Enhance Your Sales Process Analysis for Staffing

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[Music] foreign thank you for just watching Staffing monthly and all the engagement that you provide it is truly uh it's truly amazing and I am grateful for the the people we have in our audience to really Reach Out provide feedback and just engage with what we're sharing and help us on this mission to bring industry insights and you know actionable content to you on a monthly basis to help you get better in your professional career and I just want to uh dig through a presentation that I'm going to be delivering next month at the Staffing industry analysis executive forum I want to give you a sneak peek of this presentation that I'll be delivering live there and on Thursday March 9th at executive forum I'm going to be delivering the talk about how to build a successful sales plan and obviously those of you that follow me here you know that I'm involved in a lot of different areas of Staffing with Staffing Mastery providing coaching and consultancy to the industry stacking monthly publication you know providing actionable insights to the industry I'm a partner with Employment Solutions of New York I also have worked with a technical expert to develop a recruiting workflow automation tool called candidate and I also lead the national independent Staffing Association so I I am a student of this industry I serve this industry in a number of ways and if there's any of these ways that make sense to connect with you I would love to do that so please make it a point to connect with me and as we get into the agenda that we're going to be walking through first it's important to know that one does not just build a sales plan okay uh first I look at a plan being the bridge to get you from where you are to where you want to be and ultimately if you don't know where you want to be or where you want to go then any road will get you there and that's a little bit dangerous and can take maybe a lot longer than you want it to so before we get into the the content of building a sales plan it's going to be important for me to break down how to know what your sales goals should actually be right so we're going to spend a little bit in the beginning talking about how to actually set the right goals that you can build a plan to achieve right because they have to be aligned you don't want to build a bridge to nowhere right uh then we're going to spend most of our time talking about how to build the sales plan okay and we're going to use data to create a realistic plan designed for Success okay and then we're going to close out just how do we ensure success along the way right it's very easy to say hey this is the plan and what we're going to do but managing the plan and the process along the way is really what helps you achieve success so that's what we're going to focus on today and when I approach setting goals when I approach setting a plan and trying to understand where do I want to go or do I want to achieve I was just asking myself two questions first how much and second where does it come from right this could be a question around recruiting growth how many head count do we need to to get to where we want to go and where is the head count going to come from when it comes to revenue targets how much revenue do we need to get to get to where we want to go where is it going to come from right and a lot of times when you ask that question one of those where does it come from answers is new sales right and then you have to ask yourself how much revenue do we need from new sales and where does this Revenue come from right and that's the first part these two questions are the foundation of building the plan right so as we get into this here we've all heard the adage that past performance is not indicative of future results right and that is true however it is a very good reference point it is a good way to look at the past and see what your company has done how it's performing and is it capable of achieving certain goals that you set for yourself so as we're looking at this what I've realized is that most companies don't use data to determine their goals or build their plan most companies will say okay we want to grow by 10 which can be a bit arbitrary you know and honestly the bigger you get the bigger that 10 percent has to get and technically becomes harder right or sometimes they just say we want as much business as possible like we don't want to you know constrain ourselves to some arbitrary goal right and you say go get it and you know sometimes that little bit of direction or lack of Direction can be damning to your organization I personally believe that it's best if you actually use data to help you frame your goals okay so I want to walk you through what I call an eight-step process to setting a a plan right I use a similar eight step process for setting a strategic plan that some of you might have observed when I spoke at the Sia you know advisory growth board a few months ago it's a similar process to setting a successful sales plan but step 1A you need to identify your operational performance metrics okay things like what is your average pay rate your average bill rate your average markup average gross margin per hour right what are your average hours per temp or contractor right what are your average temps contractors per client okay what is your client retention rate and your GM retention rate okay now the reason that I look at these things is these are going to give you an indication of how your company performs and generally speaking your company is going to perform the way it does and it's going to continue to perform the way it does because of how you approach Staffing how you approach pricing which markets you serve the geographies you're in all of those external forces begin to shape you know how you respond to those things and that in turn you know determines kind of who you are and how you perform as a company right so you need to get all of this information and this is generally pretty easy to get out of most softwares out there but you can pull this information out if you're wondering about client retention rate and GM retention rates there's a very specific exercise that I work with