We love December… we are all happy because Christmas in on the way… 🎄🎅🏻… we have a long break coming up… 🏖 …and many businesses are finally starting to slow down...🥳 … What better time to review the past year, write a sales plan, set some goals and targets for next year? 🎯

One of the main things to review in your business is your sales plan, this will ensure you :- 

✅ Start 2022 strong with a clear plan for substantial growth
✅ Plan your sales and operations strategies based on known metrics  
✅ Get ahead of your competition!

Here are 8 areas you should be focusing on right now to be able to create a winning strategic sales plan for next year;

1. Research any visible changes of needs/wants or trends in your target market (or new markets). You can do this by looking at your historical sales data and collating conversations with customers/ your marketplace/industry.
   • Have you seen any new types of demand/potential customers for your existing products?
   • Have you developed a new product that needs to be promoted to your current market? 
   • Are there any new or aggressive competitors that will impact your business and threaten your sales potential? 
2. Compare 2021 sales forecasts vs actual sales for the year.
   • How did you perform against your original sales forecast? 
   • Have you learnt any lessons that you can bring forward to next year’s forecast?
3. Analyse and review your current KPIs (performance & activity based)
   • Have you achieved all your activity based KPIs - marketing (e.g. Social media posts, campaigns, advertising, PR…) & sales (e.g. direct sales campaigns, calls, meetings…)?
   • Have you achieved all your performance targets - marketing (e.g. leads, website visits, clicks…) & sales (e.g. sales revenue, products sold, profit erosion)?
   • Do you know the implications on sales revenue from your KPIs? i.e. we gained 100 leads from £100 of Ad spending or we made £10K from 200 direct sales calls?
   • Change KPIs for 2022 based on strategy & targets
4. Analyse and review your lost and won business. Reviewing lost business is a great way to see where you can improve next year and convert more business
   • Come up with a list of actions that you can do from your analysis & implement them.
5. Get useful and measurable feedback from your current customers, this will make a significant difference to your positioning next year … if you action any feedback to improve your overall product delivery (what you promise).
   • Ask questions that you can measure (use categorised drop down answers) and try to get enough feedback to create a reliable NPS Score.
   • Review & Analyse Feedback against last year or industry standards.
   • Make a plan to use positive feedback for testimonials & case studies in 2022
6. Create a forecast for next year and discover the impact on operations (assets, resources & capacities), finance (cash) and marketing activities.
   • Create a forecast that includes:  
     • reoccurring revenue from existing customers 
     • new & lost business from existing/new customers
7. Schedule your key account review meetings for 2022. If you have key accounts or larger accounts that require regular review meetings, schedule these in your calendar now …  make them reoccur and include the participants in the scheduling so that you never miss these important meetings.
8. Review your staff performance positively and tell them that they are valued – if your company did well, thank them with a nice Christmas bonus for all their hard work! 

We have created a simple and easy to use sales planning checklist for all these activities that you can use to ensure you are on top of your sales plan this year. Happy New Year! Click here to download it.

If you want some further help with your sales plan for 2022 then get in touch with us and we will be glad to have a chat about your sales strategy plan for next year.