How to create a sales plan that actually drives results

The sales world is ever-changing. Customer demand and expectations, market conditions, technological advancements, evolving techniques, shifting employee demographics, and more threaten an organization’s ability to stay ahead of the curve and be successful.

Simply improvising in the face of change isn’t an adequate strategy to ensure your team will meet its goals. While flexibility is a vital quality for any great sales team, proper planning is crucial for reaching your goals consistently and predictably. 

The numbers tell a sobering story: according to Salesforce's State of Sales report, only 28% of sales professionals believe their teams will hit 100% of quota. Meanwhile, research from the Sales Management Association shows that organizations implementing formal sales methodologies with consistent training see quota attainment rates significantly higher than those relying on ad-hoc approaches, making structured sales planning essential rather than optional.

According to Salesforce research, sales reps spend only about a third of their time actually selling. The rest goes to administrative tasks, meetings, and other non-selling activities. 

A well-structured sales plan becomes essential for maximizing the impact of every customer interaction. The most effective plans don't just set targets; they remove obstacles that prevent reps from doing what they do best.

A strong sales plan can help your team boost alignment and collaboration, better understand competitors and the broader market, effectively analyze performance, and improve future outcomes. Let's explore some important elements of sales plans, including key process steps and elements, real-world examples, and tips for getting it right.

What is a sales plan? 

A sales plan is a document that outlines your specific objectives, challenges, strategies, and target audience. It’s a sales-specific illustration of exactly what steps your team will take to succeed. While a business plan lays out your organization’s broader goals, a sales plan maps out how you’ll actually achieve them.

What are the benefits of a sales plan?

Effective sales plans help organizations align their sales and marketing teams and avoid conflicting efforts. It’s an essential part of a strong sales management process because it reduces distractions and helps managers and sellers focus on selling to the right prospects at the right time. When used as an ongoing process, sales planning enables teams to track their progress, boost rep motivation, and reduce wasted time. 

Strong sales plans also serve as the foundation for accurate revenue forecasting. As the distinction goes, goals are aspirations and budgets dictate spending, but forecasts use data to tell you where you're actually headed. When your sales plan clearly defines target markets, team capacity, and realistic timelines, your forecasts become more reliable and actionable.

The sales planning process

Nothing about sales is static. Sales planning should therefore be a living, breathing process that managers review as new products are updated or released, market conditions change, or their team scales.

The typical sales planning process includes 6 key steps:

1. Align your mission statement with your sales plan

Take the first step by crafting an awesome mission statement. This will establish your company’s purpose and unify your team around a succinct principle. 

But it is vital to bring that mission statement to increase employee engagement, boost productivity, and commit your team to the same goals and objectives. To keep your big-picture strategy from floating around in the stratosphere, tie it together with your already-established mission statement. 

For example, if your mission statement centers around finding the best possible solutions for each customer’s unique problems, your sales plan should mirror that same sentiment and offer ways you can actually deliver. 

Once you’ve ironed out these details, be sure to clearly communicate them with your team. Explain how your sales plan aligns with your mission statement and the importance of maintaining that continuity. 

2. Analyze your market 

Your business doesn’t operate in a vacuum, and neither should your sales plan. Take a close look at each of your competitors and your own company’s current performance in the market and incorporate that data into a holistic plan. How do your competitors serve your target audience? How do your own strategies stand up to or fail to meet market demands?

In order to identify your ideal customers, as well as their product and service needs, you should utilize customer feedback, user research, client surveys, sales team and service team interviews, social listening, keyword research, and competitive analysis. Instead of assuming that you already know what customers want, potentially wasting time, resources, and revenue, take the time to pinpoint their demands, expectations, and requirements. Then train and develop your sales plan to address them. 

Remember that 77% of B2B customers find their buying journey difficult, so a sales plan that takes their unique needs into account can make all the difference when it comes to attracting and retaining clients. 

3. Set sales goals and targets 

Setting both short- and long-term goals and targets is sometimes challenging. Managers often scramble to improve everything all at once without a clear understanding of how to do it.

