Top 10 Sales Fail #6- No Sales Plan

In a previous blog post “Top 10 Sales Fails” I promised to write future blogs on each of the Top 10 as voted by one of my Presidents Club sales training groups. In this post I will cover the #6 “Sales Fail” which is “no sales plan.”

Almost every salesperson I’ve met will acknowledge the importance of having a plan for what is going to happen on a sales call yet when asked to produce theirs what actually surfaces is more often than not a sheepish grin. Sales plans are frequently one of those things we acknowledge we SHOULD do but frequently DON’T DO for a myriad of reasons including the king of all reasons…time.

With that in mind the first key element of effective sales planning should probably be related to time. At Sandler Training we call the principle that governs making sure you allocate the proper amount of time for key selling activities as “Pay Time VS. No Pay Time.”

As sales professionals perhaps the most important “planning” you can do is to list out EVERY activity you need to do in the course of a typical workday then divide the list into two groups. In one group list all the activities that you need to do as part of your job but are not an activity directly  related to moving a prospect towards a sale. These activities are usually things like attending meetings, filing reports, dealing with internal company issues, etc. These activities are known as “No Pay Time” activities since they are not activities with a direct link to how sales people get paid.

The second group, of course, would be your “Pay Time” activities or activities central to moving prospects towards a sale. Once you have these lists the next step is quite simple though not always easy. Decide the “prime selling hours” or "Pay Time" of every day when you are most likely to reach prospects and schedule all your “Pay Time” activities into those hours. Simple huh? Keep “No Pay Time” tasks from sneaking into your “Pay Time” and this key element of sales planning is complete.

Now that you are spending your prime selling hours doing prime selling activities what about a sales plan related to each individual selling opportunity? There are plenty of great documents or templates you can utilize to compile a good sales plan (including the Sandler Sales Planning document) so I am going to touch on what you should be planning “for” versus the medium for compiling or listing the planned activities.

There are many obvious things you will want to capture in your plan such as who the players are within the prospect account, what you want to accomplish as a result of the call, and what you need to bring along on the call in the way of collateral material, etc. For my money the two most valuable pieces of a good sales plan are not related to what you are going to TELL the prospect but what you are going to ASK the prospect and what the prospect most likely will ask you.

A good sales plan should have about 2 to 4 great “high impact” questions you want to make sure you ask related to the potential “pain” of the prospect. You don’t want to prepare an interrogation but just a few key questions that will set the tone. You establish far more credibility and professional trust through the quality of the questions you ask than you do through the information you dispense.

Similarly you might want to prepare a couple of good questions related to digging deeper into questions the prospect might ask you. For example, instead of planning how you would answer a question such as “has your company ever worked on a project like this?” a good sales plan might contain questions you will ask in response to likely prospect questions such as “Great question, how important is experience in making this decision?”

I could go on but let me close with this thought. ANY sales plan is better than NO sales plan and a sales plan that prepares you for a great first impression, a great last impression, and some targeted, high impact questions in between will take you far.