There isn’t a connection between strategic planning and sales for you if you enjoy working hard, and struggling day in and day out to hit your sales goals. Yet, if you’d rather make more and work less then strategic planning has everything to do with sales and your sales success. There are two distinct approaches to sales, and the choice is yours to make. Unfortunately most sales people take the approach of being incredibly active hoping that all that activity will result in at least some sales for you. Even though that approach sounds logical both and I know people who’ve tried that approach, worked themselves beyond the point of frustration and still failed. You’re constantly being told by sales managers, broker dealers, underwriters, and others that if you’re just active enough you’ll succeed but the facts don’t support that logic.

Why does that approach fail, or at best provide not much more than a very meager living? It fails because just being highly active is never enough. You have to be focused on the right activities.

Right activities position you with the right people so when you meet you’re meeting: for the right reasons, people who are highly likely to do business with you, and people who’ve preselected themselves as being ideal customers for you. That’s very different from the approach that focuses on activity because with that approach you’re meeting: anyone who can fog a mirror, people who aren’t likely to do business with you, and people you have to try and talk into doing business with you. When you see it spelled out like that it’s pretty clear the activity based approach just isn’t a good business model for you, or anyone.

The other and more effective approach is based on limiting your activities to those that are most productive for you. With the second approach you’re focused on learning and doing the right things that put money in the bank. As you change your approach you’ll find that you have a whole lot more time and money. No longer are you going out each day trying to hunt and kill the next sale.

You understand there is a difference in approaches and that one produces better results than the other, but you may not see the connection to how strategic planning fits in. In fact, you probably think strategic planning is something only large corporations do, but you need to do too on a smaller and more focused way. A strategic planning process helps you to gain clarity about what you need to effectively attract the ideal customers you want.

You know you have more potential than you’re achieving now and the strategic planning process helps you to get the clarity you need to develop a plan for how you’ll reach that potential. You end up with a dash board that helps you to know exactly what you need to do when. From your dashboard you can track, measure, and adapt so you hit your sales targets.

Rather than starting each day wondering what you’re going to do and what you should do, you know exactly what you need to do to get the results you want. You know who you want to do it with, and you have a clear plan for how to attract those people. You no longer have to constantly hunt for people to appoint because you’ve developed plans and systems that filter out the people who aren’t right for you and gather in the people who are.

Posted: December 4th, 2007 under Marketing.
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