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How to Write a Sales & Marketing Plan: Comprehensive Guide

• September 4, 2024
• Business Plan , How to Write

Creating a sales and marketing plan for your business plan is really important. It shows how you’ll attract customers and make sales, which is crucial for your business to succeed. This guide will walk you through the steps to make a great sales & marketing plan.

Whether your business is new or you’re looking to grow, having a clear plan for sales and marketing can help everyone believe in your business’s success. Let’s dive in!

What is a Sales & Marketing Plan

A sales and marketing plan is a strategic document that outlines how a business intends to reach its target market and achieve its sales goals. It details the strategies, tactics, channels, and tools the business will use to attract and engage customers, promote its products or services, and convert prospects into buyers.

This plan typically includes information on target customer segments, marketing objectives, sales targets, competitive analysis , marketing strategies (like advertising, content marketing, social media, and SEO), sales tactics (such as direct selling or channel partnerships), budgets, and key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring success.

Why do we use a Sales & Marketing Plan?

We use a sales and marketing plan for several critical reasons, all aimed at ensuring a business’s growth and success:

• Strategic Direction : It provides a clear roadmap for reaching and engaging the target audience , guiding the marketing and sales efforts in a unified direction.
• Resource Allocation : Helps in the efficient allocation of resources, ensuring that time, budget, and personnel are focused on high-impact sales and marketing activities.
• Goal Setting : Establishes specific, measurable objectives for what the business aims to achieve through its sales and marketing efforts, such as revenue targets, customer acquisition goals, and market share.
• Target Market Identification : Assists in identifying and understanding the target market’s needs, preferences, and behaviors, enabling the business to tailor its offerings more effectively.
• Competitive Advantage : By analyzing the competitive landscape, the plan allows businesses to identify their unique selling proposition (USP) and differentiate themselves from competitors.
• Performance Measurement : Sets key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to track the effectiveness of sales and marketing strategies, providing insight into what’s working and what needs adjustment.
• Investor and Stakeholder Confidence : A well-thought-out plan demonstrates to investors, stakeholders, and potential partners that the business has a solid strategy for achieving growth, increasing their confidence in the venture.

Why do we use a Sales & Marketing Plan in a Business Plan?

Including a sales and marketing plan in a business plan is crucial because it directly influences investor and stakeholder confidence. This component of the business plan serves several key purposes that reassure investors and stakeholders about the business’s potential for success:

• Demonstrates Preparedness : It shows that the business has thoroughly researched and understood its market environment. A detailed plan signals to investors and stakeholders that the company is prepared to navigate the competitive landscape effectively.
• Outlines a Clear Path to Revenue : Investors and stakeholders are particularly interested in how a business plans to generate revenue. The sales and marketing plan provides a clear strategy for attracting and retaining customers, crucial for the business’s financial sustainability.
• Highlights Growth Potential : By outlining specific marketing strategies and sales targets, the plan showcases the business’s growth potential. It illustrates how the business intends to capture market share and expand its customer base, which is a key indicator of its future success.
• Provides Metrics for Success : The plan includes key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that will be used to measure success. This allows investors and stakeholders to understand how the business will track its progress and adjust strategies as needed, instilling confidence in the business’s ability to meet its goals.
• Facilitates Alignment with Investor Expectations : Finally, a sales and marketing plan helps align the business’s strategies with investor and stakeholder expectations. By clearly communicating how the business intends to achieve growth, it ensures that everyone is working towards the same objectives, reducing potential conflicts and increasing support.

How to Write a Sales & Marketing Plan?

Writing a sales and marketing plan for a business plan involves outlining how you intend to reach your target customers and achieve your sales goals. It’s a strategic document that details the actions, tools, and resources you will use to promote your products or services.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to crafting an effective sales and marketing plan:

1. Define Your Target Market

Identify who your ideal customers are by considering demographics (age, gender, income level, etc.), psychographics (interests, values, habits), and geographics (location). Understanding your target market is crucial for tailoring your sales and marketing efforts effectively.

2. Set Clear Marketing and Sales Objectives

Establish what you aim to achieve with your sales and marketing plan. Objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Examples include increasing website traffic by 20% within six months or boosting sales by 15% in a year.

3. Analyze Your Competition

Understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses , and how you compare. This knowledge will help you identify your unique selling proposition (USP) and position your offerings more attractively.

4. Develop Your Marketing Channels

Outline the strategies you will use to achieve your objectives by listing what are your marketing channels . This might involve:

• Content Marketing : Creating and sharing valuable content to attract and retain customers.
• Social Media Marketing : Engaging with your audience on social platforms.
• Email Marketing : Sending targeted messages to encourage customer action.
• SEO : Optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results.
• Advertising : Paying for space to promote your product on digital platforms, print, or outdoors.

5. Plan Your Sales Channels

Detail how you will sell your product or service by laying out your sales channels . This can include:

• Direct Sales : Selling directly to customers through sales reps or online.
• Channel Sales : Using intermediaries, such as distributors or resellers.
• Retail Sales : Selling through a physical or online store.
• Discuss any sales processes or techniques that will be employed, like consultative selling or solution selling.

6. Determine Tools and Resources

List the tools and resources needed to implement your strategies. This could include CRM software for customer management, social media platforms for marketing, or sales training programs for your team.

7. Set Your Budget

Allocate a budget for your sales and marketing activities. Include costs for advertising, software subscriptions, marketing materials, and any other expenses associated with executing your plan.

8. Define Metrics and KPIs

Identify how you will measure success by setting key performance indicators (KPIs) for each objective. Examples of KPIs include conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and average order value.

9. Create an Action Plan

Break down your strategies into actionable steps with assigned responsibilities and deadlines. This plan will guide your daily operations and help keep your team focused and accountable.

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How to create a sales plan in 7 Steps

A sales plan is the first step toward defining your sales strategy , sales goals and how you’ll reach them.

A refined sales plan is a go-to resource for your reps. It helps them better understand their role, responsibilities, targets, tactics and methods. When done right, it gives your reps all the information they need to perform at their highest level.

In this article, we outline what a sales plan is and why it’s important to create one. We also offer a step-by-step guide on how to make a sales plan with examples of each step.

What is a sales plan and why create one?

Your sales plan is a roadmap that outlines how you’ll hit your revenue targets, who your target market is, the activities needed to achieve your goals and any roadblocks you may need to overcome.

Many business leaders see their sales plan as an extension of the traditional business plan. The business plan contains strategic and revenue goals across the organization, while the sales plan lays out how to achieve them.

The benefits of a sales plan

A successful sales plan will keep all your reps focused on the right activities and ensure they’re working toward the same outcome. It will also address your company's specific needs. For example, you might choose to write a 30- , 60- or 90-day sales plan depending on your current goals and the nature of your business.

Say your ultimate goal for the next quarter is $250,000 in new business. A sales plan will outline the objective, the strategies that will help you get there and how you’ll execute and measure those strategies. It will allow your whole team to collaborate and ensure you achieve it together.

Many salespeople are driven by action and sometimes long-term sales planning gets neglected in favor of short-term results.

While this may help them hit their quota, the downside is the lack of systems in place. Instead, treat sales processes as a system with steps you can improve. If reps are doing wildly different things, it’s hard to uncover what’s working and what’s not. A strategic sales plan can optimize your team’s performance and keep them on track using repeatable systems.

With this in mind, let’s explore the seven components of an effective sales plan

1. Company mission and positioning

To work toward the same company goals, everyone in your organization must understand what your organization is trying to achieve and where in the market you position yourself.

To help define your mission and positioning, involve your sales leaders in all areas of the business strategy. Collaborating and working toward the same goals is impossible if those goals are determined by only a select group of stakeholders.

Recommended reading

How to set sales goals that improve team performance (with examples)

To get a handle on the company’s mission and positioning, take the following steps:

Collaborate with marketing: Your marketing teams live and breathe the positioning of your company. Take the time to talk to each function within the department, from demand generation to performance marketing to learn what they know.

Interview customer success teams: Customer support reps speak with your existing customers every day. Interview them to find common questions and pain points.

Talk to your customers: Customer insights are a foundational part of any positioning strategy. Speak directly with existing and new customers to find out what they love about your product or service.

Read your company blog: Those in charge of content production have a strong understanding of customer needs. Check out blog articles and ebooks to familiarize yourself with customer language and common themes.

Look for mentions around the web: How are other people talking about your organization? Look for press mentions, social media posts, articles and features that mention your products and services.

These insights can provide context around how your company is currently positioned in the market.

Finally, speak with the team in charge of defining the company’s positioning. Have a list of questions and use the time to find out why they made certain decisions. Here are some examples:

What important insights from the original target audience research made you create our positioning statement?

What competitor research led us to position ourselves in this way? Does this significantly differentiate us from the crowd? How?

What core ideals and values drove us to make these promises in our positioning statement? Have they shifted in any way since we launched? If so, what motivates these promises now?

How to communicate mission and positioning

In this section of the sales plan, include the following information:

Company mission : Why your company exists and the value you’re determined to bring to the market.

Competition: Who your direct competitors (those who offer similar products and services) and indirect competitors (brands who solve the same problem in different ways) are.

Value propositions: The features, benefits and solutions your product delivers.

What is brand positioning: The ultimate guide with 4 examples

2. Goals and targets

Define your revenue goals and the other targets sales are responsible for.

As mentioned earlier, sales goals are usually aligned with business goals. Your boardroom members typically establish the company’s revenue goals and it’s your job to achieve them.

Revenue goals will shape your sales strategy. Use them to reverse engineer quotas, sales activity and the staff you need to execute them.

Break your big-picture revenue goal down further into sales targets and activity targets for your team. Activities are the specific actions you and your reps can control, while sales targets are the results provided by those activities.

9 steps to creating the perfect sales strategy (with free template)

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10 predictable revenue hacks to grow your sales

Use data on sales activity and performance from previous years to calculate sales targets. You should break this down by pipeline stage and activity conducted by reps across all functions.

For example, how many cold emails does it take to generate a deal? What is the average lifetime value (LTV) of your customer?

Breaking down these numbers allows you to accurately forecast what it will take to achieve your new revenue goal.

This part of your sales plan might include setting goals like the following:

200 total cold emails sent per day

200 total cold calls made per day

25 demos conducted per day

5 new sales appointments made a day

100 follow-up emails sent per day

Breaking down your goals into specific activities will also reveal the expertise needed for each activity and any required changes to your organizational structure, which will come into play in the next step.

How to communicate goals and targets

Within this section of the sales plan, include the following information:

Revenue goals : Reverse engineer the boardroom revenue goals to identify achievable sales goals and the number of staff needed to reach them. Sales targets : Use data on sales activity and past performance to define quotas and metrics for each stage of the sales pipeline.

Expertise needed for each activity: What qualities and attributes do your staff need to achieve these predefined activities? How much experience do they need vs. what can be learned on the job?

3. Sales organization and team structure

Identify the talent and expertise you need to achieve your goals.

For example, a marketing agency that depends on strong relationships will benefit more from a business development executive than a sales development representative (SDR) .

Use the targets established in the previous section to identify who you need to hire for your team. For example, if the average sales development rep can send 20 cold emails a day and you need to send 200 to achieve your goals, you’ll need around ten reps to hit your targets.

Include the information for each team member in a table in your sales plan. Here is an example.

Visualizing each role helps all stakeholders understand who they’re hiring and the people they’re responsible for. It allows them to collaborate on the plan and identify the critical responsibilities and qualities of their ideal candidates.

You want to avoid micromanaging , but now is a good time to ask your existing teams to report on the time spent on certain activities. Keeping a timesheet will give you an accurate forecast of how long certain activities take and the capacity of each rep.

How to communicate your sales organization and team structure

Team structure: These are the functions that make up your overall sales organization. The roles of SDR, business development and account teams must be well-defined.

Roles and responsibilities: These are the roles you need to hire, along with the tasks they’re responsible for. This will help you produce job descriptions that attract great talent.

Salary and compensation: How will the company remunerate your teams? Having competitive salaries, compensation schemes and sales incentives will attract top performers and keep them motivated.

Timeline: Attempting to hire dozens of people at once is tough. Prioritize hiring based on how critical each role is for executing your plan. Take a phased hiring approach to onboard new reps with the attention they deserve.

Building a sales team: How to set your group up for success

4. Target audience and customer segments

A sales plan is useless without knowing who to sell to. Having clearly defined customer personas and ideal customer profiles will help you tailor your selling techniques to companies and buyers.

Whether you’re looking to break into a new market or expand your reach in your current one, start by clearly defining which companies you’re looking to attract. Include the following criteria:

Industries: Which markets and niches do you serve? Are there certain sub-segments of those industries that you specialize in?

Headcount: How many employees do your best accounts have within their organization?

Funding: Have they secured one or several rounds of funding?

Find out as much as you can about their organizational challenges. This may include growth hurdles, hiring bottlenecks and even barriers created by legislation.

Learn about your buyers within those target accounts, learn about your buyers. Understanding your buyers and personalizing your sales tactics for them will help you strengthen your customer relationships.

These insights will change as your business grows. Enterprise companies may wish to revisit their personas as they move upmarket. For small businesses and startups, your target audience will evolve as you find product-market fit.

It’s important to constantly revisit this part of your sales plan. Even if your goals and methodologies are the same, always have your finger on the pulse of your customer’s priorities.

How to communicate target audience and customer segments

Profile: Include basic information about their role, what their career journey looks like and the common priorities within their personal lives.

Demographics : Add more information about their age, income and living situation. Demographic information can help tailor your message to align with the language used across different generations.

Attributes: Assess their personality. Are they calm or assertive? Do they handle direct communication themselves or have an assistant? Use these identifying attributes to communicate effectively.

Challenges: Think about the hurdles this persona is trying to overcome. How does it affect their work and what’s the impact on them personally?

Goals: Analyze how these challenges are preventing them from achieving their goals. Why are these goals important to them?

Support: Use this insight to define how your product or service will help these people overcome challenges and achieve their goals.

Behavioral segmentation: What is it and how can it drive engagement and loyalty

5. Sales strategies and methodologies

Define your sales approach. This includes the strategies, techniques and methodologies you’ll use to get your offering out to market.

This part of your sales plan may end up being the largest. It will outline every practical area of your sales strategy: your sales stages, methodologies and playbooks.

Start by mapping out each stage of your sales process. What are the steps needed to guide a prospect through your deal flow?

9 essential sales stages

Traditionally, a sales process has nine sales stages :

Prospecting and lead generation : Your marketing strategy should deliver leads, but sales reps should boost this volume with their own prospecting efforts.

Qualification: Measure those leads against your target account criteria and customer personas. Ensure they’re a good fit, prioritizing your time on high-value relationships.

Reaching out to new leads : Initiate emails to your target customers to guide new leads into the sales funnel. This outreach activity includes cold calling and direct mail.

Appointment setting: Schedule a demo, discovery call or consultation.

Defining needs: After the initial meeting, you’ll understand your prospect’s problems and how your product or service can solve them.

Presentation: Reveal the solution. This can be in the form of a proposal, custom service packages or a face-to-face sales pitch .

Negotiation: Dedicate this stage to overcoming any objections your prospect may have.

Winning the deal: Turn your prospects into customers by closing deals and signing contracts.

Referrals : Fostering loyalty is an organization-wide activity. Delight your customers and encourage them to refer their friends.

Not all of these stages will be relevant to your organization. For example, a SaaS company that relies on inbound leads may do much of the heavy lifting during the initial meeting and sales demo . On the other hand, an exclusive club whose members must meet certain criteria (say, a minimum net worth) would focus much of their sales activity on referrals.

Map out your sales process to identify the stages you use. Your sales process should look something like this:

To determine your sales methodologies, break each sales stage down into separate activities, along with the stakeholder responsible for them.

With your sales activities laid out, you can do in-depth research into the techniques and methodologies you need to execute them. For example, if you sell a complex product with lengthy sales cycles , you could adopt a SPIN selling methodology to identify pain points and craft the best solution for leads.

Finally, use these stages and methodologies to form your sales playbooks . This will help you structure your sales training plan and create playbooks your reps can go back to for guidance.

How to communicate sales strategies and methodologies

Within this section of the sales plan, include the following:

Sales stages: The different steps required to convert prospects into paying customers.

Sales methodologies: The different practices and approaches you’ll adopt to shape your sales strategy.

Sales playbooks: The tactics, techniques and sales strategy templates needed to guide contacts throughout each stage of the sales process.

6. Sales action plan

You have the “who” and the “what”. Now you must figure out “when” to execute your sales plan.

A well-structured sales action plan communicates when the team will achieve key milestones. It outlines timeframes for when they’ll complete certain projects and activities, as well as the recruitment timelines for each quarter.

The order in which you implement your sales action plan depends on your priorities. Many sales organizations prefer to front-load the activity that will make a bigger impact on the bottom line.

For example, when analyzing your current sales process and strategy, you may find your existing customers are a rich source of qualified leads . Therefore, it would make sense to nurture more of these relationships using a structured referral program.

You must also consider how recruitment will affect the workload in your team. Hire too quickly and you may end up spending more time training new reps and neglecting your existing team. However, taking too long to recruit could overload your existing team. Either can make a big impact on culture and deal flow.

To complete your sales action plan, get all stakeholders involved in deciding timelines. When applying this to your sales plan, use GANTT charts and tables to visualize projects and key milestones.

A GANTT chart shows you the main activities, their completion dates and if there are any overlaps. Here is an example:

By prioritizing each activity and goal, you can create a plan that balances short-term results with long-term investment.

How to communicate your sales action plan

Key milestones : When do you aim to complete your projects, activities and recruitment efforts? You can map them out by week, month, quarter or all of the above. Let your revenue goals and priorities lead your schedule.

Short- and long-term goal schedules: With a high-level schedule mapped out, you can see when you will achieve your goals. From here, you can shape your schedule so that it balances both short- and long-term goals.

7. Performance and results measurement

Finally, your plan must detail how you measure performance. Outline your most important sales metrics and activities, how you’ll track them and what technology you’ll need to track them.

Structure this part of your plan by breaking down each sales stage. Within these sections, list out the metrics you’ll need to ensure you’re running a healthy sales pipeline.

Performance metrics can indicate the effectiveness of your entire sales process. Your chosen metrics typically fall into two categories:

Primary metrics act as your “true north” guide. This is commonly new business revenue generated.

Secondary metrics are those that indicate how well specific areas of your sales process are performing. These include lead response time and average purchase value.

The metrics you select must closely align with your goals and sales activities. For example, at the appointment setting stage, you might measure the number of demos conducted.

Each team also needs its own sales dashboard to ensure reps are hitting their targets. Sales development reps will have different priorities from account executives, so it’s critical they have the sales tools to focus on what’s important to them.

Finally, research and evaluate the technology you’ll need to accurately measure these metrics. Good CRM software is the best system to use for bringing your data together.

How to communicate sales performance metrics

Sales stage metrics : Identify the metrics for each specific sales stage and make sure they align with your KPIs.

Chosen sales dashboard: Explain why you chose your sales dashboard technology and exactly how it works.

Performance measurement: Outline exactly how and what tech you will use to measure your team’s activities and metrics.

How to track, measure and improve your team’s sales performance

Developing a sales plan involves conducting market research, assessing current sales performance , identifying sales opportunities and challenges, setting measurable goals, creating a sales strategy, allocating resources and establishing a monitoring and evaluation framework.

To write a sales business plan, include:

An executive summary

A company overview

A market analysis

A target market description

Sales strategies and tactics

Financial projections

A budget and timeline

Make sure that you clearly articulate your value proposition, competitive advantage and growth strategies.

