B2B sales planning is top of mind for me after we had a great session at the Communitech Sales Leaders P2P. Cailin Radcliffe, the Director of Analytics and Strategy at Vidyard, talked about how the team at Vidyard puts together a sales plan for the different sales and marketing teams. Based partly on Cailin’s presentation and my experience working in Sales for almost 25 years, here are some things to think about when setting your sales plan.
Revenue needs:
What revenue do you need to get to or want to get to. For a funded company this could be meeting your plans or commitments to your investors. For a smaller business this may mean targets relating to modest head count increase and being able to pay yourself a new target income.
Sales cycle:
It is important to understand your B2B sales cycles. Adding new sales people today may not yield results for the next 6 months.
Existing business:
Keeping existing business is much easier than closing new business. If you have a consulting business, that could mean understanding the existing and future planned business with a customer. For a SaaS based business it means understanding your churn rate and working to keep customers happy and using your system.
History:
The best predictor of the future is often the past. Understand your historical rates of moving from one funnel stage to another. This will help B2B sales planning, especially when adding new products or new sales people. You can be more or less aggressive but base it on something historically.
Bottom up feedback:
Sales targets and planning often come from top down, it is important to work with the sales team or sales reps to get feedback from them before a final plan is in place. In some cases, it may mean creating a plan to bridge the gap using the ideas from the team.
Ownership:
One of the things I really took away from Cailin’s session was the work they did on ownership of opportunities. A big part of that is tracking where an opportunity starts and measuring the applicable team on that. Cailin said this extra focus on Vidyard has helped them get more with less marketing spend and even though they had fewer opportunities/leads in the funnel, they closed more of them.
Metrics:
Make sure you have key metrics set and measured. This doesn’t just mean revenue, but also the activities that build towards revenue. Set a yearly goal and then break it down to quarterly, monthly, and in some cases weekly goals.
If you need some help with your B2B sales planning please contact me and we can talk about it..
