![How to Craft a Winning Sales Action Plan [ + Templates]](https://visme.co/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/How-to-Craft-a-Winning-Sales-Action-Plan-Including-Ready-to-Use-Template-Header.jpg)
When it comes to hitting sales goals, the gap between target numbers and actual performance often leaves many sales teams feeling lost and under pressure. In fact, a Salesforce study revealed that 72% of sales professionals don’t expect to meet their yearly quota.
But there’s a fix. You can bridge that gap and set your team up for success with a solid sales action plan.
This plan serves as a detailed and strategic document that zooms in on your actions, tasks and steps to achieve the goals set in the sales plan. It helps your sales team to know what to do and the information they need to perform at their highest level.
In this guide, we’ll give a detailed breakdown of how to craft a winning sales action plan. We've also added customizable templates to get you started right away.
A sales action plan and a sales plan are essential resources for any business serious about sales strategy and execution. They both share a common goal of increasing revenue and driving business growth.
While a sales plan sets the strategic direction and goals, a sales action plan provides a detailed roadmap and actionable steps to accomplish those goals within the specified timeframe.
Sales plans often set long-term goals and strategies and cover a more extended period, like a fiscal year. However, sales action plans focus on shorter timeframes, breaking down the sales plan into actionable steps for weeks, months, or quarters.
If you're interested in creating a sales plan, check out this informative article, which includes 16 sales plan templates to guide you through the process. Better yet, read this article to discover how Visme can help you close more sales.
Below are some reasons why a sales action plan is necessary for your business.
A well-crafted sales action plan helps define your sales strategies in a way that team members know precisely what they need to accomplish to contribute to the overarching sales goals. This clarity ensures everyone is on the same page and aligned with the company's vision.
For example, if your ultimate goal for your new business in the next year is $300,000, your sales action plan will outline the steps, actions and specific strategies to achieve a certain sales target each month until you reach your ultimate goal.
When you have clearly defined your sales activities and timelines, you can prioritize your sales activities and allocate resources effectively. In essence, you can focus your time, money, budget, tools and efforts toward the most impactful activities that’ll achieve better outcomes.
An action plan includes measurable milestones and KPIs. This provides a basis for you to measure progress and success. Not only is the sales action plan excellent for month-to-month direction, but it also provides a comprehensive assessment of your sales team.
Sales action plans enhance communication and coordination between sales and marketing teams by providing clear strategies and timelines for tasks. For example, when marketing knows the sales team's schedule for product releases or campaigns, they can align their promotional efforts to drive better results.
Now that you know why a sales action plan is important, it is essential for you to learn what goes into a sales action plan to help you create an impactful one. Here are some strategic information that you can include in your sales action plan.
This outlines what your sales team aims to achieve and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that’ll be used to track progress toward these objectives.
Your objectives could be increasing market share, expanding into new territories, or boosting product and service adoption. Examples of KPIs include a 20% increase in sales revenue targets, a 50% increase in store traffic or a 25% increase in referral rate.
Ultimately, your team should aim to achieve monthly or weekly targets that align with overall brand objectives.
Your target audience is your core customer base or segments that the sales team will focus on.
Your target audience is dictated by their demographics—age range, gender profiles, needs, income range, lifestyle types and geographical locations. Other critical details include the market size and potential reach.
Want to learn more about your target audience? Read this article to discover how to create an ICP. We’ve already rounded up templates in this article to help you create your buyer persona.
Your sales strategy outlines the approaches, tactics and methods your sales team will use to reach your target audience and achieve the set objectives.
This section could include sales techniques, marketing strategies, customer engagement plans, etc.
For every item that forms part of your sales strategy, you can share specific tactics like:
This section outlines the name, roles, responsibilities and structure of the sales team. Use professional images inside circular or rounded corner square frames to showcase each team member.
Your resources section covers the tools, technologies, budget and any other resources required to execute the sales strategies effectively. It could include CRM software, sales enablement tools, marketing materials, etc.
