We measure the pulse of business - the secrets of the implementation of sales plans in IT and not only
Author: Andrey Mayboroda, CEO of GreenBusiness
Imagine how much it means to fulfill the sales plan for a consulting company that helps build sales? So here. Let's be frank. In the first year on the market, we, a consulting company, worked without a sales plan, and in the second year we did not always follow it.
I think we know about the topic of the sales plan, its subtleties, tricks and nuances, much more than the average company on the market. And that is why we will talk about this topic, which is often shyly ignored by the majority of companies in our country. And the more consulting companies.
')
This note will be interesting first of all to heads. Negative expect from lazy managers and people who are used to looking for one hundred percent recipes. Although they will find a "cookie" at the very end of this material.
The sales plan is about discipline. The sales plan is about consistency. The sales plan (let's sometimes call it PP for short) is about the transformation of the natural chaos of the world into order through the willful effort of the business captain and the actions of his team.
It is useful to remember the classics. “The main function of the sales plan is in the prevention of cash gaps and ensuring the stable development of the enterprise,” something like this can be found in textbooks on the economics of the enterprise.
Stable development of the enterprise is not only a common place in textbooks and not only a dream of 90% of Russian businessmen - it is also a function of the PP, for which it is worth doing sales planning. Proven by practice: if you work according to the sales plan and find your balanced plan, your business will develop predictably and steadily.
Hundreds of articles have been written about planning methods, but ordinary entrepreneurs still live “in the old manner”, without a plan, explaining this either by what they “didn’t understand how to do” or by what they “tried, it didn’t work”.
Sales planning is primarily a process that only brings results. Let's see what planning methods are the most inefficient and meaningless.
Harmful advice 1. Plan from the ceiling. Take any number, ideally, higher than that of your closest colleagues by 20%.
How to do it right: calculate and count seven times how much your company can produce to the maximum and set the plan at 50% -70% of its specific monetary capacity. If your business is easy to scale, do a survey of market capacity and determine the real share in its worst forecast you can take this year.
Harmful advice 2. When the sales plan is not fulfilled, discard the sales plan.
How to do it right: analyze the reasons for the failure of transactions and change the approach of your work with clients, order processing, the method of your sales. Sometimes you are mistaken in the height of the bar. Feel free to lower it if you do not reach the PP and close - especially when you do not know the market and / or when the market is immature. It is important to adjust the PP and most importantly - try to achieve it against all odds.
Harmful advice 3. Enter an ambitious sales plan and a "small salary plus a small limited percentage" motivation scheme. Wait for superstars who will burst into your sales team.
How to do it right: if you have a “leadership” sales plan, take the average salary of a seller in your industry, add 20%, provide an increasing percentage when doing, a little over-fulfillment and a huge over-fulfillment of the sales plan, plus bonuses for many calls and meetings, provide an additional weekend for the initiative of the seller and the attraction of cool potential customers, add a cozy office - and your company has a chance to create a truly stellar sales department.
Whether we like it or not, the fulfillment of the sales plan is a much more flexible and complex process than we would like the leaders to have. Our monthly figures in the excel plate rarely differ spasmodically, the amount slowly grows every month, or the whole quarter or even half year stays the same.
But real revenues are always more similar to the expression “now thick, empty”.
However, fluctuations in real revenue are always there, and they are normal. Our task is to bring the amplitude of oscillations into the zone “above the sales plan” or at least minimize the depth of the “lowlands of non-achievement”.
A common problem that is often diagnosed during the audit of the GreenBusiness sales system is precisely the irregularity and non-systemic management of the sales process. Yes, that is what they also call the “business kamikaze path”.
The main and well-known tool for minimizing revenue fluctuations is the notorious “push up” and “slow down” commands. We see that the plan is not executed in May = the “press” command in June + a positive additional bonus for overfulfilment + an additional depressing component for sabotage or “sloppy” work.
We see that this month the plan has already been fulfilled - we give an additional holiday to holiday managers and informally recommend that we “hold” certain transactions for the next month so that the manager will again receive an increased percentage, and the company will enjoy the desired stability.
This tactic allows you to more or less accurately fulfill sales plans with a margin of plus or minus a month.
A strategically important way to fulfill a sales plan is to ensure a fairly wide mouth of your sales funnel, that is, to ensure that managers are sufficiently active, have enough bids and the level of demand that exceeds your supply.
This is a completely different story, more complex, more sad, and to marketers.
A curious moment in the situation of non-fulfillment of the sales plan: we really did everything that depended on us, but still did not fulfill the plan.
Anyone who has ever worked on the sales plan will confirm that this story happens quite often.
We call it business pulse. Moreover, it is not about the pulse of your business, but about the pulse of the surrounding business.