Final thoughts

An effective sales plan is an invaluable asset for your sales team . Although you now know how to create a sales plan, you should remember to make one that works for your team. Writing one helps with your sales strategy planning and aids you in defining targets, metrics and processes. Distributing the sales plan helps your reps understand what you expect of them and how they can reach their goals.

Providing supportive, comprehensive resources is the best way to motivate your team and inspire hard work. When you do the work to build a solid foundation, you equip your reps with everything they need to succeed.

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How to Write a Sales and Marketing Plan

2 min. read

Updated January 3, 2024

You’ve addressed what you’re selling and why in the products and services section. You now have an understanding of the market and an ideal customer in mind thanks to your market analysis. Now, you need to explain how you will actually reach and sell to them.

The marketing and sales section of your business plan dives into how you’re going to accomplish your goals. You’ll be answering questions like:

• Based on your audience, how will you position your product or service in the current market?
• What marketing channels, messaging, and sales tactics will you implement?
• What’s your business model and how will your business operate day-to-day?

By the end of this section, you should have an outline of what growth looks like, what milestones you intend to hit, and how you’ll measure success. Basically, you’re backing up the opportunity you’ve identified with a solid go-to-market plan.

What to include in the sales and marketing section

The sections you should include act as a useful framework for exploring and defining your marketing and sales tactics.

Create a positioning statement

How does your business differ? What do you do that others don’t? If you’re unsure, work through a handful of strategic exercises to create a simple but convincing positioning statement.

Outline your marketing strategy

A marketing plan brings together strategic goals with tangible marketing activities designed to reach and engage your target market—ultimately convincing them to purchase your product.

Craft your sales plan

A good sales strategy provides actionable steps to reach your goals. Estimate how much you intend to sell and outline a process that anyone else in your business can execute.

Optional sales and marketing information to include

The basics of a marketing and sales plan are fairly straightforward. However, it’s also the perfect place to flesh out any details that you think will make your outreach efforts successful.

Create a unique value proposition

What makes your business unique? How does the solution you provide stand out? This is your chance to point to what you believe potential customers will find more valuable about your business over the competition.

Don't forget digital marketing

While we don’t recommend creating separate traditional and digital marketing plans, it may be wise to explore and address them separately within your plan.

Build your promotional plan

How will you convince your customers to buy your products or services? While actual ads and promotions may be months away, it’s best to think through and even mock up designs now.

Conduct a SWOT analysis

With this simple analysis, you’ll better understand your strengths and weaknesses, along with the opportunities and threats you should account for.

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Kody Wirth is a content writer and SEO specialist for Palo Alto Software—the creator's of Bplans and LivePlan. He has 3+ years experience covering small business topics and runs a part-time content writing service in his spare time.

Table of Contents

• What to include
• Optional information

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9 Stunning Sales Business Plan Templates to Close Deals

Written by: Orana Velarde

When sales and marketing teams work together, amazing things can happen for a business. Take, for example, the creation of an integral sales business plan that covers not only the goals the team aspires to but also all the data to support the actions, timelines, roadmaps and org charts.

Your business plan for sales and marketing activities is the guideline by which both teams undertake their tasks, aiming for a common goal. Creating a sales business plan collaboratively can help the teams see the big picture faster and be ready for any eventuality along the way.

In this guide, we will share nine business plan templates to help you build the perfect plan for your teams to work with. Share it digitally with your sales and marketing teams; they will be more productive and close more deals.

Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

What is a sales business plan, what is the sales business planning process, what goes in a sales business plan template, 9 business sales plan templates, sales plan faqs.

• A sales business plan is a document that outlines the goals, strategies and tactics of a company’s sales department, including current state and future plans.
• The sales business planning process includes figuring out the scope, organizing the team and assigning roles, collecting critical information in a centralized location, setting up branded templates, customizing the templates and collaborating with the team to finalize the document.
• The five different types of strategic sales planning are goal-oriented planning, account-based planning, product planning, relationship planning and sales process planning.
• Explore the nine templates provided according to sales business plan examples and choose the one that matches your sales goals.
• Sign up for Visme to create your sales business plans and all your sales and marketing collateral without needing any design skills.

A sales business plan—sales plan for short—is a document or presentation that defines the strategies your team will undertake to close deals, retain clients and bring in new leads. With a business plan , sales are contrastingly better overall.

Each section defines the steps toward hitting milestones and achieving goals. It lays a forecast for all activities that have to do with selling and hitting sales targets. The team members who benefit the most from a sales business plan are the sales reps and marketing strategists. It gives them all a vision of the big picture, a mission to aim for and a roadmap to achieving the goal.

Overall, a well-crafted sales business plan is crucial for optimizing the sales cycle and achieving success in the competitive world of sales.

To create a business plan for sales activities, follow an industry-standard format and add your team's unique content plus the company’s branded elements. Build a sales action plan based on your strategies and goals, backed up by your chosen sales plan template .

Here’s the path to take:

1. Figure out the scope

First, you need to know the scope of possibilities for the sales business plan you’re working on.

To figure this out, you need to answer these questions:

• What do you intend to cover in your sales plan?
• What aspects of the business will the sales plan cover?
• How far can this plan take you?
• Will it span weeks, months, a quarter, or an entire year?
• How many people will need to work together from how many teams?

This is the perfect opportunity to use mind maps . Visualizing your scope with mind maps makes it easy for you to organize the information and communicate it with everyone. And if you want to gather ideas from your sales team, brainstorming is the way to go.

Read this article to learn how to maximize your brainstorming meetings using online whiteboards.

Brainstorm the sales plan with your team using Visme’s infinite whiteboard . Our infinite whiteboard supports real-time collaboration and has more than enough space for you to lay out all the information.

Once you’ve mapped out your scope, create an outline for the overall plan. The outline will be the foundation for the pages and sections in your sales business plan. The next section, “What goes in a business plan” includes a list of essential sections that will help create a business plan for sales.

2. Organize the team and roles within the team

Part of the planning includes organizing a group of people who will work together to meet the goals laid out in the plan. Create a branded org chart visualizing team roles and responsibilities. Include this chart on a page in your sales plan; make it part of the process.

Using hotspots and hyperlinks, connect each team member's photo to their task list on monday.com or your favorite productivity platform.

Do you need more people to achieve the goals you’re pitching? Use this template to assign roles and tasks to team members.

3. Collect all information, analysis and data in one digital location.

No plan gets anywhere without data. Research, analysis, and investigation are your best friends at this point. Collect all the data you need and organize it in an accessible way. This will help immensely when building the sales plan .

Gather raw data about your current sales activities and performance, competitors, user persona, target market, industry analysis and more. Keep all visual documentation and relevant research samples inside a folder in your Visme workspace and name it accordingly.

Give access to those folders only to people involved in the project. The permission settings are in the brand controls for your workspace.

When you take advantage of the workspace organization features in your Visme account, you can plan your team's activity productively.

4. Set up a branded template

Are you regularly creating the same document more than once to share with different people? Branded templates are your secret weapon for any visual asset creation task. It saves time and serves as the guideline for all future versions of that document.

Applying your brand to industry templates is simple. First, pick one of our professionally designed templates, and then use our intuitive editor to change the color scheme, fonts and other design elements. You can also create a master layout to control fonts and logo placements.

Better yet, try Visme's Brand Wizard feature . Input your website URL and follow the steps. In the end, you’ll have a full set of templates with your brand colors and fonts.

5. Create each page in the document/slide in the deck

Transfer content from the outline to the document, section by section. Analyze and customize the visualization of each slide or page so it's optimized for the story you will tell. Yes, even sales plans can use storytelling techniques to be functional and effective. It’s the single most important communication tool in your arsenal.

Customize the sections, pages and slides with all the design elements available inside your Visme editor. Tap into all the interactive features to create an interactive sales business plan experience or make your digital PDF more engaging.

Take note of all the pages and slides as you create them to help you build the "table of contents" page. Use hyperlinking to let readers navigate the sales business plan however they wish.

6. Collaborate with the team

Involve the teams from the start. Task them with providing information or creating sections of the plan that pertain to their sector. Create the pages together, tag team members and leave comments to share information.

Ask managers for feedback through the Visme workspace; send them a live link to the project where they can leave notes and comments for edits.

Use a template to create an org chart that explains and details everyone’s role in the plan moving forward. When you make the process, plan and action collaborative, the team culture is strengthened. It’s a win-win in all directions.

7. Finalize and Share Your Plan

Take care of the last edits and proofread all the content. Double-check all image permissions and finalize all the layouts. Now that all the slides or pages are ready, it’s time to share and present the finished project. Use Presenter Studio to add a personalized message to the sales plan presentation, which is ideal for remote teams.

How do you wish to share the sales business plan with your team?

If there's any degree of interactivity in your plan, digital is the way to go. In the settings tab, publish your Visme project to the web and generate a live link to share with anyone you wish.

Download or share your sales business presentation as a video, a flip book, an interactive PDF or an interactive digital experience. All of these and more are possible with Visme.

There are templates, and then there are branded templates. A regular template has a color palette chosen by our designers for anyone to use. A branded template has all your company colors and fonts ready to fill up with content and finalize.

Here's a comprehensive list of the actual slides or pages in a sales business plan template. These apply to the document or presentation format of a top-down sales business plan.

Made with Visme Infographic Maker

 Start with the stunning cover page, then follow up with an interactive table of contents and other pages such as:

• Executive summary. Summarize your company goals, sales objectives, revenue targets, and top-level strategies. This lays the foundation for the rest of your document.
• Business goals (SMART goals & KPIs). Provide clear goals that you'll use to guide your sales plan activities and resources. 
• Current sales performance.  Use data visualization to present an overview of your current sales performance. 
• Industry and market overview.  Provide actionable insights on data or trends to support your sales plan.
• Description of sales strategies and tactics.  Break down the sales techniques that will be used to execute your plan.
• Customer segments.  Define your customer persona , target audience or segmentation, answering the question, "Who do you plan to sell to."
• SWOT Analysis.  Take a look at your sales team or brand's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and potential threats. 
• Resources and team capabilities. Using the organizational chart , visualize the team roles and list resources to accomplish your goal.
• Timeframe for execution.  Provide an estimated timeframe you'll need to execute your sales plan. 
• Budget.  State how much you plan to spend or need to accommodate your sales plan's resources.  

Here’s the collection of sales business plan examples you’ve been looking for. They are available in different selling styles, covering an array of industries. Simply add your brand content with elements of storytelling to make it unforgettable.

If time is running out or you need a speedy start for your sales business plan, Visme's AI business plan generator can get it done in just a few minutes.

These business sales plans are a great starting point for sales managers looking for more templates to use with their team.

1. New Product Sales Plan

Plan the sales strategy for a new product with a new product sales plan template. Put together a strategy to promote the new product to existing clients and new prospects. Look at the data from previous campaigns and use it as the foundation for future product launches and sales plans.

The document-style sales business plan template below has all the pages you need to share information about the products, the goals, the KPIs to follow and the team in charge of getting it done. Finally, there are data pages for the budget and market analysis.

2. SaaS Sales Plan

SaaS companies need effective sales plans to grow their client base and increase quarterly revenue. A comprehensive sales plan for a SaaS company needs specific sections for each item and clear strategies for reaching team goals. Link to the materials the sales team will use, like sales playbooks and surveys .

This sales plan sample template, designed especially for SaaS companies, concentrates on the strengths, opportunities and unique selling points. The color blocks and data widgets offer a quick overview of the foundation, goals and team in charge of taking care of it.

Beyond creating a sales plan, you want to visualize your sales pipeline to see where your sales prospects are in the purchasing process.

3. 30-60-90-day Sales Plan

Maximize the efficiency of your sales team by utilizing this comprehensive sales action plan template. This 30 60 90 day sales plan example template is based on the idea of time. The strategies in the plan are laid out in three sections of one month each. Roadmaps have a timeframe, and there are three sets of goals. The purpose is to integrate new technology better or train a new sales rep into the team.

Get the most from your 30-60-90 sales business plan with the template below. Each page concentrates on the dedicated time period, explaining everything expected from the employee or the team.

4. Territory Sales Plan

Territory sales business plans are based on a specific geolocation or localization where the sales will occur. You need this type of sales plan if your company has client bases in different areas of the country or world. Culturally, each location can have different approaches and sales tactics. Use the dynamic fields feature to reuse territory sales presentations and easily change the location information.

Across nine pages in a purple color scheme, this territory sales plan is ready for your team’s detailed strategic planning. Create a document per location, or use interactivity to create hotspots that change the data or information according to the reader’s choice.

5. Business Development Sales Plan

Strategic business development can mean increasing client reach, improving business partnerships and many other business activities that increase revenue. Using this business development sales plan, your team can strategize different approaches to achieve positive goals.

In the business development sales plan template below, you’ll find all the graphic organizers to help your team see the big picture across different factors. Create timelines , Gantt charts and roadmaps to organize tasks and measure goals.

6. Market Expansion Sales Plan

Expanding the market is a large part of many sales strategies. And it also needs a solid sales business plan for the team and higher-ups to know what they can expect. To expand your target market efficiently, you’ll need to do a lot of research. All the data you collect goes on the pages of the market expansion sales plan in attractive data visualizations and infographic layouts.

Get inspired to set bold market expansion goals with this colorful and clean-cut template design. Each page has a specific function and purpose, and charts and data visualizations grace the pages without visual obstacles. This template is great for fast and easy information sharing.

7. Revenue-based Sales Plan

The name of this sales plan says it all. The entirety of this plan stems from revenue-how much there is, how much the company wants, and how to get it. These are ideal for sales teams that separate the big picture into actionable parts.

With the template below, your team can create an actionable sales plan that moves the needle forward. The angled leading lines on each page take the reader on a visual journey across goals and timelines to success. Part of the plan is to inspire the team members and stakeholders to believe in the process and work together.

8. Real Estate Sales Plan

In real estate, you’ll have to plan strategies for your agents and teams to follow together. Real estate agents must work with the marketing team to be on the same page about messaging, strategies and goals. With a sales plan, you can put it all together into one.

In this template, all the marketing, prospecting, and target market calculations work together to improve your sales strategies. Strategic planning can improve revenue for the agency, the agents, and the homeowners.

9. Sales Training Plan

New sales reps perform better when their onboarding and training are inspiring and motivating. Use this template to plan your training and onboarding strategies and create a better company culture. Instruct new hires in the systems and explain timelines of expected performance during the probation and orientation phase.

The choice of color palette and design elements is important for telling the story of your sales training plan. Cover both high and low levels of the sales process by training efficiently. Plan how to train and get results.

After personalizing your preferred sales business plan template, the next step is to download and share it with your team and stakeholders.

With Visme, you have complete freedom over how you use your documents. You can download the design in various formats, such as PDF, JPG, PNG, and HTML5, or share it online via email or a shareable link.

You can even publish your content anywhere on the internet by generating a snippet of code from the Visme app.

One of our satisfied customers, shares their positive experience with Visme's templates and sharing options.

Matt Swiren

Manager of Partnership Marketing

Q. What Are the Different Types of Strategic Sales Planning?

As a sales leader, it is crucial to avoid poor planning, as it can result in missing up to 10% of annual sales opportunities . Your responsibility is to ensure that your company does not experience this setback.

To help you avoid this pitfall, here are five distinct approaches, each with its own unique flair.

1. Goal-Oriented Planning: This approach begins with setting ambitious yet achievable revenue targets, followed by reverse-engineering your sales process to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) necessary to reach those targets. Sales activities are then meticulously aligned with the overarching goals to create a cohesive roadmap to success.

2. Account Planning: It focuses on developing a comprehensive strategy for managing individual accounts. This type of planning involves researching the account, identifying key stakeholders, and creating a plan to engage with them. Account planning benefits businesses that rely on a small number of large accounts for their revenue.

3. Product Planning: Product planning involves the development of a strategy for selling a particular product or product line. This type of planning focuses on understanding the market for the product, identifying key features and benefits, and developing a plan for promoting and selling the product.

4. Relationship Planning: Relationship selling is a long-term approach focusing on building strong customer relationships. It involves understanding the customer's needs, building trust and providing ongoing support and value. This approach requires excellent communication skills, a customer-centric mindset and a commitment to delivering exceptional service.

5. Sales Process Planning: This involves developing a comprehensive plan for managing the sales process, from lead generation to closing the sale. This type of planning involves identifying the critical steps in the sales process, developing a plan for each step, and establishing metrics to measure the effectiveness of the process.

Q. How Do I Write a Sales Business Plan?

After learning about the various types of sales planning and their advantages, as well as the components of a sales business plan, it's time to delve into the process of drafting one. Let's explore some tips for writing a successful sales business plan.

• Define Your Sales Objectives: Start by defining your sales objectives. What are your revenue goals? What products or services do you want to sell? Who is your sales ICP ? Defining these objectives will help you create a clear roadmap for achieving your sales goals.
• Conduct a Market Analysis: Conduct a market analysis to identify opportunities and threats in the marketplace. Analyze your industry, competitors, and target audience. This will help you understand how to position your product or service in the market.
• I dentify Your Unique Selling Proposition: Identify your unique selling proposition (USP)—what makes your product or service different from your competitors? What are the benefits of your product or service? Understanding your USP will help you market and sell your product or service better.
• Develop a Sales Strategy: Develop a sales strategy that aligns with your sales objectives. This should include a plan for lead generation, lead qualification and the sales process. You can revisit the types of strategic sales planning sections to choose the one that fits your sales goals. Consider the sales channels you'll use, the sales team structure and the sales tools you'll need.
• Define Sales Metrics: Define sales metrics that will help you measure your progress toward achieving your sales objectives. This could include revenue, sales growth rate, conversion rate and customer acquisition cost.
• Develop a Sales Budget: Develop a sales budget that aligns with your sales strategy and objectives. This should include expenses related to lead generation, sales team compensation, sales tools, and marketing.
• Review and Refine: Review and refine your sales business plan regularly. This will help you stay on track toward achieving your sales goals and make adjustments as needed.

Additionally, you can read this article on creating a strategic sales plan to get more help writing your own sales business plan.

Create Your Sales Business Plan With Visme

Jumping right into a project isn’t always the best idea; you won’t be prepared for the obstacles and hurdles. Every layer of your sales stack should be potentially planned and brainstormed for optimal results.

This is where sales business plans come into play. With well-designed and personalized plans, you create meaningful connections with prospects, turning them into loyal clients.

Create an interactive sales business plan to engage your team in a shared journey toward a common goal. Designate roles and link them together in the sales plan and your productivity platform so everyone is always on track.

Visme has plenty of features to help you and your team close deal after deal. Not only can you create a sales business plan collaboratively, but you can also brainstorm, create other content, share it online, track performance and keep all assets organized within your workspace. Make your team more efficient at creating visual content at every level of your organization using our third-party integrations .

Ready to up your company's sales game and close more deals? Book a demo or sign up today to see how we can help your sales team succeed.

Easily put together winning sales business plans in Visme

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• Marketing and Sales Strategy
• 11 April, 2024
• 12 Sales and Marketing Strategy Examples from Real Companies

No matter how big or small, every business needs a sales and marketing strategy . Depending on how much experience you have in either field, that task can sound daunting. 

There’s no need to worry! You do not have to reinvent the wheel. The beauty of being in business is that you walk on a road paved by giants. Sure, you’ll want to toss in a little spice of your own. Perhaps someday, you’ll be a pioneer in your strategy. But for now, we need to take a look at some real examples.

Sales strategy examples

• Value-based Selling
• Power-Based Principle
• SPIN Selling
• Solution Selling
• Challenger Selling

A sales strategy is a series of actions, decisions, and corresponding goals that inform you how your sales department depicts your business and its services/products to new customers. A sales strategy is the guiding light for salesmen and saleswomen to follow, providing clear objectives for the sales process , competitive analysis, and product/service positioning.

