Developing a Sales and Marketing Plan

By Jim Hingst

After you establish your sales and marketing goals, you need to
develop an action plan. See my blog post on Setting
Goals for Your Business.

Some major goals can seem daunting, even unachievable. A large
annual sales goal is more manageable and attainable if you break it into
monthly targets and divide a team sales budget into individual sales goals.

Brainstorming.

Sales goals are also more acceptable, if you include the sales
reps in the planning process. Brainstorming sessions are one way to engage them
in planning and create a list of those actions or tasks that you need to
take to achieve your goals. Involving your associates in planning can also
serve as a catalysis for bringing individuals together and operating as a
team.

As you brainstorm with your
sales reps, SWOT analysis can stimulate the interchange of ideas. SWOT is an
acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

This technique is effective
in enumerating the strengths that make your shop unique and give you a competitive edge. These strengths comprise your product differential or
unique selling proposition which you should communicate in your sales and
marketing messaging.

Your
SWOT analysis should also identify any weaknesses that put you at a
disadvantage. These shortcomings may include outdated equipment, limited
machine capacity, or a lack of manpower or technical expertise.

The
technique also helps uncover opportunities as well as threats to your
business. Threats could include new developments in printer technology,
downturns in the economy, changes in local legislation or new competitors.

After your sales and
marketing people identify new opportunities, you should generate a target list,
which you will work through as you qualify these prospects. In the
qualification process and initial sales interview, your reps should quantify
the sales potential for each account. In comprising your target list be sure to
include former customers lost to competitors.

Based on a competitive
analysis, you can then assess the probability of closing the sale. This is all
the information needed to construct a rolling forecast.

In developing your plan, you should detail what actions are required
as well as who is responsible for undertaking those activities and achieving
the goal. You should also describe how you will measure your progress
throughout the year.

An easy way to outline your plan is to create a spreadsheet,
listing the tasks, the person or people responsible for each task, the deadline
for completion, key performance indicators (or KPIs) and any associated costs.
The spreadsheet provides you with an overview, which allows you to track your
progress.

As you review your plan each month, you can measure your progress
and see what works and what doesn’t. As conditions change in your business, the
spreadsheet is an uncomplicated format to modify.

In
developing your plan, keep it simple. You will find it impossible to maintain focus,
if you have too many goals. If you are working in a larger shop, you can assign
a few goals to either individuals or teams of employees.

In helping your sales people manage their sales efforts, you need
to set objectives for each of their activities in the sales process. Here are
some activities that you might include in your sales plan:

Sales Activities

• Qualify 50 sales leads each week.

• Conduct 25 face-to-face sales meetings each week.

• Quote on $25,000 of new business each week.

• Close $5000 of new business each week.

The Importance of CRM Software. A
spreadsheet or Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM) is essential in
tracking the activity of your sales people. Today CRM software is relatively
inexpensive and can help you in supporting the activities of your sales
associates as well as improving their odds of hitting their targets.

Utilizing CRM software can help you store
customer information (past purchases, new opportunities, key contacts) and
strengthen the bonds with your account base, which can help you increase repeat
sales. CRM can also make it easier to generate email blasts and direct mail to
your sales targets and integrate with social media platforms. It also helps
schedule next call dates and generate sales reports.

Using
a CRM software program will also help sales reps to build customer profiles, recording
critical information such as decision makers, upcoming opportunities and areas
of interest.

As
a manager, sales software can help you determine how much time your reps are
actually spending on actual selling. You can also use the information collected
in customer profiles in your coaching efforts.

In selling to your existing customer base, you can establish
several strategies for protecting your established accounts and growing sales
to these clients. Sales and marketing activities could include:

• Contact each current customer once a month on the phone to identify
new opportunities, generate referrals and to promote new product offerings,
such as window and wall graphics, safety signage, tradeshow graphics and floor
graphics.

• Create an e-newsletter for distribution to customers and
prospects each month. Stories could focus on profiles of successful graphics
programs. The newsletter should provide links to your website and blog. Click
here for Tips on
Building an Email Marketing List.

• Create weekly social media posts showcasing examples of your
work. Read my article on Where
Social Media Fits in Your Marketing Plan.

• To protect your business
base, your marketing plan could incorporate a variety of forms of
communication, such as telemarketing, direct mail, email blasts, website
updates and social media. Your plan should also include networking with
businesses that serve some of the same customers.

Your Marketing Plan.

Below are other examples of
what your marketing action plan might also contain as well as a suggested spreadsheet which includes responsibilities, estimated cost, target date and action steps:

Marketing Activities

• Enter 100 prospects into your database each week

• Make 200 telemarketing calls each week

• Send 200 direct mail packages as follow up to the phone calls
each week.

• Write a blog article each week.

• Generate a report at the beginning of each week recapping the
sales and marketing activities of the previous week.