The pulse of a business is the conjuncture of the business environment, on which we have no direct levers of influence.
The implementation of the sales plan is in direct proportion to the pulse of your business environment. Therefore, it is very important to know which factors influence this pulse.
The reason is one. Receivables in crisis. She is disguised dishonesty of your customers. Rarely when a company has no money at all, more often it happens that the reluctance to give money to you or just now. Customer dishonesty is a reflection of your marketing filter. If you want to improve the quality of your clients, ask yourself the question: by what channels and in what ways can I attract more trustworthy clients?
Reason two. Underestimation of risks and an overly optimistic estimate of the closing time of transactions by managers. All the risks that can play - play, axiom first. Everything that can be postponed is postponed, axiom two. People are busy, forgetful and sometimes slaughtered, axiom three. All this, our manager often does not see or does not want to see, and we, if we are an inexperienced sales manager, believe in any optimistic forecast - if only he would please our hearing. Introduce a sober and rigorous analysis of the risks of transactions. We at GreenBusiness use SMART for this, and, by the way, is very convenient.
Reason three. Insufficient activity of managers for any equally unimportant reasons. The clinical picture: few calls and many reasons why there was no time for them, few meetings and a lot of words about the complexity of cold sales, few working days this month and many promises. The cure is one thing: remember that the main and holy function of a manager is to deal directly with sales. Everything else can be done with @ AndreiMai as secretary, marketer, engineer, accountant, and if necessary even the director.
Not less than 70% of the time of the day a sales manager should take the iron directly to the sales - the main axiom of sales.
Yevgeny Kaspersky in one great interview said that if you start working in the market, you can choose one of two strategies - either hide under the tree, or run fast. And if you hide under a tree, then sooner or later you will be found, and if you run fast, either they will catch up with you, or you will find someone under the tree.
The most recent illustration on this page depicts the only 100% secret we know about how to fulfill a sales plan in any business and in any economic situation.
Always remember this.
Imagine how much it means to fulfill the sales plan for a consulting company that helps build sales? So here. Let's be frank. In the first year on the market, we, a consulting company, worked without a sales plan, and in the second year we did not always follow it.
I think we know about the topic of the sales plan, its subtleties, tricks and nuances, much more than the average company on the market. And that is why we will talk about this topic, which is often shyly ignored by the majority of companies in our country. And the more consulting companies.
')
This note will be interesting first of all to heads. Negative expect from lazy managers and people who are used to looking for one hundred percent recipes. Although they will find a "cookie" at the very end of this material.
Who is the sales plan? Why sales plan?
The sales plan is about discipline. The sales plan is about consistency. The sales plan (let's sometimes call it PP for short) is about the transformation of the natural chaos of the world into order through the willful effort of the business captain and the actions of his team.
It is useful to remember the classics. “The main function of the sales plan is in the prevention of cash gaps and ensuring the stable development of the enterprise,” something like this can be found in textbooks on the economics of the enterprise.
It is important to understand that the sales plan is not a fetish, not an end in itself, and not a tool of moral superiority over colleagues and competitors. Its function is different in ensuring the stable development of the enterprise.
Stable development of the enterprise is not only a common place in textbooks and not only a dream of 90% of Russian businessmen - it is also a function of the PP, for which it is worth doing sales planning. Proven by practice: if you work according to the sales plan and find your balanced plan, your business will develop predictably and steadily.
How to plan sales. Bad advice
Hundreds of articles have been written about planning methods, but ordinary entrepreneurs still live “in the old manner”, without a plan, explaining this either by what they “didn’t understand how to do” or by what they “tried, it didn’t work”.
Sales planning is primarily a process that only brings results. Let's see what planning methods are the most inefficient and meaningless.
Harmful advice 1. Plan from the ceiling. Take any number, ideally, higher than that of your closest colleagues by 20%.
How to do it right: calculate and count seven times how much your company can produce to the maximum and set the plan at 50% -70% of its specific monetary capacity. If your business is easy to scale, do a survey of market capacity and determine the real share in its worst forecast you can take this year.
Harmful advice 2. When the sales plan is not fulfilled, discard the sales plan.
How to do it right: analyze the reasons for the failure of transactions and change the approach of your work with clients, order processing, the method of your sales. Sometimes you are mistaken in the height of the bar. Feel free to lower it if you do not reach the PP and close - especially when you do not know the market and / or when the market is immature. It is important to adjust the PP and most importantly - try to achieve it against all odds.
Harmful advice 3. Enter an ambitious sales plan and a "small salary plus a small limited percentage" motivation scheme. Wait for superstars who will burst into your sales team.