For the most part, all sales strategies involve management creating a plan for processes, practices, and goals. 

Sales strategies are not universal. Sure, you can follow some examples, but as I mentioned just above, you will have to implement your own twist in order for it to make sense and work for your customers. For that reason, a proper sales strategy relies almost completely on your target audience.

Now that we’re all on the same page about what a sales strategy is, it’s time to talk about some examples. These examples are merely here to inspire you for your own strategy. Although these strategies are proven successful for the companies I’ll mention, you will need to adapt them to your brand to have similar results.

Value-based selling – UPS

One of the more popular sales strategies recently is value-based selling. This is the process of positioning what you’re offering and the received value of your products or services. This is the opposite of selling based on the product or service alone. Focus on the benefit, not the product.

UPS does this very well. As one of the biggest shipping and logistics companies globally, they have a lot of competition constantly nipping at their heels. However, they tend to gallop ahead of the competition by providing an extra layer of value to their services and products.

UPS has built a global infrastructure for shipping, offering deals and value to businesses that other shipping companies simply can’t. They offer a wide range of shipping options for businesses , broadening their value by producing extra value for their customers. They don’t just sell shipping deals. They sell convenience, variety, simplicity, flexibility, and peace of mind.

Power-Based Principle – Apple

In the power-based principle selling strategy, the salesperson assumes the role of the expert in the industry. Instead of talking to customer service, development, or engineers to figure out a solution and sell something, the salesperson assesses the situation, provides all the necessary knowledge needed, and follows up with a solution.

Apple is the perfect example of this. If you’ve never been to an Apple store, then this is something that you may not be very familiar with. When you step foot in an Apple store, you’ll be greeted by what they call “Apple Geniuses”. These are people that know the product inside and out. They know every little detail, update, and product that Apple has to offer, and they have the power to sell it to you instantly.

These Apple Geniuses are also able to troubleshoot software issues and hardware failures. This is all to make the sales process as smooth as possible when visiting Apple. You deal with one person and one person only because they have all the power in the sale.

SPIN selling – everyone

SPIN selling is a strategy that utilizes a set of four basic questions in order to move closer to a sale. In his book titled “ SPIN Selling ,” Neil Rackham summarizes sales as simply learning to ask the right questions. He then goes on to highlight the four types of questions that you need to ask:

S – Situational

Asking situational questions gives you data that you can’t gather through research. These are questions that are unique to the lead/prospect. 

P – Problem

Asking about the problem they’re having gives you insight into their needs. It points out priority number one for them.

I – Implication

Implicational questions let you know the urgency of the situation. How soon do they need a fix?

N – Need/Payoff

Asking about what they need outside of your company gives you a general understanding of their interest independently. This provides for a solid transition to talk about features and pricing.

The idea is that each one of these questions, if asked correctly, will tell you everything you need to know about the lead, whether they qualify or not. 

No specific company is mentioned here as an example because most fortune 1000 companies use this strategy in some way or another. Because this strategy is not limited to four-set questions, it can be adapted very heavily. 

Solution Selling – Sleepnumber

Solution selling involves a process where the seller focuses on pain points and offers a solution based on the customer’s unique needs. This may sound like a generic sales strategy that every company adopts, but it has different levels to it.

Most companies have a pricing page where they focus on features. For something like a SaaS , this makes sense. Generally speaking, the features point users towards a solution.

But for physical products, it can be a little more tricky, especially if you offer a wide range of products. That being said, Sleepnumber, the mattress company, implements solution selling pretty flawlessly by asking users to take a quiz.

By answering these questions, they can direct you towards which solution they think is best for your unique pain points. This, of course, is an automated example, but it can be adapted to manual sales calls and emails. Focus on what they need and their pain points, then sell them a solution.

Challenger Selling – Cyber security

The challenger sales strategy is potentially one of the most popular sales models right now, but it’s not for everyone. Challenger selling may or may not be relevant depending on the sales rep, the situation, and the customer.

Challenger selling involves taking full control over the sale (as the sales rep) and aiming to teach the customer something new about their company. In turn, this forces the experience to be tailor-made to the situation.

Because of this, you can understand why it’s hard to nail down a specific name as an example. Instead, let’s imagine a situation based on an industry: Cybersecurity.

Remember, the goal of the challenger sales strategy is to take control of the situation by informing the customer. In cybersecurity, users may not know exactly what they need, but they know they need something. Big businesses worldwide implement some sort of security network to protect their data, but they may not understand how dire the situation can be.

Cybersecurity salespeople swoop in and inform the customer of the potential dangers and what they need to stay protected. Instead of asking, they’re telling. 

This can come off as a bit rude on paper, but in B2B , this is precisely what many business owners are looking for. They won’t care so much about the emotion of the sale. They want results.

Marketing strategy examples

• Alternating user experience
• Retargetting users
• Employing user-generated content
• Implementing loyalty rewards programs
• Niche marketing
• Value proposition marketing
• Marketing as a brand, not a product

A marketing strategy is a process that marketers use to guide their various campaigns, projects, and marketing models. Much like in sales, a marketing strategy aims to structure marketing efforts, aligning the team with common goals, objectives, and processes to market to the right audience.

Think of a marketing strategy as guidelines. Marketers will reference these guidelines anytime they start a new project or create a new plan for gathering marketing qualified leads . For example, a marketing plan might be to bring awareness to a new product. A marketing strategy is what outlines the process for that plan.

At its core, marketing is nothing but promoting your brand, product, or service. It shows what you have to offer to the market in a creative way, one that stands out.

Sounds simple enough, but with the competition heating up constantly, companies are forced to step out of the box and develop new and innovative ways to get their name out there. Content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing , and many other examples were born from a need.

Depending on your company, what you’re selling, and your audience, you can utilize any number of strategies to really break into the market. It’s a matter of understanding what works and what doesn’t work and adapting to new and changing data. So for that reason, here’s a list of real companies that utilize certain marketing strategies.

Constantly alternating user experience – Spotify

Being the largest music streaming platform in the world, Spotify has to change up its marketing game constantly. They do this by marketing their differences, alternating the user experience nearly every time someone logs on to the app.

Implementing advanced algorithms and AI , Spotify tracks users’ preferences, genres, and music styles to make daily, weekly, and even yearly playlists. This, among many other things, makes Spotify unique. They play this to their benefit by making ads promoting their constantly alternating user experience. 

Retargeting campaigns – 1 800 Contacts 

Retargeting campaigns are one of the most effective lead nurturing strategies there is. So successful that it’s highly regarded as a marketing strategy that you simply cannot afford to miss out on.

The premise behind retargeting campaigns is relatively simple. Find already converted customers or leads familiar with the brand and target them again with new ads. An excellent example of this is how 1 800 Contacts does it. 

Using remarketing, 1 800 Contacts entices users after they’ve already left the website. With this ad, you can see that by simply coming back to them (in this case, the user hasn’t even converted yet), they get an additional 12% off their first order. 12% might seem minuscule compared to the prices of contacts nowadays, but it just might be the icing on the cake for indecisive shoppers.

User-generated content – Airbnb

We mentioned content marketing just above, but what about user-generated content? User-generated content is one of the most effective and powerful marketing strategies that any brand can utilize, but only if it fits the narrative.

For example, a company like CISCO might have a hard time creating user-generated content. On the other hand, a company like Airbnb has everything they need to implement this strategy. In fact, they already do!

Airbnb magazine is a publication that highlights user experiences all over the world. Think of it like a travel magazine used for marketing. Being a household name nowadays, people will see these exotic locations and experiences and instantly want to go. Ideally, they will look for an Airbnb on their journey.

The best part about this is that users submit their stories to the magazine. They’re already written! Once set up correctly, user-generated content is a powerful tool that doesn’t require much effort.

Loyalty rewards program – Starbucks

Everyone likes to be rewarded . It’s something that’s encoded in our DNA that we all love to receive free stuff, even if it means we have to purchase something beforehand.

Starbucks, one of the world’s leading names in coffee, implemented a loyalty program back in 2008, and it has raked in massive success ever since.

The idea is simple. By making purchases, you get points. Those points can be saved up to receive rewards like free drinks, snacks, and Starbucks merchandise. The more you spend, the more points you receive, and the more rewards. 

Niche marketing – Twitch

One could argue that niche marketing is just regular marketing. After all, we all know the importance of identifying your target audience. But what happens if that target is too broad? What happens if you try to market to an audience that is not specific enough? You will be spending tons on ads and other channels and not seeing enough ROI.

Nobody does niche marketing quite like the popular streaming service Twitch. Instead of aiming high and targeting anyone who might be interested in their service, they went explicitly for those who they know will be interested. They wasted zero time or money on broad audiences and instead went for niche-specific ones. 

What makes Twitch unique is that the platform itself is split into niches. You have video games, music, makeup, art, and all sorts of other subgenres that users can tune into and enjoy watching. Using this data, they were able to target those who have an interest in the niche and curate a unique ad experience just for them.

Value proposition marketing – Uber

We mentioned value-based selling above and listed UPS as one of the best examples. That being said, marketing your value proposition is also a really great marketing strategy.

What do people want? Value! How do they find out about the value that you’re selling? Marketing! And nobody does it quite like Uber.

Uber’s value proposition states it is “The smartest way to get around.” 

Without directly mentioning it, Uber markets its value based on the frustration that is traveling nowadays. Think about when you ride in a taxi. You either have to call them or hunt one down. Then you have to give them directions. Then, you typically pay with cash.

Uber takes the unnecessary pain points out of urban travel by including a convenient app with its service. The app allows you to summon a car directly to your location. Then, you use GPS to let the driver know where you’re going. Finally, you pay within the app, cashless and headache-free.

Marketing as a brand, not a product – Red Bull

Red Bull is well known for some obscure marketing strategies. One of the more famous examples is when they first launched in Europe. Instead of spending millions of dollars plastering posters and ads everywhere, they took to the streets of London.

For a time, you would see nothing but Red Bull cans “thrown away” in the recycle bins all around the city. Anytime someone would go to toss in a competing beverage, they would see some Red Bull cans in the mix. This caused people to wonder why so many Red Bulls were being consumed, giving the brand the leverage they needed to blast off in Europe.

It’s marketing strategies like this, and Red Bull’s stance on experiences give them the brand image they have now. They‘re constantly supporting athletes, racing teams, and individuals that dare to take risks, putting their brand up there with those who live life to the fullest. It’s hard to think about any world record broken in a car, airplane, or anything else with an engine that wasn’t sponsored by Red Bull in the last 10-15 years.

Tips for creating effective sales and marketing strategies

We’ve seen some amazing brands do amazing things in the examples above, but not every example will be easy to implement. I would say that none of these examples are easy to implement for any brand without doing the following few things first.

1. Set goals

No strategy, sales or marketing, will be successful if you don’t identify the goals of the strategy beforehand. You have to be specific with these goals and make sure everyone is on the same page. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself neck-deep and over budget without clear direction.

2. Find your target audience

Just in case you didn’t catch it before this paragraph, identifying your target audience in any strategy is not only a good idea; it’s detrimental to the success of your business. You need to know who you are marketing and selling to, their interests, where they are, and what they need.

3. Find your competition 

In addition to identifying your target audience, you also need to identify your competition. In doing so, you can learn more than you might think. You’ll understand what they’re doing well, what they aren’t doing so well, and how their audiences react to their marketing and sales strategies. 

4. Use the right tools for the trade

When it comes to sales and marketing, there’s seemingly an infinite amount of tools that you can use to help make the process smoother and even automate it. For example, Encharge helps you build automation flows so that you can automate the right emails at the right times. Create user profiles and even send out automated emails based on behaviors and actions taken by the prospect, lead, or customer. 

Conclusions and takeaway

Sales and marketing strategies are something that not many businesses will share. After all, if it works well for them, it can work well for the competition. For that reason, it’s hard to say what will work well for you in your unique situation.

No matter what you decide and which strategy you decide to go with from the list above, it will need to be adapted to meet the needs of your target audience. Play around a bit, see how your leads react, and make sure to stay on top of data as it comes in. Don’t be afraid to change things up!

And most importantly, make sure you have the tools that you need. You can book a demo with Encharge today to see how having the right tools makes all the difference.

Further Reading

• 6 B2B Marketing Tips That Can Directly Boost Revenue Growth
• 7 Customer Marketing Strategies for Sustainable Growth
• 15 Non-traditional B2B campaigns – Examples & Ideas You Can Implement
• 10 Ways to Automate Your Sales Processes

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Powerful email sequences that have been proven to work. Use them like lego pieces to grow your SaaS. 13 sequences / 27 email templates and 5,000 words of marketing gold.

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Blog Marketing What is a Marketing Plan & How to Create One [with Examples]

What is a Marketing Plan & How to Create One [with Examples]

Written by: Sara McGuire Oct 26, 2023

A marketing plan is a blueprint that outlines your strategies to attract and convert your ideal customers as a part of your customer acquisition strategy. It’s a comprehensive document that details your:

• Target audience:  Who you’re trying to reach
• Marketing goals:  What you want to achieve
• Strategies and tactics:  How you’ll reach your goals
• Budget:  Resources you’ll allocate
• Metrics:  How you’ll measure success

In this article, I’ll explain everything you need to know about creating a marketing plan . If you need a little extra help, there are professionally designed marketing plan templates that’ll make the process much easier. So, let’s ditch the confusion and get started!

Click to jump ahead:

What is a marketing plan?

How to write a marketing plan , 9 marketing plan examples to inspire your growth strategy.

• Marketing plan v.s. business plan
• Types of marketing plans

Marketing plan FAQs

A marketing plan is a report that outlines your marketing strategy for your products or services, which could be applicable for the coming year, quarter or month.  

Watch this quick, 13-minute video for more details on what a marketing plan is and how to make one yourself:

Typically, a marketing plan includes:

• An overview of your business’s marketing and advertising goals
• A description of your business’s current marketing position
• A timeline of when tasks within your strategy will be completed
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) you will be tracking
• A description of your business’s target market and customer needs
• A description of how you will measure marketing plan performance

For example, this marketing plan template provides a high-level overview of the business and competitors before diving deep into specific goals, KPIs and tactics:

Learning how to write a marketing plan forces you to think through the important steps that lead to an effective marketing strategy . And a well-defined plan will help you stay focused on your high-level marketing goals.

With Venngage’s extensive catalog of marketing plan templates, creating your marketing plan isn’t going to be hard or tedious. In fact, Venngage has plenty of helpful communications and design resources for marketers. If you’re ready to get started, sign up for  Venngage for Marketers   now. It’s free to register and start designing.

Whether you’re a team trying to set smarter marketing goals, a consultant trying to set your client in the right direction, or a one-person team hustling it out, Venngage for Marketers helps you get things done.

As mentioned above, the scope of your marketing plan varies depending on its purpose or the type of organization it’s for.

For example, you could look for performance marketing agency to create a marketing plan that provides an overview of a company’s entire marketing strategy:

A typical outline of a marketing plan includes:

• Executive summary
• Goals and objectives
• User personas
• Competitor analysis/SWOT analysis
• Baseline metrics
• Marketing strategy
• Tracking guidelines

Below you will see in details how to write each section as well as some examples of how you can design each section in a marketing plan.

Let’s look at how to create a successful marketing plan (click to jump ahead):

• Write a simple executive summary
• Set metric-driven marketing goals
• Outline your user personas
• Research all of your competitors
• Set accurate key baselines & metrics
• Create an actionable marketing strategy
• Set tracking or reporting guidelines

1. Write a simple executive summary

Starting your marketing plan off on the right foot is important. You want to pull people into your amazing plan for marketing domination. Not bore them to tears.

One of the best ways to get people excited to read your marketing plan is with a well-written executive summary. An executive summary introduces readers to your company goals, marketing triumphs, future plans, and other important contextual facts.

Basically, you can use the Executive Summary as a primer for the rest of your marketing plan.

Include things like:

• Simple marketing goals
• High-level metrics
• Important company milestones
• Facts about your brand
• Employee anecdotes
• Future goals & plans

Try to keep your executive summary rather brief and to the point. You aren’t writing a novel, so try to keep it under three to four paragraphs.

Take a look at the executive summary in the marketing plan example below:

The executive summary is only two paragraphs long — short but effective.

The executive summary tells readers about the company’s growth, and how they are about to overtake one of their competitors. But there’s no mention of specific metrics or figures. That will be highlighted in the next section of the marketing plan.

An effective executive summary should have enough information to pique the reader’s interest, but not bog them down with specifics yet. That’s what the rest of your marketing plan is for!

The executive summary also sets the tone for your marketing plan. Think about what tone will fit your brand ? Friendly and humorous? Professional and reliable? Inspiring and visionary?

2. Set metric-driven marketing goals

After you perfect your executive summary, it’s time to outline your marketing goals.

(If you’ve never set data-driven goals like this before, it would be worth reading this growth strategy guide ).

This is one of the most important parts of the entire marketing plan, so be sure to take your time and be as clear as possible. Moreover, optimizing your marketing funnel is key. Employing effective funnel software can simplify operations and provide valuable customer insights. It facilitates lead tracking, conversion rate analysis, and efficient marketing optimization .

As a rule of thumb, be as specific as possible. The folks over at  VoyMedia  advise that you should set goals that impact website traffic, conversions, and customer success — and to use real numbers. Complement your goals with website optimization tools (e.g., A/B testing speed with Nostra – check Nostra AI review to learn more) to further improve conversions.

Avoid outlining vague goals like:

• Get more Twitter followers
• Write more articles
• Create more YouTube videos (like educational or Explainer videos )
• Increase retention rate
• Decrease bounce rate

Instead, identify  key performance metrics  (KPI) you want to impact and the percentage you want to increase them by.

Take a look at the goals page in the marketing plan example below:

They not only identify a specific metric in each of their goals, but they also set a timeline for when they will be increased.

The same vague goals listed earlier become much clearer when specific numbers and timelines are applied to them:

• Get 100 new Twitter followers per month
• Write 5 more articles per week
• Create 10 YouTube videos each year
• Increase retention rate by 15% by 2020
• Decrease bounce rate by 5% by Q1
• Create an online course  and get 1,000 new leads
• Focus more on local SEO strategies
• Conduct a monthly social media report to track progress

You can dive even deeper into your marketing goals if you want (generally, the more specific, the better). Here’s a marketing plan example that shows how to outline your growth goals:

3. Outline your user personas

Now, this may not seem like the most important part of your marketing plan, but I think it holds a ton of value.

Outlining your user personas is an important part of a marketing plan that should not be overlooked.

You should be asking not just how you can get the most visitors to your business, but how you can get the right visitors.

Who are your ideal customers? What are their goals? What are their biggest problems? How does your business solve customer problems?

Answering these questions will take lots of research, but it’s essential information to get.

Some ways to conduct user research are:

• Interviewing your users (either in person or on the phone)
• Conducting focus groups
• Researching other businesses in the same industry
• Surveying your audience

Then, you will need to compile your user data into a user persona  guide.

Take a look at how detailed this user persona template is below:

Taking the time to identify specific demographic traits, habits and goals will make it easier for you to cater your marketing plan to them.

Here’s how you can create a user persona guide:

The first thing you should add is a profile picture or icon for each user persona. It can help to put a face to your personas, so they seem more real.

Next, list demographic information like:

• Identifiers
• Activities/Hobbies

The user persona example above uses sliding scales to identify personality traits like introversion vs. extroversion and thinking vs. feeling. Identifying what type of personality your target users tend to have an influence on the messaging you use in your marketing content.

