Back to basics; Sales 101 and your personal business plan

Yesterday I was asked to write a lengthly essay on my sales management philosophy.
As I got more involved in the process of putting my thoughts on to paper. I realized that now would be a great time to go back to the basics of sales, planning, etc. and to publish my thoughts on building a personal business plan to my blog for all to read.

One of the things that every sales person that I have worked with during the last 10 years will say, is that upon the outset of our relationship they received two things from me:

1. A personalized copy of the greatest sales book ever written
2.  A request and an offer from me to help them write their personal business plan for the upcoming year.

Getting up every morning and heading into your sales job with out a business plan would be the equivalent of getting into your car and driving from NYC to Los Angeles without a road map/plan (or in todays world a smartphone with GEO location or GPS app installed). While if you just head West you will eventually get close to your destination, your journey will not be the most efficient or rewarding. With gas rapidly approaching $4 per gallon unnecessary detours will be very expensive, and don't forget the fact that you will miss all of the really cool excursions along the way that you could have seen if you had only planned your trip in advance.

The same analogy applies to sales. In its simplest form sales is comprised of three main factors; Talent, Hard work, and Persistence. Talent is God given in its simplest form, and while we can and always should build and expand on our natural talent daily, if you do not have any talent or drive for selling there is not too much that you can do about it, (Thus the job of the person or team interviewing and hiring sales people to ensure at a minimum that your are only interviewing candidates that posses strong sales talent and drive).

Hard work, persistence and enhancing their god given talents are where I spend most of my time working with my team. This is where the business plan comes into its own. Using our road trip to LA analogy, if we drove our Turbo Porsche as hard and fast as we could without a plan, all we will do is waste more time and energy along the way. The plan is what helps us to maintain focus and be efficient, ultimately helping us to Drive more sales.

The key ingredients that I have always insisted on for any business plan are that it be:

1. simple to follow 
2. realistic
3. measurable every day 

So in effect you are creating a business plan for the year that is composed of 261 individual daily plans. At the end of every day, you are able to review your plan, to determine what did and did not work, and make any changes going forward as necessary. With your plan, one of the key things that you will be able to do is to closely monitor your efforts and hard work. If at any stage you find that your sales are suffering, the first thing that you will do is to review your completed daily plans to see that your efforts have always met or exceeded your daily goals. Once you have confirmed that, you can then move forward to review all of the other variables that go into selling successfully; your qualifying presentations to create leads/appointments, any changes you have made to your presentations, etc. You always want to eliminate the simplest variables first, and hard work is the one item that we can always be in control of.

It goes without saying that your plans daily goals must be written down for you to see and monitor your progress against all day long. I have always used a day timer, one page per day to write my goals down, but find more and more that I am copying them to my Blackberry. However to each his own as long as you can track and record and save your daily progress. For a sales manager its crucial that you insist that all of your team members have plans, and that you are involved in their creation and review to ensure that these plans are realistic and that they are followed every day. You do not want to micro-manage your team, but to be a part of the each team members plans creation and ultimate review as goals are met and exceeded.

Every company and division within a company has a business plan. Why not each sales person?
Those are some of my strong beliefs on one of the major factors that sets a great salesperson apart from an average salesperson. Assuming similar talent, the salesperson that has a plan/road map will ALWAYS have greater success and far less frustrations and worry than the salesperson who does not have a plan. The salesperson with the plan always know where they are now and where they are going.

Happy New Years to all
Tim Daly

Feel free to e-mail me your thoughts and comments:
tdaly@ingenuitymediaoutdoor.com