How to do it right: if you have a “leadership” sales plan, take the average salary of a seller in your industry, add 20%, provide an increasing percentage when doing, a little over-fulfillment and a huge over-fulfillment of the sales plan, plus bonuses for many calls and meetings, provide an additional weekend for the initiative of the seller and the attraction of cool potential customers, add a cozy office - and your company has a chance to create a truly stellar sales department.
Do you have a hand on the pulse?
Whether we like it or not, the fulfillment of the sales plan is a much more flexible and complex process than we would like the leaders to have. Our monthly figures in the excel plate rarely differ spasmodically, the amount slowly grows every month, or the whole quarter or even half year stays the same.
But real revenues are always more similar to the expression “now thick, empty”.
The secret of the sales departments that work according to the PP is that the mediocre departments really have “something thick or empty”, and the steep ones have “thicker and sometimes thicker”.
However, fluctuations in real revenue are always there, and they are normal. Our task is to bring the amplitude of oscillations into the zone “above the sales plan” or at least minimize the depth of the “lowlands of non-achievement”.
Fulfillment of sales plan requires constant attention to the pulse. That is why the business process of sales in your company must not be managed regularly, but continuously, by a dedicated person, and not by fits and starts, competently, and not as it will, without discounts and excuses.
A common problem that is often diagnosed during the audit of the GreenBusiness sales system is precisely the irregularity and non-systemic management of the sales process. Yes, that is what they also call the “business kamikaze path”.
The main and well-known tool for minimizing revenue fluctuations is the notorious “push up” and “slow down” commands. We see that the plan is not executed in May = the “press” command in June + a positive additional bonus for overfulfilment + an additional depressing component for sabotage or “sloppy” work.
We see that this month the plan has already been fulfilled - we give an additional holiday to holiday managers and informally recommend that we “hold” certain transactions for the next month so that the manager will again receive an increased percentage, and the company will enjoy the desired stability.
This tactic allows you to more or less accurately fulfill sales plans with a margin of plus or minus a month.
A strategically important way to fulfill a sales plan is to ensure a fairly wide mouth of your sales funnel, that is, to ensure that managers are sufficiently active, have enough bids and the level of demand that exceeds your supply.
This is a completely different story, more complex, more sad, and to marketers.
But not on the pulse - in the surrounding business!
A curious moment in the situation of non-fulfillment of the sales plan: we really did everything that depended on us, but still did not fulfill the plan.
Anyone who has ever worked on the sales plan will confirm that this story happens quite often.
We call it business pulse. Moreover, it is not about the pulse of your business, but about the pulse of the surrounding business.
It's not so scary when in one month your sales plan is fulfilled by 70%, and in the next by 130%. It is terrible when your plan is a million money a month, you earn a maximum of one hundred thousand and therefore abandoned the sales plan and organizational conclusions.
The pulse of a business is the conjuncture of the business environment, on which we have no direct levers of influence.
The implementation of the sales plan is in direct proportion to the pulse of your business environment. Therefore, it is very important to know which factors influence this pulse.
The three most common causes of failure of the sales plan '2015
The reason is one. Receivables in crisis. She is disguised dishonesty of your customers. Rarely when a company has no money at all, more often it happens that the reluctance to give money to you or just now. Customer dishonesty is a reflection of your marketing filter. If you want to improve the quality of your clients, ask yourself the question: by what channels and in what ways can I attract more trustworthy clients?
Reason two. Underestimation of risks and an overly optimistic estimate of the closing time of transactions by managers. All the risks that can play - play, axiom first. Everything that can be postponed is postponed, axiom two. People are busy, forgetful and sometimes slaughtered, axiom three. All this, our manager often does not see or does not want to see, and we, if we are an inexperienced sales manager, believe in any optimistic forecast - if only he would please our hearing. Introduce a sober and rigorous analysis of the risks of transactions. We at GreenBusiness use SMART for this, and, by the way, is very convenient.
Reason three. Insufficient activity of managers for any equally unimportant reasons. The clinical picture: few calls and many reasons why there was no time for them, few meetings and a lot of words about the complexity of cold sales, few working days this month and many promises. The cure is one thing: remember that the main and holy function of a manager is to deal directly with sales. Everything else can be done with @ AndreiMai as secretary, marketer, engineer, accountant, and if necessary even the director.
Not less than 70% of the time of the day a sales manager should take the iron directly to the sales - the main axiom of sales.
The method "magic hare" and other secrets of the sales plan
Yevgeny Kaspersky in one great interview said that if you start working in the market, you can choose one of two strategies - either hide under the tree, or run fast. And if you hide under a tree, then sooner or later you will be found, and if you run fast, either they will catch up with you, or you will find someone under the tree.
The most recent illustration on this page depicts the only 100% secret we know about how to fulfill a sales plan in any business and in any economic situation.
All the other secrets of your business success are in your head.
Always remember this.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/291070/
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