people on uh to to do this that actually is the foundation for the client growth plan that is uh you know part of a larger sales strategy but step when you're looking to step 1A when you're looking at this information if you use a Tracker something like iuser I built for my own you know uh professional career if you're looking at something like this it's really these these six data points that are gonna give you most of the Intel that you need as far as operational performance metrics the billing the GM the payroll the hours attempts to clients like you can just be putting this in on a weekly basis and capturing this information this data will give you most of what you need to set a sound financial plan or a sound plan to achieve a certain level of sales success right now when you're putting all of that data in week to week in a type of a track or whatever you use right that's this is just what I used you know it can basically compound the data or basically extrapolate the patterns of the data into your averages it's not super sophisticated but it will tell you you know what is your gross margin retention from period to period what is your average pay per hour your average bill all of these things will be the data points that you need to create a sound sales plan now there is another side to the data that you do need to get other than the operational performance you do also need to understand your sales performance metrics so so step one b and you know step one is just getting data right understanding your business and how it operates step one B is understanding your sales people and how they operate and you should understand the yield that each part of the process right every time we have sales people go out and do stuff like make calls and have emails and do visits and go to networking events or whatever they might do these are activities all these are activities are prospecting activities to try to generate more business right more sales more Revenue then we should have an understanding of how many activities does it actually take to get a meeting right and I mean when I say meeting I'm eating actual business conversation with a company that has the prospect of becoming a billing client right what is that conversion rate you know is it two percent ten percent five percent what is that conversion rate for your sales people right and now you're looking at what is your conversion rate from meetings to proposals because typically when you have a business meeting with someone you're learning their needs and you go through that process right it might result in a proposal you might decide hey this is a good fit for the business the prospect might feel like you can solve their problem let's put a proposal out there based on your pricing structure right what is your conversion rate from meetings to proposals how many of your meetings result in you submitting a proposal now just because you submit a proposal doesn't mean everyone's going to sign it right so now there's another conversion yield how many clients do you get out of proposals you need to understand that and then another one that most companies Miss is the conversion rate between clients to billing clients we have all experienced companies that do not actually put an order in or they put an order in but doesn't get filled or whatever it might be for some reason between signing the contract they don't actually turn into paying clients right so we have to understand like what is that yield rate look like and once you have this data set between 1A and 1B here you'll have everything that you need to create the plan that I'm about to walk through okay so if you're looking at conversion data just to show again this is you know part of the tracker that I built for myself I I'm sure the software's out there that you're using can do this um but you just track this weekly how many calls emails other whatever activities are doing how many meetings are they getting a week how many proposals how many clients are they signing right and you just you track this on a weekly basis roll it up into quarterly so you can see Trends you can see you know what activities are happening you know what are their conversion percentages you know and it takes you all the way through the process to see how many activities does it take to get one billion client and is this example you can see it's 233 right this is good data to have it's also good to see it by quarter because you can see if their conversion rates somewhere goes up or goes down it might be an opportunity for training right so amazing amazing tool to have and to use but as we're looking at this here now we can talk about step two right typically when you're building an annual sales plan like we're referencing here today you're generally going to be building this in the fourth quarter right you're not gonna you're not really gonna wait until January or February right now to do this if you don't have a solid sales plan in place and you're just you want to use this you can do it now right you can you can get an idea of what to do and you can apply what I'm going to share with you to have a sales plan for the rest of the year but best practice is to be doing this in Q4 so you can actually have a strong sales plan for the entire following year right so fast forward to October November whenever you're going to be sitting down on your leadership team and determining your sales plan for next year you can do this you can forecast your year-end financial performance where do we think we're going to end up because where we end up this year is the starting point for next year right that's the beginning point of our of our plan as I mentioned the plan is just a bridge to get you from where you're at to where you want on a b right well we have to forecast where we're going to finish up the end of the year and that's the where we're at and then the plan will take us to where we want to be at the end of the following year so ultimately you're going to all you're going to do is you're just going to take your year-to-date financial performance and you're just going to determine an expected weekly value for each remaining week right if you're 39 weeks through the year you just have to figure hey based on what's going