Before setting targets, assess your team's current capacity – how much revenue your existing roster can realistically produce based on historical performance, rep tenure, and available selling time. This baseline helps you identify the gap between where you are and where you need to be, so you can determine whether to hire, increase quotas, or invest in enablement to close that gap.

The foundation for strong goal-setting is a healthy mix of the right sales metrics (e.g., activity metrics, pipeline metrics, lead gen metrics, and productivity metrics) and measuring them against the right KPIs. 

The best way to set realistic, yet challenging targets for your sales plan is to collect and make effective use of high-quality data. Powerful, fully-integrated sales tools help your team accomplish this by eliminating the need for manual data entry and updating. Your team can glean a comprehensive, up-to-date understanding of where they are and where they want to go, all without missing a beat. 

Over time, you can use metrics and KPIs from previous periods to fine-tune your targets. Integrate both your sales and marketing metrics to help you refine your goals and find more opportunities to improve your processes.

4. Build data-driven territory plans

Territory planning has evolved from annual geographic assignments to continuous optimization based on real-time data. According to Xactly's territory planning research, companies with data-driven sales territory plans see up to 30% higher sales objective attainment.

Effective territory planning requires three integrated data areas: internal performance data (historical results, rep capabilities, account relationships), market potential data (third-party intelligence, competitive landscape), and territory balance metrics (quota attainment, coverage ratios, revenue per territory).

• Internal performance data: Historical results, rep capabilities, existing account relationships, and tenure inform realistic capacity calculations, and should be combined with market potential data and territory balance metrics for comprehensive territory planning.
• Market potential data: Third-party intelligence on competitive landscape, economic indicators, and growth potential helps identify underserved opportunities. This represents one of three essential data areas (alongside internal performance data and territory balance metrics) that organizations need for effective sales territory planning and balanced quota setting.
• Balance metrics: Track quota attainment percentage, territory coverage ratios, and revenue per territory to identify imbalances before they impact results.

Rather than treating territories as static annual assignments, modern sales plans incorporate quarterly or monthly optimization cycles. This allows managers to rebalance workloads, address coverage gaps, and respond to market changes without waiting for the next planning cycle. Your sales quotas should never be set in stone, and neither should your territory assignments. As your business grows and its priorities shift, so should your sellers' goals and territory alignments.

5. Define your sales team’s roles and responsibilities

Each sales team member plays a crucial role in the success of the larger unit:

• Inside and outside sales reps focus on making contact with prospects through sales prospecting
• Account managers retain, engage, and satisfy clients
• Regional sales managers support their direct reports and coordinate sales operations 
• Sales operations managers improve team efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness
• Sales development reps (SDRs) research, prospect, and qualify leads
• Account executives (AEs) run demos, conduct compelling presentations, identify and resolve purchasing challenges, and negotiate buying terms. 
• Sales engineers address in-depth product questions, identify customers’ technical needs, and develop demos

While this isn't an exhaustive list of each individual role’s responsibilities, it illustrates how many moving parts a well-oiled sales team needs to run. Executive sales team members (like the Director of Sales, VP of Sales, and Chief Sales Officer) focus on higher-level sales initiatives, and their knowledge and expertise is crucial to the team’s overall success.

Because there are so many different sales career pathways, managers should clearly define each person's responsibilities and outline how their efforts will contribute to the sales plan. Break down tasks and targets for each team member and measure their performance alongside those larger KPIs. For example, you might measure SDRs against number of deals closed, number of calls, or number of meetings, while evaluating account executives using number of demos, opportunities won, and win rate.

For distributed and hybrid teams, role clarity becomes even more critical. With a significant portion of the workforce now working remotely at least part of the time, your sales plan must address how team members collaborate across locations. Effective hybrid management requires outcome-based goals rather than activity tracking, real-time dashboards providing visibility without micromanagement, and clear communication rhythms including daily asynchronous updates, weekly pipeline reviews, and monthly retrospectives. 

Learn how to structure productive 1:1s that keep remote reps engaged and on track.

