Strategic Planning: What does Strategic Planning have to do with Sales?

If you enjoy working hard, and struggling day in and day out to hit your targets then strategic planning has nothing to do with sales. But if you'd like to make more and work less then strategic planning has everything to do with sales. There are two distinct approaches to sales, and the choice is yours to make.

The approach that most sales people take is to focus on being incredibly active hoping that all that activity will result in sales. The problem with that approach is that you and I both know people who tried that approach, worked nearly night and day yet they still failed. And that contradicts what you’re constantly being told by sales managers, broker dealers, underwriters, and others.

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.

The right activities are those that 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. Now that’s very different from the approach that just 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 coerce into doing business with you. It’s pretty obvious when you see it laid out like this that the activity based approach just isn’t a very good business model for you, or anyone.

The second approach is based on limiting your activities to those that are highly productive for you. Now you’re focused on learning and doing the right things that put money in the bank for you. You have a whole lot more time and money because you aren’t running around like a starving wolf trying to find some fresh game each day.

Ok, you get there is definitely a difference and that one approach produces better results than the other, but you may not get how strategic planning fits in. You probably think strategic planning is something that only large corporations and international conglomerates do, but it’s something you need to do too on a much smaller and much more focused scale. The strategic planning process helps you to develop the clarity about your business that you need to effectively attract customers.

Strategic planning helps you to determine the potential you see for your business, and through that clarity you can begin to develop a plan for how you’ll get that potential. Ultimately you end up with a dash board that serves as a working document for you, so you know exactly what you need to do when. And you can track, measure, and adapt so you don’t miss your targets.

Instead of 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. Instead of constantly hunting for appointments you develop plans and systems that filter out the people who aren’t right for you and gather in the people who are.