Why your sales plan is failing - and how you can do better with playbooks

The new year begins, goals are set, plans are made. Sales planning is a science in itself!

The way in which we set our sales targets has hardly changed in the last century. Today, we have modern sales tools that generate fancy graphs and tables. But we are actually still doing the same thing as we did 100 years ago.

Sales planning usually starts with the figures from previous years. Based on this, we consider what will change this year:

• Do we have a larger sales team?
• Do we have more sales partners?
• Is our target market growing?
• Do we have a better brand or more products?
• Have we changed the strategy?

Based on such assumptions and the figures from previous years, we develop the strategy for the next twelve months and draw up our new sales plan.

The problem with this type of sales planning is that 90 percent of plans miss their targets, according to Harvard Business!

The problem here is not the planning process itself, but ...

• Incorrect assumptions due to a lack of data
• Poor implementation of planned measures
• Lack of opportunities for intervention

Below we show you how playbooks can solve these problems.

Incorrect assumptions due to a lack of data

Bad data in, bad data out! If the basic assumptions of your sales plan are wrong, the goal will not be achieved.

That's why modern playbook software includes an analytics tool with real-time data. Playbooks collect data during every customer interaction, for example during social selling on LinkedIn or during discovery calls with Zoom. The dashboard summarizes this data and thus provides a reliable database.

Better still, as the data is recorded in real time, you can update your sales planning continuously. So instead of drawing up a 12-month plan once a year, you can use the data from your playbooks to generate reliable forecasts on an ongoing basis.

Poor implementation of planned measures

Whatever you come up with in your management meetings, your team has to implement it. In practice, however, it is often the case that your sellers usually rely on the strategies and tactics they have been using for years - even if they don't (or no longer) work.

This is the greatest strength of Linkando Playbooks: you provide your team with digital guidelines directly in their sales tools. This enables your sales team to implement the measures in their day-to-day work. They receive concrete instructions, such as new lead criteria or sales arguments, to actually implement your strategy.

Lack of opportunities for intervention

What if your strategy doesn't work? In this case, sales managers tend to stick to their strategy for too long. This is mainly due to the fact that they lack the opportunity to intervene.

Playbooks make it very easy to flexibly adapt sales strategies. With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can change your employees' digital guidelines, for example to incorporate new learnings into the sales process. This doesn't require extensive training, just a few changes in the playbook.

How do you plan to achieve your sales targets in the coming year? And more importantly, how do you ensure that your strategies are actually implemented? Write to us at info@linkando.com.

If you want to see a digital guide in action, visit www.linkando.com/playbooks/getting-started.