6. Evaluate results

Your sales plan should never be rigid. Even if you think you’ve crafted a sales plan masterpiece, it’s essential to follow up after implementation and evaluate your results. Using robust sales technology, you can easily track every activity within your sales process and evaluate how the execution of each task reveals your team’s strengths and shortcomings. 

A strong sales tool offers a variety of features that help you assess performance – one of which is a sales dashboard. Dashboards standardize, centralize, and visually illustrate all of your sales data in a single place, helping managers evaluate team performance and progress against their set goals in real time.   

Companies that commit to structured evaluation and adjustment processes, supported by data-driven territory planning and continuous optimization, see measurable results. Omniplex Learning achieved forecasts accurate within 5% while adding 400+ new customers annually, demonstrating the power of implementing consistent evaluation and adjustment processes.

Then, armed with those deep insights, you can adjust your sales plan as needed for even better outcomes in the future. 

6 key elements of an effective sales plan

Though your specific sales plan will vary depending on your unique business, goals, target audience, team size, and industry, there are several common elements you should always consider.

1. Set realistic goals

Goals motivate sellers and keep them excited about their work. Since highly-engaged teams are 14% more productive than those with low engagement, taking the time to create achievable targets based on market conditions and your customers' needs is essential for keeping your sellers motivated and committed.

A varying combination of daily, weekly, and monthly goals can help managers keep salespeople inspired. Make sure you clearly establish how these smaller goals impact the success of the sales plan to get reps fully committed. 

Also consider the seasonality of your business when setting targets. Not all months deliver equal selling opportunity. December typically has 15-17 effective selling days compared to 23 in other months due to holidays and customer availability. Building this seasonality into your expectations creates more accurate and achievable targets.

2. Choose your quota setting approach

Quota setting deserves careful consideration in your sales plan. According to Salesforce's guide to sales planning, two primary methodologies exist: 

Top-down quota setting, where sales targets are divided among teams and managers set individual rep quotas, and Bottom-up quota setting, where territory-based calculations build to organizational targets. The approach you choose should align with your organization's structure and market conditions.

• Top-down approach: Start with organizational revenue targets, divide among teams, and cascade to individual reps. This ensures alignment with company objectives but risks setting unrealistic individual targets. Organizations using this approach should adjust targets based on territory potential, historical performance, and book composition so each rep's number is both fair and achievable.Regardless of approach, factor in rep experience levels when finalizing individual quotas. New sellers need ramp time to build relationships and learn your sales process, so setting the same targets for a first-year rep as a seasoned veteran sets them up for failure. Create graduated quotas that increase as reps gain tenure and demonstrate consistent sales performance.
• Bottom-up approach: Build quotas from territory potential, historical performance, and book composition. According to CaptivateIQ's quota planning guidance, this approach creates quotas that are "both fair and achievable" for each rep, though this territory-based calculation method may not always align with aggressive company-wide growth targets.

Most effective sales plans combine elements of both approaches, adjusting targets based on territory potential, historical performance, and book composition so each rep's number is both fair and achievable.

One practical benchmark: Be conservative in setting quotas, assuming your team will make around 80% of the planned goal, while designing compensation plans that prioritize and reward sales growth. Learn more about tracking progress against quotas through essential sales metrics.

3. Build your sales technology foundation

Many of today’s sales teams rely heavily on their tools, but some still struggle with lackluster, disconnected, or outdated technology. To create and carry out a seamless sales plan, your team needs tools that are completely integrated and offer the type of transparency that streamlines your entire operation.

With the vast majority of sales teams now using at least one automation tool according to HubSpot's Sales Strategy Report, the question isn't whether to adopt technology but how to consolidate and integrate your stack effectively. Sales ops teams increasingly focus on streamlining tech stacks to reduce context-switching, improve data accuracy, and eliminate tool redundancy.

While your CRM is crucial, that one tool alone is not enough to support your team at every step of the sales process. Your team needs a full suite of integrated features, like dashboards, forecasts, automation, and buyer sentiment analysis. With the right SalesTech, your team can improve productivity, communication, and lead conversion to ultimately build and execute excellent sales plans. 

