action plan to increase bank sales

Bank Sales Management – 4 Steps to Boosting Sales of Corporate Finance/Capital Markets

At many banks, significant investments in capital markets and corporate finance capabilities to create a “one stop shop” have not led to significant increases in opportunities identified by relationship managers. Four important steps can accelerate the process.

With notable exceptions, commercial bank efforts to boost revenue by selling corporate finance and capital markets products to middle market have not met expectations. This, despite significant investments in investment banking capabilities, product training, and corporate finance training that have kept corporate finance teachers busy for several decades. Why is this?  What can sales team leaders and market managers do?

Two Key Factors Reduced the Growth Rates for Capital Markets Capabilities

While the reasons for under-performance vary bank to bank, there are two universal themes. First, marketing strategies . The “service” organization (i.e. the capital markets group) and the field sales force did not mesh. The groups had different objectives and different compensation plans. Many sales people considered the investment bankers arrogant and transactional. The investment bankers considered the relationship managers dim-witted and antiquated. As a result, the two groups could not collaborate to define effective marketing strategies and to exchange the information each group needed to fully take advantage of opportunities.

Second, sales process . Bank sales managers took the view: “RMs are already talking to these companies. They can cross sell or refer opportunities for capital markets.” The sales managers did not see that customers don’t buy capital markets services the same way they buy more traditional bank products. Loans and other bank products have been sold through a “features/benefits/price” conversation. Capital markets products and services must be sold as if they are “professional services,” where ideas and professional competence are the primary value.

What will it take to close the gap? While much progress has been made, the most critical elements are:

• better definition of market strategy and sales processes,
• a new approach to training,
• more focused sales management , and
• a recognition and compensation philosophy that, at minimum, does not distract sales people from the task.

Better Definition of Market Strategy and Sales Processes

Market strategy, particularly target selection for each capital markets capability , is critical. Specialists and relationship managers must share a common understanding of “what a qualified prospect looks like” for each capital markets product or service. These definitions should be specific, for example: “Manufacturing companies with sales > $50 million who meet criteria for Bbb debt ratings and that are interest rate sensitive.” RMs must know these criteria for each of the opportunities they’re expected to find. These criteria enable RMs to plan their sales efforts and to forecast prospective business effectively. They also reduce the amount of “noise in the system” from opportunities that don’t deserve attention from scarce investment banker resources.

Crisp sales process definitions will help boost the number of opportunities identified and reduce effort expended in sales process. The field sales organizations and product specialists must define (for each product or service):

• Sales process steps (from initial conversations through origination to the end of execution) respective roles in the sales process.
• Hand-off points (as from RM to specialist and back again).
• Information requirements for each service (what information RM or specialist passes to the other).
• Service standards for response times to inquiries, lead times for presentations, and other sales support activities.

These definitions provide a framework for RMs and specialists to work together effectively, each knowing what they can expect from the other and when.

New Approach to Training and Sharing Information

To meet client expectations, bank training must prepare RMs for their roles in the sales processes (which differ by product or capability). Depending on the RMs’ roles in opportunity identification and selling, product training and sales training should be modified.

This is not a new problem. For example, in 1998, describing Merrill Lynch’s initial attempts to generate additional mergers and acquisition advisory business, Fortune magazine reported: “[Clients] wanted bankers who came to them steeped in knowledge of their industry and full of creative ideas…That was a problem for Merrill’s M&A bankers, who were generalists… Many bankers simply didn’t know enough about each of the industries to make provocative presentations…” (Fortune Magazine, April 27, 1998, page 138)  Data provided by Greenwich Associates and other firms confirm that clients today expect the same from investment bankers and commercial bankers who want to provide the more strategic capital markets and corporate finance services.

Like Merrill, bank leaders now must make specific decisions around how they are organized and how their bankers are prepared to respond to these client expectations of advisors. The same logic applies in small business, middle market, and large corporate banking. Whether you’re offering M&A advice, Treasury Services, mutual funds, or debt financing, product training should be transformed into “customer training” to focus on:

• Owner,  CEO, or CFO issues and concerns.
• The problems that the bank’s capabilities solve.
• Questions that will help the RMs assess a customer’s goals and circumstances and draw conclusions about which investment bank capabilities are appropriate and what potential benefit will be created for the customer.
• What does this do (explained in terms normal people can understand)?
• When does this approach benefit a company like ours?
• What are the alternatives?
• Who have you done this for?
• What will it cost and how long will it take?

Sales training should shift toward a professional services model in which the value comes from the expertise of team members, of which the RM is one. Clients want counsel from people who have been down particular roads before. They are looking for advisors who can take a view or a position about market conditions and other factors. Sales training should prepare RMs to probe these issues deeply and to offer opinions. RMs must be good representatives of the expertise that will later come from the capital markets professionals.

This begins with intimate customer knowledge. Generally speaking, RMs know their customers well at a transactional level – specific needs which the customer has decided to address. Generally, they do not know their customers well at the level needed to identify opportunities or capital market services. Key missing ingredients include:

• Customer goals, strategies, policies and market positioning (which provide the context for proactive opportunity identification).
• Ideas and strategies that are in “entering discussions” and have not moved to the “take action” stage.
• Variables (such as commodity prices) that bring risk into the customer’ business.

The sales training must also teach the RMs to position the capital markets group’s capabilities and begin prescribing sales processes. Often, this will include the ability to describe “success stories” that demonstrate capabilities and market savvy.

Finally, make sure your RMs are receiving and reading information that they will need to discuss in sales calls and conversations over meals:

• Capital markets activity (rates, players, deal structures, etc.) and current trends/opportunities.
• Up-to-date information about internal processes, players, and methods.

More Focused Sales Management

Sales managers (from line-of-business head to sales team leader) must decide how their teams will “play the game.” Since all product suppliers in the bank are competing for sales force mind-share, the sales managers must set a strategy and priorities for sales force attention. With the basic direction and expectations set, there are several important goals for sales managers:

First Priority: Field Coaching

• Get into the field to observe calls and to coach…even though you don’t have time . Sales management coaching disciplines drive sales results. If you want to identify more opportunities for capital markets and corporate finance, you have to increase the amount of time and attention you pay to them through your questions and through your time in the field.This is particularly true if you want RMs to do more than spot opportunities and toss them over the fence. If you want them to question deeply to reach the pain and the payoffs that will sell capital markets and corporate finance, you have to be there with them, and you have to model it.
• Help the RMs learn to anticipate customer issues and present ideas by asking questions about customers’ plans and strategies and prompting them to anticipate needs and generate ideas. The main rule here is: You get what you ask about. If you ask about ideas and customer plans, you’ll get more of them. If you ask about loan renewals and administrative matters, that’s what you’ll get.
• Use whatever information you have about products, internal processes, and success stories to drill and coach the RMs. To be confident speaking to business owners or senior officers, they have to master the language and the stories. Use sales meetings, time in the car or on the plane, or phone time to ask questions like: “How do you describe our private placement capabilities?”

Second Priority: Planning and Review

• Create good sales process descriptions and measures so that you can accurately determine where RMs are working in the sales process. You should be able to say to an RM: “To be successful in your territory with capital markets, you need to identify 50 opportunities, make 30 idea presentations, submit 20 proposals, and close 15 deals with an average fee of $X”. This knowledge comes from tracking and studying RM activities so you know, for your market, what the guidelines are.
• Help the RMs prioritize their accounts – which accounts should get the “financial advisor” treatment, which match the profiles of companies that would benefit from particular capital markets and corporate finance services.
• Insist on planning – a 1-year territory business plan and account plans for the top 5 – 10 customers and 5 – 10 prospects. The planning will (1) help focus the RM’s time on accounts most likely to be productive and (2) help the RM think through customer’s goals, strategies, policies, and obstacles.
• Monthly business review meetings with RMs, to review their short term action items and forecasted business.
• Quarterly account reviews , to revisit their one-year business plans and all account plans – where are we versus what we’d planned, why, and what do we need to do to close the gap?

A Supportive Recognition and Compensation Plan

The basic test we apply is: “Do no harm.” Relationship manager recognition and compensation plans are typically complex because of the large array of products and services available for sale and the impact on a bank’s balance sheet and income statement. Separate recognition and incentive compensation plans. The recognition plan should kick in for activities that drive sales. The compensation plan should kick in for sales results. Having said that, our “no harm” guidelines include:

• Create a system of immediate and visible recognition to be awarded based on high quality completion of activities – capital markets or corporate finance opportunities identified, proposals submitted, and so on. You want to stimulate and recognize the activities that will ultimately lead to the results. Use personal notes, peer recognition in team meetings, circulation of good proposals to team members, and other techniques that call attention to both what was done and how it was done.
• Establish incentive compensation plans that reward RMs for generating capital markets or corporate finance revenue. To shift RM attention toward certain capabilities, make some revenue count for more in the plan than other types of revenue. (Example: private placement fees might count for $1.25 per dollar of fee, while loan commitment fees might count for 80 cents per dollar of fee). DO NOT run sales contests based on product sales (numbers of installations or revenue by product). The dynamics of these approaches are completely counter to the “advisory” approach needed to position and sell capital markets and corporate finance services (and other bank products as well).
• Establish incentives for retaining accounts. This compensates the RM for the time and risk associated with working accounts that are worth keeping but not, in a given year, big revenue generators.

Compensation and recognition plans must recognize that RMs must invest time to develop their knowledge, competence, and confidence with their customers’ circumstances and with the services they are representing. The plans must recognize the time RMs invest with their customers, learning far more about them than they had to learn when selling ZBA accounts, loans, or corporate trust services. The plans must recognize the risk the RMs take when selling these services; the risks to their compensation and sales production are higher for capital markets and corporate finance capabilities than they are for standard loans and operations-oriented products.

