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Start Sales Planning NOW to Meet Next Year’s Sales Goals

Sales

Next year is a new beginning ... and just around the corner. Are you ready to start selling again? Here's some of the sales planning you can do now to get a fast start and meet your sales goals next year.

Manage your sales meetings

Where did you spend your time this year? How many high value prospects and customers did you meet with? Do you know? If not, immediately characterize your customers and prospects by value to achieving your sales objectives.

A good rule of thumb, depending on your sales geography and expense budget, is to meet with an A account monthly. B accounts could warrant a meeting every 6 weeks. You could meet with a C account once a quarter. Remember, your time is valuable. Face-to-face time is expensive. Use the telephone if you can accomplish your sales objective.

Manage your budget

Your expense budget is a sales tool. Don’t waste it. You’re attending industry meetings for more than a meal when you take time and pay money for them. You should have a sales objective for each trade association meeting and business meal. How many new prospective customers do you want to meet at an industry lunch? Be sure you set that objective before the lunch. Then after, you can gauge your lunch's success if you accomplished your sales objective.

Manage your time

Part of being successful in selling is being suitably rested and ready to sell. A worn out, exhausted, sleepless sales professional is pretty useless in the field. Running from industry meeting to meeting is exhausting.

Examine the results you are getting from the regular industry trade group and networking meetings you have attended this year. You are going to meetings for fun if you haven’t gotten any business from the time and money you have invested. Those are the meetings you should stop attending next year.

You will tend to get more business and better results if you are an active participant in a group. If you haven’t participated this year, consider getting more involved next year. Find other groups to evaluate next year if you are unwilling to increase your involvement.

It’s a little late to start to make this year’s sales goals. But you’ll be right on time if you start now to organize your business for next year.

Profile: Maura Schreier-Fleming

Maura Schreier-Fleming is president of Best@Selling, a sales training and sales consulting company. She works with business and sales professionals to increase sales and earn larger profits. She is the author of Real-World Selling for Out-of-this-World Results and Monday Morning Sales Tips. Maura focuses on sales strategies and tactics that lead to better sales results. Maura is a sales expert for WomenSalesPros. She is part of their group of top sales experts who inspire, educate, and develop salespeople and sales teams.She speaks internationally on influence, selling skills, and strategic selling at trade association and sales meetings, demonstrating how her principles can be applied to get results. She successfully worked for over 20 years in the male-dominated oil industry with two major corporations, beginning at Mobil Oil and ending at Chevron Corp. She was Mobil Oil’s first female lubrication engineer in the U.S. and was one of Chevron’s top five salespeople in the U.S. having sold over $9 million annually. Maura writes several columns to share her sales philosophies. She's been quoted in the New York Times, Selling Power, and Entrepreneur.