we do we have project based work and retainer-based work and the projects are like one-time website designs etc and the retainer-based work is like when a company hires us to be pretty much what their marketing department would do um and while the projects were okay um that wasn't the most fruitful kind of work that we had on both ends like the clients that had us on a retainer tended to to do a lot better tended to be a lot happier because they were getting the you know long-term results that they wanted to see whereas the projects tended to drag on maybe longer than they needed to um and so you know just being able to identify maybe we need to focus more on our retainers versus projects um maybe you know if we do take on projects we only need to do this type or at this financial level for it to make sense for us and so this is the kind of soul-searching before you build any sales plan that i think any organization should do just to make sure that you have the right service offering or the right product offering and that you have that you're targeting it to the right people all right so there's a little okay one thing we did uh after we developed these buyer personas is we developed smart goals and you know this outlines what smart goals are we're gonna go through an example in just a minute um but you know the first year i think we set some loose revenue goals it's like we want to make x amount of money the first year but that that really just didn't even scratch the surface of what we needed to think about as a business as an organization and so when we developed our our sales plan for the next year we started to develop smart goals and you know there's specific measurable achievable relevant and time-bound and not only did we develop smart goals for our revenue projections but we developed other smart goals that maybe didn't relate to revenue but that would help the the organization really be a better organization as a whole all right so this is like a little worksheet and i can email this to anybody who is interested in it i didn't bring a print out of it today but this is a good outline for you to determine how to create a smart goal and what we're going to do right now is just go through a quick example of a smart goal this is not a smart goal this is a really bad generic goal and so we're going to take this and work some magic and turn it into a smart goal so let's say every every business wants to increase revenue so that's a start but how can we be more specific about that like how much do you want to increase your revenue by let's say eighteen thousand dollars and then how are we going to measure that well you know if each of our clients brings in an average of thirty six hundred dollars then we need to bring in five so that's how we're going to measure that how are you going to achieve that um well you know to work backwards we know that we generally need to bring in about 50 leads and then five of those will turn into customers so that's that's how many leads we're going to have to talk to and that's achievable we can do that why is this relevant why do we need to increase revenue you know this seems like a silly question but you need to reflect on this with any goal that you set and then for this is to improve cash flow and profitability and then time bound we want to achieve our revenue goals in q2 so set yourself a deadline for these smart goals when you're going to achieve them so we put all that together our smart goal is this to improve cash flow and profitability we will add eighteen thousand dollars and build revenue to our business in the second quarter by acquiring five new clients to acquire five new clients we will talk to 50 new leads by attending two networking events per week in valdosta during april may and june so i know it's kind of a long drawn out run-on sentence but you get the idea of what you need to do why you need to do it and how you need to get there when you look at this and so you know as we were crafting our sales plan we took our smart goals and we filled out a template that looks just like this so we outlined our priorities in terms of how much revenue we wanted to generate which new hires we wanted to bring on which types of service offerings we would start to push or promote we identified who we're going to sell to so that's where we're talking about our buyer personas you know whether that's a certain type of business or a certain age group etc who is going to be responsible for this who's going to sell you know i i sell probably the most for a sin but i have a lot of support with stephen and gretchen and even the team at nextup chipping in to help as well so you know it doesn't all have to fall on you you can delegate certain aspects of the sales process or the sales role to your co-workers and i recommend you do that when you can because you know if most of us in this room are business owners then it can be hard to make time for sales in addition to everything else that you're doing and then looking at you know our 12-month sales goals this is kind of where we get to the time-bound aspect how many new deals do we need to bring in how how big are those deals needing to be and then you know how we're going to get there what activities are we going to generate to to get there and a little bit later in this presentation i'm going to go through this template with an example that is filled out but just to kind of break down some of the aspects of this going back to the previous slide this 30 to 90 day milestones and quick wins this is a you know more of a tactical piece of your sales plan but i think it's very important to have some quick wins because it's such a good motivator like if you know that that you have some deals coming down the pipeline that you can close that you know can can generate some momentum and some confidence in your team try to focus in on those in within the first few months of initiating your sales plan it might be running a special sale or a promotion to just generate some more quick revenue and you know while this is not like a long-term strategy by any means it's important to keep the fire going and you know keep that momentum up really throughout your sales process so one thing that you do when you're setting smart goals is that you work backwards to define the path that you want to take you know we talked a little bit earlier about defining our buyer personas and our ideal clients etc so one of the the things that we identified