Sales management coaching drives sales results. To accelerate sales of capital markets and corporate finance products and services toward optimum levels:

• Clarify market strategies and sales processes by product, including the specific roles and hand-off points for RMs and specialists.
• Increase emphasis on “customer and industry” training. Make sure RMs see a constant flow of market information (about deals, rates, and market activity) that they need when they talk to customers.
• Focus sales management attention and recognition on the activities that lead to the results you want (high sales of corporate finance and capital markets products). Field coaching and planning are the highest two priorities.

Nick Miller is president of Clarity Advantage, Concord, Mass., a firm that helps banks generate more profitable relationships faster with small- and medium-sized companies, their owners, and employees. He can be reached at [email protected] .

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9 Keys to Bank Branch Sales and Service Success

Ask management about essential elements of great frontline service and sales, and you’ll likely hear something along these lines: “Train and equip employees to provide prompt, knowledgeable, and friendly service and to recognize and take advantage of cross-sell opportunities that arise in interactions with customers.”

Now ask whether and how they know how well their branches actually perform. Beyond some vague comments about customer satisfaction surveys, those answers can be a lot harder to pin down.

The FMSI Retail Branch Lobby Study provides some clues to clear up the mystery of measuring branch performance by defining and delivering useful metrics from banks and credit unions across North America, and recommending effective strategies to enhance service and sales in your branch lobbies. The study assembles and analyzes data from 780,000 branch interactions during the third quarter of 2015, with comparisons to 2013 and 2011.

Key Branch Performance Metrics

Three key metrics can be applied to measure current branch performance and identify areas in need of improvement:

Wait time . Lobby wait times have risen steadily since 2011 in many branches. On average, the time that customers wait for initial contact with a service representative after signing in the queue management system has increased from four minutes 46 seconds to seven minutes six seconds over four years.

The variation in wait time, which ranges from 11 minutes 18 seconds at the lowest-performing branches studied to two minutes 36 seconds at the best performers, demonstrates that a commitment to streamlining service delivery can pay off. In fact, service response at the top 10 institutions identified in the study actually declined more than one minute over two years, as those organizations proactively set out to identify problems and improve processes and training.

Assist time . This related metric measures the duration account holders interact with customer service representatives. The FMSI branch lobby study reports that in 2015, average assist time was 23 minutes 16 seconds, compared to 17 minutes 12 seconds at branches providing the quickest service.

There may be some nuances in interpreting this data. Some banks and credit unions train customer service staff to chat with account holders, with the aim of identifying their financial goals and opportunities to recommend useful products and services—which may increase assist time. That raises several questions: Are employees conducting routine interactions as efficiently and accurately as possible? Do longer assist times translate into higher sales? Are longer assist times increasing wait time and, if so, are scheduling and staffing changes needed to hold the line on wait time while giving employees adequate time to serve and sell?

Service-product ratio . According to the branch lobby study, 52% of customer encounters in 2015 involved services, on average, with 48% focusing on products – the latter directionally measuring cross-selling efforts. Product interactions ranged from 69% of customer contacts at top-performing branches to 30% on the low end.

In 2011, by comparison, the average was 35% product interactions to 65% service, with even high-performing branches averaging around 50-50. This data supports the conclusion that financial institutions are making progress in better focusing on lobby sales.

Strategies to Improve Sales and Services

In response to the changes in the way consumers are using branches, there are nine strategies that can improve lobby service and sales. By effectively deploying technology along with sales and service training supported with key metrics, customer service staff and managers can better evaluate individual and team performance.

1. Install self-directed technology . Introducing kiosks and smart ATMs frees branch employees to shift from transaction-centric to sales-centric interactions as they engage in higher quality conversations with customers. Self-service options can also decrease wait times and labor costs and position your brand as technologically adept.

2. Employ service alerts . Automated systems with customizable controls can alert staff and managers when wait times are exceeding standards, so employees currently serving customers can pick up the pace of those interactions. Wait time is a crucial metric in the customer experience mix, so a real-time monitoring system can be a valuable tool in improving service.

3. Steer lobby traffic for routine transactions to other channels . Educating customers about their options for convenient self-service online and via mobile access and for customer assistance through the call center can help to streamline branch traffic to improve service there.

4. Recognize and minimize privacy concerns . Customers may worry that writing their name and other information on a sign-in sheet exposes personal data to others. Lobby tracking software does double duty by providing a confidential sign-in system and collecting wait and assist time data to assess service performance.

5. Enhance cross-sell systems and training . Customer relationship management systems can supply frontline staff with information about accounts customers currently hold with other institutions and suggest “next best products” to recommend. Needs-based training encourages employees to uncover sales opportunities by asking the right questions at the right time.

6. Integrate tablets into lobby service . Using iPads or other tablets for customer sign-in is an inexpensive gateway for queue management that provides a comfortable, familiar, and secure interface.

7. Introduce lobby wait-time widgets . This option allows busy customers to check on wait times at their favorite branch via your website or mobile app.

8. Use automated tools to optimize staffing . Staff scheduling software applies historical branch traffic data to forecast service demands so you can deploy staff based on customer needs and streamline staff costs. A mobile app that allows customers to schedule appointments is another useful avenue to ensure that the right service representative trained to provide the requested service is available to meet customers when they walk in the door.

9. Professionalize service representatives’ initial interactions with customers . A queue management system provides an efficient means of steering customers toward the financial professionals with skill sets aligned with their stated needs.

Deploying strategies like these can help management teams drive the right employee behaviors to improve branch productivity and sales performance – and answer crucial questions about how well their branches are doing in delivering optimal service and sales.

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October 31, 2017

Cross Selling in Banks with Implementation of a Relationship Banker Strategy

A Relationship Banker (sometimes called a “Universal Banker”) wears many hats: Teller, Loan Salesperson, Customer Service Rep. He or she is the front-line person who brings more of the bank to the customer—and more profits by cross selling in the bank than a single-skilled teller. That’s why the Relationship Banking strategy is important and such an emerging trend for increasing cross selling in the banking industry today.

Our  previous article  described how to design a successful Relationship Banking model transformation for regional banks, including the in-going research, KPIs, and benchmarking required. In this article, we’re going to wrap up the series—and our various banking case studies—by showing you how to implement a Relationship Banker transformation to increase customer engagement and cross selling. And we’ll list the steps you must take to measure and monitor its effectiveness, ensuring continuous improvement in your bank.

An action plan for implementing a Relationship Banking strategy to increase cross selling in banks

Here at The Lab Consulting, we call our action plan a Process Improvement Record, or PIR. It’s the vehicle we use to map out the implementation of any project we design. And note that everything we include in the PIR—whether for a Relationship Banking strategy transformation or any enterprise-wide initiative—can be accomplished  without any new technology required.  Keep that in mind as you read the following stories from these various case studies:

Relationship Banking Strategy Example 1: Re-structuring Investment Sales and Administration processes

As we noted in our  previous article , an important part of the up-front work in these relationship banking strategy engagements was benchmarking. We needed to see how each bank stacked up against its peers.

When we scrutinized these banks’ investment operations, the findings were often eye-opening. The ratio of accounts per client-facing employee, too often, was far below the industry average.

The question was: Why?

Deeper digging revealed the answers. As it turned out, many banks’ investment management clients were assigned too many people (such as a customer service representative, investment advisor, and trust administrator), regardless of the size of the account.

For those banks exhibiting such over-staffing, we recommended that the banks impose new logic on their staffing model. For example, we typically recommended that accounts below $1 million get only one person assigned to them. And for the accounts above $1 million, they would only get a maximum of two.

Making these simple changes—and remember, none of this required any new technology—immediately  tripled each bank’s capacity to handle accounts.  Their accounts-per-client-facing-employee KPI skyrocketed. Their people were able to handle more accounts and increase cross selling. They were leaner, smarter, and more productive.

And all of this new structuring meshed neatly with the new Relationship Banker strategy.

Relationship Banking Strategy Example 2: Cleaning up the commercial lending process to reduce cost and increase cross selling in bank branches

These banks had all developed their own systems for processing commercial loans. They typically worked like this:

• A relationship manager would make the sale.
• A commercial loan administrator would type the information into the system.
• The underwriters would review the information and approve the loan.
• A “closer” would process the closing documents.
• The “closer” would send the package off to the relationship manager, who would hand off a check to the client.

It seems straightforward. But each bank’s process was rife with inefficiencies.

As it turned out, the underwriters would continually discover that essential information was missing. It had never been collected from the customer in the first place by the relationship manager.

This would force the underwriters to stop, well, underwriting. They’d need to kick the application back to the relationship manager, who would need to bother the client for more information. The process basically started over from scratch. You can imagine the effect this had on cycle time, not to mention the customer experience.

Meanwhile, whatever happened to those loan admins? Who was managing them?

Today, those underwriters can make loan decisions in 24 to 48 hours. The cycle process was slashed by  weeks.  Customer satisfaction soared. And we were able to remove 30 percent of the labor from the process. Even relationship bankers had more time to cross sell in the bank instead of chasing down missing customer information.

Four tools for ensuring sustainable improvement and increased cross selling in the Relationship Banker strategy   implementation

Most big-box consultancies will do the upfront research. But after that, you’re on your own. They’ll hand you a huge to-do list, and promise that if you follow the instructions, you’ll improve.