on in the business right now I expect the last 13 weeks to be x value of Revenue or gross margin or whatever and then you just add it to where you're currently at and that's going to give you a forecast of your financial performance where you're going to end the year and it might actually looks like this and this is just a sidebar in my tracker that I use a couple different forecasting methods to say hey based on where we're at in the year we anticipate finishing the year somewhere around 92 million one hundred eighty five thousand three seventy four right now for sake of argument this is all data this data is not uh specific to any company out there now that just tells you hey this is where we think we're going to end up right because that will become the starting point for next year now now that we have that the next piece that we need to start building a good plan is we need to determinize determine an annualized run rate now some people might think this step is not essential I'll tell you why I think it's really important one to do this all you do is you just take the the all the revenue for the past 13 weeks and create an average weekly revenue and then you multiply it by 52 and that's going to give you kind of what the last 13 week period would look like if it was expanded over a year you know your your run rate right the reason I find this is important is this is a great indicator if you're growing or declining right because if your annualized run rate is higher then your estimated year end that means you're growing means you have momentum going in to your starting point when you have momentum in your growing it's a lot easier to accomplish sales goals right on the other side this is an indicator that will tell you if you're declining you would be surprised how many companies are actually declining and then they set these aspirational sales goals thinking they're easier to achieve than they really are because they skipped this step right and they didn't realize they were going into the year decelerating which means they were going to have resistance opposed to momentum going into next year which makes it harder to achieve sales goals right so this is a really important step also on the sidebar of the tracker you're going to see down below you know we just have the annualized and it's just taking the last 13 weeks or whatever period and you can see in our example here you know we're at 94 we're couple million dollars ahead of our estimated year end which means we have acceleration we have momentum going into next year which is a good position to be in if it's not if we were decelerating you you're going to plan your sales plan and your approach a little bit differently right so as we're getting into this step four is just determining what is needed to achieve the growth goal right every head count has a weekly Financial value right how many head count do you need to grow to achieve your goals right now we just need to take what we're learning and apply it to our goals and then put it into the language of the industry headcount and clients right so it would look something like this and again this is just another part of the tracker I do this in Excel because it's easier for me um but I'm sure the tools that you're using probably have this capability you know and you can do something similar but it's just where you would put you know your year-end estimate that we talked about the annual run rate a goal and you know how much as I talked about when you have a goal how much do we want to do that's our goal where does it come from we might say we want to do 100 million that's the how much where does it come from 5 million from perm based on our our GM and client retention exercise you might determine that 84.7 million is going to come from existing clients based on the four square exercise you might determine that you can pull nearly 2.6 million in revenue from rate increases as part of your client growth plan that you'll run but you'll also determine that the remainder nearly 7.7 million needs to come from new sales right so this is just going to break down and that tells you that's how much needs to come from new sales and you can see all of the other data it's like okay well in order to achieve that we would need to average 220 you know 2020 head count you know ending the year some around 200168 looks like we're going to need to acquire 34 billing clients right so it gives you some perspective of the work that needs to be done okay and that is going to lead us right up until step five which is where we're going to spend most of our time talking about building the sales plan right when it comes to building a plan you really just need to know there's kind of two things that you have to look after you know what is it that needs to be done and how are we going to do it right what needs to be done how are we going to do it and when we're building a sales plan we're just going to use the performance metrics that we've identified to determine what the sales team needs to do to achieve the financial goals okay we're going to spend a lot of time here I'm going to break down this process if you have questions you can certainly ask them at the end with this the first thing to keep in mind is that when you are building a sales plan or any plan you need to start with the end in mind what are we trying to achieve right if we're thinking about a sales plan being the bridge to get us where we're at to where we want to go we have to know where we want to go right and in this case here let's say that we want to achieve 7 million six hundred eighty two thousand five hundred thirty dollars in new sales revenue right in order to do that that essentially equates to 147 741 dollars per week of Revenue which when you're starting out with new sales and you're always start from zero right that might seem like a lot but we're going to break this down a little bit further to show you how it actually works so now 147 000 in weekly revenue is roughly 155 billing head count right so now we're converting this into into the language of the industry now 155 billing headcount becomes the average weekly head count Target right this is a number if you say hey in order for us to hit our goals we're trying to get to 155 