Other elements that could be included in an action plan include:
With the wide variety of features and templates available in Visme, you can easily create a visually appealing and professional-looking sales action plan within a few minutes.
Here’s how to create a sales action plan using Visme.
Create a Visme account or sign in if you're already a user. Enter your login information and you'll be taken to your dashboard. Consider getting a team account for your business to get access to all of Visme’s impressive features.
Now, it's time to develop your sales action plan. You can either begin from scratch or opt for ready-made templates.
However, leveraging Visme’s sales action plan template will streamline your workflow and help you create your professional-looking sales action plan in minutes.
Simply head to Visme's dashboard, click Create New >Project, and then check out the Sales action plan category. There, you'll find a variety of templates for various industries and company styles. Browse through until you find the one that suits your company's needs.
After choosing your template, proceed with writing the content. We've already outlined the essential components of a sales action plan. But focus on the sections that directly address your company's specific requirements.
Insert all text into designated placeholders or create new text boxes. You can change text alignment or arrangement and even animate your text inside Visme’s editor.
Make sure you maintain uniformity by using the designated font for all content and a bold font for headings. If you have brand-specific fonts, replace them accordingly.
If you need help generating ideas for your sales action plan, you can leverage Visme's AI writer. Simply input your prompt and within seconds, the tool crafts a high-quality copy. The tool can also refine grammar, enhance ideas, or condense text to suit your needs.
Collaborate with your team to leverage diverse perspectives and unique insights. Utilize Visme’s collaboration features to invite team members to view, comment, edit and engage in real-time discussions with your team members.
The workflow feature allows you to assign roles and tasks to team members and track their progress and deadlines in one place.
The next step is to input crucial sales data into the sales action plan.
You can leverage Visme’s data visualization tools to convert complex data into concise and easily understandable visuals. You can access a wide range of graphs, charts, tables and data widgets in Visme’s library.
Use the tool that best represents your data. For instance, you can employ GANTT charts and tables to visualize project timelines and key milestones. These can be useful to showcase activities and completion dates and identify any overlaps within your project.
With Visme, you can link your live data source directly to the dashboard. You can extract data from a range of platforms, such as Google Analytics, Survey Monkey, Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. This integration simplifies the process of transferring data from your favorite apps, eliminating the need for manual input.
Additionally, Visme effortlessly integrates with well-known applications such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Monday.com, Jotform and Mailchimp. This functionality guarantees that your dashboard remains consistently updated with real-time information from your preferred platforms. When you’re done creating your sales action plans, you can also easily export them from Visme to these platforms.
Pro Tip: Maintain a harmonious visual appeal across your data dashboards by employing consistent theme colors. Utilize customization tools to align widget colors, fonts and sizes with your dashboard's layout and style.
You can take advantage of a wide range of customization options on Visme to make your sales action plan visually appealing and professional, even if you lack design skills.
Visme’s brand design tool will help you keep your sales action plan on brand. Simply input your website URL and the wizard will pull up your logo, colors, fonts and other design elements. With your brand assets saved in your brand kit, you can apply your branding to your sales action plan in one click.
Who says your sales action plan has to be boring? Spice things up and keep your team engaged by including interactive elements within the sales action plan.
Elements like pop-ups and hover effects can help you reveal additional information while engaging your readers. You can amp up the experience further by embedding videos, integrating animated icons and adding clickable menus, illustrations, or special effects.
Once finalized, you can publish and share it with your team or the whole organization, either by inviting them directly on Visme, sharing a link, or embedding it on a secure intranet site. You can securely distribute your customized sales report with just a few clicks, ensuring it gets to the right people at the right time. Not only does this foster transparency and communication, but it also improves your workflow.
Visme has an extensive library of professionally designed and customizable action plan templates to help you jumpstart your creation process. Using these templates will save you hours of planning and designing.
Don’t just take our word for it. Hear what one of our happy customers has to say about Visme.
"Visme also helped us to free up our creative and design team to work on other projects across the organization. We created a supply of customizable templates they can cycle through and customize quickly on their own rather than waiting on a designer."
Manager of Partnership Marketing