We don’t work that way at The Lab. We stick it out through completion. We’re there for the implementation. We want to ensure that everything works as promised. And when it comes to continuous improvement, we provide four essential tools to accomplish it:

• Bank Cross Selling Improvement Tool 1: KPI dashboards. These dashboards act as a speedometer for senior leadership. They measure the throughput of the groups. Leveraging hard data, they spotlight the areas that are improving—and those that are lagging. Hint…you can increase cross selling in the bank by implementing the right metrics (We also train the customer to use the KPI dashboard efficiently, so they know what to look for and can take fast action.)
• Bank Cross Selling Improvement Tool 2: Cross Selling Activity Trackers.  These are mechanisms that help the client to measure productivity. They can be as simple as an employee tick-sheet (“I worked 8 hours and completed 5 of these”), or an IT-type element (“I started this at 10:02 and completed it at 10:15”). Trackers allow the client to, say, add a column to a spreadsheet that lets them calculate a ratio and reveal productivity KPIs.
• Bank Cross Selling Improvement Tool 3: Retail Branch Huddles.  This is our term for the different types of management meetings we put in place. We help managers prep for their daily “huddle” with their direct reports (“Who’s here today, and who’s out? Yesterday’s queue lines were at 2.5 minutes; we need to cut those down.”). We also help managers in their weekly meetings with their supervisors, in which they both review the KPI dashboards and look for areas of improvement.
• Bank Cross Selling Improvement Tool 4: The audit. This provides vital information for the executive committee: Are the huddles being done? Are they effective? Are the KPIs being put to good use? So the lower-level reports get the tools, and the senior-level leadership gets the accountability. It’s top-down  and  bottom-up.

Bottom line in increasing cross selling in retail banks: Is the Relationship Banker strategy right for  your  bank?

It may seem daunting to change your branch model from teller lines to customer reps doing transactions at their desks. But in our experience, it’s easier than it seems.

The Relationship Banker strategy is the undeniable way to increase cross selling in banks. Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity to slash costs, boost efficiency, improve the customer experience, and increase revenue.  Contact The Lab  to learn more, and get a free no-obligation quote on a Relationship Banker transformation.

For 2021: We have updated our bank client offering. Much of these findings and implementation results can be reviewed in the 3-part-series of “Big Rocks for Banks” below. Find out how to strategically lower costs, increase operating leverage, improve customer experience, and automate what previously wasn’t automatable in your bank.

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Enhance Your Bank's Sales and Marketing Initiatives: 5 Tips

Part three of a three part observation series

In  my last post  we examined a few ways that banks can elevate the role of data in their marketing programs to begin the process of gaining better alignment to overall strategy. This post will focus on the sales aspect of sales and marketing campaigns – what can be referred to the execution channel. But a word of caution: sales and sales people are no longer synonymous.

As with our data post , you will find five areas of focus for bank marketers to enhance sales activities. Since we emphasized the critical nature of list development driven by strategy, we would be remiss if we now veered back to traditional sales activities to execute the program. Modern marketing programs should create buyers - not just serve as a ‘warm lead sheet’ for field staff.

[5] Tips to Enhance Your Bank's Sales and Marketing Initiatives

1. assess your sales channel capabilities and capacity (honestly).

The pressures on marketers to maximize the opportunities for bank sales channels to deliver positive results are significant. Let’s face it, the number of internal business units lined up to leverage every possible sales channel within any given bank often requires an air traffic controller to manage. While we primarily think of bank sales channels as branches and business development officers – supported with direct mail, digital marketing or other messaging platforms - the increasing use of call centers and outsourcing firms are also gaining greater demand for their services. 

As marketing investment returns continue to be heavily scrutinized, it is time to look at all of your sales channels and honestly assess both the capability and the capacity for all of them. Branches serve as an effective channel for many activities due to staffing models and periodic downtime to facilitate campaigns, but they shouldn’t be used to support every initiative – for a variety of reasons. Nor should a dedicated sales force be the only source through which a business unit should promote its offerings – it is more expensive and requires differentiated segment expertise to be effective. 

Emerging technology has enabled greater levels of channel diversity to support a bank’s sales and marketing campaigns – knowing how effective and available these channels are should create a more dynamic set of "selling" tools for you to use that can better align with your target segments. Taking advantage of these channels allows you to push your sales messages out to the market with less conflict and noise.

As an aside, I recently read an interesting piece from the UK highlighting the preferences for SME’s for sales and service.  No matter the geography, it is never a good idea to assume that you and your customers assign the same value to what your institution offers.

2. Measure the value of each channel in your omnichannel programs

Yes, I realize a key marketing buzzword had to make it into this post. While a daunting term, omnichannel ( click here to read a very academic definition of omnichannel if you are not already familiar with the topic)  has become a marketing darling lately with the introduction of so many devices and access points for customers to interact with their financial institution. As one who is very interested in the topic of payments, I am sensitive to not only the advancement in device and technology capabilities but also the fluid nature of how the market finds new ways use them that may not have been intended by the provider or the bank.

It is a stretch to ask that a full blown omnichannel approach finds its way into every bank’s strategy - but the aspiration of the topic - and expectations of your target audience - cannot be ignored. At a minimum, begin to develop a digital strategy for your institution – starting with your web presence. If you can market an offer online, shouldn’t your customers be able to take advantage of the offer online? Seems pretty simple but those that have thought through and delivered on this alignment are differentiating themselves in the market, particularly with business segments. Maybe you don’t call it omnichannel – call it whatever you like – but you have to have a plan for it because at some level isn’t a branch just another device?

3. Invest (more) in sales and onboarding automation

Despite the title, many banks appear to be heading in two different directions with respect to technology investments to support sales activities. On one hand, the piggy bank has been smashed open to fund KYC/BSA/AML initiatives over the past five years. On the other, investments into leveraging that investment into a better customer experience seem rare, if not nonexistent.  

It is fascinating that while blank checks have been written to support the ever changing world of compliance – believe me when I say that essentially no two banks have the same interpretation of the same commentary on the same day – banks don’t seem to realize that most of the current compliance language was written before any of the current technology existed and aren’t really consistent with today’s technological benefits.

Rather than succumbing to the ongoing maintenance of antiquated processes to address these compliance issues, why not look to leverage your bank’s investment into this robust set of tools to enhance your sales and onboarding process. There is no reason that I have read that you cannot undertake this effort - and the robust nature of these tools (such as real-time predictive transaction reporting and behavioral modeling) can truly differentiate your customer experience from the frustrating process it is for many today.

4. Stop just selling banking products...sell your brand

If there is one mantra that I have held close for years for bank marketing, it is this: stop just selling products! For most institutions, almost everything you offer is a commodity. While some may argue that their features and benefits or prices may be subtly different, you are still providing a highly commoditized set of financial products. But we all still do it, don’t we? Why? Primarily because focusing on products  seems to work - with an emphasis on seems here. We outlined a number of data driven themes in our previous post which would on the surface seem to support more granular capability to target offers to prospects – all true.

I am not naïve thinking that this will change anytime soon. But what I do hope is that your selling efforts are able to transcend this. Focus on what your institution can offer that your competitors cannot – true competitive differentiation . Besides your location and name – apologies to all of the First Banks out there – what do you have that customers and prospects cannot get anywhere else? Most likely your answer is not much. Bank marketers don’t help matters by continually reinforcing messages that are based on features and benefits that customers can find anywhere (and expect) - starting with service.

Note: I have worked with both the largest banks in the U.S. and very small Credit Unions and truth be told, you can receive outstanding service from big banks and lousy service from small Credit Unions. There is no universal ownership of service culture in smaller institutions. Let’s take a page out of the consumer packaged goods playbook and start to sell your brand first; the products are a given.

5. Incent sales on more than widgets

The topic of incentive in sales has been long lamented and hashed and rehashed. We don’t mean to do it again on this post but it would be irresponsible to not highlight the recurring challenges for how sales is evaluated. As the final item to recommend for an honest assessment, it is past time to measure sales effectiveness - regardless of channel or channels used - based on widgets.

Every banker knows that the value of each customer is not the same, and multiple product relationships are certainly stickier than single relationships. So what is the value of an unutilized line of credit or a low transaction account that meets minimums and generates no fees? If you look at some of the scorecards we have seen over the years, you would think they are all worth the same. Not to mention, fully loaded some banks are paying out incentives for these dormant relationships because a widget is a widget. If you haven’t taken on this topic recently, please begin to do so. If you have invested in a strategy and chosen to align your data activities to that strategy, this should be fairly easy.

If you like selling stories,  click here to read one of my favorites from a recent BKM prospect meeting. 

Bank Marketing , Financial Marketing , Community Banks

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Strategies To Increase Your Bank Sales & Profitability

By alex ryzhkov, bank bundle.

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Introduction

Welcome to our blog post on strategies to increase your bank sales and profitability. In today's highly competitive banking industry, it is vital to implement effective strategies to stay ahead of the curve. With the global banking sector projected to grow at a CAGR of 6.7% between 2021 and 2026 (source: market research report) , it is crucial for banks to explore innovative methods to boost their sales and improve profitability. In this article, we will discuss several proven strategies that can help banks achieve their targets and succeed in an ever-evolving market.

Expand product offerings

One effective strategy to increase bank sales and profitability is to expand product offerings. By offering a wider range of financial products and services, banks can attract new customers and engage existing ones, ultimately driving sales and increasing profits.

Expanding product offerings can be done in various ways. Banks can introduce new types of accounts, such as high-interest savings accounts or specialized checking accounts tailored to specific customer needs. They can also offer a broader range of loans, catering to different segments of the market. Additionally, introducing new credit card options or investment opportunities can further diversify a bank's product portfolio.

Implementing this strategy can have a significant impact on sales and profits. By providing customers with more choices, banks increase their chances of meeting individual needs and preferences. This leads to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, and ultimately translates into increased sales volumes.

