Sales plan template

How often do you create a new sales strategy? For many sales teams, this is something that happens on a quarterly basis. However, developing your strategy from scratch every quarter can take up precious planning time that could be used for selling your product.

Instead of creating your sales plan from scratch every quarter, try using our free sales plan template.

What is a sales plan template?

A sales plan template is a reusable framework that helps develop your sales team’s strategy, success metrics, and end goals. These templates may also include your sales team’s objectives, target audience, and revenue goals. 

Why is this important? Instead of starting from scratch, your team can use our free sales plan template as a starting point during quarterly sales planning. This helps expedite the process by providing your team with a basic strategy to work from. Then, all your team has to do is to fill in their specific success metrics, goals, and responsibilities for that specific time period.

What goes into a sales plan template?

There are a few different components that go into a sales plan template. These components may vary depending on the type of sales you work in—software sales are very different from retail sales teams, after all—but the most common components include:

• Revenue targets: This is the revenue goal you want your sales team to achieve before your team’s chosen deadline.

• Team structure: Who on the team is responsible for what. This means identifying managers, dedicated team members, and who reports to who. 

• Key deadlines and milestones: Any important dates or deadlines that are relevant to a sales cycle.

• Directly responsible individuals (DRIs): Anybody on the team who’s responsible for a specific task or part of a project.

Depending on how your team functions and your sales strategy, you can add additional information like:

• Current market conditions: This could be information regarding the economic climate, to understand how potential customers are feeling about purchasing at a certain time of year. For example, you can add information like a PEST analysis in this section.

• The target market or an ideal customer profile: Information about the ideal customer you’re selling to. This helps your sales team better understand who their target audience is and how to best sell to them.

• Competitive data: Any information on your competitors. Competitive analysis information helps give sales people the upper hand by illustrating how your product or service compares to the competition.

How to use our free sales plan template

Creating a sales plan with our free template is simple. Here are a few steps to help you get started. 

1. Analyze your current sales process. If your team has repeatable tasks in your current sales process, your template should capture all of these steps. This will save your sales managers from manually repeating tasks when they create a new sales strategy.

2. Establish a main sales objective. No matter the quarter, you should always clearly state the main objective you want your team to achieve. This helps your team focus on work that will make the most impact on your sales objective. 

3. Determine success metrics. Connecting your sales goals to your business goals is an important part of developing a sales plan template. Your sales plan template should have a dedicated section for success metrics, so your team knows exactly how certain tasks connect with larger goals. These success metrics should connect directly with the sales objective you established in step two.

4. Document actionable steps. Our free sales plan template makes it easy to capture the actionable steps your team is taking to achieve the objectives you outlined in step 2. This section ensures you can accurately measure if the work you’re doing is helping to achieve your goals.

5. Provide important contextual information for your team. Your sales plan template should include information like competitive research, market conditions, and an individual customer profile. This information can be updated and duplicated for future sales plans. 

Integrated features

• Goals. Goals in Asana directly connect to the work you’re doing to hit them, making it easy for team members to see what they’re working towards. More often than not, our goals live separate from the work that goes into achieving them. By connecting your team and company goals to the work that supports them, team members have real-time insight and clarity into how their work directly contributes to your team—and company—success. As a result, team members can make better decisions. If necessary, they can identify the projects that support the company’s strategy and prioritize work that delivers measurable results. 

• Reporting. Reporting in Asana translates project data into visual charts and digestible graphs. By reporting on work where work lives, you can reduce duplicative work and cut down on unnecessary app switching. And, because all of your team’s work is already in Asana, you can pull data from any project or team to get an accurate picture of what’s happening in one place.

• Automation. Automate manual work so your team spends less time on the busy work and more time on the tasks you hired them for. Rules in Asana function on a basis of triggers and actions—essentially “when X happens, do Y.” Use Rules to automatically assign work, adjust due dates, set custom fields, notify stakeholders, and more. From ad hoc automations to entire workflows, Rules gives your team time back for skilled and strategic work.

• Milestones. Milestones represent important project checkpoints. By setting milestones throughout your project, you can let your team members and project stakeholders know how you’re pacing towards your goal. Use milestones as a chance to celebrate the little wins on the path towards the big project goal. 

Recommended apps

• Salesforce. Remove bottlenecks by enabling sales, customer success, and service teams to communicate directly with their support teams in Asana. Share attachments and create actionable, trackable tasks for pre-sales needs. With Service Cloud, connect your implementation and service teams with supporting teams in Asana to deliver amazing customer experiences.

• Zoom. Asana and Zoom are partnering up to help teams have more purposeful and focused meetings. The Zoom + Asana integration makes it easy to prepare for meetings, hold actionable conversations, and access information once the call is over. Meetings begin in Asana, where shared meeting agendas provide visibility and context about what will be discussed. During the meeting, team members can quickly create tasks within Zoom, so details and action items don’t get lost. And once the meeting is over, the Zoom + Asana integration pulls meeting transcripts and recordings into Asana, so all collaborators and stakeholders can review the meeting as needed.

• Gmail. With the Asana for Gmail integration, you can create Asana tasks directly from your Gmail inbox. Any tasks you create from Gmail will automatically include the context from your email, so you never miss a beat. Need to refer to an Asana task while composing an email? Instead of opening Asana, use the Asana for Gmail add-on to simply search for that task directly from your Gmail inbox. 

• Slack. Turn ideas, work requests, and action items from Slack into trackable tasks and comments in Asana. Go from quick questions and action items to tasks with assignees and due dates. Easily capture work so requests and to-dos don’t get lost in Slack.