Meanwhile, this user persona guide identifies specific challenges the user faces each day:

But if you don’t want to go into such precise detail, you can stick to basic information, like in this marketing plan example:

Most businesses will have a few different types of target users. That’s why it’s pertinent to identify and create several different user personas . That way, you can better segment your marketing campaigns and set separate goals, if necessary.

Here’s a marketing plan example with a segmented user persona guide:

The important thing is for your team or client to have a clear picture of who their target user is and how they can appeal to their specific problems.

Start creating robust user personas using Venngage’s user persona guide .

4. Conduct an extensive competitor analysis

Next, on the marketing plan checklist, we have the competitor research section. This section will help you identify who your competitors are, what they’re doing, and how you could carve yourself a place alongside them in your niche — and ideally, surpass them. It’s something you can learn to do with rank tracking software .

Competitor research is also incredibly important if you are starting a blog .

Typically, your competitor research should include:

• Who their marketing team is
• Who their leadership team is
• What their marketing strategy and strategic marketing plan are (this will probably revolve some reverse-engineering)
• What their sales strategy is (same deal)
• Social Media strategy (are they using discounting strategies such as coupon marketing to get conversions)
• Their market cap/financials
• Their yearly growth (you will probably need to use a marketing tool like Ahrefs to do this)
• The number of customers they have & their user personas

Also, take as deep a dive as you can into the strategies they use across their:

• Blog/Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• SEO Marketing
• Video marketing
• And any other marketing tactics they use

Research their strengths and weaknesses in all parts of their company, and you will find some great opportunities. Bookmark has a great guide to different marketing strategies for small businesses if you need some more information there.

You can use this simple SWOT analysis worksheet to quickly work through all parts of their strategy as well:

Click the template above to create a SWOT chart . Customize the template to your liking — no design know-how needed.

Since you have already done all the research beforehand, adding this information to your marketing plan shouldn’t be that hard.

In this marketing plan example, some high-level research is outlined for 3 competing brands:

But you could take a deeper dive into different facets of your competitors’ strategies. This marketing plan example analyses a competitor’s inbound marketing strategy :

It can also be helpful to divide your competitors into Primary and Secondary groups. For example, Apple’s primary competitor may be Dell for computers, but its secondary competitor could be a company that makes tablets.

Your most dangerous competitors may not even be in the same industry as you. Like the CEO of Netflix said, “Sleep is our competition.”

5. Set accurate key baselines & metrics

It’s pretty hard to plan for the future if you don’t know where your business stands right now.

Before we do anything at Venngage, we find the baselines so we can compare future results to something. We do it so much it’s almost like second nature now!

Setting baselines will allow you to more accurately track your progress. You will also be able to better analyze what worked and what didn’t work, so you can build a stronger strategy. It will definitely help them clearly understand your goals and strategy as well.

Here’s a marketing plan example where the baselines are visualized:

Another way to include baselines in your plan is with a simple chart, like in the marketing plan example below:

Because data can be intimidating to a lot of people, visualizing your data using charts and infographics will help demystify the information.

6. Create an actionable marketing strategy

After pulling all the contextual information and relevant metrics into your marketing plan, it’s time to break down your marketing strategy.

Once again, it’s easier to communicate your information to your team or clients using visuals .

Mind maps are an effective way to show how a strategy with many moving parts ties together. For example, this mind map shows how the four main components of a marketing strategy interact together:

You can also use a flow chart to map out your strategy by objectives:

However you choose to visualize your strategy, your team should know exactly what they need to do. This is not the time to keep your cards close to your chest.

Your strategy section may need to take up a few pages to explain, like in the marketing plan example below:

With all of this information, even someone from the development team will understand what the marketing team is working on.

This minimalistic marketing plan example uses color blocks to make the different parts of the strategy easy to scan:

Breaking your strategy down into tasks will make it easier to tackle.

Another important way to visualize your marketing strategy is to create a project roadmap. A project roadmap visualizes the timeline of your product with individual tasks. Our roadmap maker can help you with this.

For example, this project roadmap shows how tasks on both the marketing and web design side run parallel to each other:

A simple timeline can also be used in your marketing plan:

Or a mind map, if you want to include a ton of information in a more organized way:

Even a simple “Next, Now, Later” chart can help visualize your strategy:

7. Set tracking or reporting guidelines

Close your marketing plan with a brief explanation of how you plan to track or measure your results. This will save you a lot of frustration down the line by standardizing how you track results across your team.

Like the other sections of your marketing plan, you can choose how in-depth you want to go. But there need to be some clear guidelines on how to measure the progress and results of your marketing plan.

At the bare minimum, your results tracking guidelines should specify:

• What you plan to track
• How you plan to track results
• How often you plan to measure

But you can more add tracking guidelines to your marketing plan if you see the need to. You may also want to include a template that your team or client can follow,  for  client reporting ,  ensure that the right metrics are being tracked.

The marketing plan example below dedicates a whole page to tracking criteria:

Use a task tracker to track tasks and marketing results, and a checklist maker to note down tasks, important life events, or tracking your daily life.

Similarly, the marketing plan example below talks about tracking content marketing instead:

Marketing plan vs. marketing strategy

Although often used interchangeably, the terms “marketing plan” and “marketing strategy” do have some differences.

Simply speaking, a marketing strategy presents what the business will do in order to reach a certain goal. A marketing plan outlines the specific daily, weekly, monthly or yearly activities that the marketing strategy calls for. As a business, you can create a marketing proposal for the marketing strategies defined in your company’s marketing plan. There are various marketing proposal examples that you can look at to help with this.

A company’s extended marketing strategy can be like this:

Notice how it’s more general and doesn’t include the actual activities required to complete each strategy or the timeframe those marketing activities will take place. That kind of information is included in a marketing plan, like this marketing plan template which talks about the content strategy in detail:

1. Nonprofit marketing plan

Here’s a free nonprofit marketing plan example that is ideal for organizations with a comprehensive vision to share. It’s a simple plan that is incredibly effective. Not only does the plan outline the core values of the company, it also shares the ideal buyer persona.

Note how the branding is consistent throughout this example so there is no doubt which company is presenting this plan. The content plan is an added incentive for anyone viewing the document to go ahead and give the team the green light.

2. Social media marketing plan

Two-page marketing plan samples aren’t very common, but this free template proves how effective they are. There’s a dedicated section for business goals as well as for project planning.

The milestones for the marketing campaign are clearly laid out, which is a great way to show how organized this business strategy is.

3. Small business marketing plan

This marketing plan template is perfect for small businesses who set out to develop an overarching marketing strategy for the whole year:

Notice how this aligns pretty well with the marketing plan outline we discussed in previous sections.

In terms of specific tactics for the company’s marketing strategy, the template only discusses SEO strategy, but you can certainly expand on that section to discuss any other strategies — such as link building , that you would like to build out a complete marketing plan for.

4. Orange simple marketing proposal template

Marketing plans, like the sample below, are a great way to highlight what your business strategy and the proposal you wan to put forward to win potential customers.

5. One-page marketing plan

This one-page marketing plan example is great for showcasing marketing efforts in a persuasive presentation or to print out for an in-person meeting.

Note how the fact sheet breaks down the marketing budget as well as the key metrics for the organization. You can win over clients and partners with a plan like this.

6. Light company business fact sheet template

This one-page sample marketing plan clearly outlines the marketing objectives for the organization. It’s a simple but effective way to share a large amount of information in a short amount of time.

What really works with this example is that includes a mission statement, key contact information alongside all the key metrics.

7. Marketing media press kit template

This press kit marketing plan template is bright and unmistakable as belonging to the Cloud Nine marketing agency . The way the brand colors are used also helps diversify the layouts for each page, making the plan easier to read.

We like the way the marketing department has outlined the important facts about the organization. The bold and large numbers draw the eye and look impressive.

8. Professional marketing proposal template

Start your marketing campaign on a promising note with this marketing plan template. It’s short, sharp and to the point. The table of contents sets out the agenda, and there’s a page for the company overview and mission statement.

9. Social media marketing proposal template

A complete marketing plan example, like the one below, not only breaks down the business goals to be achieved but a whole lot more. Note how the terms and conditions and payment schedule are included, which makes this one of the most comprehensive marketing plans on our list.

Marketing plan vs. business plan

While both marketing plans and business plans are crucial documents for businesses, they serve distinct purposes and have different scopes. Here’s a breakdown of the key differences:

Business plan is a comprehensive document that outlines all aspects of your business, including:

• Mission and vision
• Products or services
• Target market
• Competition
• Management team
• Financial projections
• Marketing strategy (including a marketing plan)
• Operations plan

Marketing plan on the other hand, dives deep into the specific strategies and tactics related to your marketing efforts. It expands on the marketing section of a business plan by detailing:

• Specific marketing goals (e.g., brand awareness, lead generation, sales)
• Target audience analysis (detailed understanding of their needs and behaviors)
• Product:  Features, benefits, positioning
• Price:  Pricing strategy, discounts
• Place:  Distribution channels (online, offline)
• Promotion:  Advertising, social media, content marketing, public relations
• Budget allocation for different marketing activities
• Metrics and measurement to track progress and success

In short, business plans paint the entire business picture, while marketing plans zoom in on the specific strategies used to reach your target audience and achieve marketing goals.

Types of marketing plans that can transform your business strategy

Let’s take a look at several types of marketing plans you can create, along with specific examples for each.

1. General marketing strategic plan / Annual marketing plan

This is a good example of a marketing plan that covers the overarching annual marketing strategy for a company:

Another good example would be this Starbucks marketing plan:

This one-page marketing plan example from coffee chain Starbucks has everything at a glance. The bold headers and subheadings make it easier to segment the sections so readers can focus on the area most relevant to them.

What we like about this example is how much it covers. From the ideal buyer persona to actional activities, as well as positioning and metrics, this marketing plan has it all.

Another marketing plan example that caught our eye is this one from Cengage. Although a bit text-heavy and traditional, it explains the various sections well. The clean layout makes this plan easy to read and absorb.

The last marketing plan example we would like to feature in this section is this one from Lush cosmetics.

It is a long one but it’s also very detailed. The plan outlines numerous areas, including the company mission, SWOT analysis , brand positioning, packaging, geographical criteria, and much more.

2. Content marketing plan

A content marketing plan highlights different strategies , campaigns or tactics you can use for your content to help your business reach its goals.

This one-page marketing plan example from Contently outlines a content strategy and workflow using simple colors and blocks. The bullet points detail more information but this plan can easily be understood at a glance, which makes it so effective.

For a more detailed content marketing plan example, take a look at this template which features an editorial calendar you can share with the whole team:

3. SEO marketing plan

Your SEO marketing plan highlights what you plan to do for your SEO marketing strategy . This could include tactics for website on-page optimization , off-page optimization using AI SEO , and link building using an SEO PowerSuite backlink API for quick backlink profile checks. Additionally, incorporating a rank tracker can help monitor keyword performance and track the impact of your optimization efforts.

This SEO marketing plan example discusses in detail the target audience of the business and the SEO plan laid out in different stages:

4. Social media marketing plan

Your social media marketing plan presents what you’ll do to reach your marketing goal through social media. This could include tactics specific to each social media channel that you own, recommendations on developing a new channel, specific campaigns you want to run, and so on, like how B2B channels use Linkedin to generate leads with automation tools and expand their customer base; or like making use of Twitter walls that could display live Twitter feeds from Twitter in real-time on digital screens.

For B2C brands, you can target Facebook and Instagram. Gain Instagram likes to build trust for your brand’s profile and post engaging content on both platforms. Leverage AI social media tools to automate and scale your content plan..

Edit this social media marketing plan example easily with Venngage’s drag-and-drop editor:

5. Demand generation marketing plan

This could cover your paid marketing strategy (which can include search ads, paid social media ads, traditional advertisements, etc.), email marketing strategy and more. Here’s an example:

What should marketing plans include?

Marketing plans should include:

• A detailed analysis of the target market and customer segments.
• Clear and achievable marketing objectives and goals.
• Strategies and tactics for product promotion and distribution.
• Budget allocation for various marketing activities.
• Timelines and milestones for the implementation of marketing strategies.
• Evaluation metrics and methods for tracking the success of the marketing plan.

What is an executive summary in a marketing plan and what is its main goal?

An executive summary in a marketing plan is a brief overview of the entire document, summarizing the key points, goals, and strategies. Its main goal is to provide readers with a quick understanding of the plan’s purpose and to entice them to read further.

What are the results when a marketing plan is effective?

When a marketing plan is effective, businesses can experience increased brand visibility, higher customer engagement , improved sales and revenue, and strengthened customer loyalty.

What is the first section of a marketing plan?

The first section of a marketing plan is typically the “Executive Summary,” which provides a concise overview of the entire plan, including the business’s goals and the strategies to achieve them.

Now that you have the basics for designing your own marketing plan, it’s time to get started:

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Free Marketing Plan Examples: Real-World Samples & Templates

By Joe Weller | April 27, 2024

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A  marketing plan  is a comprehensive document that outlines a company’s marketing strategy and tactics, and ensures that its marketing goals align with its overall objectives. Effective marketing plans include detailed analysis of the market along with roadmaps for upcoming campaigns. Inside this article, you’ll find the  elements of a marketing plan , 10 real-world examples of marketing plans with commentary from experienced marketing professionals, free marketing plan templates and samples , and a  chart to help you determine which template suits your needs .

Marketing Plan Elements

Typical marketing plans begin with an executive summary and include audience demographics, company objectives, situational analysis of the business, and marketing strategies and tactics. Market research and analysis provide campaign direction, and the budget and timeline offer practical parameters. A marketing plan can provide an overview of all strategies and campaigns to be executed in a certain time frame, or it can focus on a specific product, channel, or strategy. The level of detail and the sections included might vary, depending on the organization’s needs. The nine main elements of a marketing plan are:  

Executive Summary and Mission Statement:  A concise, high-level summary conveys the purpose of your marketing plan, introduces key strategies and research insights, and highlights the most important takeaways for stakeholders. For example, an executive summary might outline your brand’s identity, its place within the competitive landscape, and the major opportunities that upcoming marketing campaigns will target. Longer plans might include a separate mission statement or vision statement to align marketing efforts with your company’s larger goals. Discover more  examples of executive summaries with templates to help you write one effectively.  

Situational Analysis:  One of the most crucial elements of your marketing plan, a situational analysis is an assessment of the internal and external factors affecting a business’s performance. It should include research-based insights into market trends and dynamics, customer demographics and pain points, and internal resources.  A strong situational analysis often includes a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, which provides a foundation for an effective marketing strategy. Learn more about  how to perform a SWOT analysis .  

Competitive Analysis:  Understanding the competition is key to developing a compelling marketing plan. This analysis should consider recent marketing campaigns from similar brands to identify successful ways to reach a shared target audience. Being aware of the competitive landscape can also help your business develop a unique selling proposition and stand out in the market. The competitive analysis might be included in the larger situational analysis, or it might be a stand-alone section. For example, a marketing plan could include data on how competitors rank on keywords, or it could evaluate the performance of competitors’ recent social media campaigns. One common framework for understanding market dynamics is a Porter’s five forces analysis, which identifies the forces that contribute to industry rivals. Learn how to evaluate the competitive landscape with  free industry analysis templates .  

Target Audience: In order to implement marketing strategies that engage consumers and drive conversions, businesses need to know who their audience is, what they want, and how they behave. A marketing plan should define a specific, segmented target audience with demographic, geographical, psychographic, and behavioral data.  This section often includes customer profiles or buyer personas — fictionalized representations of ideal customers or audience segments — which help marketers typify consumer behaviors. These profiles should include media habits and most-used platforms to ensure that your marketing plan selects the right channels for each campaign. Learn how to analyze your target market with  free customer profile templates .  

Goals and Objectives:  Marketing plans typically include both long-term goals, which provide broad direction for the company’s marketing strategy, and short-term objectives, which focus on more immediate tactics and campaigns. Goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) and include corresponding key performance indicators (KPIs).  The goals and objectives in a marketing plan often focus on conversions, market share, brand awareness, or engagement. Clearly defined goals ensure strategically aligned marketing initiatives with measurable results. Take a look at  real-world examples of SMART goals for more insights.  

Marketing Strategy:  This section of a marketing plan details the business’s unique value proposition and the channels that will communicate it. A robust marketing strategy addresses the touchpoints in a consumer’s buying cycle and breaks down the 4 Ps (product, price, place, promotion) of the marketing mix. Channels might include digital marketing, advertisements, social media, and influencer partnerships. To develop an overarching marketing strategy, consider using a  marketing strategy template . To learn more about the 4 Ps, read this  product marketing guide .  

Tactics and Action Plan:  A marketing plan is not an abstract strategy document, but a concrete roadmap for executing specific campaigns with specific tactics. Your plan should detail the messaging for each campaign and the corresponding methods for communication — such as email newsletters, social content, targeted ads, and public relations.  This section provides KPIs and actionable steps such as resource allocation, deliverables, and distribution plans. It might also include the expected outcome for each campaign. To plan individual campaigns, consider using a  marketing project plan template .  

Budget:  Marketing expenses might include the cost of advertising, content creation, website maintenance, or promotional materials; no marketing plan is complete without a budget that breaks down the costs of such initiatives. A clear, comprehensive budget ensures that marketing efforts are financially feasible and resources can be allocated for maximum impact. The budget also enables the marketing team to track the return on investment (ROI) of each campaign. To create a comprehensive budget, try our  free marketing budget templates .    

Timeline:  Finally, a marketing plan includes a clear schedule for implementing its initiatives and tactics. This timeline details the start and end dates of each campaign, deadlines for deliverables, and key events or milestones. It keeps the marketing team aligned and initiatives on track, ensuring that marketing objectives can be achieved within the set time frame. Organize dates and deadlines with the help of a  marketing timeline template .  

Marketing Plan Examples

Real-world marketing plans show how businesses utilize effective planning documents. These 10 examples from various industries exhibit unique strengths and weaknesses. With insightful commentary from marketing experts, these plans offer practical takeaways any marketer can use.  

Delmarva and the Ground for Change This  in-depth marketing plan for a documentary produced by the USDA Northeast Climate Hub includes audience profiles, competitive analysis, and a distribution plan. Along with a detailed breakdown of its digital marketing strategy, it considers how different tactics will affect the viewer’s content journey.   

John Dinsmore , a marketing consultant and professor at Wright State University, praises this plan for its attractive design and thoughtful, thorough content: “They do a nice job of extrapolating on who the target market is and tying their tactics to achieving specific goals.”  He appreciates the inclusion of a SWOT analysis, but feels it could be done more effectively. “‘Opportunities’ is not a place for business ideas. It’s a place to identify external, positive trends that can help your initiative. In this context, an opportunity could be ‘Rising concern for and awareness of climate issues.’ Similarly, ‘threats’ is not a place to list things that are difficult. It’s for negative external trends such as ‘Increased skepticism over ability to combat climate change.’” 

Dekker Fraser , former Global Marketing Manager at Sony PlayStation, adds that this plan includes a strong focus on collaborations with media and influencers: “Many marketing plans place too much emphasis on target customers and not enough on target collaborators.”  

Minnesota Tourism This  marketing plan by Explore Minnesota , the state’s Department of Tourism, showcases Minnesota’s beauty with vivid imagery. It uses a variety of demographic information to identify priority audience segments and includes well-designed infographics that analyze audience and competition. As a result, the campaigns are clearly targeted at specific audiences and objectives. 

John Rarrick , Head of Marketing at Movius Corp., admires the strength of the message behind the strategy. “This plan has a very well-developed ‘why,’” he says. “You’ll see that often when the plan is to repair or save something that has undergone a time of great loss — such as a loss of revenue or reputation. The audience personas, goals, tactics, and budget are all detailed and measurable.” 

