Strategic and operative planning of sales

The most important aspect for sales department is to set goals properly and work out a strategy of success achievement. In many companies annual sales plans are worked out but in the process of their realization some difficulties are appeared. Modern business is conducted in conditions of fast changes when on-the-spot reaction on new opportunities often brings more benefits then the steady posteriority to strategic long-term plans. However, long-range planning is important and necessary, otherwise how can you plan your salary for employees or advertising campaign budget then? So we have questions that are vital for your business: how to work out strategic plans and operative plans?

Strategic planning

Let's imagine that you sell computer equipment. A new type of device is appearing on the market and this novelty is in strong requisition for short terms. You begin to sell new device and because of this, you execute the annual sales plan for 130 %. But what you will do with this figure, considering the fact that at the moment of the annual plan statement you did not know about the novelty? After all, you achieved such a result due to selling new device. But does this mean that your business is efficient? Most likely, it does not. In this case execution of annual sales plan will be not single indicator but there must be a group of indicators to characterize your business. The annual plan of sales should be exclusively a reference point for employees of the company. The accent in planning should be displaced on operating plans, i.e. quarter and monthly.

Operative planning

Manager of sales department must request every sales agent about what estimated quantity the agent is planning to sell to his clients. As a result, the manager will get individual sales plan per sales agent. The sum of all individual plans will give monthly total sales plan of the department. So we have the following rule: operative (monthly and quarter) sales plan must be worked out bottom-up (as a sum of individual plans), but not top-down (as a figure divided proportionally between all managers).

VIP Task Manager allows to work out individual plan and assign it to sales agents. Using custom fields you can create the following indicators for operative and strategic planning:

• Individual sales plan . Each sales agent gives estimated sales volume per client to the department manager. The manager completes the entire data and sets plan per agent.
• Total sales plan . This is the sum of all individual sales planes. Total sales plan is assigned to the sales department by the manager.
• Actual sales volume . At the end of each month or quarter the manager can calculate sales volume per agent as well as total sales volume for the sales department.
• Outturn . Efficiency of sales plan can be determined using key performance indicator "Outturn". This is ratio between sales volume and sales plan. The department manager can calculate outturn as per agent as for the whole department.

Individual sales plans can be set for each month or quarter. In VIP Task Manager you can create custom fields "Monthly individual sales plan" and "Quarter individual sales plan". In order to check if sales are efficient, these indicators can be compared to "Monthly individual sales" and "Quarter individual sales".