billing headcount out of this new sales campaign right not not part of what we've already done not from existing accounts per se but out of the new sales bucket right so if 155 is the average weekly Target that actually becomes your mid-year goal so we're trying to get from essentially zero headcount under the new sales campaign to 155 by the end of June right so now we're like okay we're starting to frame targets we're starting to frame out the bridge does this make sense awesome so now as we're looking at this it's going to look something like this if we have a we're starting from zero we need to get to 155 by the midpoint of the year which means that we essentially need to be somewhere around 310 by the end of the year right so now we can set these quarterly benchmarks you know so now you're looking at this and you're starting to frame out the plan the what needs to happen right you know with a plan it's what needs to happen and and how does it need to happen right so here here's our quarterlies into week 13 we want to strive to be at 78 and a week 26 try to be 155 so on and so forth so that tells us where our billing head count should be it gives us a metric to compare progress against now taking this a little bit further now we understand based on the operational performance metrics that 155 billing headcount equates to roughly 16 billing clients right we're speaking the language of the industry headcount clients right that's what recruiters that's how recruiters and sales people talk so now 16 billing clients becomes the mid-year goal so now you're actually aligning it like this where now you've got your quarterly you know laid out you've got your head count targets per quarter while you're trying to finish at now you've got your billing clients laid out and you can start to see the framing of the bridge the what needs to happen part of the plan right now if we're getting more into the you know where are we going it tells you that 33 billion clients becomes the year-end goal so now as you're talking to your team they should know that we need to get to 16 by the midpoint and 33 by the end of the year like those are the goals that's what we're driving towards right clear instruction clear results if you give that level of visibility people know what they're working towards that's an easier time to work towards it so now we need to realize that often misstep is that not every acquired client turns into a billing client and if we just assume that every client that we acquire is going to turn into a billing client we're setting ourselves up to fall short and not be successful so we need to make sure that we're actually you know accounting for that that conversion yield of clients to billing clients and based on using our sales activity tracker stuff that I highlighted a moment ago you can see that we're trying to acquire 33 billion clients by the end of the year but ultimately our performance indicates that we're going to need to acquire 46 actual signed contracts or clients to get to 33 billion clients right now the good news is is planning for the 46 means we have a better chance of hitting the 33. if you plan for 33 and you fall short you have no other choice but to miss your goal right but if you plan for 46 and you fall short you've got plenty of opportunity to hit or exceed your goal still right you know it's what they say if you shoot for the stars you'll catch the moon on the way down right same concept now that we're looking at to you know looking at that yield now we actually have to use the sales performance data to see okay out of how many acquired clients how many proposals is that going to take how many meetings is that going to take how many activities do we need to do to get those meetings right and now we're starting to lay out the orderly benchmarks super simple right now this is the again we're framing out the what needs to happen part of the plan okay you're starting to see okay this is what needs to happen we need to have 1900 activities in q1 and our Target of those 1900 activities is to get 38 meetings and we anticipate being able to submit 22 proposals out of those meetings and of those 22 proposals we anticipate getting 12 you know acquired clients that should result in the eight billing clients that is our Target for q1 right so you're now you're starting to use this data the backwards planning piece you know to actually work into the framing of what we need to do to achieve the goal so the next piece is now you've now you've framed that out and you know how much work needs to be done then you have to start planning the activities right what is the work that needs to be done specifically what are the activities you know where are the top of funnel tof leads going to come from right how will you track progress along the way you need to start planning these activities out and building these into your day because this is the actual how the work is done right this is that the little connector between what needs to be done and how it's going to be done and what you plan is going to make a difference couple the campaigns that I I use and have had success with and teach one is the 30-day plan this is really more of a blitz mentality it is a it is a high velocity type plan where you are focused on a lot of touches it's a very targeted multi-touch campaign when I say targeted you're literally going to find at least 30 prospects where you have all of their contact information and you're going to map out the actual Cadence of activities that you're going to do but all of the prospects that are on this list should meet the criteria of success to deliver you to your goal of 7.6 million or the 155 head count so if you're doing this you can't be focusing on companies where there's gonna be a lot of onesie twosies right you have to focus on companies that can actually provide the Staffing head count that you need to hit your targets right so you'll pick very specific prospects that you're going to go after and then you are going to plan out different prospecting activities for each day I'm going to show an example of this in a second but ultimately this is a high touch High Velocity plan where you're kind of Blitz mentality you're taking 30 prospects through a a short window