Gold Coast Transit District  

A  short, high-level marketing plan for Gold Coast Transit highlights key campaigns and includes the most important details, such as timelines, budgets, and tactics. It begins with a bulleted overview of the most important takeaways and takes into account general marketing efforts that don’t fit under a specific campaign umbrella. Fraser notes that this plan includes year-round marketing initiatives, with an effective “emphasis on strong offers, such as youth-free fares.” However, he points out that its brand awareness goals could be more specific. “Instead, use context-specific awareness goals such as ‘When commuting to work, residents first think of Gold Coast Transit’ or ‘When coming home from the library at night, I think of taking the bus,’” he says. “In other words, peg awareness to specific category-entry points.”  

University of Arizona College of Engineering This  marketing, branding, and communications plan for the University of Arizona College of Engineering sets out a long-term vision, high-level goals, and strategies for achieving these goals. It has a section for methodology — including promotional videos and email newsletters — and segments its audience to align with its strategies. This plan “demonstrates a clearly defined audience,” according to Rarrick. That said, not every section of the plan includes the same level of specificity. “The KPIs are vague,” he adds. “I would expect to see something more measurable, rather than ‘increase’ or ‘improve.’” 

Timberland Regional Library This  library's two-year marketing plan sets initiatives in motion with a clear schedule for action. It includes both promotional and production calendars for effective planning, which is especially important for campaigns pegged to external events.  Dinsmore cites this plan’s “professional and elegant graphic design” as a strength. It also offers a roadmap for tackling several marketing campaigns on different timelines. However, he suggests that the plan needs more measurable goals and defined strategies. “There’s no overarching strategy that ties all of these tactics and initiatives together,” he says. “It’s just a laundry list of dates and actions.” 

Safe Haven Family Shelter Nonprofit organizations need creative marketing strategies to reach their targets and use funds efficiently. With specific objectives and actionable steps, this  marketing plan for Safe Haven Family Shelter delineates high-level goals and details the path to achieving them. It identifies the roles and responsibilities of individual team members to ensure alignment. Rarrick commends this plan for its “clearly defined audience and very clearly defined goals.” The plan showcases the differences between strategic business goals and measurable marketing objectives.  

Visit Myrtle Beach This  destination marketing plan by the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Chamber of Commerce  incorporates detailed information about target markets, audience personas, and key behaviors. It includes an infographic that illuminates the touchpoints in a traveler’s journey and shows the marketing team how each tactic contributes to conversions.  Overall, Dinsmore praises this plan as a “very smart and thoughtful presentation.” It outlines a distinct media mix for each target audience, defines its objectives clearly, and ties these objectives to success metrics. He continues, “I want to thank the Myrtle Beach folks for planning to measure their efforts. Measurement is often anathema to marketing people, but if you’re not measuring, you don’t know how to improve.”  With so much information to cover, the plan would benefit from an executive summary to introduce key takeaways. “The bigger the scope, the harder it is to make everything feel connected, and that’s a bit of an issue with this plan,” Dinsmore adds.  

Tropical Avocados This  example of a no-frills plan was commissioned by the nonprofit Improving Economies for Stronger Communities (IESC) to help brand and launch tropical avocados in the U.S. market. It shows the importance of making branding decisions backed by market and consumer research. A detailed SWOT analysis and competitive analysis provide essential insights that enable the company to determine the best unique selling proposition.  A key strength of this plan is its detailed research into its audience. Fraser cites its “excellent identification of consumer objections — e.g., concern over how natural the avocado size is — and consumer behavior.” As a result, the brand can adopt effective messaging in its marketing campaigns. As with USDA Northeast Climate Hub’s Delmarva and the Ground for Change documentary, “target collaborators — e.g., food writers, organizations, and chefs — are included in the target audience. Collaborators are often more critical to the marketing plan than the consumers themselves,” Fraser adds.  

Rochelle Community Hospital This  case study of Rochelle Community Hospital in Rochelle, Illinois, shows how a targeted marketing plan can be used to achieve significant results. The report by Legato Healthcare Marketing showcases the importance of reevaluating an existing marketing strategy — in this case, shifting the emphasis from print to digital. External marketing agencies often have more tools at their disposal, particularly if the business has not had a strong digital presence. With targeted ads and website updates, the agency employed tactics with direct metrics in order to track its impact.   

Visit Concord This  example from the Concord Tourism Improvement District marketing plan is concise and includes streamlined insights on the audience and market. It details each marketing channel with specific tactics and measurable KPIs.  The overall strategy, according to Fraser, offers “an excellent emphasis on social proof and word-of-mouth marketing,” as well as a “good balance of awareness and activation marketing.” In order to improve, he suggests, “the plan should factor in the following critical quantitative factors to help drive the media strategy: reach, frequency, and the total-addressable market.” 

Marketing Plan Templates

Using a template takes the guesswork out of organizing a marketing plan document. These customizable templates include essential elements and options for specific industries or marketing channels, and they range from one-page plans to comprehensive, presentation-ready reports.

Microsoft Word Simple Marketing Plan Template

Download the Simple Marketing Plan Example Template for Microsoft Word Download the Blank Simple Marketing Plan Template for Microsoft Word

This example of a simple, customizable plan focuses on key strategies and prioritizes readability. This one-page marketing plan template includes space to summarize marketing strategy and overarching business objectives, along with an action plan to highlight responsibilities and deadlines.

Microsoft Word Annual Marketing Plan Template

Download the Annual Marketing Plan Example Template for Microsoft Word Download the Blank Annual Marketing Plan Template for Microsoft Word  

This comprehensive marketing plan template includes a number of key sections — such as goals, target market, marketing channels, and performance standards — that can be customized to suit a variety of businesses. In the situational analysis, you can find space for both a 5C (company, collaborators, customers, competitors, climate) analysis and a SWOT analysis. The blank template begins with a table of contents, a business summary, and a mission statement to allow for easy readability. The sample focuses on marketing strategies for one fiscal year, but you can modify this plan for any time period. 

Microsoft Word Small Business Marketing Plan Template

Download the Small Business Marketing Plan Example Template for Microsoft Word Download the Blank Small Business Marketing Plan Template for Microsoft Word

A strong marketing plan is essential for small businesses looking to stand out from larger competitors. This small business marketing plan template provides an outline for a detailed marketing strategy, including a unique selling proposition, the 4Ps marketing mix, and marketing channels. It builds its strategy on situational analysis and identification of the business’s core capabilities. Find  more marketing plan templates  for different industries.

Microsoft Word Nonprofit Marketing Plan Template

Download the Nonprofit Marketing Plan Example Template for Microsoft Word Download the Blank Nonprofit Marketing Plan Template for Microsoft Word

This example marketing plan for a nonprofit incorporates information on the funding climate into its situational analysis, as well as a detailed organizational summary. With sections for short- and long-term goals, marketing strategies and channels, and stakeholder profiles, the template is comprehensive and customizable. Find  more nonprofit marketing plan templates here .

Excel Product Marketing Plan Template

Download the Product Marketing Plan Example Template for Excel Download the Blank Product Marketing Plan Template for Excel

When integrating a new product into existing marketing strategies, it’s important to take into account all the elements of the marketing mix. This product marketing plan template is organized by product, price, place, promotion, process, people, and physical evidence. In these sections, you can find space to consider market research, consumer behaviors, and marketing channels.

Excel Social Media Marketing Plan Template

Download the Social Media Marketing Plan Example Template for Excel Download the Blank Social Media Marketing Plan Template for Excel

For planning specific campaigns, this social media marketing action plan template begins with the campaign goal, highlights important promo dates, and separates actions by platform. It’s useful for executing targeted social media campaigns within a larger marketing strategy. Find  more marketing action plan templates here .

Excel Digital Marketing Plan Template

Download the Digital Marketing Plan Example Template for Excel Download the Blank Digital Marketing Plan Template for Excel

Focusing on digital marketing channels is an effective way to organize strategies into a streamlined and actionable plan. This strategic digital marketing template highlights important audience behaviors and access channels to ensure messaging reaches consumers. Customizable for a variety of digital marketing projects, the template includes space for keywords, goals, and tasks. Find  more digital marketing plan templates here .

Which Marketing Plan Format Is Right for You?

To choose the right marketing plan format for your needs, consider the plan’s role in your marketing strategy. Do you need a comprehensive plan to provide an overview of tactics that will take place over a long period of time? Or are you looking for a plan to focus on specific channels, campaigns, or product launches? 

Each template in this article offers space to detail market research, strategies, and access channels. The longer plans include more sections for in-depth situational analysis and audience demographics, while the shorter plans focus on the marketing mix and action plan. This chart highlights the key elements of each marketing plan:  

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How To Build a Strategic Sales Plan + 10 Examples

• March 28, 2024

Every sales team has some sort of plan, even if it’s just “sell more of the product/service that you’re employed to sell.”

A sales plan is a portfolio that includes a layout of your processes, target audience, objectives and tactics. It’s used to guide your sales strategy and predict cost and returns. 

Yet without a codified sales plan, it can be difficult to give a sales team the motivation and purpose they need to successfully engage customers and continue to generate revenue.

Not having a sales plan that’s written down and signed off on by stakeholders can lead to confusion around what sales reps should and shouldn’t be doing , which can be demotivating.

It might seem daunting or time-consuming to put together an entire sales plan, but it doesn’t need to be. Here’s how to create a thorough sales plan in 10 simple steps. 

What Is a Sales Plan? 

A successful sales plan defines your target customers, business objectives, tactics, obstacles and processes. An effective plan will also include resources and strategies that are used to achieve target goals. It works similarly to a business plan in the way it’s presented, but only focuses on your sales strategy. 

A sales plan should include the following three components: 

• Ideas: If you use specific business methodologies, you may choose to outline key principles and examples of them in action within your sales plan. An example could be conversation tactics when pitching your product to your target customer. 
• Processes: In order to streamline productivity and business strategy, you’ll want to make sure your processes are defined within your sales plan. Your sales team should be able to refer to the sales plan when they’re in need of direction. 
• Tools and tactics: The most effective sales plans include not only high-level business strategies, but also step-by-step approaches for your sales team to utilize. These tools can include key conversation pieces for your sales reps to use when pitching a product or content to close out a deal. 

Solidifying a sales plan is crucial for a strong business model. Taking the time to narrow in on the components above will set you and your business up for success down the road. 

Sales Planning Process

It’s important to keep in mind that sales planning isn’t just about creating a sales plan document. A sales plan should be a go-to item that’s used every day by your team, rather than sitting on your desk collecting dust. Creating an effective sales plan requires high-level strategy.

You should: 

• Decide on a timeline for your goals and tactics
• Outline the context
• Write out the company mission and values
• Describe the target audience and product service positioning
• Include sales resources
• Draw out an overview of concurrent activities
• Write an overview of your business road map
• Outline your goals and KPIs
• Outline an action plan
• Create a budget 

 Below we dive into each of these steps to create your ideal sales plan. 

1. Decide on Your Timeline

Setting goals and outlining tactics is not going to be productive if you’re not working toward a date by which you’ll measure your efforts.

Determining the timeline of your sales plan should therefore be your number one consideration. When will you be ready to kick-start your plan, and when is a reasonable time to measure the outcomes of your plan against your SMART goals?

Remember that you need to give the plan a chance to make an impact, so this timeline shouldn’t be too restrictive. However, you also want to make sure that you’re flexible enough to adjust your plan if it’s not producing the desired results.

Most sales plan timelines cover about a year, which may be segmented into four quarters and/or two halves to make it a little more manageable.

2. Outline the Context

Use the first page of your sales plan to outline the context in which the plan was created.

What is the current state of the organization? What are your challenges and pain points? What recent wins have you experienced?

Do you have tighter restrictions on cash flow, or does revenue appear to be growing exponentially? How is your sales team currently performing?

While you’ll discuss your business plan and road map later in the document, you can also outline the long-term vision for your business in this section. For example, where do you want to see the business in five years?

Tip: Comparing the current situation with your vision will emphasize the gap between where you are now and where you need to be. 

3. Company Mission and Values

It’s essential that you put your mission and values at the heart of your business. You need to incorporate them into every function – and this includes your sales plan.

Outlining your mission and values in your sales plan ensures that you remember what the company is striving for, and in turn helps ensure that your approach and tactics will support these objectives.

Remember: A strong brand mission and authentic values will help boost customer loyalty, brand reputation and, ultimately, sales.

4. Target Market and Product/Service Positioning

Next, you’ll need to describe the market or markets that you’re operating in.

What is your target market or industry? What research led you to conclude that this was the optimal market for you?

Who within this industry is your ideal customer? What are their characteristics? This could be a job title, geographical location or company size, for example. This information makes up your ideal customer profile .

If you’ve delved further into audience research and developed personas around your target market, then include them in here, too.

5. Sales Team and Resources

This step is simple: Make a list of your sales resources, beginning with a short description of each member of your sales team.

Include their name, job title, length of time at the company and, where appropriate, their salary. What are their strengths? How can they be utilized to help you hit your goals?

You should also include notes around the gaps in your sales team and whether you intend to recruit any new team members into these (or other) roles.

Tip: Communicate the time zones your team members work in to be mindful of designated work hours for scheduling meetings and deadlines. 

Then, list your other resources. These could be tools, software or access to other departments such as the marketing team – anything that you intend to use in the execution of your sales plan. This is a quick way to eliminate any tools or resources that you don’t need.

6. Concurrent Activities

The next step in creating your sales plan involves providing an overview of non-sales activities that will be taking place during the implementation of your sales plan.

Any public marketing plans, upcoming product launches, or deals or discounts should be included, as should any relevant events. This will help you plan sales tactics around these activities and ensure that you’re getting the most out of them.

7. Business Road Map

For this step, write up an overview of your business’s overall road map, as well as the areas where sales activities can assist with or accelerate this plan. You’ll need to collaborate with the CEO, managing director or board of directors in order to do this.

In most cases, the business will already have a road map that has been signed off on by stakeholders. It’s the sales manager’s job to develop a sales plan that not only complements this road map, but facilitates its goals. 

Tip: Highlight areas of the road map that should be touchpoints for the sales team. 

Ask yourself what your department will need to do at each point in the road map to hit these overarching company goals.

8. Sales Goals and KPIs

Another important part of the sales plan involves your sales goals and KPIs.

Outline each goal alongside the KPIs you’ll use to measure it. Include a list of metrics you’ll use to track these KPIs, as well as a deadline for when you project the goal will be achieved.

It’s vital to make these goals tangible and measurable.

A bad example of a goal is as follows:

Goal 1: Increase sales across company’s range of products and services.

A better goal would look something like:

Goal 1: Generate $500,000+ in revenue from new clients through purchases of X product by X date.

9. Action Plan

Now that you’ve laid out your goals, you need to explain how you will hit them.

Your action plan can be set out week by week, month by month, or quarter by quarter. Within each segment, you must list out all of the sales activities and tactics that you will deploy – and the deadlines and touchpoints along the way.

Tip: Organize your action plan by department – sales, business development and finance. 

While this is arguably the most complex part of the sales plan, this is where sales leaders are strongest. They know which approach will work best for their team, their company and their market.

Budgets vary from team to team and company to company, but whatever your situation, it’s important to include your budget in your sales plan.

How are you going to account for the money spent on new hires, salaries, tech, tools and travel? Where the budget is tight, what are your priorities going to be, and what needs to be axed?

The budget section should make references back to your action plan and the sales team and resources page in order to explain the expenditures.

6 Strategic Sales Plan Examples 

You can create different types of strategic sales plans for your company, depending on how you want to structure your sales plan. Here are a few examples.   

Customer Profile 

A customer profile outlines your ideal customer for your service or product. It will usually include industry, background, attributes and decision-making factors.  

Creating a customer profile helps narrow in on the target customer your sales team should focus on while eliminating unproductive leads.  

Buyer’s Guide

A buyer’s guide is an informational sheet that describes your company’s services or products, including benefits and features. This document is useful both for your sales team but also for a potential customer who requires more information on the product before purchasing. 

30-60-90-Day Plan

This plan is organized based on time periods. It includes outlines of goals, strategy and actionable steps in 30-day periods. This is a useful sales plan model for a new sales representative tracking progress during their first 90 days in the position or meeting quotas in a 90-day period. 

This type of sales plan is also ideal for businesses in periods of expansion or growth. It’s helpful to minimize extra effort in onboarding processes. 

Market Expansion Plan

A market expansion plan clarifies target metrics and list of actions when moving into a new territory or market. This sales plan model is typically used with a target market that resides in a new geographical region. 

You’ll want to include a profile of target customers, account distribution costs and even time zone differences between your sales representatives. 

Marketing-alignment Plan

Creating a marketing-alignment sales plan is useful if your organization has yet to align both your sales and marketing departments. The goal of the sales plan is finalizing your target customer personas and aligning them with your sales pitches and marketing messages. 

New Product/Service Plan 

If your organization is launching a new service or product, it’s best to create a sales plan to track revenue and other growth metrics from the launch. You’ll want to include sales strategy, competitive analyses and service or product sales positioning. 

Sales Plan Template

4 additional sales plan templates.

Here are some additional templates you can use to create your own unique sales plan. 

• Template Lab 
• ProjectManager

5 Tips for Creating a Sales Plan 

Now that you’ve seen and read through a few examples and a sales plan template, we’ll cover some easy but useful tips to create a foolproof sales plan. 

• Create a competitive analysis: Research what sales strategies and tactics your close competitors are using. What are they doing well? What are they not doing well? Knowing what they are doing well will help you create a plan that will lead to eventual success. 
• Vary your sales plans: First create a base sales plan that includes high-level goals, strategies and tactics. Then go more in depth on KPIs and metrics for each department, whether it’s outbound sales or business development . 
• Analyze industry trends: Industry trends and data can easily help strengthen your sales approach. For example, if you’re pitching your sales plan to a stakeholder, use current market trends and statistics to support why you believe your sales strategies will be effective in use. 
• Utilize your marketing team: When creating your sales plan, you’ll want to get the marketing department’s input to align your efforts and goals. You should weave marketing messages throughout both your sales plan and pitches. 
• Discuss with your sales team: Remember to check in with your sales representatives to understand challenges they may be dealing with and what’s working and not working. You should update the sales plan quarterly based on feedback received from your sales team. 

When Should You Implement a Strategic Sales Plan? 

Does your organization currently not have a sales plan in place that is used regularly? Are you noticing your organization is in need of structure and lacking productivity across departments? These are definite signs you should create and implement a sales plan. 

According to a LinkedIn sales statistic , the top sales tech sellers are using customer relationship management (CRM) tools (50%), sales intelligence (45%) and sales planning (42%) .

Below are a few more indicators that you need an effective sales plan. 

To Launch a New Product or Campaign 

If you’re planning to launch a new service or product in six months, you should have a concrete marketing and sales strategy plan to guarantee you’ll see both short- and long-term success. 

The sales plan process shouldn’t be hasty and rushed. Take the time to go over data and competitor analysis. Work with your team to create objectives and goals that everyone believes in. Your sales plan should be updated formally on a quarterly basis to be in line with industry trends and business efforts. 

To Increase Sales

If your team is looking to increase revenue and the number of closed sales, you may need to widen and define your target audience. A sales plan will help outline this target audience, along with planning out both sales and marketing strategies to reach more qualified prospects and increase your sales conversion rate. 

Now that you’ve seen sales plan examples and tips and tricks, the next step after creating your sales plan is to reach those ideal sales targets with Mailshake . Connect with leads and generate more sales with our simple but effective sales engagement platform.