Moreover, expanding product offerings allows banks to tap into new revenue streams. For instance, introducing high-yield savings accounts can attract customers seeking better returns on their savings, resulting in increased deposits and interest income. Similarly, offering specialized loans, such as mortgages for specific demographics, can target underserved markets and generate additional interest revenue.

To illustrate the potential impact, let's consider a hypothetical example. Suppose Bank X decides to introduce a new product: an exclusive premium checking account, offering enhanced features and benefits. They estimate that they can attract 1,000 new customers within the first year. Assuming an average monthly fee of $10, this would result in an additional $120,000 in annual revenue from account fees alone.

In addition, Bank X expects these premium customers to have a higher likelihood of utilizing other banking services, such as loans and credit cards. With an estimated increase of 20% in cross-selling, they anticipate an additional $200,000 in annual revenue from interest and fees related to these complementary products.

In summary, expanding product offerings is a strategic approach that can significantly impact bank sales and profitability. By providing more choices, banks attract and retain customers, leading to increased sales volumes and customer loyalty. Moreover, introducing new products opens up additional revenue streams, diversifying income sources and driving overall profitability.

Enhance customer experience

In today's competitive banking industry, enhancing the customer experience is essential for driving sales and profitability. By prioritizing customer satisfaction and delivering a seamless banking experience, banks can cultivate long-lasting relationships, increase customer loyalty, and ultimately boost their bottom line.

To enhance customer experience, banks should focus on:

• Streamlining digital banking: In this digital age, customers expect instant access to their accounts and seamless online banking experiences. By investing in user-friendly mobile apps and intuitive online platforms, banks can provide convenience and accessibility, which translates into satisfied customers and increased sales.
• Delivering personalized services: Tailoring services to meet individual customer needs strengthens the relationship between banks and their customers. This can be achieved through personalizing marketing communications, offering customized product recommendations, and providing one-on-one financial consultations. When customers feel understood and valued, they are more likely to engage in cross-selling opportunities, leading to higher sales and profitability.
• Improving customer service: Exceptional customer service is the cornerstone of a positive banking experience. Banks can invest in training their employees to deliver prompt and efficient service, resolving customer queries and concerns effectively. Additionally, leveraging technology such as chatbots and AI-assisted customer support systems can further enhance response times and customer satisfaction.
• Providing seamless omni-channel experiences: Customers now interact with banks through various channels, from physical branches to online platforms and mobile apps. It is crucial for banks to ensure a consistent and seamless experience across all channels. This means integrating data and information across platforms, allowing customers to seamlessly transition between channels without losing sight of their banking activities.

Implementing these strategies to enhance the customer experience can have a significant impact on sales and profits. Satisfied customers are more likely to become loyal, repeat customers, increasing the lifetime value of each customer. Moreover, positive word-of-mouth recommendations from satisfied customers can attract new customers, further expanding the bank's customer base and revenue streams.

For example, let's consider a scenario where a bank focuses on enhancing the customer experience and successfully increases customer satisfaction ratings by 10%. With a customer base of 100,000, this improvement translates into an additional 10,000 satisfied customers. If each of these customers generates an average annual revenue of $500, the bank's total revenue would increase by $5 million annually.

In conclusion, implementing customer-centric strategies that enhance the customer experience can lead to tangible business outcomes. By prioritizing convenience, personalization, service excellence, and seamless omni-channel experiences, banks can drive sales, boost profitability, and secure a competitive edge in the industry.

Implement personalized marketing strategies

Personalized marketing strategies can be a game-changer for banks looking to increase their sales and profitability. By tailoring their marketing efforts to target specific customer segments, banks can create more meaningful and engaging experiences for their customers, ultimately driving greater sales and revenue.

One effective tip for implementing personalized marketing strategies is to leverage customer data to understand their unique needs and preferences. By analyzing data such as transaction history, demographics, and online behavior, banks can gain valuable insights into what their customers want and tailor their marketing campaigns accordingly.

For instance, let's consider a hypothetical scenario: A bank identifies a segment of customers who frequently use their credit cards for travel expenses. To cater to this segment, the bank can develop personalized marketing campaigns that highlight the benefits of their travel rewards credit card, offering exclusive discounts or special incentives for booking travel through the bank's partners.

By doing so, the bank is not only providing relevant offers to its customers but also building a stronger relationship with them. This approach enhances customer loyalty, increases the likelihood of repeat business, and ultimately leads to higher sales and profits.

Furthermore, it's crucial to utilize technology and automation in implementing personalized marketing strategies. Banks can leverage customer relationship management (CRM) systems and marketing automation tools to streamline and scale their efforts. These tools enable banks to segment their customer base effectively, automate communication workflows, and deliver tailored messages at the right time through various channels.

Additionally, another strategy to consider is integrating personalized recommendations into digital banking platforms. By analyzing customer data, banks can provide personalized product suggestions, such as recommending suitable investment options or tailored loan offers. This not only adds value to the customer experience but also increases the likelihood of upselling and cross-selling, driving additional revenue for the bank.

In conclusion, implementing personalized marketing strategies is an essential tactic for banks aiming to increase their sales and profitability. By leveraging customer data, utilizing technology, and tailoring their marketing efforts, banks can create more engaging experiences for customers, build stronger relationships, and ultimately drive higher revenue. So, embrace personalization and take your bank's marketing efforts to the next level!

Increase cross-selling efforts

Cross-selling is a crucial strategy for banks to boost their sales and profitability. By effectively implementing cross-selling techniques, banks can maximize their revenue potential and further enhance customer satisfaction. Here are some tips and tricks to help you increase cross-selling efforts and achieve greater success.

• Understand your customers: To effectively cross-sell, it is important to have a deep understanding of your customers' needs and preferences. Analyze their banking behavior, conduct surveys, or utilize data analytics tools to gain valuable insights. This information will enable you to offer personalized solutions and recommendations, resulting in higher customer engagement and cross-selling success.
• Train your employees: Your employees are the key drivers of cross-selling success. Train them to be knowledgeable about all your products and services. A well-informed staff will be able to identify potential cross-selling opportunities and confidently communicate the benefits to customers. Providing ongoing training and incentives can further motivate your employees to actively cross-sell, increasing your chances of success.
• Bundle your offerings: Create attractive product bundles to encourage cross-selling. For example, offer special promotions for combining a savings account with a credit card, or provide incentives for customers who take out a loan and open a new checking account. Bundling not only enhances the value proposition for customers but also simplifies their financial management, resulting in increased sales and profitability.
• Use targeted marketing: Implement targeted marketing campaigns to promote cross-selling initiatives. Leverage customer segmentation and existing data to identify specific groups likely to be interested in complementary products. Tailor your marketing messages to highlight the benefits of cross-selling and the value it brings to customers. By reaching out to the right audience with the right messaging, you can significantly increase your cross-selling success rate.

By executing these strategies, you will witness a positive impact on your bank's sales and profitability. Cross-selling not only generates additional revenue through increased product adoption, but it also strengthens customer relationships and leads to higher customer loyalty. Here's a simple example calculation to illustrate the potential impact.

Let's say your bank currently has 10,000 customers, and on average, each customer holds two products with you. By successfully cross-selling one additional product to just 10% of your existing customer base, you would effectively increase your product adoption rate to three products per customer. This would result in an additional 1,000 product sales, directly contributing to your bank's revenue and profitability.

In conclusion, increasing cross-selling efforts is an essential strategy for banks to achieve higher sales and profitability. By understanding your customers, training your employees, bundling products, and leveraging targeted marketing, you can unlock significant growth opportunities. Implement these tips and tricks, and watch your bank's bottom line thrive.

Improve digital banking capabilities

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, it is crucial for banks to continuously improve their digital banking capabilities. With the increasing reliance on technology, customers now expect seamless and convenient online banking experiences. By enhancing digital banking capabilities, banks can effectively attract and retain customers, ultimately driving sales and profitability.

Tip 1: Invest in user-friendly online and mobile banking interfaces

One of the key strategies to improve digital banking capabilities is to invest in user-friendly online and mobile banking interfaces. Customers should be able to navigate through their accounts effortlessly, perform transactions seamlessly, and access relevant information conveniently. By prioritizing user experience, banks can enhance customer satisfaction and encourage them to engage more frequently, which can lead to increased sales and profits.

Tip 2: Offer personalized and targeted digital marketing campaigns

Another effective way to improve digital banking capabilities is by offering personalized and targeted digital marketing campaigns. By leveraging customer data and analytics, banks can tailor their marketing efforts to individual customers' needs and preferences. Personalized offers and recommendations will not only attract customers' attention but also increase the likelihood of conversion. This can ultimately drive sales and boost profits for the bank.

Tip 3: Implement robust security measures and promote trust

Trust is paramount in the banking industry, especially when it comes to digital transactions. To improve digital banking capabilities, banks must prioritize the implementation of robust security measures. By deploying state-of-the-art encryption technologies, multi-factor authentication, and continuous monitoring, banks can ensure a secure and trustworthy online banking environment. This will not only retain existing customers but also attract new ones who value the safety of their financial information. Increased trust will directly impact sales and profits.

Impact on sales and profits:

Improving digital banking capabilities can have a significant impact on a bank's sales and profitability. By providing a seamless and user-friendly online banking experience, customers are more likely to engage frequently and utilize various banking products and services. Increased customer engagement, in turn, leads to higher transaction volumes and revenue for the bank. Moreover, personalized marketing campaigns and enhanced security measures further drive customer satisfaction and trust, ultimately leading to long-term loyalty and increased profitability for the bank.

Example calculation:

Let's consider a hypothetical scenario where a bank improved its digital banking capabilities and witnessed a 20% increase in customer engagement. If the bank had 100,000 active customers previously, the increase in engagement would result in an additional 20,000 active customers. If each customer generates an average of $500 in annual revenue for the bank, this 20% increase would translate to an extra $10 million in annual revenue. This demonstrates the substantial impact of improving digital banking capabilities on sales and profits.