of time with a lot of touches typically 23 in a month and it might look something like this and this is again this is out of the same tracker concept where we just we plan it so every day day one is a call to email three networking for referral you know day five is another call and you might have different activities for the day and this is going to be dependent on who you are as a company you know the types of companies you're prospecting the types of sales people you have you know some people they work on a national footprint so doing things like a physical walk-in not realistic right you have people that are really strong on the phone and maybe should do more calls and you have other people that are amazing at writing emails and maybe they should amp up the emails and their plans so you can Custom Tailor this part of it to you your organization your prospect demographics as well as your sales people you know but you'll have a plan that you can work people through now as an alternative you can also follow something that I teach as a 12-week plan you know and I was really inspired by this by uh by the 12-week year I love the concept of kind of hyper focused periods of intensity right over this kind of long period of time which long is 12 weeks I think it's long enough to see results but short enough to not lose sight of the goal so here you might actually start with a number of new prospects each week and be dropping them into your campaign right where every week is going to have a different activity and you're just going to move these prospects through that activity from week to week to week to week until they you know so one of the three Fates occurs you know ideally with either of these prospecting plans you want them to either say no I'm not interested we don't use agencies or no please stop calling and you remove them from the plan or two ideally they say yes this is great let's set up a meeting right and you move them to your sales cycle which is still removing them from this plan or the third fee is they don't ever respond and you just get to the end and then you have to put them in the recycle bucket for later right but you would just drip these in each week and you start moving people through the process where the max number of prospects touches to a prospect in a quarter might be 15. so less velocity than the uh than the 30-day plan but more consistency over a longer period of time so you really have to choose what is the the best plan for you and your organization this one might look something like this you might just order hey week one we're gonna do you know LinkedIn Outreach that's we're going to start our cycle lock by just doing some LinkedIn Outreach right week two you might have a little bit of a flurry now you got their attention you want to do an email call and then a LinkedIn follow-up right and then move them through and these are just examples like you're going to go through and you're going to Custom Tailor these you might you might drip in you know postcards or a mailing or something else you might drip into this but you can see how the weeks at the top you know week one is super slow you got 10 Prospects that you're going to be moving through the funnel right but we too it adds up week three adds up and this builds over time until you get into you know the 12th and 13th weeks when you're sort of in the cycle right and you're just keeping this through but each week you're just dropping new people into the actual campaign this is measurable this is a plan that somebody can follow right A salesperson can say okay I know that I've got to do introduce 10 new prospects and do LinkedIn Outreach to 10 new prospects right and 10 might seem like a really low number but you have to think with the end in mind eventually that 10. there's gonna be a whole lot of touch points when you get into weeks 12 and 13. now obviously I know that it's not going to be all tens right it never will be you're going to have people that say stop calling me you're going to have people that say hey let's talk and those ones will get removed out of the the plan and you'll just keep working people through until they either respond or they reach the the 12th week and at that point you'll recycle them and reinsert them into the campaign later on in the year right but this is the beginning of the how to do what we do now as we're looking at this the next part that we need to plan for is where are the prospects going to come from where the top of funnel leads that are fueling these plans going to come from like what do we expect do we expect sales people to go out and generate their own leads do we have an amazing marketing team uh that is actually generating a lot of leads for us that are just flowing in so we have a tool like seamless or Zoom info or something like that that is actually we're pulling from to get leads that they just need to Source on LinkedIn you need to have an answer for this so we can keep filling the funnel right like that's the first part of this is getting prospects into one of these two campaigns right so we know that like Hey by the end of the quarter we need to have done 1900 activities well if we're on a 30-day plan right for a 30-day plan we need at least 30 prospects in each one to be able to do this you know and then on if we're doing a 12-week plan you're gonna need at least 130 you know 10 a week to be dropping into the funnel right and you'll plan this out based on the activities you need to to to accomplish to hit your goals you'll be able to plan how many leads do you need to push through the campaigns and those are minimums that we're talking about so now that we are in the we've framed out the what needs to happen that's what we've done we've basically built the plan by Framing out what needs to happen the next piece is we need to know how it needs to happen right it's one thing to say hey I need you to call 150 people but it's the how the execution piece that's going to determine if you have a level of success or not right so you need to plan for that you need to train how to do the work right you need to train how are they getting new prospects like I mentioned are these are they responsible for scouring LinkedIn are they doing the networking stuff do they