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10 Free Sales Plan Templates in Word, Excel, & ClickUp

Praburam Srinivasan

Growth Marketing Manager

August 12, 2024

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Every sales team wants to win more leads and close more deals. But how do you make that happen? With a solid sales plan, of course!

A sales plan gives your team a way to focus on your goals while taking only the necessary steps to get there. It has everything you need to win, which means it’s often a comprehensive guide—and that takes time.

And we’re guessing you’re already pressed for time. ⏲️

Fortunately, creating a plan doesn’t have to be complicated—with the right template, you can simplify the process.

That’s why we’re sharing this list of the best sales plan templates. Not only are these sales strategy templates absolutely free but they’ll also save you time so you can start closing those deals faster. ⚡

What Is a Sales Plan and Why Create One?

1. clickup sales plan template, 2. clickup sales and marketing plan template, 3. clickup sales strategy guide template, 4. clickup sales pipeline template, 5. clickup sales kpi template, 6. clickup b2b sales strategy template, 7. clickup sales calls template, 8. word sales plan template by business news daily, 9. word sales plan template by templatelab, 10. excel sales plan template by spreadsheet.com.

A sales plan is your roadmap for how to make sales effectively. Think of it in the same way that a business plan guides the strategy for your company or a marketing plan sets out how you’ll find, reach, and serve your ideal customers.

A good sales plan sets out your sales goals , objectives, and sales activities. It considers your target audience, brand, products, services, and needs—and covers which sales tactics and strategies you’ll use to close deals, as well as which metrics you’ll use to measure success.

Your sales plan is a practical plan that outlines who’s responsible for what, the resources you’ll need, and the overall goals you’re working toward. Without one, your sales team will feel lost and struggle to connect with your customer base.

With a strategic sales plan, though, the sales manager and the entire team will know exactly what you’re trying to achieve and the steps needed to get there. 📚

How to choose the best sales plan template

There are so many different sales plan templates out there. Some are designed for specific niche audiences, while others are more generic and easier to customize. How do you know which is the right template for you?

When you’re thinking about using a sales plan template, consider the following:

• Ease of use: Is the template easy to use? Will everyone in the team structure and sales planning process be able to understand it fully?
• Customization: Can I personalize the template to match my sales goals?

• Sales Collaboration : Can my sales team work on this template together?
• Integrations: When I create a sales plan, can I integrate this template with other aspects of my sales pipeline or workflow, like task management?
• Artificial intelligence: Can I use a built-in AI writing tool or copywriting tool to help me complete the template? Are there sales automation features that speed up the process?
• Platform: Which sales app is this template for? Do I have it already, or should I invest in it? What’s the pricing like?

Asking yourself these questions will help you figure out what your needs are, so you can then choose a template to match.

Now that you have a better idea of what you’re looking for, let’s explore what’s out there. Take a look at our hand-picked selection of the best sales plan templates available today for Microsoft Word and sales enablement tools like ClickUp.

Smart sales teams use a sales plan to map out their route to success. The best sales teams use the Sales Plan Template by ClickUp to simplify the process and ensure they don’t leave anything out.

This template is designed with all the structure you need to create a comprehensive sales plan that can drive results. Use this template to set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) business goals; plan strategies and tactics; and organize all your sales ideas in one place.

The list-style template is split into sections that cover the executive summary all the way through to specific tactics and strategies. Beneath this, you can arrange tasks and subtasks, and see the progress at a glance. View task titles, deadlines, who’s responsible, approval status, and a visual progress bar.

Use this template if you want to consolidate all your sales tasks and initiatives in one area. Add your sales tasks and tactics, then tag team members so you can see what’s happening and hold everyone accountable. ✅

While sales and marketing teams often work independently, sometimes it’s useful to collaborate on shared goals. With the Sales and Marketing Plan Template by ClickUp , you can organize and run your sales and operations from one location.

Our collaborative template makes it easy to set sales and marketing goals and objectives, visualize your tasks, work together on sales and marketing campaigns, and track your results in real-time. View the status of your sales and marketing projects, adjust your plans, and monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs)—all from one view.

This sales and marketing plan template allows you to split your tasks into sections. The examples in the template include revenue goals, competitive analysis, and action items, but you can customize these to match your needs exactly.

View tasks beneath these categories to see at a glance whether there are any roadblocks when a task is due, and who is responsible for it.

Add this template to your collection if you want to work more collaboratively with your marketing team—especially on preparing assets for sales calls or outreach programs. 📞

Before you can plan your sales tactics, you first need to decide what your overall goals are. The Sales Strategy Guide Template by ClickUp is your go-to resource for determining your approach.

This sales process template explains the benefits of having a well-defined approach and gives you a central place to create, review, and store your own. Everyone on your team can then access your sales strategy guide to help them understand what to do when prospecting and closing deals.

Our sales goals and strategy guide template is presented in a document format. Some sections and headings allow you to split your guide into different areas, making it easier to read and understand.

Use the prompts to fill out your own strategy guide details like your target market, sales strategies, and how you’ll monitor progress.

Use this sales strategy guide template to create a resource for your team. Make it the only destination for everything your sales reps need to know to execute an effective sales plan. 📝

Sales strategies are a must-have for any great sales team, but beyond that, you need a way to record and monitor specific tasks or initiatives. That’s where the Sales Pipeline Template by ClickUp comes in handy whether you need a visual into sales forecasting or your specific sales goals.

This sales pipeline template gives you one place to store all your daily sales-related tasks. With this template, it’s easy to work toward your sales goals, track leads, map out each step of the sales process, and organize all your tasks in one place.

You can view a task’s title, assignee, status, due date, complexity level, start date, and department—or customize the experience with your own custom fields.

With ClickUp’s Sales KPI Template , you and your team can create and manage goals surrounding your sales initiatives. See instantly what’s in progress and when it’s due, alongside the task’s impact level.

This allows you to identify high-priority tasks to focus on and to react quickly if it looks like there’s a roadblock.

This sales KPI template includes:

• Custom Statuses: Create tasks with custom statuses such as Open and Complete to keep track of the progress of each KPI
• Custom Fields: Utilize 15 different custom attributes such as Upsell Attempts, Value of Quotes, Product Cost, No of Quotes by Unit, Repeat Sales Revenue, to save vital KPI information and easily visualize performance data
• Custom Views: Open 4 different views in different ClickUp configurations, such as the Weekly Report, Monthly Report, Revenue Board per Month, and Getting Started Guide so that all the information is easy to access and organized
• Project Management: Improve KPI tracking with tagging, dependency warnings, emails, and more

This template gives you a simple way to see which tasks are complete or in progress, so you can monitor the progress of your project and crush your sales KPIs. 📈

While there’s not a huge difference in the way we market to business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) customers these days, it’s still useful to have specific templates for niche needs. If you’re driving sales in the B2B space, you need the B2B Sales Strategy Template by ClickUp .

Like our first sales plan template, this one gives you space to communicate your sales objectives and revenue targets, but it also introduces other areas—like market research, stakeholder analysis, customer relationships, buyer persona, and customer pain points.

This document-style template is highly customizable so you can make it match your brand style and sales approach. Fill in each section and use the supplied prompts to complete your B2B sales strategy document even faster.

Add this template to your collection if you’re working in B2B sales and want to approach your process in a more organized way. Use the template to build a strong sales strategy, then share it with the rest of your sales team so they know how to execute against your sales and company goals. 🎯

ClickUp’s Sales Calls Template is designed to streamline the sales process, from tracking contacts and calls to managing sales opportunities.

The template includes custom statuses for creating unique workflows, ensuring that every call and client interaction is accounted for. It also provides an easy-to-use Sales CRM to manage and track leads, visualize sales opportunities in the sales funnel, and keep all contacts organized.

With additional features like the Sales Phone Calls SOP Template, sales professionals can empower their teams to make every call count and close more deals. ClickUp’s Sales Calls Template is a versatile solution for sales teams, aiding in everything from daily calls to long-term sales forecasting.

We’re big advocates of using ClickUp as the go-to place to store everything about your sales workflow, but if you’re limited to using Microsoft Word or Google Docs, then this template is a great option.

This sales business plan template has sections for your executive summary, mission statement, target customers, sales targets, benchmarks, and more. Each section has useful prompts to guide you on completing your new sales plan.

Use this template if you’re tied to using Microsoft Word and want a comprehensive guide on how to create your own sales plan or sales strategy. 📄

If you want a free sales plan template or want to choose from a variety of options, this collection of Word templates by TemplateLab is a good place to do that.

There’s a wide range of options available including sales process plans, lead generation plans, sales action plans, and sales report templates . Each template works with Microsoft Word, and you can customize the look and feel to match your brand or your sales goals.

Use this resource if you prefer to see a range of templates on one page, or if you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for until you see it. You can easily set your sales goals and the action steps needed to achieve them. 📃

Successful sales strategies need to be integrated with other teams—like your marketing department—to ensure your sales objectives are clear and possibly align with the overall marketing strategy too. Choose your specific sales goals, set revenue targets, and describe everything in detail with these Word sales planning and sales process templates.

The Excel Sales Plan Template by Spreadsheet.com is a comprehensive and user-friendly tool designed to assist businesses in developing effective sales strategies and managing their sales activities.

T his template is crafted with the aim of providing a structured framework for sales planning, enabling organizations to set clear objectives, track performance, and optimize their sales processes.

Types of Sales Strategies

It’s essential to know that there isn’t a single ‘best’ strategy that will work for every business or every sales team. It all depends on your business goals, the nature of your product or service, your audience demographics, and various other factors. Here’s an overview of some of the most common types of sales strategies that you may consider incorporating into your sales plan:

Solution Selling: This strategy involves identifying a problem that your prospective customer is experiencing and positioning your product or service as the best solution. This requires a deep understanding of your customers’ pain points and how your offerings can address those issues.

Value Selling: Value selling is a strategy often used in B2B sales where the focus is on communicating the overall value that a product or service brings to a customer’s business. It involves demonstrating how features and benefits translate to significant returns on investment, savings, or productivity gains for your customer.

Social Selling: With the prevalence of social media platforms in today’s business landscape, social selling has become highly effective. It involves using social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook to find and engage with potential customers. By providing useful content, answering questions, and engaging in conversations, salespeople can build relationships and generate leads.

Inbound Selling: Inbound selling puts the customer first. It’s a sales methodology that focuses on personalizing the sales experience based on where the buyer is in their journey. This strategy aligns sales efforts with buyer needs to provide solutions that are the best fit for their individual challenges.

Consultative Selling: This strategy involves acting as a trusted adviser to potential customers. The focus is on building relationships, understanding the needs and problems of the customer, and then recommending solutions. It’s more about dialogue and less about pitching.

Account-Based Selling : Account-based selling is a strategic approach that treats individual accounts as markets of their own. It involves crafting personalized buying experiences that cater to the unique needs and challenges of high-value accounts.

Each of these sales strategies can bring efficiency and effectiveness to your sales process. However, the key to success is understanding and selecting which strategy aligns best with your business model and customer base. Then, incorporate it into your sales plan and support it with the right sales plan template.

Sales Planning Tips and Strategies

Planning is a crucial aspect for a successful sales strategy. Here are some valuable tips and strategies to boost your sales planning process:

1. Set Clear Objectives: Clearly outline what you want to achieve. Your objectives are your guiding light, providing a direction for your sales planning. These objectives should align with broader business goals.

2. Understand Your Audience: Research extensively about your target audience. Understand their needs, desires, and pain points. The more you know about your potential customers, the better you’ll be able to position your product or service effectively.

3. Implement SMART Goals : Your sales plan should be based on SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound) goals. This way, your goals will be clear, realistic, and trackable.

4. Stay Informed about Market Trends: Business environments are constantly changing. Stay updated with the latest industry trends and competitor strategies to keep your sales plan agile and effective.

5. Incorporate Sales Tools: The effective use of technology can completely transform your sales process. Build your sales tech stack with CRM software , data analytics, and sales project management platforms like ClickUp to automate processes and give your sales team a high-impact lift.

6. Regularly Review and Adjust Your Plan: Your sales plan should be a dynamic document. Regularly revisiting and adjusting your plan based on performance metrics, market changes, or shifts in company goals ensures that your sales strategy remains relevant and effective.

7. Train and Empower Your Sales Team: The success of any plan lies in its execution. Provide your sales team with proper training and resources they need to effectively implement the sales plan. Encourage them to also bring innovative ideas to the table.

8. Customer Retention: Don’t just focus on acquiring new customers. Implement strategies in your sales plan to retain existing customers as it’s often more cost-effective to maintain a loyal customer base than to constantly seek out new ones.

9. Refine Your Sales Pitch: Ensure your value proposition is strong and compelling. Your sales pitch should highlight the unique values and benefits of your product or service.

10. Measure Performance: Use key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of your sales plan. This can provide valuable insights about what’s working and what needs to be improved.

By incorporating these sales planning tips and strategies into your processes, you can improve your sales plan’s effectiveness and increase your chances of success. As always, keep an open mind to adjustments and improvements along the way!

Reach Sales Goals With Free Sales Strategy Templates

A strategic sales plan makes it easier to achieve your goals. Give your team the guidance and support they need with the help of a well-crafted free sales plan template.

If you’re considering making even more improvements in how you work, try ClickUp for free . We don’t just have incredible sales process templates: Our range of features and AI tools for sales make it easy for you to optimize and run your entire sales funnel and CRM system from one place. ✨

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Strategic Sales Plan Examples: 13 Sales Plan Templates

Casey O'Connor

What Is a Strategic Sales Plan?

When you should implement a strategic sales plan, what to include in your sales plan, 13 sales plan template examples, put your sales plan into action with yesware.

A strategic sales plan is a must-have for any business looking to increase their sales, amp up their revenue, bring a new product to market, or branch into a new territory.

In this article, we’ll go over everything you need to know about strategic sales plans: what they are, when to create one, and exactly what they need to include. We’ll also show you a handful of real-life, tangible sales plan template examples and tips for implementation. 

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• When You Should Implement a Strategic Sales Plan 

A strategic sales plan is designed to guide a sales organization through their overarching sales strategy. It provides them with access to the resources needed to prospect, pitch to, and close new accounts.

Strategic sales plans can include any combination of the following:

• Ideas: If you utilize a certain sales methodology — consultative selling or target account selling , for example — you might outline its key principles and a few tactical examples of it in action in your strategic sales plan. Your strategic sales plan should also include an overview of your target customer.
• Processes: In order for your sales team to reach maximum productivity, it’s important that your sales processes are clearly defined and standardized. Your sales team — both new hires and seasoned vets alike — should be able to refer to your sales plan for a repeatable, scalable process that’s backed by solid metrics. The processes should provide direction to sales reps that allow them to contribute to the company’s goals.
• Tools & Tactics: The best strategic sales plans are more than just high-level strategy and goals. They also include specific, step-by-step strategies that sales reps can implement in sales conversations, as well as the specific tools and content that reps need to close more deals.

Sales plans also typically spell out the organization’s revenue and overall business goals, as well as the KPIs and benchmarks that sales managers and other stakeholders will monitor to determine whether or not those goals are being met.

They should also outline management’s strategic territory design and quota expectations, with specific indicators and data to back those decisions. 

Finally, these sales plans should take into account your current team’s sales capacity and specifically address the acquisition plan for any resources that are not yet available but may be necessary for future growth.

If your sales team doesn’t already have a strategic sales plan in place — that is, one that’s referenced and updated regularly and the product of careful data analysis and inter-team collaboration — you may want to consider creating one. 

Research shows that the majority of the highest-performing sales teams operate under a formalized, closely monitored sales structure. 

On the other hand, most underperforming sales teams lack this structure. 

It’s clear that a well-defined sales plan is one of the prerequisites to optimized sales productivity and success; every salesforce should strive to create and adopt one if they want to meet their sales goals more efficiently.

That being said, there are a few key indicators that signal a need for more urgency in putting a strategic sales plan in place. 

You’re Trying to Increase Sales

A strategic sales plan will help your sales and marketing teams align their processes so that your outreach efforts are tailored to your target audience. 

You’re Looking to Amp Up Your Revenue

For startups and small businesses, attaining as many new customers as possible is usually the name of the game.

For larger or more established businesses, however, the business plan may instead emphasize revenue goals. In other words, the deal size starts to matter much more than deal volume. 

A sales strategy plan can help salespeople target and nurture higher-value accounts. Sales planning can also boost your revenue by illuminating untapped potentials for revenue growth within your existing customer base through cross-selling, upselling , and referrals .

You’re Gearing Up to Launch a New Product

A sales strategy plan is crucial for businesses that are preparing to bring a new product to market.

One last note: for businesses that already use strategic business planning (or for those on their way after reading this article), be sure to update your plan at least yearly. Many businesses at least review their plan, if not update it more formally, on a quarterly basis.

Ultimately, your strategic sales plan will be unique to your company and its specific goals.

Consider including the following components in your strategic business plan. 

Mission Statement

Industry & Market Conditions

Great sales planning cannot be performed in isolation. Your plan must take into account the current market conditions, including any challenges, recent disruptions, or upcoming notable events.

Organization Chart

A sales org chart can range in scope from very simple, like the one above, to more complicated. Some go as far as naming individual employees and outlining their specific responsibilities. 

A detailed org chart is especially helpful for efficiently onboarding new hires.

Product Info & Pricing

No sales plan would be complete without a one-sheet that outlines the features, benefits, and value proposition of your product or service.

It’s also helpful to include information about pricing tiers, as well as any discounts or promotions available for leverage at a sales rep’s discretion.

Compensation Plan

While we have no doubt that you’ve hired only the most intrinsically motivated salespeople, remember the bottom line: cash is king.

Money is the primary motivator for most salespeople, regardless of how truly loyal and hard-working they may be.

With that in mind, it’s a good idea to include your company’s compensation plan and commission structure in your sales plan. This is a surefire way to motivate your team to continuously improve their sales performance. 

Target Market & Customer

Sales Enablement

With the tremendous rise in content marketing, it can be challenging for salespeople to keep track of the various materials available for generating new business.

Branding & Positioning

The strategic sales plan should offer at least a high-level overview of your brand and messaging specifics, including social media presence. Take the time to optimize your company’s LinkedIn presence — it’s a goldmine of new business opportunities.

Marketing Strategy

In today’s day and age, it’s unlikely that your sales and marketing team are working in isolation from one another. At a certain point, sales and marketing strategies start to flow together until they (ideally) perform in harmony.

Still, it’s important to outline the perspective of the marketing team within your strategic sales plan. This will help your salespeople fine-tune their sales pitch and speak more meaningfully to the needs of the customer. 

Prospecting Strategy

Most salespeople report that their number one challenge in lead generation is attracting qualified leads. 

Prospecting can certainly be daunting, but it’s worth the effort to get it right. Tweak and fine-tune the process until you’re sure it’s as efficient as possible. Make sure it’s repeatable and scalable, and map it out within your sales plan. 

Action Plan

Any good strategic sales plan will also include a step-by-step section, much like a playbook. Here, you’ll outline the specific tactics and processes — including scripts, demos, and email templates — that have been proven to move prospects through the sales funnel . 

Be as specific as possible here. This will act as a blueprint for the day-to-day sales activities for your team.

It can be tempting to leave the numbers with the finance department, but financial transparency can go a long way in creating a culture of trust among your sales team.

You don’t need to go through every line item in the spreadsheet, but it’s not a bad idea to include a high-level look at where the dollars are flowing. 

KPIs, Metrics, and Benchmarks

Be sure to give your team a snapshot of how they’re currently performing, with real numbers to back it up.

