The Right Plan

Avoid missing your 2025 number before the year even starts

Now is the time to put a tight plan together to execute.  In and of itself, the right plan is a force multiplier. The right plan is the precursor to a high-performance “sales engine”. To be sure, there are other critical factors from hiring the right sales people to putting the right sales incentives in place to enabling the success of the sales team to broader structural considerations. That said, without a well-constructed sales plan, success can be elusive.

So what’s a “Well-Constructed” sales plan?

Authors Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana shed bright light on this in their book “Cracking the Sales Management Code“.

First, clearly define and delineate desired Business Results from Sales Objectives from Sales Activities. 

Jordan and Vazzana explain that understanding how the causal relationships work up the chain is not as important as the ability to reverse-engineer the relationships.  We must also associate relevant metrics with each of these levels in order to track compliance with the activities and to measure progress towards the objective and result.  For example:

• Business Results (e.g. To achieve 10% increase in revenue.)
• Sales Objectives (Add 20 new customers per quarter.)
• Sales Activities (Complete 80 more prospecting calls per quarter.)

SALES ACTIVITIES can be managed, OUTCOMES and BUSINESS RESULTS can’t. Sales Activities include metrics such as number of sales calls made per rep, percentage of reps using the CRM, percentage of account plans completed. Sales Activity Metrics measure the things that a sales force actually does. No one “does” revenue or product mix, but everyone makes sales calls.  “What gets measured gets done”.

SALES OBJECTIVES: These metrics are not highly manageable, but they can be directly influenced by pointing certain Sales Activities at them. Therefore, the first focus of the planning exercise needs to be on the separation of Sales Activities from Sales Objectives.  Asking for specific Sales Objectives without ensuring that the proper Sales Activities are in place is not necessarily a recipe for inevitable disaster, but it is certainly a recipe for unpredictable and (more importantly) uncontrollable performance.

Through this lens the necessary behaviors become visible, and affecting those behaviors is the primary purpose of your 2025 sales compensation plan.

Fractional Sales Leaders from Treeline can quickly help you put the right plan and measures in place!

For more about Treeline CRO services, please visit https://www.treelineinc.com/sales-recruiting/fractional-cro-service/