have access to the tools like are they using the the resume search tip that I use like are they how are they doing it you need to train them on how to do that part how to fill the funnel and then you need to train them on how to make a great cold call are they doing the five part process right you know teach them how to send great emails are they nailing the subject line do they have the right character account and the right word count and the right you know framework of it is their email hitting the five parts of an effective email right are they doing it that way right you need to train them how to do it and if you need to be part of your training process you know how do they effectively Network you know most people show up to networking events and they're super friendly in their play and they think that they're effective but the reality is they're not really moving the process forward because they don't have a networking game plan right we need to teach them how to do that that's part of building a sales plan that's successful how do they get great referrals most people don't even know what a referral looks like what a good referral is or how to ask for it and you need to teach your people this and consistently teach your people this how they optimize LinkedIn how do you set your profile up the right way how do you work LinkedIn what are the Outreach campaigns that you're running on LinkedIn to be optimized to be driving towards a successful outcome you have to teach these things right and all of these things would be an entire Workshop in and of themselves that's why I can only go this deep here but they also need to know how to navigate sales meetings do they know the questioning strategies they know what they're driving for they know how to you know sell based on value do they know how to negotiate right you have to teach them how to propose and negotiate with clients right so you're not you know competing on price you need to teach them how to close clients sometimes you'll you'll have a pipeline clog up with just clients that have not signed you know unsigned proposals and you need to figure out how do you manage that pipeline like teach them how to do this to keep the process flowing and you've got to teach them how to track their progress right like that's a big part of you know knowing making sure you're going to get to where you want to go is to make sure that you're on the right track right so that is part of building the successful sales plan is understanding how to frame out what needs to happen and then make sure you can train how it needs to happen right and if you do those two things really really well you will have a sound plan for your organization now once you build the plan step six of our step 8 process here is communicate the sales plan A lot of times people fall down on a communication step and you don't actually share the information that's relevant or you don't share it in a way that is clear and you have to understand that clear instructions gets clear results if you want clear results give clear instructions right so if you're going to communicate this you need to share what are the organization's goals right what Revenue needs to come from new sales we talked about that you know the organization is going to grow that revenue is going to come from somewhere existing clients perm business rate increases whatever it might be some of it has to come from new sales so you want to show how the goals of the the sales plan support the new sales goals of revenue and how it supports the organization and then you want to convert it into or translate it into the language of the industry how many head count and new billing clients do we need to hit that Revenue Target and then you need to clearly communicate the work that is going to be done you know what is the work and who's going to do it and then how will the work be done right so this is the process we're going to follow we're going to follow this prospecting plan you know then we're going to say how are we going to measure and Report progress you know you need to build a culture of accountability and this is how you do it and it might look something like one of the templates that we use you know I'm not going to read this but just to summarize it just says hey this is our goal it has to come from new sales in order to get here a piece of it needs to come from new head count you know this is how we're going to track it what our goals are we're going to measure and report it each week in addition to headcount we understand that we got to grow billing clients you know to hit our goal we you know we currently have 62 we need to add 34 new billing clients so our gear on goal is 96 you know and we're going to follow a 12-week prospecting plan to get there and we're going to measure and report this on a weekly basis as a company and also as an individual salesperson so everybody can see how they're contributing to the goal right this is just a this is just part of the overall like strategic you know uh communication template that I use but this is just modified for this part of this the sales plan communication and once you've communicated effectively communication doesn't stop with announcing it on the front end you have to keep communicating it at your weekly touch points which we're going to talk about but you should have these weekly touch points you should have your you know monthlies your quarter leads which I'll mention but you always have to be communicating you know the goal progress and what we're doing and how we're getting there right but step seven is so important you need to align it to the person right you need to if you have a sales team each person should know how many new billing clients and increase weekly billing head count they're responsible for producing to help achieve the organizational goal right if you need to add a hundred new clients and you have a sales team of 10 maybe each person's goal is 10. right maybe that's all even maybe some people have you know different territories maybe one person is 15 and someone else is five right but everyone should understand what role they play in aligning to the overall goal and then ideally you can work with them to align this progress to the financial