A 'Sales Project Plan' keeps everyone on track and moving forward

Project plans are a great way to understand and manage all sorts of things that people and teams work on, and sales is no exception.

Sales, when thought of and approached as a process, lends itself extremely well to a Sales Project Plan. Message me and I'll send you my Sales Project Plan template.

Why a Sales Project Plan?

I've used Sales Project Plans throughout my career. They're a simple yet powerful way to answer 3 important questions:

• Who are the Sponsors and who is Power throughout the discovery, evaluation, and ultimately in the buying decision?
• What are the definitive steps in each prospect's decision-making process?
• When will each step happen, when will specific people and/or groups be involved, and when will the decision be made?

Why This Sales Project Plan?

The Sales Project Plan template isn't meant as a replacement for anything you may already be doing in your CRM. I'm sharing this simple and stripped-down version for a few reasons.

• It's been useful to me when thinking about sales process, qualifying prospects, and forecasting opportunities
• It's helpful for remembering to ask questions that reveal and confirm how a prospect makes their decision
• If you don't already have something in place, this Sales Project Plan can be customized and shared with your prospect and within your organization

A quick word on internal communications. Sales Project Plans are very helpful for earning and building trust with colleagues. In addition to sharing with prospects, I've used them to support forecasts, in sales funnel review meetings, and in meetings with sales support, production, and professional services teams so they know what I know when it comes to how the prospect makes decisions and who is involved.

Project Plan as Qualifier

Proposing the Project Plan approach with the prospect has proven useful to me as a qualifier. With it, I better understand what authority and influence the people I'm connecting with actually have.

The degree to which there's objection to this approach can be quite telling. Strong objection is often a signal that I may not be talking with someone with much influence.

Agreement and even enthusiasm for this approach, however, is a pretty good signal that you — and they — won't be wasting time since the plan is designed to get to a decision along an agreed-to timeline.

Project Plan as Time Management

Sales is about diagnosing problems and prescribing solutions. That's how I go into each sales opportunity.

My goal is to be helpful, but I also must be pragmatic and efficient in how I use my time. Using the Sales Project Plan approach has helped me to make better use of my time by spending it with more interested, more engaged, and more qualified prospects.

I hope that it can do the same for you.