In conclusion, to stay competitive in the ever-evolving banking industry, it is essential for banks to continuously improve their digital banking capabilities. By implementing user-friendly interfaces, personalized marketing campaigns, and robust security measures, banks can attract and retain customers, resulting in increased sales and profitability.

Optimize Operational Efficiency

In the realm of increasing bank sales and profitability, one strategy that stands out is the optimization of operational efficiency. This approach involves streamlining internal processes, leveraging technology, and maximizing resources to enhance the overall efficiency of the bank's operations.

Tip 1: Embrace Automation

Implementing automated systems and software can significantly improve operational efficiency. By automating repetitive tasks such as data entry, transaction processing, and customer onboarding, banks can save time, reduce errors, and empower employees to focus on higher-value activities.

Tip 2: Enhance Digital Channels

In today's digital age, banks must prioritize the enhancement of their digital channels. By offering robust online and mobile banking platforms, customers can conveniently access their accounts, perform transactions, and seek assistance. This not only improves customer satisfaction but also reduces the reliance on physical branches, increasing operational efficiency.

Tip 3: Foster Collaboration

Collaboration within the bank is vital for optimizing operational efficiency. Encouraging cross-departmental communication and teamwork allows for the identification of bottlenecks, process improvements, and the sharing of best practices. By fostering a collaborative environment, banks can streamline operations and enhance overall performance.

Impact on Sales and Profits:

Implementing an optimized operational efficiency strategy directly contributes to increased sales and profitability. By reducing operational costs through automation and streamlining processes, banks can allocate resources more efficiently. This, in turn, allows for the provision of competitive interest rates, favorable loan terms, and attractive offers, leading to higher customer acquisition and retention rates.

Example Calculation:

Consider a bank that optimizes its operational efficiency, resulting in a cost reduction of $500,000 per year. With this operational cost saving, the bank can allocate additional resources for marketing, customer incentives, and product development. Assuming a conservative estimate of a 10% increase in customer acquisition and retention rates, resulting in an annual profit increase of $1,000,000.

In conclusion, optimizing operational efficiency is a crucial strategy for banks aiming to boost sales and profitability. By embracing automation, enhancing digital channels, and fostering collaboration, banks can unlock their full potential and achieve sustainable growth in today's competitive market.

Strengthen customer relationships

Building and nurturing strong customer relationships is key for banks looking to increase their sales and profitability. By focusing on strategies that prioritize customer satisfaction and loyalty, banks can not only retain existing customers but also attract new ones. In this chapter, we will explore some effective tips and tricks to strengthen customer relationships and discuss how implementing these strategies can positively impact sales and profits.

• Provide personalized banking experiences: Tailoring the banking experience to the individual needs and preferences of customers can significantly enhance their satisfaction and loyalty. Banks can achieve this by analyzing customer data and utilizing it to offer relevant products and services. For instance, if a customer frequently uses their savings account, the bank can suggest investment opportunities to help them maximize their returns.
• Offer proactive customer support: Being proactive in addressing customer concerns and inquiries can go a long way in boosting customer relationships. Implementing a responsive customer support system that promptly addresses issues and provides solutions will show customers that their needs are valued and prioritized. This can lead to increased trust and loyalty, ultimately driving sales and profitability.
• Engage with customers through multiple channels: Today's customers expect seamless access to banking services through various channels such as online banking, mobile apps, and social media platforms. To strengthen customer relationships, banks should provide a cohesive and integrated experience across these channels. This allows customers to interact with the bank whenever and wherever it is convenient for them, enhancing overall satisfaction.
• Reward customer loyalty: Implementing a loyalty program can incentivize customers to engage more frequently with the bank. By offering rewards such as special discounts, cashback, or exclusive benefits, banks can foster customer loyalty and encourage repeat business. This, in turn, can boost sales and profitability as loyal customers tend to become advocates for the bank and recommend its services to others.

Now let's consider how implementing these customer relationship strategies can impact sales and profits. Let's assume that a bank has 10,000 customers with an average annual spend of $1,000. By successfully strengthening customer relationships, the bank aims to increase customer retention by 10% and increase the average annual spend per customer by 15%.

With an improved customer retention rate of 10%, the bank would retain an additional 1,000 customers annually. Additionally, with an increased average annual spend of 15%, each customer would spend an extra $150 per year on average.

Considering these numbers, the bank could potentially generate an additional $1,500,000 in revenue per year through increased customer retention and spending. This would directly impact the bank's sales and profitability, showcasing the significant benefits of investing in strategies to strengthen customer relationships.

In conclusion, building and strengthening customer relationships play a vital role in enhancing a bank's sales and profitability. By personalizing experiences, offering proactive support, engaging through multiple channels, and rewarding loyalty, banks can create a loyal customer base that leads to increased revenue. Implementing these strategies can have a substantial impact on the bottom line of any bank.

Focus on target market segments

To increase your bank sales and profitability, it is crucial to focus on target market segments. Identifying and understanding the specific groups of customers that your products and services cater to will allow you to tailor your marketing efforts and offerings more effectively. By doing so, you can optimize your sales strategies and maximize your profits.

Tip #1: Conduct thorough market research. Begin by analyzing market trends and consumer behavior to identify potential target market segments. Look for patterns and common characteristics among your existing customer base and use that data to narrow down your focus. This research will provide valuable insights into the needs, preferences, and purchasing habits of your target customers.

Tip #2: Segment your customer base. Once you have gathered the necessary information, divide your customer base into distinct segments based on shared characteristics such as age, income level, lifestyle, or geographic location. This segmentation allows you to create more personalized marketing messages and tailor your products and services to meet the specific needs of each segment.

Tip #3: Develop targeted marketing strategies. With your identified target market segments, you can now develop targeted marketing strategies. Customize your messaging, channels, and offers to resonate with each segment separately. By speaking directly to their needs and desires, you increase the likelihood of capturing their attention, building relationships, and ultimately driving sales.

Tip #4: Measure and analyze results. As you implement your targeted marketing strategies, it is crucial to track and measure their effectiveness. Monitor key performance indicators such as customer acquisition rates, conversion rates, and revenue generated from each target segment. Regularly evaluate and analyze these metrics to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven adjustments to your strategies.

Impact on sales and profits: By focusing on target market segments, you can experience a significant impact on your sales and profits. By catering to the specific needs and preferences of each segment, you increase the chances of converting leads into paying customers. Moreover, targeted marketing helps build customer loyalty and encourages repeat business, leading to higher customer lifetime value. These factors contribute to increased sales volumes and improved profitability for your bank.

Example calculation: Let's imagine that your bank starts targeting a specific demographic segment, 'young professionals.' By tailoring your marketing strategies to appeal to this segment's needs and aspirations, you observe a 20% increase in customer acquisition rates compared to your overall average. If your previous monthly customer acquisition rate was 500, targeting the 'young professionals' segment results in an additional 100 new customers per month. Considering the average revenue generated per customer, you can calculate the boost in sales and profitability achieved by this focused strategy.

• Monthly customer acquisition rate (before targeting): 500
• Monthly customer acquisition rate (after targeting): 600
• Revenue per customer: $1000

Additional monthly revenue generated: 100 (new customers) * $1000 (revenue per customer) = $100,000

This hypothetical calculation demonstrates the potential impact of focusing on target market segments in driving sales and profitability for your bank.

Invest in Innovation and Technology

One effective strategy to increase bank sales and profitability is to invest in innovation and technology. In today's digital age, staying ahead of the curve and embracing technological advancements is crucial for banks to remain competitive in the market.

By leveraging innovative technologies, banks can streamline their operations, enhance customer experiences, and create new revenue streams. Embracing digital platforms and mobile banking applications allow customers to conveniently access their accounts, make transactions, and manage their finances, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Investing in technology also enables banks to automate various processes, reducing manual errors and improving efficiency. This, in turn, leads to cost savings and better resource allocation, positively impacting the bottom line.

Additionally, innovation opens up new opportunities for revenue generation. For instance, introducing innovative financial products or services, such as robo-advisory platforms or peer-to-peer lending, can attract new customers and diversify the bank's revenue sources.

Let's consider an example calculation to demonstrate the potential impact of investing in technology. Suppose a bank invests $1 million in developing a state-of-the-art mobile banking application. By providing an intuitive and user-friendly interface, the bank attracts an additional 10,000 new customers in the first year. Each customer, on average, maintains a balance of $5,000 in their account and generates an annual profit margin of 2% for the bank.

• Increase in customer base: 10,000
• Average balance per customer: $5,000
• Profit margin: 2%

Based on these figures, the bank can expect to generate an additional $200,000 in profits annually, solely from the new customers acquired through the mobile banking application. This exemplifies the potential boost in sales and profitability that can result from investing in innovation and technology.

In conclusion, incorporating innovative technologies in the banking industry is imperative for driving sales and increasing profitability. Banks can harness the power of digitalization to provide seamless customer experiences, optimize operations, and explore new revenue streams. It is essential to prioritize investment in innovation and technology to maintain a competitive edge in today's rapidly evolving financial landscape.

In today's competitive banking industry, implementing effective strategies is crucial to increase bank sales and drive profitability. By adopting customer-centric approaches and utilizing digital banking technologies, banks can maximize their revenue potential. Utilizing data analytics and market segmentation helps identify target customers, allowing banks to tailor their product offerings and marketing campaigns more effectively. Investing in employee training and development not only enhances customer experience but also improves sales performance. Furthermore, optimizing operational efficiency through automation and streamlining processes reduces costs and enhances profitability. It is imperative for banks to continuously adapt and evolve their strategies to stay ahead in the market, focusing on building long-term customer relationships and delivering value-added services. Implementing these strategies can lead to impressive results, such as increasing sales by 20% and boosting profitability by 15% . By embracing innovation and embracing a customer-centric approach, banks can position themselves for long-term success in the competitive banking industry.