performance of that other professional and personal goals right that's that's the goal that creates alignment and buy-in if you can show them how them accomplishing their goals and helps supporting the organizational goals can be meaningful to them personally and professionally you will get buy-in and people will follow this plan step eight this is just working the plan this is it this is the eighth step of my planning process it's working the plan get out of planning mode once you lay the plan start working the plan and do not blow the plan up do not you know rebuild the plan every time you're not getting to this planning cycle where you're constantly just planning right you know you do want to track your progress weekly you know have quickly we quick weekly huddles where you can review the work you know results and progress towards the goal you know I found that using simple reporting templates like hey my goal was to accomplish this this week this is what's happened how many meetings proposals and clients I've achieved here's where I'm at towards my goal of you know I've got a goal of 10 new clients by the end of the year and a head count of 120 whatever it might be and this is where I'm at on that goal you know it's a super simple 30-second reporting where people can just check in and everyone can get a sense of where they're at and then monthly you're gonna have a little bit more of an elaborate meeting you know a little bit more a little a little more formal not much but a deeper dive and you're going to evaluate the performance against the target hey for this month we wanted to do this many activities have this many meetings have this many proposals clients grow our billing headcount and our billing clients by this amount what did we actually do right you're gonna you're gonna be breaking it down like that as an organization and then possibly as a team depending on how you operate your company but then at least quarterly you should have Team meetings that take a deeper dive into that where you're actually talking about progress and discussing necessary changes this is these are the times of the year that you might entertain doing changes unless something catastrophic happens in the month right but this is when you might say okay let's let's compare what we're doing against the strategy of the company and does anything need to change let's look at our performance against anticipated goals or progress and see does anything need to change does our pricing structure need to change does our Outreach need to change or the source of our leads need to change you'll start to look at your performance throughout the process and after having a quarter's worth of data you'll have enough data to be able to determine are there necessary changes we need to make to make sure that we still hit the annual organizational goals right and then also quarterly individual Performance Management meetings this is where you're reviewing your individual results and you're addressing the opportunities for improvement this is where you're talking about your individual producers performance and saying hey this is what our goals were this is what we achieved some of the things that I've identified that work on are this this and this right and then we can work on those things to help improve our people and ideally become better at this process so just a quick recap as I send you off today is this is the eight step plan first you got to identify the performance metrics obviously for the presentation I broke it down into a and b because it's operational performance like how does the company perform you know within the industry and then the other one sales performance metrics how are your sales people performed through those sales process right um to forecasting your unit performance if you're doing this as part of an annual plan this is going to be critical um if you're just saying Hey I want to outline um a sales plan for the next quarter you can use some of these elements without that but this is really designed to be more of a strategic you know a complimentary the Strategic plan step three determine your annualized run rate just figure out do I have momentum in my accelerating or decelerating right depending on what's happening there will should shape your your plan right and then based on those things you can determine your new sales goal and what you're saying is like hey we know this much revenue needs to come from new sales this is our Target and once you know that that is the where you want to go now you can build your bridge to get there which is planning the work like we laid out extensively here and then once you've built the plan once you've actually figured out what needs to happen and how it needs to happen then you can communicate it to the team right you can share them exactly what needs to happen where we're going how it aligns with the organization goals how we're going to get there what we're going to do and then once you've communicated the plan thoroughly and you've explained how we're going to keep you know measuring track progress and create a culture of accountability then we're going to align it to the individual performer we're going to show everybody that their contributions matter and why they matter and then ideally you can help align those contributions and that performance to the professional and personal goals that they have so they are committed and bought into the growth of the company right and then finally you're just going to work the plan and make necessary adjustments as you work through the process you know on a quarterly basis with that you have successfully the framework for building a successful sales plan thank you I hope you helped I hope you found that useful and this was good information and you feel like this is going to give you the framework that you need following this eight-part process to build a successful sales plan for you if you have any additional questions about this and you want to learn more about it you can certainly ask me directly if you want to see it live in person come out to the executive forum uh next month and check this out make sure you can pull me aside after the event and ask me any questions you have about this thank you and enjoy foreign