Work Your Plan

So, it’s Wednesday and the week is half over. Are you smiling or about to enter panic mode?

It’s the last week of the month to boot. What happened to the last 30 days? Why aren’t you at your goal?

Maybe you didn’t plan to ease into the end of the month. And good sales month does require creating a plan, but at the same time understanding that plans aren’t perfect and will go awry. What’s never perfect is skipping the plan and “winging it” while letting the days unfold as they may. That’s like driving across country without a map. You might end up in Florida or you might get lost in the hills of Tennessee. Instead of the trip taking three days, it could be seven days later and nothing much is happening when it comes to finding your final destination.

You need that map.

In our tech-rich life, think of your sales plan as your GPS. It’s wonderful to get you where you want to be, but first you must program it and tell it where you want to be in a given amount of time. Don’t be someone who vaguely knows where he’s going while saying, “There are a number of roads that will get me there.” It’s better to be on a specific path in sales or you’re going to aimlessly wandering around.

Without a plan, there is no measurability and no accountability. There is nothing to give you concrete feedback until you set some targets in place.

I’m not saying you should be a stickler to the plan. Very rarely are plans perfect. For instance, if you’re flying from Dallas to Hawaii, the pilot will certainly file his plan with the FAA. That’s the law. But when he flies into the jet stream, the plan must be altered or modified because of life and circumstances. The longer the path, the more modification will be required.

But since there is a plan, there will be that first bit of feedback. That’s the starting point for adjusting the plan.

My sales technique for creating a plan begins with sitting down on the first day of the month and reviewing my territory from a year ago. I also review the month before. In essence, I’m working to write the order that I’m anticipating and based on what a client did a year ago, I can predict with some certainly what they will do today. When you look at what the client did last month, it seems even more reasonable to know what will happen now. This is a great way to really know your clients because you’ll see how their business is doing and how quickly inventory is turning over for them.

Again, I’m essentially writing a pre-order and will succeed in predicting within five to ten percent of where I was last year.

My plan allows me to get a feeling of what’s supposed to happen and helps me set my target for now. I’ll say, “Customer XYZ will order ten percent of Product A and ten percent of Product B for $3500 for the month based on the information I have put into my plan.”

This also gives you a road map to your month. If you have to sell 50 of product A, 50 of product B and 50 of product C and know ten of A and 15 of B, but zero of C will probably go to client XYZ then you know how much you have to sell of these products to other customers.

You can say, “OK, it’s time to move elsewhere now.”

Or you might say, “I’ve hit my target and bonus. Now let’s see what else I can do.”

If you just drift through your month, you won’t know anything. There’s never any benefit of being someone who sticks his head in the sand. It doesn’t mean the world isn’t still going on around you. Just because you have plausible deniability doesn’t mean you’re in control.

It’s the plan that puts you in the driver’s seat.