Sales Planning
After nearly four decades experience in Sales, Sales Management and Sales Operations I’ve learned a thing or two about the difference between a business or product succeeding or failing.
The single obvious root cause is the failure to generate sufficient revenue to achieve profitability often regardless of product viability.
Having stated the obvious, let me clarify , most business plans deal with a go to market strategy at a high level however the failure most often occurs in translating that into an effective tactical effort to deliver on the day to day business requirements.
To make strategy more interesting — and different from a budget — we need to break free of this obsession with planning.
Strategy is not planning — strategy is the making of an integrated set of choices that collectively position the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage relative to competition and deliver superior financial returns.
Obviously you can't execute a strategy without initiatives, investments, and budgeting. But what you need to get managers focused on before you start on those things is the strategy that will make these initiatives coherent.
Your "Strategy" is a singular thing; there is one strategy for a given business — not a set of strategies. It is one integrated set of choices:
- What is our winning aspiration?
- Where will we play?
- How will we win?
- What capabilities need to be in place?
- What management systems must be instituted?
That strategy tells you what initiatives actually make sense and are likely to produce the result you actually want. Such a strategy actually makes planning easy. There are fewer fights about which initiatives should and should not make the list, because the strategy enables discernment of what is critical and what is not.
This conception of strategy also helps define the length of your strategic plan. The five questions can easily be answered on one page and if they take more than five pages (i.e. one page per question) then your strategy is probably morphing unhelpfully into a more classical strategic plan.