By doing so, you help them self-initiate regular SWOT analysis of their own sales actions and processes. This will give them an opportunity to right the course if things aren’t going according to plan. 

Tip: Looking to fuel your sales plan with data-backed findings? Grab our free ebook below.

Remember that your company’s strategic sales plan will be highly unique. It may take some time and tweaking to find the components and format that best meet the needs of your business.

Here are 13 sales plan templates to help you get started.

1. Product Launch Plan Template

Sales and marketing teams create a product launch plan when they’re preparing to launch a new product. 

A product launch plan should include your product’s positioning statement , a SWOT competitive analysis, detailed market analysis, sales strategies and tactics, and details about the target market. 

2. Ideal Customer Profile Template

One way to avoid wasting time on unproductive leads is to include an ideal customer profile (ICP) in your sales plan. Here’s a sample : 

This will help ensure your prospecting campaigns are targeted and attract only the most qualified leads from the get-go. 

3. Microsoft Word Sales Plan Template

Here’s a great example of a sales plan goals template , easily accessible through Microsoft Word. 

4. 30-60-90 Day Sales Plan Template

5. Buyer’s Guide Template

A buyer’s guide is a short, simple information sheet that describes your product or service, its features and benefits, and its use. Below is an example of a buyer’s guide from Wayfair . 

In many cases, this document is as useful internally as it is for the customer. 

6. Marketing Alignment Sales Plan Template

If your company hasn’t already formally aligned sales and marketing, start with this type of sales plan template (basic example below), as most traditional sales plans already assume that these two teams collaborate regularly. 

One key component of a marketing alignment sales plan template is the presence of an ideal customer profile and buyer personas. 

The marketing alignment sales plan template should also focus on cohesive, on-brand messaging between marketing campaigns and sales conversations . 

This type of sales plan template helps keep everyone on the same page, increases efficiency, and improves sales effectiveness. 

7. Battle Card Template

8. Territory Design Template

Well-designed sales territories see a 10% – 20% increase in sales productivity. Be low is a basic example of a territory design map.

9. Market Expansion Plan Template

A market expansion plan outlines the strategies, tactics, metrics, resources, and more that teams will use when expanding into a new market or (more commonly) a new geographical territory. 

Market expansion plans also need to include details about distribution expenses and timelines, time zone variations, industry notes or important compliance information, local/cultural expectations and laws, and sometimes more. 

10. Compensation Plan Template

Your compensation plan (including a specific commission structure) is one way to motivate your sales reps.

While it may seem controversial or sensitive, the compensation plan is an important component of a strategic sale plan.

11. Sales Funnel Template

The sales funnel is a visual representation of the sales process. 

12. Marketing Plan Template

Your salespeople should be extremely familiar with the marketing strategies your company is using to attract new leads. Here’s a great example of a template you can use in your sales plan that outlines the different campaigns at work.

This kind of resource will help your reps know who to contact, when, and with what kind of content throughout the sales cycle .

13. B2B Sales Strategy Template

A B2B sales strategy template helps sales teams outline their goals, as well as the specific methodologies and tactics they will use to achieve them. Here’s an example :

The B2B sales strategy plan will vary widely depending on your team’s specific goals and strategies, but most teams include at least the categories highlighted in the template above. 

Yesware is the all-in-one sales toolkit that helps you win more business. It can be an invaluable resource for putting your sales plan into action in a way that’s streamlined, productive, and intuitive.

Communication

Yesware’s meeting scheduler tool helps you skip the back-and-forth when scheduling meetings.

Meeting Scheduler integrates with your Outlook or Gmail calendar and helps your clients automatically schedule meetings with you during times of availability. New events will automatically sync to your calendar. 

​ It can also create meeting types for common calls, like a 30-minute intro call or a 60-minute demo call. These templates can be automatically saved and generated with custom descriptions and agendas so everyone can come prepared. 

Prospecting

One of Yesware’s most popular features is its prospecting campaigns .

This feature enables salespeople to create automated, personalized campaigns with multi-channel touches. 

The tool tracks communication and engagement throughout the process and helps move prospects through the pipeline with little administrative effort from the sales team.

Yesware’s attachment tracking feature helps you find your winning content by tracking which attachments are most often opened and read by your prospects.

You can use these insights to sharpen your content and increase your engagement.

The reporting and analytics tools are also extremely valuable in optimizing your sales plan.  These reports enable salespeople to use data to win more business. The feature generates daily activity, engagement data, and outcomes to show you what is/isn’t working across the board.

Try Yesware for free to see how it can help your team carry out your sales plan today.

This guide was updated on March 6, 2024.

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What is a Marketing Plan & How to Write One [+ Examples]

Published: August 07, 2024

One of my favorite ways to break through writer’s block, whether the assignment is a marketing plan or a short story, is simply reading more examples. (I also recommend taking a long walk; you’d be surprised.)

I can’t take you on a walk, but I can give you some examples, some inspiration, and some guidelines to get your creativity humming.

If you don’t know where to start, we’ve curated lists of marketing plans and marketing strategies to help you write a concrete plan that will produce results.

Let’s start by understanding the differences between the two.

Featured Resource:   Free Marketing Plan Template

Looking to develop a marketing plan for your business?   Click here to download HubSpot's free Marketing Plan Template to get started .

Table of Contents

Marketing Strategy Examples

What is a marketing plan, marketing plan vs. business plan, how to write a marketing plan, types of marketing plans, marketing plan examples, marketing plan faqs, sample marketing plan.

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A marketing plan is a strategic road map that businesses use to organize, execute, and track their marketing strategy over a given period. Marketing plans can include different marketing strategies for various marketing teams across the company, all working toward the same business goals.

The purpose of a marketing plan is to write down strategies in an organized manner. This will help keep you on track and measure the success of your campaigns.

Your marketing plan lays out each campaign‘s mission, buyer personas, budget, tactics, and deliverables. With all this information in one place, you’ll have an easier time staying on track with a campaign, and you can figure out what works and what doesn’t.

To learn more about creating your marketing plan, keep reading or jump to the relevant section:

A marketing plan is a strategic document that outlines marketing objectives, strategies, and tactics.

A business plan is also a strategic document. But this plan covers all aspects of a company's operations, including finance, operations, and more. It can also help your business decide how to distribute resources and make decisions as your business grows.

A marketing plan is a subset of a business plan; it shows how marketing strategies and objectives can support overall business goals. And if you need an assist executing a marketing plan, might I recommend HubSpot’s marketing hub ?

Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan

A marketing strategy is the part of your marketing plan that describes how a business will accomplish a particular goal or mission.

This includes which campaigns, content, channels, and marketing software you’ll use to execute that mission and track its success.

A marketing plan contains one or more marketing strategies. It's the framework from which all your marketing strategies are created, and it helps you connect each strategy to a larger marketing operation and business goal.

For example, suppose your company is launching a new software product, and it wants customers to sign up. The marketing department needs to develop a marketing plan that'll help introduce this product to the industry and drive the desired sign-ups.

The department decides to launch a topical blog, debut a YouTube series to establish expertise, and create new X and Instagram accounts to join the conversation around this subject. All this serves to attract an audience and convert this audience into software users.

To summarize, a business' marketing plan is dedicated to introducing a new software product to the marketplace and driving sign-ups for that product. The business will execute that plan with three marketing strategies : a new industry blog, a YouTube video series, and an X account.

Of course, the business might consider these three things as one giant marketing strategy, each with its own specific content strategies. How granular you want your marketing plan to get is up to you. Nonetheless, every marketing plan goes through a particular set of steps in its creation.

• State your business' mission.
• Determine the KPIs for this mission.
• Identify your buyer personas.
• Describe your content initiatives and strategies.
• Clearly define your plan's omissions.
• Define your marketing budget.
• Identify your competition.
• Outline your plan's contributors and their responsibilities.

1. State your business' mission.

Your first step in writing a marketing plan is to state your mission. Although this mission is specific to your marketing department, it should serve as your business' main mission statement.

In my experience, you want to be specific, but not too specific. You have plenty of space left in this marketing plan to elaborate on how you'll acquire new customers and accomplish this mission.

For those of you running startups or small businesses, HubSpot’s starter bundle is a great all-in-one solution — it can help you find and win customers, execute content marketing plans, and more.

If your business' mission is “to make booking travel a delightful experience,” your marketing mission might be “to attract an audience of travelers, educate them on the tourism industry, and convert them into users of our bookings platform.”

Need help building your mission statement? Download this guide for examples and templates and write the ideal mission statement.

2. Determine the KPIs for this mission.

Every good marketing plan describes how the department will track its mission‘s progress. To do so, you need to decide on your key performance indicators (KPIs) .

KPIs are individual metrics that measure the various elements of a marketing campaign. These units help you establish short-term goals within your mission and communicate your progress to business leaders.

Let's take our example of a marketing mission from the above step. If part of our mission is “to attract an audience of travelers,” we might track website visits using organic page views. In this case, “organic page views” is one KPI, and we can see our number of page views grow over time.

Also, make sure to check whether your current reporting software facilitates the KPIs you need. Some reporting tools can only measure a set of pre-defined metrics, which can cause massive headaches in particular marketing campaigns.

However, other tools, like HubSpot’s analytics software , can offer full flexibility over the KPIs you wish to track.

You can generate custom reports that reveal average website engagement rates, page visits, email, social media traffic, and more.

These KPIs will come into the conversation again in step 4.

3. Identify your buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a description of who you want to attract. This can include age, sex, location, family size, and job title.

Each buyer persona should directly reflect your business' current and potential customers. All business leaders must agree on your buyer personas.

4. Describe your content initiatives and strategies.

Here‘s where you’ll include the main points of your marketing and content strategy.

Because there‘s a laundry list of content types and channels available today, you must choose wisely and explain how you’ll use your content and channels in this section of your marketing plan.

When I write this section, I like to stipulate:

• What types of content I'll create. These might include blog posts, YouTube videos, infographics, and ebooks.
• How much I'll create. I typically describe content volume in daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly intervals. It all depends on my workflow and the short-term goals for my content.
• The goals (and KPIs) I'll use to track each type. KPIs can include organic traffic, social media traffic, email traffic, and referral traffic. Your goals should also include which pages you want to drive that traffic to, such as product pages, blog pages, or landing pages.
• The channels on which I'll distribute my content. Popular channels include Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram.
• Any paid advertising that will take place on these channels.

5. Clearly define your plan's omissions.

A marketing plan explains the marketing team's focus. It also explains what the marketing team will not focus on.

If there are other aspects of your business that you aren‘t serving in this particular plan, include them in this section. These omissions help to justify your mission, buyer personas, KPIs, and content.

You can’t please everyone in a single marketing campaign, and if your team isn’t on the hook for something, you need to make it known.

In my experience, this section is particularly important for stakeholders to help them understand why certain decisions were made.

6. Define your marketing budget.

Whether it's freelance fees, sponsorships, or a new full-time marketing hire, use these costs to develop a marketing budget and outline each expense in this section of your marketing plan.

You can establish your marketing budget with these 8 free marketing budget templates .

7. Identify your competition.

Part of marketing is knowing your competition. Research the key players in your industry and consider profiling each one.

Keep in mind that not every competitor will pose the same challenges to your business. For example, while one competitor might rank highly on search engines for keywords that you’re also chasing, another competitor might have a heavy footprint on a social network where you plan to launch an account.

Easily track and analyze your competitors with this collection of 10 free competitive analysis templates .

8. Outline your plan's contributors and their responsibilities.

With your marketing plan fully fleshed out, it‘s time to explain who’s doing what.

I don’t like to delve too deeply into my employees’ day-to-day projects, but I know which teams and team leaders are in charge of specific content types, channels, KPIs, and more.

Now that you know why you need to build an effective marketing plan, it’s time to get to work.

Starting a plan from scratch can be overwhelming if you haven't done it before.

That’s why there are many helpful resources that can support your first steps. We’ll share some of the best guides and templates to help you build effective results-driven plans for your marketing strategies.

Ready to make your own marketing plan? Get started with this free template.

The kind of marketing plan you create will depend on your company, your industry, and your business goals. We compiled different samples to suit your needs:

1. Quarterly or Annual Marketing Plans

This marketing plan by Visit Oxnard, a convention and visitors bureau, is packed with information: target markets, key performance indicators, selling points, personas, marketing tactics by channel, and much more.

It also articulates the organization’s strategic plans for the upcoming fiscal year, especially as it grapples with the aftereffects of the pandemic.

Lastly, it has impeccable visual appeal, with color-coded sections and strong branding elements.

• It states clear and actionable goals for the coming year.
• It includes data and other research that shows how the team made its decisions.
• It outlines how the team will measure the plan’s success.

4. Safe Haven Family Shelter

This marketing plan by a nonprofit organization is an excellent example to follow if your plan will be presented to internal stakeholders at all levels of your organization.

It includes SMART marketing goals , deadlines, action steps, long-term objectives, target audiences, core marketing messages , and metrics.

The plan is detailed yet scannable. By the end of it, one can walk away with a strong understanding of the organization’s strategic direction for its upcoming marketing efforts.

• It confirms ongoing marketing strategies and objectives while introducing new initiatives.
• It uses colors, fonts, and formatting to emphasize key parts.
• It closes with long-term goals, key themes, and other overarching topics to set the stage for the future.

5. Wright County Economic Development

• “Going viral” isn’t a goal; it’s an outcome.
• Be surprising. Subvert expectations.
• Be weird and niche if you want to be weird and niche, but establishing a shared cultural understanding might result in a bigger audience.

Pridemore Properties’ Instagram smash hit is unexpected, to say the least. You think you’re getting a home tour that takes your figurative breath away; you get a home tour that takes the agent’s literal breath away.

Verizon’s toe-tapping, hip-shaking Totalmente (aka Total by Verizon, a contractless phone plan) ad debuted during Univision’s Spanish-language broadcast of Super Bowl LVIII. The ad reinvents the 1998 Elvis Crespo song “Suavemente,” an earworm if I’ve ever heard one, replacing the lyrics with Total by Verizon features.

Verizon Value’s CMO and VP of Marketing, Cheryl Gresham, has admitted that she didn’t know much about marketing to a majority-Latinx audience.

In an interview with Campaign Live , she said she didn’t think the idea would have gotten off the ground “if it had just been me and a lot of other people that had a background like myself in that room.”

CampaignLive wrote, “Gresham says the team opted for a creative concept that spoke to all the Latinos in the room — despite Gresham herself not understanding the connection.”

Gresham’s marketing strategy hinged on knowing her audience and, just as importantly, trusting her fellow marketers who knew how to reach that audience.

Strategic Takeaways for Demographic Marketing

• Know what you don’t know.
• Foster diversity in marketing leadership and staff.
• Know your audience.

The catchy tune and the great storytelling certainly don’t hurt.

But more than that, Ogilvy and Verizon dug deep into Latinx culture — more than 25 years deep — to craft an ad that doesn’t feel like it’s just responding to the latest trend. They also tapped Venezuelan American comedian, musician, and producer Fred Armisen to direct the spot.

6. Chappell Roan

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8 Effective Sales Strategies, Examples, and Best Practices for Successful Selling

Published December 05, 2023

Updated December 06, 2023

Ready to take your revenue to new heights?

A winning sales strategy entails far more than pushing a product or service. It's about creating a comprehensive plan to help you and your sales team share goals and optimize your sales process. It should help you understand your audience, make genuine connections, foster customer loyalty and increase sales.

This guide will show you how to develop a sales strategy and refine your approach using different sales techniques, channels, and tools to improve sales.

But first, let's define what we mean when referring to a sales strategy.

Table of contents

What is a sales strategy?

Types of sales strategies, creating your sales strategy, strategic sales channels, tools to improve sales.

• Don’t forget existing customers

Implementing your sales strategy

Sales strategy example, transform your sales strategy with clari.

A sales strategy is a detailed plan that guides sales teams on how to sell products or services and attract new customers encompassing sales goals, processes, product positioning, and team structure, and includes clear steps for selling effectively and hitting sales goals.

Some of the elements it may include are:

• Organizational goals
• Selling processes
• Steps to identify qualified leads
• Team structure and responsibilities
• Market data
• Customer personas
• Product positioning
• How you'll engage with your customers
• Customer journey
• Competitive analysis

Your sales strategy should include any factors you've identified necessary to acquire new customers and achieve your sales goals.

The importance of a sales strategy

A sales strategy is vital in providing clear objectives and guidance for the sales team. It gives you a long-term plan for the future with a detailed road map for achieving your sales goals while pre-empting any problems you might encounter.

It clarifies your market positioning, helping you identify your ideal customer base and how you'll speak directly to those customers.

Moreover, as your sales strategy is unique to your business, it provides a way to differentiate your business from that of your competitors.

A sales strategy shouldn't be carried out as an exercise in box-ticking. It should be a highly relevant document with practical guidance that you can use to achieve your sales goals .

An effective sales strategy can help you:

• Improve your team's performance
• Achieve more effective targeting
• Achieve higher conversion rates
• Give you a clearer understanding of your target customers
• Provide actionable tasks for each team member
• Increase customer retention rates
• Improve communication and collaboration within the sales team
• Optimize resource allocation and budgeting
• Be consistent with your sales messaging and branding
• Forecast sales trends more accurately

When we use the phrase "sales strategy" to describe a methodology or sales tactic, there are many to choose from. In this next section, we'll look at a selection of those methods and in which contexts they work best.

Inbound vs. outbound

In broad terms, sales strategies can be categorized as inbound or outbound. Their categorization depends on who initiates the sales relationship.

If the prospect reaches out to the business first, this is inbound selling; if the sales rep reaches out to the prospective customer, this is outbound selling.

Some examples of inbound sales strategies include:

• Content marketing
• Search engine optimization
• Social media channels
• Email marketing (can be both inbound and outbound)

Some examples of outbound marketing are:

• Cold emailing
• Telemarketing
• Print advertising
• Pay-per-click ads

In addition to the categories of inbound and outbound selling, teams can use various selling methods as part of their broader strategy. These include:

1. Value-based selling

Value-based selling is a method in which sales reps aim to provide the best solutions for their customers. It reinforces the benefits of the product or service to deliver value.

Sales representatives get to know their customers' specific needs and pain points so that they can provide the best solution possible.

This means that building customer trust is at the core of the approach. Consequently, value-based selling develops better customer relationships and a more loyal clientele. It works best when customers prioritize the solution's value over product features or price.

2. Consultative selling

Consultative selling has similarities to value-based selling in that it focuses on the specific needs and problems of the customer. However, in consultative selling, the salesperson has industry-specific knowledge, which allows them to provide expert advice to their customers.

The salesperson's role is very much an advisory role in which they may ask probing questions to fully understand their customer's needs. The emphasis in consultative selling is on building long-term customer relationships, often prioritizing this over immediate sales.

3. SPIN selling

SPIN selling is a well-established sales technique based on extensive research by Neil Rackham, the author of the book "SPIN selling." The acronym "SPIN" comes from four types of questions designed to uncover your prospect's needs and challenges:

Situation: Gather facts about your customer's current situation.

Problem: Define what specific issues your customer needs to address.

Implication: What are the consequences of these problems, and how urgently do they need addressing?

Need-payoff: What would be the value or benefits of a potential solution? Is the product that you're offering right for your customer?

This systematic approach shifts the sales conversation from a product-centric sales pitch to a customer-centric discussion, focusing on identifying and addressing the customer's needs.

4. Solution selling

Solution selling involves deeply understanding a prospect's problems and needs. It doesn't focus on pushing any particular product but instead emphasizes recommending a product or service that meets those needs.

It's best used in situations where customers need unique setups where you can offer a variety of products or tailored solutions.