is that some of our best clients came from a directory listing that we have on uh the hubspot partner agency website um which you know we wouldn't have thought that but then when we were doing our our backwards math it turned out to be the case and so you know if you have a good source of customers or leads make sure you're doing everything you can to maximize that because we had this listing and it wasn't really fleshed out we didn't have you know a lot of text or information about what we do so we really filled that out tried to get reviews from our clients and and beef it up a little bit and since then we've generated more leads from that source so that's just an example of you know kind of working backwards and seeing where you can go um or where you should go and then activity metrics so you know this is different for for every organization but with working backwards you sort of begin to identify okay how many leads do i need to get to get this many customers okay well how how many phone calls do i need to make to get that many leads how many networking events do i need to go to to get that many leads you sort of outline those activities and figure out a game plan to get there and then you got to hold yourself accountable so for us that meant you know we use the crm and we measure all of these things in our crm so we know how many leads are coming in how many of those are turning into opportunities and closing as customers and then you know taking it a step back even from that we can see you know what level of activity do we need to have to get there how many emails do we need to send how many emails are we sending um how many notes you know are we are we making on customers or meetings do we have etcetera so um you know and just a note on this this is a crm that we use it's the hubspot crm and it's free so if you guys are in a organization where it makes sense to have a database of your customers i would highly recommend this one you know you can't lose anything if if it's free so what is it it's uh the hubspot crm and what does crm stand for good question relationship that's right yep um yes it's customer relationship management and and it's basically a database of your customers and prospects uh like an excel spreadsheet on steroids that you can refer to to pull information about your customers and log activity etc all right and then finally of course we got to measure our revenue metrics we got to make sure that we're hitting our revenue goals and you know keeping that in some kind of system whether that is your accounting system or your crm etc you know we also um i think a very important note we sit down with our cfo at least once a quarter to review our financials and make sure that we are on the right track to remain profitable and to hit our revenue goals and i think any business needs to to have a good accountant whether that is somebody internal to your organization or if it's somebody who um you know as a cpa that you hire and meet with them on a regular basis and try to get an understanding of the costs that you're incurring and what it's going to take for you to become more profitable and how much you need to sell to get to your goals that was really one of the most insightful things for us was to to get a true understanding of of the costs that we have of the overhead and and the value of our services and then be able to put together some more realistic projections from there so now we're going to put it all together this is this is an example a completely fictional example that we're going to talk about um with a sales plan diego's barker shop and this is i gotta give credit to steven on this one he came up with this logo and concept in about i guess like 20 minutes this morning so really good job on that and that cute little dog is actually gretchen's dog and she didn't know that we were going to do this i'm sure she's really excited now so yeah diego uh so this is yeah and that's that's diego but um this is a an example sales plan with diego's grooming or diego's barber shop it's a little hard to read i can see that from from here but let's say that that our top priorities for diego's is to increase revenues by 50 000 dollars and we want to hire one new part-time groomer we want to hire a receptionist to handle appointments and payments and we want to purchase more grooming equipment so those are our big priorities at diego's so um you know how how are we going to get there how many new customers do we need to get and by the way i don't know anything necessarily about grooming shops so i might be way off with these numbers and everything but this is just an example so um let's say we need to get seven new customers a month and uh the average customer is gonna spend fifty dollars a month to get to that uh fifty thousand dollar increase so um you know additionally we wanna be sure to promote that we accommodate large dogs that's something that some low-hanging fruit that we're not capitalizing on right now moving into who we sell to we're going to be targeting mostly young professionals and retirees these folks consider their pets as family members i know that gretchen does and then uh you know what what is our approach going to be well our grooming salon we just need to we need to generate more awareness that's our big push for this year because we've only gotten or we've got most of our business so far out of referrals so we want to make sure that more people know about us so we're going to start a social media strategy we're going to start putting out more video content so people can see the you know the cute animals that we um groom and and you know maybe some before and after pictures and things like that and then looking at activity metrics so we want to generate 60 grooming appointments and 20 bath appointments per month we want to attend at least one networking event per week we want to ask for five referrals from customers every week and then we want to make sure that we're being super responsive to our website inquiries and try to get all those in within 15 minutes and then for our quick wins we want to implement a formal referral program and then sign up 10 customers for a theoretical loyalty program so that is diego's barber shop i think great things are in store for them and that i mean i think i ran through that pretty quickly so i apologize if i was too fast but that is my presentation but i have all the time in the world to answer questions now [Music] you