4. Integrate AI into your sales planning process

AI adoption in sales has reached a tipping point. According to HubSpot's State of AI in Sales report, the majority of sales teams now leverage AI in their processes, with sellers reporting significant time savings on administrative tasks. This isn't a future consideration for your sales plan; it's a current requirement.

According to Gartner's research on B2B sales, digital channels powered by AI will dominate B2B sales interactions in the coming years. To prepare for this shift, modern AI capabilities that should inform your sales planning include autonomous task execution, enhanced decision-making support, and predictive forecasting powered by real-time data integration across CRM, email, calls, meetings, and product usage data.

• Predictive forecasting: AI synthesizes multi-source data (including CRM, email, calls, meetings, and product usage) to generate real-time pipeline visibility and predictive insights
• Enhanced decision support: AI-synthesized multi-source data generates actionable insights for deal prioritization and resource allocation decisions
• Content personalization: AI crafts tailored messaging using configured rules and data sources like company 10-Ks, LinkedIn profiles, and recent news

When evaluating sales forecasting tools, look for platforms that unify data across your tech stack rather than adding another silo. Moving toward elite forecast accuracy requires simultaneous focus on three factors: platform architecture, data foundation quality, and seller adoption.

5. Set and communicate clear expectations 

Establishing and enforcing expectations is critical to just about every part of a business. After all, how are employees supposed to know what they should do and whether they’re doing it properly without understanding what’s expected of them? 

In sales, this is especially important. Success often hinges on specific, time-sensitive activities that are properly executed. For instance, swift customer follow-up can make or break a deal. A rep’s failure to understand where their co-worker’s responsibility ends, and theirs begins, can change a success into a failure. 

To anticipate or resolve any existing confusion, managers should define crystal-clear expectations both for the team and for individual sellers. Document those expectations in an easy-to-access place. Each seller should have the right resources and direction to execute every sales task in a timely manner. This builds trust and communication within the team, which is the key to the success of any sales plan. 

6. Develop training programs 

Top-performing sellers are more likely to spend a significant amount of time training with their managers. It’s no wonder 89% of sales leaders have invested or plan to invest in internal sales training. Those who fail to prioritize skill development will likely fall behind their competitors. 

There are many different types of training programs, each with varying benefits and costs. One thing to note is that regardless of which type of training program you choose, make sure your team has the right tools and the training to effectively use those tools to help everyone get the most out of the investment.

Examples of strategic sales plans 

There are several different types of sales plans that might be useful to your specific business and team. Here are some examples of the most commonly used strategic sales plans.

Customer profile  

Developing an ideal customer profile (ICP) is an excellent way to make sure your team targets the right prospects. An ICP can fine-tune messaging and establish a strong overall sales strategy. 

To get started building this type of sales plan, identify your best current customers, reach out to those customers for feedback, and study your customer and sales data. Then, use those insights to craft a valuable ICP that’ll drive even more business from new verticals. 

30-60-90-day plan

It’s helpful to break your sales plan up into more digestible chunks. A 30-60-90-day plan divides goals, activities, and metrics into 30-day intervals, each with progressively challenging steps. It’s a great way to set reps up for continuous improvement without overwhelming them right off the bat. 

Market expansion plan 

Stimulating growth in new markets is a daunting task, but a market expansion sales plan gives your team clear direction on how to break through. This model is best used for new territories or regions where your ICP, account distribution costs, time zones, and other key factors differ from those in your typical market. 

Marketing-alignment plan 

Getting your sales and marketing departments on the same page can ameliorate many issues that might hinder your sales success, like inconsistent messaging, uncoordinated strategy, disparate data, disconnected tools, lack of understanding, differing priorities, competition for funding, and more. A sales plan that’s grounded in sales-marketing alignment can effectively bring both teams together for greater cohesion, better resource sharing, more scalable playbooks, and shorter sales cycles.

Revenue operations alignment plan

The elevation of sales operations to Revenue Operations (RevOps) reflects a fundamental shift in how organizations approach revenue generation. According to Gartner's research on revenue operations, RevOps adoption has grown substantially as companies recognize the value of aligning sales, marketing, and customer success around shared metrics.