5. Challenger selling

Challenger selling is based on the idea that successful salespeople challenge and educate their prospects. Salespeople first seek to understand their prospects' business and then use that knowledge to offer new ideas and solutions that the customer hasn't previously considered.

Salespeople are willing to take control of sales conversations and push their customers out of their comfort zones by challenging any preconceived ideas they might have.

Challenger selling is most commonly used in B2B selling and emphasizes the need for salespeople to become trusted advisors with in-depth knowledge and insight.

6. Conceptual selling

Conceptual selling is a sales approach based on the assumption that prospects buy for unique reasons, often different from what the seller presumes.

It's a helpful method when selling to large corporations involving high-value complex deals with multiple decision-makers.

Using this technique, salespeople must take the time to understand the prospect and their concept of what they need. This requires in-depth research of the customer to uncover any underlying perceptions and motivations behind a potential purchase.

Conceptual selling is a holistic approach focusing on how the product or service integrates with the prospect's long-term objectives. It's centered on collaboration and fostering long-term relationships.

7. SNAP selling

SNAP selling is based on the principle that customers are overwhelmed with information, distractions, and numerous responsibilities, so they need a fast, simple, and effective selling method.

SNAP stands for the four core principles of the method, which are:

Simple : Salespeople should present their solutions in a straight-forward and easy-to-understand way.

iNvaluable: They should position their products as indispensable to the prospect and themselves as a trusted partner in the sales process.

Aligned: They should ensure that their sales message aligns with the buyers' objectives, needs, and core beliefs.

Priority: They should address those issues of the highest priority to the buyer and position their product as the best solution to the needs they care about the most.

SNAP selling is most appropriate for busy prospects who value straight-forward solutions that address their immediate priorities.

8. Account-based selling

Account-based selling (ABS) is a strategic sales approach, most commonly used in B2B sales, that targets specific high-value customers.

These customers are chosen because they align closely with the seller's ideal customer profile (ICP). Once these customers are identified, the seller researches to gather deep insights into the intricacies of the target organization.

Then, a collaborative team including sales, marketing, and customer service works together to create a personalized sales package for the stakeholders within the target company.

This method focuses on building long-term relationships with all those involved in the decision-making process within the target company. By targeting their resources and providing highly personalized packages, businesses can outpace their competitors and increase their chances of securing more significant deals.

Determine your goals

Decide what you want to achieve and your specific sales goals . For example, you could decide that you want to increase sales by a certain amount, expand into a new market, or acquire a specific number of new clients.

Understand your audience

Research your target audience. Look into their age, location, income level, and buying behaviors and create a buyer persona.

Analyze the competition

Identify your main competitors and find out what they do well and not-so-well. Then, determine how you can outperform them.

Choose your sales channels

Decide how you'll sell your product or service. Which of the channels identified above might work best for your business?

Determine your pricing

Set your prices considering production costs, competitor pricing, and what your target audience is willing to pay. Think about discounts, bundles, or promotions that you might offer.

Develop your sales message

Create a sales message that communicates the benefits of your product or service and demonstrates why it's better or different from your competitors.

Decide on the sales tools that you'll use

Decide which software or tools will help you the most and give you the best return on investment.

Decide how you're going to train your sales team

Ensure that your sales team has the necessary training and resources to sell your product or service effectively.

Determine your sales methodology

Which of the sales methodologies outlined above will your sales team use?

Set a budget

Decide how much you'll make available for each component of your sales process, such as tools, training, promotions, and any other sales expenses.

There are two broad categories of sales channels: direct sales channels and indirect sales channels.

Direct sales channels sell directly to customers and include:

• In-house sales teams: Your company employs dedicated sales teams that reach out directly to customers. B2B businesses often use this sales channel.  
• Company stores: Apple, for instance, sells its products directly to the public through its stores.  
• Company websites: Businesses sell products or services directly to the public through their websites. This is one of the most popular direct sales methods, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic when physical stores were forced to close.  
• Direct mail catalogs: Although this is a less common sales channel since the growth of e-commerce, it can still serve a purpose. For instance, gardening businesses that sell seeds, bulbs, plants, and gardening tools still often sell through direct mail catalogs.  
• Telemarketing: This is where sales calls are made directly to customers.

Indirect sales channels involve a third party, such as distributors, resellers, or agents. In indirect sales, the intermediary buys the product from your company and resells it to the final customer.

Examples of indirect channels are: 

• Retailers: The retail business buys the product from the manufacturer.  
• Wholesalers: These entities purchase products in bulk from manufacturers and then sell them to retailers or other businesses.  
• Franchises: Companies grant licenses to businesses to sell their products. There are countless franchises worldwide. Some examples are McDonald's and Subway.  
• Online marketplaces: These include platforms like Amazon and eBay, where many individual sellers list their products.  
• Affiliates: In this case, businesses promote another company's product to earn a commission fee every time a sale is made through their platform.

The best sales channel for your business depends on factors such as your product type, target market, company size, and industry.

For example, if you manufacture standard office items such as pens, staplers, and notepads, your target market would be offices, educational institutions, and the general public. Brand loyalty would likely be low, so in this case, using an indirect sales channel would potentially have a broader reach than selling directly.

A better strategy might be distributing your products in bulk to retailers like Staples or online marketplaces like Amazon.

Using multiple channels for your sales strategy

Many companies will employ multiple sales channels. There are many benefits to this approach, for instance:

• Increased reach: Using multiple channels allows you to reach more customers.  
• Spreading your risk: Relying on a single channel can be risky. Using multiple channels means that if one channel isn't performing as well as expected, you have other channels to provide sales and revenue.  
• Meeting customers' needs: Different people have different preferences, and where one sales channel might not attract a particular type of customer, another may perform better.  
• Flexibility: Different sales channels allow your business to alter your strategy should market conditions change.  
• More sales opportunities: You're more likely to sell if you offer multiple customer touchpoints.  
• Brand visibility: People are more likely to recognize and remember your brand if they see it on multiple platforms and channels.  
• Using the strengths of each channel: By using multiple channels, you can make the most of the strengths of each one.  
• Better pricing: Set prices that suit each channel's audience.  
• Learn more about your customers: Each channel allows for gathering customer data, such as their preferences, behavior, and demographics. These insights provide valuable information for your marketing strategy.  
• Competitive advantage: You can gain a competitive edge by offering more ways to buy than your competitors.  
• Better customer experience: Offering a choice of channels allows your customers to buy through the most attractive and convenient channel.

If multiple sales channels are used, ensuring the brand's message remains consistent across all your channels is essential.

In a recent survey, businesses reported that using digital technologies increased total cost savings by 8% , indicating that you should consider investing in relevant software to maximize your efficiency and profitability.

Software tools to improve sales vary in features and functions, and each tool often contains features from more than one of the categories listed below. So, one software tool may offer sales analytics features and customer relationship management, while another might provide features relating to forecasting and automation. 

The following categories aren’t strictly separate but can give you an idea of software tools' capabilities to help you design and execute a powerful sales strategy.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools

CRMs make it easier for businesses to track and manage customer relationships. They store information about customers, such as contact details, interactions, and purchase history and can track sales and automate marketing campaigns. 

Some examples of CRMs are Zoho CRM and HubSpot. Using a CRM can eliminate the need for multiple spreadsheets, databases and apps, providing a more streamlined and efficient process. 

Sales automation tools

Sales automation tools automate repetitive sales tasks throughout the sales cycle so that your sales teams can focus on selling.

Different tools work on automating various parts of the sales process. Generally, they can help you manage your sales pipeline and automate tasks such as data entry, lead assignment, invoicing, payment reminders, and follow-up scheduling.

As a result, your manual tasks are substantially reduced and sales processes become much more efficient.

Some examples of sales automation tools are HubSpot Sales and Pipedrive.

Sales analytics software

Sales teams need accurate insights about the effectiveness of their sales strategy, and recent research found that 60% of B2B sales teams are transitioning from selling based on intuition and experience to data-driven selling.

The need for reliable sales analytics software is becoming increasingly relevant. These tools accurately and automatically analyze sales trends, team performance, and customer behavior.

This helps businesses gain a better understanding of their sales processes. They then convert the data into charts and reports that make it easier to understand where improvements can be made or where particular challenges exist.

For instance, you could identify which products sell best in a particular region or how a new salesperson performs. Insights gained from sales analytics software can be used to improve your sales process and forecast future sales. This leads to better-informed decision-making and more sales.

Examples of sales analytics software are Insightly and Zendesk.

Lead generation tools

Lead generation software is a collection of tools that help you identify potential customers interested in your products or services. These leads can be gathered from various channels, such as landing pages, ads, webinars, or chatbots.

This software saves sales teams valuable time by simplifying finding and reaching out to leads.

HubSpot is one example that provides a suite of tools to capture leads from sources such as websites and social media.

OptinMonster finds potential leads by creating and displaying website pop-ups encouraging visitors to enter their details.

Sales enablement tools

Sales enablement tools allow you to create, edit, and share all of your sales materials and content in one location. This makes it easily accessible to all the members of your sales department.

It can also help onboarding new team members and getting them quickly up to speed.

By centralizing and organizing all of your sales materials, a sales enablement tool can improve the effectiveness and productivity of your sales team.

Recent research found that 63.1% of sales enablement professionals felt that the quality of their content was below par.

Sales enablement tools can help by providing insights showing how to improve the quality and relevance of your sales training content. Examples include Showpad and Highspot.

Sales forecasting tools

Sales forecasting tools enable your team to predict sales trends and potential revenue accurately within a given time frame. These insights can help you make better strategic sales decisions, set accurate sales targets, and allocate resources more effectively.

Examples of sales forecasting software include Aviso Predict and Freshsales.

Revenue operations (RevOps) software

Revenue operations software, also known as RevOps software, enables visibility and control of the entire revenue process, including various stages of the sales funnel . It can collect and analyze data, often dispersed across various software tools and spreadsheets used within the business.

Without RevOps software, it can be difficult to extract and align data from all of these various sources. RevOps software combines sales, marketing, and customer data to offer powerful insights into sales activities and performance metrics.

These insights allow for accurate sales forecasting, improving your company's performance and potentially significantly increasing revenue.

Clari is an example of a revenue operations platform. Research conducted by Forrester used financial analysis and representative interviews to conclude that Clari's platform delivered an ROI of 448% over three years.

Book a demo to see how RevOps software like Clari can help you achieve your revenue targets.

Don't forget existing customers

When writing your sales strategy, ensure that you're not solely focused on acquiring new customers. 76% of sales professionals report that prioritizing existing customers is essential to their business and provides a significant percentage of their revenue.

Loyal customers generally bring more value over their customer lifetime, and it's more cost-effective to keep current customers than it is to acquire new ones. This will save you marketing and sales expenses in the long run.

Loyal customers are more likely to recommend your products or services and be valuable ambassadors to your brand. So, satisfied repeat customers are an asset you can't afford to overlook in your business.

You can also increase revenue from your existing customers by upselling and cross-selling. Sales leaders widely recognize the value of upselling and cross-selling existing customers. One in four identify this as their primary goal for sales success in 2023.

Upselling is the process of encouraging an existing customer to upgrade to a higher-end product or service. For instance, you might offer a premium version of your software to a customer who's subscribed to your standard version.

Cross-selling means encouraging customers to buy a product or service that complements something they've already bought. For instance, if a customer of an electronics store has already purchased a laptop, the salesperson could cross-sell by recommending an external hard drive to go with it.

Don't neglect the importance of customer feedback from your existing consumer base in your sales strategy. Their feedback can give you valuable insights into how you might best improve your product or service.

Loyalty programs are additional ways to maximize revenue from existing customers. You can motivate these customers to continue to buy from you by offering them rewards, discounts, or other incentives. This helps you retain customers and deepens their commitment to your brand.

So, always consider the needs of your existing customers in your sales strategy. To avoid customer churn, include plans to communicate with them regularly with newsletters, special offers, and personalized messages.

• Ensure that your sales team is fully trained and understands the goals and methods of your new strategy.  
• Provide them with the necessary tools and resources, such as software and promotional materials.  
• Break down your strategy into small, achievable goals. This makes the process manageable and makes it easier to track progress.
• Give your team regular updates with any changes, insights, or feedback. Keep everyone aligned with open lines of communication.  
• Encourage feedback from your sales team—they can often provide valuable insights.  
• Use sales analytics tools to track your performance. This will help you identify what's working well and what needs improvement.  
• Adjust your strategy based on data and feedback. You might need to tweak sales messages, change sales channels or offer new training.  
• Celebrate achieving sales quota milestones. This boosts morale and motivates the team to push forward.  
• Set times for periodic strategy reviews, perhaps quarterly or half-yearly, to ensure that it's still relevant and effective.  
• Stay updated with any changes in the market, customer preferences, or new technologies. Be ready to adapt your strategy when necessary.  

Here's an example of how a sales strategy might look. It includes specific, measurable goals that the company has set according to data analysis of past sales and current trends.

The scenario

A B2B company offering cloud-based energy management solutions wants to expand its reach by taking advantage of the rise in sustainability issues in business. The business wants to increase its digital presence with real-time data tracking and energy optimization software. The software is designed to integrate with clients' existing systems.

The goal is to increase engagement with the online platform by 30% within the first two quarters. At the same time, they aim to grow the client list by 20%, targeting businesses moving away from traditional energy solutions to more sustainable, smart technologies.

Action plan

• Launch a LinkedIn marketing campaign, delivering twice-weekly posts and articles about energy efficiency and cost savings, to increase brand presence and attract more online customers.  
• Collaborate with five industry leaders in sustainable business practices within the next six months to expand market reach.  
• Start a rewards program for current clients introducing the product to other businesses. Offer service upgrades or discounts on future purchases as an incentive.  
• Hold quarterly online seminars highlighting the product's benefits and long-term savings. Establish the brand as a leader in the sustainable technology space for businesses.

The company might include any other factors mentioned above in its sales strategy, such as selling tactics, team structure, and customer personas. The strategy should be tailored to the company's unique aims and challenges.

So, to recap, your sales strategy is a long-term sales plan, encompassing all the practices and processes for your sales team and a methodology you might use as part of that long-term plan. We've discussed just a few tools to help you develop a successful sales strategy and implement it.

Because of its involvement in the entire revenue process, RevOps software such as Clari has the potential to play a significant part in your sales strategy./p>

Request a demo today to discover how Clari can help you achieve your business goals and optimize your revenue process.

September 11, 2024

Designing a sales compensation plan is hard. here are some tips to make it easier..

Laurie Tennant

David rudnitsky.

Compensation plans are one of the most challenging aspects of running a sales organization. To help sales and HR leaders in our portfolio navigate the complexities, we held a virtual workshop on sales compensation strategies featuring Mike Heilmann , a Norwest senior advisor and founder of ScaledRev .

Here are some of the key takeaways from the workshop.

Market Trends Drive Changes in Sales Comp

The changing market for technology companies – marked by stronger headwinds, delayed IPOs, and stricter capital availability – is having an impact on sales compensation. These are five of the most consequential trends we’re seeing:

• Draws are becoming less of an expectation. Sales personnel must wait for deals to close and revenue to start flowing before realizing rewards.
• Variable incentives are more focused on revenue outcomes than on activities. While this has always been true for direct sellers, sales- and business-development representatives (SDRs and BDRs) are seeing a diminishing portion of their compensation tied simply to activities.
• Rewards increasingly emphasize quality over quantity. High-quality, high-value, long-term deals are prized, especially for businesses with recurring revenue models such as SaaS.
• Incentives stress “expand” over “land”. While it’s always important to add new accounts, actions that grow recurring business from established accounts often produce greater long-term value at less cost.
• Clawbacks are more common. Management today monitors company performance more closely than ever and will quickly act to rein in costs – even if that means draws must be pulled back.

10 Elements of an Effective Sales Compensation Plan

Despite whatever market challenges a sales team may face at any given time, these 10 fundamental principles – the first three of which are non-negotiable – will set your sales compensation plan up for success.

• Simplicity. The easier a plan is to understand, the greater impact it will have. Don’t make people spend their valuable time trying to figure out how they make the most money.
• Consistency with company goals. No matter how good a plan is, it won’t meet its objectives if it isn’t tightly aligned with company goals and strategies. Never incentivize people to do anything that doesn’t move the company in its decided direction.
• Challenging yet achievable goals. If it’s too easy to exceed targets, sellers may lose motivation. The corollary is also true: if goals are unattainable, they may start to think “why try?”
• Tiers and/or accelerators that reward overachievers. You never want to discourage anyone from pushing beyond their quota.
• Annuity payments that reward multi-year deals. Just as the company benefits from long-term contracts, so should the people making them happen.
• One-off rewards to acknowledge extraordinary effort. In cases where a salesperson skillfully navigates an unusual circumstance or exhibits outstanding work, a creative or specialized reward can be appropriate. Just be selective in how you award these.
• Flexibility. You can be certain that things will change, and you need to adapt.
• Rewards for all members of the team. While specific amounts may vary, all contributors to a successful team – not only direct sellers but the dependent roles such as SEs as well – should be rewarded. This will drive continued collaboration.
• Equality. Even the perception of unfairness or favoritism can be fatal to a fruitful relationship.
• Transparency. Always be open, up-front, and honest, especially when you need to have hard conversations about necessary changes or a downward turn in circumstances.

What Are the Right Numbers for Your Sales Comp Plan?

Sales, finance, and HR executives always want to verify that the numbers in their sales-comp plans are at market rates. While every company is different – and industry norms can change significantly in even a few months – a 2023 survey of 236 B2B SaaS companies revealed numbers that closely matched our benchmarks in dealing with Norwest portfolio companies and other young businesses.

The survey captured data from companies ranging in ARR from $5 million to $1 billion. Not surprisingly, dollar amounts grow with the size of target markets. For example, the average OTE for an account executive at a company targeting enterprise customers is around $330,000, while it’s about $200,000 and $150,000 at companies targeting mid-market and SMB firms, respectively. At the same time, the split between fixed and variable compensation is consistent across all markets: roughly 50/50.

As the size of a target market grows, so do performance expectations for AEs. At companies targeting SMBs, the ratio of pipeline goal to OTE is in the range of 5-8x, while it is 10-15x for mid-market and 15-20x for enterprise accounts.

Account managers, predictably, have a different ratio of fixed-to-variable compensation, roughly 60/40. The same ratio generally applies to SDRs, whose average OTE ranges from $70,000 at companies targeting SMBs to around $110,000 for those serving enterprise accounts.

The comp plans for early- versus later-stage companies differ but not as much as you might expect.

The comp plans for early- versus later-stage companies differ but not as much as you might expect. The 2023 survey defined early-stage respondents as having $50 million or less in ARR and later-stage companies as having more. Across all positions, company sizes, and target markets, the difference in OTE and targets between early- and late-stage companies was generally 10 percent or less.

As for choosing metrics for sales targets, sales-qualified leads (SQLs) were the most frequent measure for SDR goals (74% of companies use them), while marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) were used by 39 percent of respondents and pipeline dollars by 34 percent.

Key Takeaways

When developing or adjusting sales comp plans, you will have many factors to consider. The takeaways below offer high-level guidance that will help you make sound decisions:

• Make your comp plan simple to understand, consistent with company goals, and challenging (but realistic).
• Conditions will change, so be willing to make adjustments to your plan.
• If you are asked to add headcount, apply a fact-based assessment of the request by measuring where you currently stand on key measurements against your quotas.

Sales compensation is just one of the challenges that Norwest’s Portfolio Services team helps leaders tackle. We work side by side with companies as they develop and execute strategies to overcome common hurdles related to sales, marketing, and HR issues.

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