Developing a Sales Plan

 Sales Prospecting

The ability to source new business determines your success as a salesperson. You are as valuable as your last find: the last customer that turned the corner and became a client; the last negotiation that became a deal.

In sales terms, prospecting describes the effort it takes to locate the people who will benefit from the added value your product offers. This tutorial introduces tried and trusted techniques to sourcing and approaching potential customers.

Developing a Sales Plan

A professional salesperson operates by thinking through every step of the sales process: planning, directing, controlling and evaluating the sales activities. S/he ensures that the target prospect recognizes and desires the value offered by the product or service being sold. In other words, you need to develop a complete sales plan. The basis for any plan requires an assessment of your product or service in the context of the market in which you operate.

The following elaborate on the steps in developing a sales plan.

Knowing Your Market Position

It is important to be aware of your market position before you try to sell within any given market. Here are some examples of the areas you need to consider in establishing your market position:

• Offer a relatively expensive, intangible solution in an area where prospects have little experience. The prospects buy because of the efficiencies and cost reductions associated with using your solution.

• Prospects are large financial institutions, many operating globally in a market competing fiercely on price. Typically, prospects make purchase decisions after consulting different business lines.

• Competition offers a similar product but with fewer capabilities. They position their product as an 'out of the box solution at a very low price.

• It is likely that you will have to make several sales calls over a three-month sales cycle. The objective is to alter the prospect's perception of the solution he thinks he needs by justifying the additional value offered by your solution.

What is the market position of your company? Who buys your products? And why?

Knowing Your Product

Before you talk to any prospect, you need to know what you are selling. You need to be able to describe your product from your prospect's perspective, not your own. Typical questions that you need to answer include the following:

• What exactly do I sell?

• What is it my product or service?

• What does it do for the prospect?

Prospects are more willing to buy when the salesperson demonstrates a thorough knowledge of his product or service. In other words, demonstrating product knowledge builds the prospect's confidence and is the foundation of a relationship of trust between the prospect and the seller.

Understanding Your Prospect

On the face of things, understanding your prospect might appear relatively simple, but this is not always the case. You not only need to understand your prospect, but also their specific business, the industry in which they operate, and their competitive position.

Here are some typical questions you will need to answer before you can launch an effective prospecting campaign.

• Who are my ideal clients?

• What challenges do they face currently?

• Do any clients have common needs?

• Why do my clients buy from me?

• When do they buy?

• How do they buy?

Understanding Your Competitors

Unfortunately, it is a competitive world out there and there are salespeople and companies also competing for your prospect's time and attention. The the only way that you can beat your competition is to know them as you know your own products and services, take advantage of their weaknesses, while minimizing or avoiding their strengths.

Typical questions you should ask include:

• Who are my competitors?

• Have I lost any sales opportunities to my competitors, and if so, why?

• What are the strengths and weaknesses of their products?

• Why do their clients buy from them?

Remember, products do not sell themselves and there is no such thing as the ‘best product or service. If the ‘best product or service always won the sale, there would be no need for competition. More often than not, it is the ability of the salesperson to align her product with the needs of the prospect that makes the difference as to whether a sale is won or lost.

Implementing Your Sales Plan

Once you have assessed your product or service relative to your prospects and competitors, you need to implement your sales plan. Outlined below is a typical approach you will follow:

Activity	Objective
Identify and approach prospects.	Make the prospect AWARE of his needs and create a level of interest in the advantages of your product. This is usually achieved through cold calling.
Conduct the sales call or sales letters and manage the sales process; Build Rapport Identify prospect needs to crystallize a solution Sell the benefits, prove your concept, and justify the value of your solution	Determine the prospect’s needs and the reasons why those needs exist. Conceive a solution in the mind of the prospects that meet these needs and which is biased toward your product or services. Match the features and advantages of you product or service to the solution you created for the prospect and sell, prove, and justify the benefits sought by the prospect.
Close the sale and negotiate the price.	Deal with any objections the prospect raises and negotiate an agreed price.
Turn your customer into a client and then into a champion.	Strengthen customer relationships after the sale. A customer may buy from you once. A client is a loyal customer while a champion will testify for the value provided by your solution.

Controlling the Process

The degree of control you exercise over the sales process is one of the key aspects to successful selling. As we have seen, selling has been likened to a process or cycle with one stage leading on to the next. Control is about making sure that you have the right to initiate the next activity in the process.

The principle of control will determine how you speak to prospects on the telephone, how you write sales letters, and how you conduct sales meetings.

For For example, how many sales letters have you seen where the letter concludes with ‘If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact me? No matter what the contents of the letter, control here has been passed to the reader; he can now decide to contact or ignore the salesperson.

Similarly, if you are trying to get an appointment with a prospect on the telephone and ask, ‘Can we meet at 10 o'clock?', this invites a possibly negative answer.

As we progress through the course, we shall identify how you can retain control at every stage of the sales process.

Evaluating your Activity

Most people in sales have sales targets provided by their employer. These targets are clear statements of what needs to be achieved — often on a quarterly or annual basis. Frequently, these targets are expressed as:

• unit sales, that is, unit product sales

• financial targets expressed in terms of revenue or profits

As a salesperson, you need to turn these targets into levels of sales activity. Two key sales ratios help to monitor and evaluate your activities:

• Telephone calls to appointments ratio: The telephone calls to appointments ratio is a measure of efficiency for telephone prospecting.

• Appointments to sales ratio: The appointments to sales ratio measures client-facing skills and the ability to close a sale.