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Improving the Branch Sales Process

The traditional branch sales model was based on cross-selling to customers who used the branch for transactions. In a typical scenario, a customer comes in to deposit a check or make a payment on a loan and the teller points them to a ready personal banker who might cross-sell a money market account or a home equity line of credit.

But transaction activity is moving out of the branches – fast. Between the ready availability of direct deposit, online and mobile banking, remote deposit capture and advanced function ATMs, many customers are finding that they hardly need to enter a branch at all. Check transaction activity has been declining an average of 7.1% per year and 39% of consumers expect to decrease the number of checks they write, according to the 2010 Federal Reserve Payments Study . Consumers still use branches – according to slide 25 of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s 2012 Investor Day presentation , branch preference remains strong across all wealth segments. But declines in check transactions means that consumers – the primary source of branch traffic – have fewer checks to deposit or cash at the teller line.

Since most banks built their staffing models to support transaction handling, reduced traffic means cuts in branch staff. Managers are finding they must do more with less in order to grow sales in this difficult environment. Where to start?

The first and most obvious opportunity is to better serve the customers who do enter your branch. Unfortunately, most banks do a poor job of capturing overall customer potential, as we recently discovered by monitoring and measuring the sales process at over 1,000 branches. Our research revealed that 65% of sales interactions involved the prospective customer sitting through a monologue of simple checking account features. In 79% of those occasions, the sales person did not ask questions or gauge the customer’s interest in products outside of a demand deposit account (DDA). When a banker did ask about non-DDA products, 92% of the time the inquiry came because the banker was completing a profile of the customer.

These are lost opportunities that bankers can ill afford. So, what can bankers do to coach their branch sales teams to greater success?

• Build the right team. Successful managers recognize that the cornerstone to performance is developing the right team. Simply put, not everyone has a high aptitude for financial services sales. We believe that standardized strengths-based assessment profiles are a valuable tool to improve the effectiveness of the recruiting process, and to target focused skills training for existing teams. As with any scoring tool, these widely used measurement techniques constitute just one piece of the puzzle. But without them, managers can be handicapped in their hiring and team development process.
• Create the right sales process. Banks that train employees in a well-defined sales interaction, with a narrow scope of variability around the process, typically do a much better job at both discovering and meeting the needs of their customers and building loyalty and relationship “stickiness.” If the process discipline is not there, branch employees will fill in the gaps with their own language and goals, which can lack consistency, impair the sale, and significantly reduce effectiveness.
• Use relationship profiles to unlock customer needs. Encouraging a customer to complete a relationship profile is the only way to consistently guaranty that employees are moving the discussion beyond the basic DDA. As noted above, our surveys and branch shops revealed that when branch staff probed for relationship needs, it was almost always because they were using a profile to assist them with the process.
• Coach for success. While the ultimate result is sales success, managers need to maintain process discipline by regularly reviewing required activities on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Banks must consider whether their goal setting, process metrics, and financial measures are well focused and in line with industry benchmarks, or whether they need tweaking to provide their expected results.

The typical branch only sells about one new product per personal banker per day. With transaction traffic declining and continued pressure on staffing, it is critical that branch managers establish and maintain disciplined sales and service processes. Cross-selling is the key to creating deep, profitable and long lasting banking relationships. Having a well-defined sales process will give branch staff the tools and discipline to be successful and deliver the service consistency that customers expect.

Mr. Kerstein is president of Austin, Texas-based Peak Performance Consulting Group , which specializes in retail and community banking. He can be reached at [email protected] .

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How to Craft a Winning Sales Action Plan [ + Templates]

Written by: Olujinmi Oluwatoni

When it comes to hitting sales goals, the gap between target numbers and actual performance often leaves many sales teams feeling lost and under pressure. In fact, a Salesforce study revealed that 72% of sales professionals don’t expect to meet their yearly quota.

But there’s a fix. You can bridge that gap and set your team up for success with a solid sales action plan.

This plan serves as a detailed and strategic document that zooms in on your actions, tasks and steps to achieve the goals set in the sales plan . It helps your sales team to know what to do and the information they need to perform at their highest level.

In this guide, we’ll give a detailed breakdown of how to craft a winning sales action plan. We've also added customizable templates to get you started right away.

Let's get to it!

Table of Contents

Sales action plan vs. sales plan, the importance of a sales action plan.

• What Should Be Included in a Sales Action Plan?
• How to Create a Sales Action Plan With Visme

7 Sales Action Plan Templates

• A sales plan is the first step toward defining your company’s sales strategy, sales goals and how you'll reach them. A sales action plan, on the other hand, operationalizes the sales plan, detailing the specific actions and tasks that individuals or teams need to undertake to execute the sales strategies effectively.
• A sales action plan aids the development of clear sales strategies, helps to optimize resources efficiently, offers a basis for measuring sales results and aligns sales and marketing teams.
• The following should be included in a sales action plan: objectives, KPI goal, target audience, sales strategies, team and resources.
• To create a sales action plan in Visme, sign up, choose a template, write the content, input the necessary data, customize your sales action plan and publish and share it with your team and stakeholders.
• Visme has a wide range of sales action plan templates, tools and features to help you create winning research proposals. Sign up to get started.

A sales action plan and a sales plan are essential resources for any business serious about sales strategy and execution. They both share a common goal of increasing revenue and driving business growth.

While a sales plan sets the strategic direction and goals, a sales action plan provides a detailed roadmap and actionable steps to accomplish those goals within the specified timeframe.

Sales plans often set long-term goals and strategies and cover a more extended period, like a fiscal year. However, sales action plans focus on shorter timeframes, breaking down the sales plan into actionable steps for weeks, months, or quarters.

If you're interested in creating a sales plan, check out this informative article, which includes 16 sales plan templates to guide you through the process. Better yet, read this article to discover how Visme can help you close more sales .

Below are some reasons why a sales action plan is necessary for your business.

Sets a Clear Course of Action

A well-crafted sales action plan helps define your sales strategies in a way that team members know precisely what they need to accomplish to contribute to the overarching sales goals. This clarity ensures everyone is on the same page and aligned with the company's vision.

For example, if your ultimate goal for your new business in the next year is $300,000, your sales action plan will outline the steps, actions and specific strategies to achieve a certain sales target each month until you reach your ultimate goal.

Increases Efficiency and Resource Optimization

When you have clearly defined your sales activities and timelines, you can prioritize your sales activities and allocate resources effectively. In essence, you can focus your time, money, budget, tools and efforts toward the most impactful activities that’ll achieve better outcomes.

Provides a Basis to Measure Sales Results

An action plan includes measurable milestones and KPIs. This provides a basis for you to measure progress and success. Not only is the sales action plan excellent for month-to-month direction, but it also provides a comprehensive assessment of your sales team.

Improves Alignment Between Sales and Marketing Teams

Sales action plans enhance communication and coordination between sales and marketing teams by providing clear strategies and timelines for tasks. For example, when marketing knows the sales team's schedule for product releases or campaigns, they can align their promotional efforts to drive better results.

Build relationships with customers and drive sales growth

• Reach out to prospects with impressive pitch decks and proposals that convert
• Monitor clients' level of engagement to see what they are most interested in
• Build a winning sales playbook to maximize your sales team's efficiency

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What Should be Included in a Sales Action Plan?

Now that you know why a sales action plan is important, it is essential for you to learn what goes into a sales action plan to help you create an impactful one. Here are some strategic information that you can include in your sales action plan.

Objectives & KPI Goals

This outlines what your sales team aims to achieve and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that’ll be used to track progress toward these objectives.

Your objectives could be increasing market share, expanding into new territories, or boosting product and service adoption. Examples of KPIs include a 20% increase in sales revenue targets, a 50% increase in store traffic or a 25% increase in referral rate.

Ultimately, your team should aim to achieve monthly or weekly targets that align with overall brand objectives.

Target Audience

Your target audience is your core customer base or segments that the sales team will focus on.

Your target audience is dictated by their demographics—age range, gender profiles, needs, income range, lifestyle types and geographical locations. Other critical details include the market size and potential reach.

Want to learn more about your target audience? Read this article to discover how to create an ICP . We’ve already rounded up templates in this article to help you create your buyer persona .

Sales Strategies

Your sales strategy outlines the approaches, tactics and methods your sales team will use to reach your target audience and achieve the set objectives.

This section could include sales techniques, marketing strategies, customer engagement plans, etc.

For every item that forms part of your sales strategy, you can share specific tactics like:

• Implementing referral incentives to encourage existing customers to refer new clients.
• Hosting educational webinars or workshops focusing on industry-related topics to attract and engage potential leads.
• Distributing content through various channels or collaborating with other industry-related blogs to expand reach and attract new audiences.
• Landing pages for all content pillars with valuable lead magnets.

This section outlines the name, roles, responsibilities and structure of the sales team. Use professional images inside circular or rounded corner square frames to showcase each team member.

Your resources section covers the tools, technologies, budget and any other resources required to execute the sales strategies effectively. It could include CRM software, sales enablement tools, marketing materials, etc.

Other elements that could be included in an action plan include:

• Projected Sales
• Budgeted Costs
• Sales Channels
• Timeline and lots more

How to Create a Sales Action Plan with Visme

With the wide variety of features and templates available in Visme, you can easily create a visually appealing and professional-looking sales action plan within a few minutes.

Here’s how to create a sales action plan using Visme.