• Once a quarter, research your competitor’s pricing, increasing
your prices to whatever the market will bear thereby improving your bottom
line.

• Each year increase your profit margin by 10%.

Small shops typically don’t have a budget for market research. In
many cases, your sales people can help provide you will all the information that
you need. They can help identifying market opportunities, target accounts and
threats to your business. Information harvested through any business
connections is also invaluable.

With a thorough sales and marketing plan you can focus the
energies of your associates on growing the business. The plan doesn’t need to
be too complicated or described in a voluminous theoretical tome. In fact, it
is best if you keep it simple. You can compose all of the details of your plan
in a spreadsheet.

For each activity, you should describe the implementation of the
action step, and a quantifiable target for the step over a specified time
period. Here is an example of the format that you may use in creating a plan:

Marketing Plan
Activity	Priority	Responsibility	Cost	Target Date	Action Steps
Database	Medium	Office Mgr. Sales Mgr.	$50/mo. for CRM software	12/31/22	Increase dbase size by 1200 annually. Add 25 records each week.
Phone Prospecting	High	Office Mgr. Sales Mgr.	$0	Generate marketing report 1^st day of each week	Qualify 25 prospects each week. Identify opportunities, decision makers and competitors.
Sales Forecast	High	Sales Mgr.	$0	Update forecast 1^st week of each month	Identify $500000 in new sales opportunities for the year. Enter opportunities into forecast each week. Review opportunities with sales reps weekly.
.E-Newsletter	Medium	Office Mgr.	$1200	1^st week of each month	Write and distribute newsletter monthly Enter leads generated into the dbase.
Marketing Activity Report	High	Sales Mgr.	$0	1^st day of each week	Generate a weekly report for management recording additions to the dbase, prospects qualified, opportunities identified, and website and social media results.

The Best Laid Plans.

The
Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote that “The best-laid plans of mice and men
often go awry.” While it helps to have a positive attitude in business
and expect the best, also prepare for the worst.

The key to overcoming
problems is remaining flexible. No plan, no matter how thorough and brilliant
should be cast in stone. Things change. Remember that your competitors have
plans too. In many cases, they are planning to grow their businesses by taking
your market share.

Be prepared for the
unexpected. As boxing legend Mike Tyson noted, everyone has a plan when they
step into the ring until they get punched in the mouth.

When you get punched in the
mouth, you better change your plan and change it fast. Better still, always have
a backup
plan or a “Plan B” as insurance. The term “Plan B” was originally known a
“Bismarck Plan”, after Otto von Bismarck, the famous German chancellor, who
always had a backup plan.

Failure to produce a wanted
outcome can be caused from an ill-conceived plan or a failure in execution. Of
course, some problems, such as an economic downturn or a technology shift in
your industry are difficult if not impossible to predict and beyond your
control.

Common mistakes in planning
include underestimating your competitor’s competencies or overrating your own
abilities. Even among the best organizations this can result in the choke,
according to famed basketball coach, Pat Riley.

To avoid the choke, you and
your sales reps need to continually be aware of changes in market conditions,
new challenges from competitors, and the introduction of innovative
technologies, which can put you at a disadvantage.

There is
no shame when a plan fails. The fault is when you fail to change the plan and
continue to do the same thing, expecting to produce a different result. That’s
business insanity.

What’s
important is that when your plans do not produce the desired results, you need
to do identify any problems and modify your plan.

Unfortunately, many action
plans simply die of neglect. They are written, tucked away in a desk drawer and
forgotten until it is unearthed a year later or longer. For action plans to be
effective, they should be a living document, that you review monthly if not
weekly and modified as business conditions change.

About Jim Hingst: Sign business authority on vehicle wraps, vinyl graphics, screen printing, marketing, sales, gold leaf, woodcarving and painting.

After fourteen years as Business Development Manager at RTape, Jim Hingst retired. He was involved in many facets of the company’s business, including marketing, sales, product development and technical service.

Hingst began his career 42 years ago in the graphic arts field creating and producing advertising and promotional materials for a large test equipment manufacturer. Working for offset printers, large format screen printers, vinyl film manufacturers, and application tape companies, his experience included estimating, production planning, purchasing and production art, as well as sales and marketing. In his capacity as a salesman, Hingst was recognized with numerous sales achievement awards.

Drawing on his experience in production and as graphics installation subcontractor, Hingst provided the industry with practical advice, publishing more than 190 articles for publications, such as Signs Canada, SignCraft, Signs of the Times, Screen Printing, Sign and Digital Graphics and Sign Builder Illustrated. He also posted more than 500 stories on his blog (hingstssignpost.blogspot.com). In 2007 Hingst’s book, Vinyl Sign Techniques, was published. Vinyl Sign Techniques is available at sign supply distributors and at Amazon.