A RevOps-aligned sales plan addresses critical pillars including: process design and optimization, forecasting and pipeline management, technology and tools management, data and analytics, sales compensation and incentive design, and territory and capacity planning.

A modern sales planning approach emphasizes alignment around shared metrics across functions. Organizations should align teams around key metrics like pipeline velocity, customer retention, and lifetime value to ensure every function contributes to sustainable growth. 

By breaking down traditional silos between sales, marketing, and customer success functions through a unified Revenue Operations framework, organizations can improve cross-functional coordination and drive more cohesive revenue generation strategies.

Read more about how leaders can improve sales and marketing alignment to drive better outcomes.

Account plan

Account plans translate your broader sales strategy into customer-by-customer execution. While territory plans assign sellers to segments, account plans help reps strategize how to bring value to individual deals. They involve researching customer needs, identifying obstacles, building stakeholder relationships, and coordinating with internal teams like BDRs and solution engineers to move opportunities forward. 

When reps create structured account plans, they can better manage their pipeline and increase win rates through more personalized engagement.

New product/service plan

If your organization plans to launch a new product or service in the near future, it’s probably ideal to create a sales plan around that debut. This will help your team properly track revenue, understand subsequent growth, and identify areas of strength and weakness. 

How the right platform supports revenue workflow execution

Your sales plan acts as your team’s guiding light for developing a clear, effective strategy. Effective planning aligns sales and marketing, helps teams progress and performance, and improves seller engagement, motivation, and productivity. But the various moving pieces of a strong sales plan require the support of an intelligent system of action.

Outreach’s AI Revenue Workflow Platform reduces the time-consuming, manual activities typically associated with sales planning. As the only AI Revenue Workflow Platform, Outreach unlocks seller productivity to create more pipeline and close more deals.

Frequently asked questions about sales plans

What is a sales plan?

A sales plan is a strategic document that outlines your objectives, target audience, strategies, and the specific steps your team will take to achieve revenue goals. Unlike a business plan that covers broader organizational goals, a sales plan maps out exactly how you'll execute to hit your numbers.

How long should a sales plan be?

Your sales plan should typically run 10-20 pages, covering all essential components. This length ensures you have sufficient detail to guide execution while remaining actionable for your team. A plan that's too brief may lack necessary specificity, while one that's overly lengthy becomes burdensome to maintain and reference during the selling cycle.

What is a sales plan template?

A sales plan template is a structured framework that captures your goals, target segments, tactics, team responsibilities, and key performance indicators. Templates provide starting points, but avoid copying generic templates without customization. A template from the internet won't match your specific sales cycle, target customers, or team structure.

What should a sales plan include?

According to Zendesk's sales plan guide, every sales plan should include six foundational elements: sales goals and objectives, target market definition, strategies and tactics, team roles and responsibilities, timelines and milestones, and performance metrics and KPIs.

How often should you update your sales plan?

Sales plans should be living documents continuously monitored and adjusted in response to performance data and market conditions, with regular reviews against key metrics. Trigger immediate revisions when market conditions change significantly, new products launch, or team structure shifts. Static annual plans often fail because they can't adapt to changing circumstances and miss opportunities for course correction in real time.

How do you measure sales plan success?

Track essential KPIs, including: win rate, sales cycle length, pipeline coverage, forecast accuracy, average deal size, lead-to-opportunity conversion, sales rep ramp-up time, and customer retention rate. Use a sales dashboard to centralize and visualize these metrics for real-time performance visibility.

What mistakes should you avoid when creating a sales plan?

The most common mistake is creating a plan that sits on a shelf – a static document that fails to drive action. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of sales planning as a living, iterative process rather than an annual deliverable. Other critical pitfalls include setting unrealistic goals without data support, failing to align sales and marketing efforts, not defining clear role responsibilities, and skipping the metrics that will tell you whether your plan is working. According to research from the Sales Management Association, teams with formalized, well-executed plans consistently outperform those without structured approaches.