Step 1: Register or Log in to your Visme Account

Create a Visme account or sign in if you're already a user. Enter your login information and you'll be taken to your dashboard. Consider getting a team account for your business to get access to all of Visme’s impressive features.

Step 2: Use Premade Templates or Start from Scratch

Now, it's time to develop your sales action plan. You can either begin from scratch or opt for ready-made templates.

However, leveraging Visme’s sales action plan template will streamline your workflow and help you create your professional-looking sales action plan in minutes.

Simply head to Visme's dashboard, click Create New >Project, and then check out the Sales action plan category. There, you'll find a variety of templates for various industries and company styles. Browse through until you find the one that suits your company's needs.

Step 3: Write the Content

After choosing your template, proceed with writing the content. We've already outlined the essential components of a sales action plan. But focus on the sections that directly address your company's specific requirements.

Insert all text into designated placeholders or create new text boxes. You can change text alignment or arrangement and even animate your text inside Visme’s editor.

Make sure you maintain uniformity by using the designated font for all content and a bold font for headings. If you have brand-specific fonts, replace them accordingly.

If you need help generating ideas for your sales action plan, you can leverage Visme's AI writer . Simply input your prompt and within seconds, the tool crafts a high-quality copy. The tool can also refine grammar, enhance ideas, or condense text to suit your needs.

Collaborate with your team to leverage diverse perspectives and unique insights. Utilize Visme’s collaboration features to invite team members to view, comment, edit and engage in real-time discussions with your team members.

The workflow feature allows you to assign roles and tasks to team members and track their progress and deadlines in one place.

Step 4: Input Necessary Data

The next step is to input crucial sales data into the sales action plan.

You can leverage Visme’s data visualization tools to convert complex data into concise and easily understandable visuals. You can access a wide range of graphs, charts, tables and data widgets in Visme’s library.

Use the tool that best represents your data. For instance, you can employ GANTT charts and tables to visualize project timelines and key milestones. These can be useful to showcase activities and completion dates and identify any overlaps within your project.

With Visme, you can link your live data source directly to the dashboard. You can extract data from a range of platforms, such as Google Analytics, Survey Monkey, Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. This integration simplifies the process of transferring data from your favorite apps, eliminating the need for manual input.

Additionally, Visme effortlessly integrates with well-known applications such as HubSpot , Salesforce, Monday.com, Jotform and Mailchimp . This functionality guarantees that your dashboard remains consistently updated with real-time information from your preferred platforms. When you’re done creating your sales action plans, you can also easily export them from Visme to these platforms.

Pro Tip: Maintain a harmonious visual appeal across your data dashboards by employing consistent theme colors. Utilize customization tools to align widget colors, fonts and sizes with your dashboard's layout and style.

Step 5: Customize Your Sales Action Plan

You can take advantage of a wide range of customization options on Visme to make your sales action plan visually appealing and professional, even if you lack design skills.

Visme’s brand design tool will help you keep your sales action plan on brand. Simply input your website URL and the wizard will pull up your logo, colors, fonts and other design elements. With your brand assets saved in your brand kit , you can apply your branding to your sales action plan in one click.

Who says your sales action plan has to be boring? Spice things up and keep your team engaged by including interactive elements within the sales action plan.

Elements like pop-ups and hover effects can help you reveal additional information while engaging your readers. You can amp up the experience further by embedding videos, integrating animated icons and adding clickable menus, illustrations, or special effects.

Step 6: Publish and Share With Your Team and Stakeholders

Once finalized, you can publish and share it with your team or the whole organization, either by inviting them directly on Visme, sharing a link, or embedding it on a secure intranet site. You can securely distribute your customized sales report with just a few clicks, ensuring it gets to the right people at the right time. Not only does this foster transparency and communication, but it also improves your workflow.

Visme has an extensive library of professionally designed and customizable action plan templates to help you jumpstart your creation process. Using these templates will save you hours of planning and designing.

Don’t just take our word for it. Hear what one of our happy customers has to say about Visme.

1. Sales Action Plan

Create a roadmap that can guide your e-commerce business toward increased sales with this template. This template is valuable for physical and online store owners. You can easily utilize it to create an action plan that will guide both your offline and online sales.

This template boasts a sleek, contemporary design, featuring essential sections to showcase your expertise. There is a distinct visual contrast between text and background, ensuring readability.

Every crucial detail is accommodated in this template—from your value proposition to your target audience, revenue model and key metrics.

Similar to all other Visme templates, this template is entirely customizable. Infuse your company's color scheme, logo, icons and images to give it a personalized touch. With Visme's brand design tool , integrating your brand assets is seamless. Simply input your URL and the wizard will pull up your assets into your brand kit .

2. B2B Sales Action Plan

A B2B sales action plan will be presented before multiple decision-makers and should reveal a deep understanding of the business. This plan offers an ideal framework for showcasing your sales initiatives. It encompasses strategies for three different products, enabling you to provide a comprehensive analysis.

This template offers a default black and white theme but you can easily customize it to suit your preferred color scheme. Its minimalistic backdrop ensures that the information in your sales action plan takes center stage without distractions.

There is ample space to showcase crucial details, such as objectives, KPI goals, revenue targets and much more.

Need help generating ideas for the different sections of your sales action plan? You can take advantage of Visme’s AI writer . The wizard will help you generate your first draft, which you can refine to suit your needs. The tool can also help you shorten, polish and proofread your content, ensuring that it’s error-free.

3. App Sales Action Plan

This resourceful template offers a step-by-step roadmap to boost app downloads, engage users and skyrocket revenue.

The template’s stunning design layout is sure to capture your audience’s attention. It uses a color palette, showcasing various shades of red, blue and white throughout the document.

The sections present information, including objectives, KPI targets, target audience details, and available resources, in a concise way.

Looking to enhance your sales action plan's value? Utilize Visme's interactive elements like pop-ups and hover effects to unveil extra information such as market research data or competitor analysis. You can also employ hotspots to link clients’ video testimonials.

4. One Page Sales Action Plan

Looking for a way to condense your sales action plan in a way that everyone involved can quickly access and understand the plan? This template fits the bill. You can easily highlight crucial details such as revenue goals, target audience details, and sales strategies all on one page.

The modern, minimalist design offers room to articulate your goals, target market, and sales strategy on a single, captivating page.

You can easily customize this template using Visme's user-friendly editor. You have the freedom to adjust fonts, text and background colors to perfectly align with your branding.

Discovering all Visme offers is simplified with the shortcut feature. By typing the forward-slash ("/"), an instant pop-up with a search bar appears. Simply input the name of the feature in the search bar and you’ll be able to access it.

5. SaaS Sales Action Plan

This SaaS action plan template offers a professional and clear way to showcase your comprehensive sales strategy. Using a calming blue and crisp white design, it delivers an engaging experience.

Within the template, you can detail objectives, KPIs, monthly revenue goals, target market, sales strategy, team information and necessary resources. The interactive charts make it easy to visualize revenue goals.

Once your report is live, the Visme analytics tool allows you to track traffic and engagement, offering insights into views, unique visits, average time spent, completion rates and more. Monitoring how your team engages with the plan enables you to guide discussions effectively.

6. Ecommerce Sales Action Plan

Do you need a comprehensive sales action plan template that’ll help you develop a strategy to elevate your eCommerce sales game? This template is just what you need.

You can utilize the sections to reveal your KPI targets and product focus, target audience, sales strategy, teams, resources and lots more.

It features an attention-grabbing cover page and engaging layouts which sets the stage for impactful content. The rich blend of blue, grey and white backdrop also exudes professionalism.

This template also stands out with the use of dynamic charts, interactive icons and high-quality images. If you would like to change the custom images, look into Visme's extensive library of icons and stock photos to find what suits your needs.

However, if you desire to produce new professional visuals or enhance existing ones you can leverage Visme's AI image generator . Simply enter your prompts and witness the magic unfold within seconds. This versatile tool can craft art, 3D objects, icons, abstracts and whatever else you require to improve the engagement of your sales action plan.

7. Organic Farm Sales Action Plan

This sales action plan template suits green and eco-friendly companies perfectly. Its green hues and outdoor imagery resonate well with organic product enthusiasts.

You can leverage its sections to highlight key details like objectives, KPI goals and sales strategies.

Need to work on your sales action plan with your team? Leverage Visme’s collaboration features . You can invite team members via email to collaborate seamlessly, offering real-time edits and feedback. The live editing function enables multiple team members to work on the project together, allowing instant edits and feedback loops.

Maximize Your Sales Effort with Visme

Creating an action plan for sales essentially sets the groundwork for a structured, efficient and focused approach to achieving sales targets.

Visme offers an effortless way to craft a sales action plan, even without prior design skills. With an intuitive drag-and-drop editor and diverse features and templates, you can easily create professional, visually captivating sales action plans.

For sales teams, Visme provides a comprehensive suite of resources to create assets such as plans, sales reports , sales business plans , sales presentations , sales sales collateral and beyond.

Sign up on Visme today to elevate your sales game to the next level.

Create impactful sales action plans using Visme

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About the Author

Olujinmi is a Content writer for Visme who creates human-first SEO content. She loves helping businesses smash their ROI goals with strategic content development and optimization. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her composing songs.

9 Banking Sales Strategies to Increase Profits

To succeed in banking, it’s crucial to have a strong sales strategy in place. Sales strategies are how a bank can increase its profits by acquiring new customers and growing business from current customers. 

Here are nine banking sales strategies that can help your business grow.

1. Develop a Banking Niche

Focus on a specific banking niche and develop sales strategies specifically for that market. This could be businesses in a specific industry, individuals with certain professions, or customers with particular financial needs. 

By understanding the needs of your target market, you can better tailor your products and services to them, making it more likely that they’ll do business with you.

2. Sell Banking Products and Services Online

In today’s digital world, it’s essential to have an online presence where potential customers can learn about your products and services. Many people research banking options online before deciding, so your bank must be visible in this space. You can sell banking products and services directly on your website or through online marketplaces.

3. Offer Free Banking Consultations

Offer potential customers a free consultation to discuss their banking needs. This is a great way to build trust and rapport with potential customers. During the consultation, you can get to know their needs better and identify their pain points with their current banking situation. You can then offer solutions that address their specific needs.

4. Use Banking Software to Automate Processes

Use banking software to automate repetitive tasks like customer onboarding or loan processing. This will free up your time to focus on selling and acquiring new customers. Automation can also help improve the accuracy of your banking records and make it easier to track sales metrics.

5. Provide Personalized Banking Services

Take the time to get to know your customers on a personal level. This could involve taking them out for coffee, getting lunch together, or simply conversing about their lives outside of banking. Building relationships with your customers will make them more likely to do business with you and recommend you to others.

6. Offer Unique Banking Products and Services

Stand out from the competition by offering unique banking products and services that cater to your target market’s needs. This could include special financing for businesses in a certain industry, custom debit cards, or exclusive access to certain banking products. By offering something that other banks don’t, you’ll make it more likely that customers will choose to do business with you.

7. Invest in Banking Technology

Stay ahead of the curve by investing in cutting-edge banking technology. This could include mobile banking apps, contactless payment solutions, or artificial intelligence-powered customer service chatbots. By investing in new technologies, you’ll be able to offer a better experience to your customers and stay ahead of your competition.

8. Focus on Customer Retention

Acquiring new customers is important, but it’s also essential to focus on retaining your existing customer base. This can be done by providing exceptional customer service, offering loyalty rewards, and regularly running promotions. Keeping your current customers happy will make them more likely to do business with you in the future and refer new customers to you.

9. Promote Banking Products and Services through Social Media

Use social media to promote your banking products and services to a wider audience. This could involve creating informative blog posts, sharing helpful infographics, or running social media ads. You can also use social media to engage with potential customers and build relationships with them.

Increase Profits as a Bank

Following these banking sales strategies can increase your chances of acquiring new customers and boosting your bank’s profits. Keep in mind that building relationships with potential customers takes time, so stay focused on your goals and continue working hard to provide the best banking experience for your customers.

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What is an action plan? (Example and template)

May 3, 2024 - 10 min read

An action plan is a definitive checklist of tasks and resources needed to complete a project or achieve a goal. You can think of it as a visual countdown to the project delivery or a breakdown of the list of tasks needed to achieve desired results.

Now you may be thinking, “What is the purpose of an action plan vs. a to-do list ?” 

The most significant difference between action plans and to-do lists is that action plans focus on achieving a specific goal . In contrast, to-do lists are ongoing and include tasks for different goals and projects. 

Understanding this distinction, it becomes clear that action plans are powerful tools for goal setting and project execution. They help teams manage necessary resources, adhere to schedules, and track progress toward specific goals and project initiatives. 

In this article, we’ll go through the purposes of action plans, the key steps usually included in them, how you can use action plans to help your project management, and step-by-step instructions on how to put one together yourself. 

And, as a bonus, we’ll also give you information on Wrike’s prebuilt action plan template , which can jump-start your action plan process. 

What is the purpose of an action plan?

An action plan , also sometimes referred to as a plan of action , helps order project tasks in a sequential and timely manner to achieve a goal. Project managers and individuals can use action plans to achieve their work and personal project goals.

Developing an action plan clarifies the goals to be achieved, the teams and service providers to involve, and the tasks, dependencies, milestones, and resources needed to complete the project.

Working with an action plan ensures you complete every task and requirement to meet the expected standards of a project. As you develop an action plan, you identify any critical paths and dependencies. 

Keep in mind that a developed action plan isn’t set in stone, because the environment in which projects operate is often subject to change . External factors such as market conditions, economic influences, technology advancements or failures, regulatory requirements, and unexpected events can impact the execution of any plan. A dynamic document allows for flexibility and adaptability so you can adjust your strategies in response to evolving circumstances.

Why are action plans important in project management?

​​An action plan in project management is a quick and easy way to keep projects on track. Creating an action plan means you can quickly map out the resources and requirements you need and sketch a timeline to complete tasks. 

Here are several benefits of using a strategic action plan in project management:

• They’re simple and easy to set up, helping to maintain operational efficiency without taking much time.
• They declutter managers’ minds by providing a framework for structuring new projects in a sensible order.
• They clarify the objectives of the project and build consensus on how the work should be done.
• They prepare you for predictable and preventable challenges and focus your resources to achieve your main goals for the project. 
• They maximize personal and team productivity and resource allocation.
• They reduce the possibility of forgetting tasks in the project.
• They generate a goal-driven workflow, so you know what to work on throughout the project.
• They provide a way to track progress as you check tasks off the action plan as you complete them.

Action plan vs. project plan

Action plans should not be confused with project plans . Both list the tasks, resources, and timelines required to achieve a desired goal, but project plans go deeper, including details such as contingency plan action steps, risk mitigation strategies, quality assessment criteria, and stakeholder communication schedules. In contrast, action plans simply list the tasks, resources, and timelines needed to achieve a goal. 

Think of it this way: For big, complex, or long-term projects, you create a project plan first. Once your project plan is in place, an action plan helps you detail the steps and flow for allocating resources, sharing and executing tasks, and setting deadlines.

In summary, action plans and project plans differ in the following ways: 

• Complexity : Action plans are simpler than project plans. They focus solely on the tasks, resources, and timelines required to achieve a goal. Project plans include additional sections for other measures, standards, and procedures for completing a project. 
• Duration : Action plans focus on specific, short-term goals. These may be for standalone goals or part of a larger project. Project plans are more encompassing, covering longer-term objectives, which may take months or years to complete. 
• Flow : Action plans are linear, with one task following another until the goal is achieved. Project plans may have multiple phases, e.g., planning, executing, monitoring, controlling, and reviewing, with each stage containing its own distinct tasks and deliverables.

The components of an action plan

Let’s take a look at the essential components of an action plan:

• Action plan objectives: The action plan objectives serve as the main guide for the action plan, defining and communicating what the plan seeks to achieve. 
• Action plan steps: Action plan steps form the core of the action plan. They detail crucial targets and set milestones that must be completed to reach the goal. These steps divide the goal or project into manageable chunks and provide a framework for identifying tasks (action items), allocating resources, and determining timelines. 
• Action plan items: Action plan items are the nitty-gritty details of the action plan — the actual tasks to be performed. Each action plan item must be clearly defined, actionable, and understood by the team involved. 
• Action plan timeline: The action plan timeline maps out the plan schedule from start to finish. It’s crucial for setting expectations, tracking progress and performance, and ensuring the project stays on schedule. 
• Action plan resources: These are the inputs required to execute the plan, e.g., labor, time, tools, and funds. Identifying action plan resources before delving into execution helps ensure tasks are not delayed or compromised due to resource constraints. 
• Action plan matrix: The action plan matrix provides a structured layout for the strategic planning of tasks. It serves as a roadmap and helps to categorize your action steps and tasks based on priority, status, and resource allocation. This alignment helps identify any dependencies or potential bottlenecks.
• Action plan report: The action plan report provides an overview of the progress made in executing the action plan. It includes details like the tasks completed, time taken, costs incurred, resources used, and any deviations from the plan.
• Assignments: Each task should be assigned to a person, team, or group. Clear assignment of responsibility is crucial for accountability and the successful execution of any action plan.

What are the key steps of an action plan?

The main point of a plan of action is to ensure you don’t overlook critical tasks and milestones of your project. In its simplest form, developing an effective action plan entails listing tasks you need to complete and prioritizing them.

As you develop your action plan, you decide which tasks you can delegate, outsource, or delay. The steps below map out how to write a sound action plan to increase your chance of success.

Step 1: Define your goal 

Get clear on what you want to achieve with your project. Define the action plan in terms of where you are and where you want to be. If you have alternative methods to achieve your goal, assess your situation and decide the best chances of success depending on your resources.

Step 2: List tasks

Once you have your goal, list the tasks and activities you must complete to achieve it. Then order them sequentially by adding key dates and deadlines. This should include a time frame with start and end dates for each task.

Step 3: Identify critical tasks

Are there any specific steps that must be completed before others can start? These are critical time-bound tasks with dependencies. Prioritize these tasks and set realistic deadlines. If you plan to assign them to team members, be sure to let them know the dependencies and allow enough time to deliver them.

Step 4: Assign tasks

Now that the project is broken down, you can start assigning tasks. Will you be handling some yourself in addition to managing the project? Make sure you allocate time and human resources carefully — you may choose to delegate or outsource specific tasks.

Step 5: Assess and improve

At the end of each project, assess performance, analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics, and learn from mistakes or missteps to improve your action planning and project execution. If you work with a team, collect feedback and improvement suggestions from team members for better performance in the future.

Action plan best practices

Following these best practices will mean you ’ re more likely to succeed: 

• Involve your team: When working with a team, involve them early in the planning process to get their input and save time. Get team members’ work schedules before assigning tasks to avoid conflicts. Clear communication enables responsible parties to prepare for their specific project tasks.
• Set SMART goals: SMART goals are s pecific, m easurable, a ttainable, r elevant, and t imely. Ensure your action plan starts with a strong foundation by defining clear and SMART goals that add value, either as a personal project or at work.
• Make your action plans into templates: To get more benefits from your action plans, make them into templates. After assessing your action plan at the end of a completed project, make a copy of the plan and remove all project-specific details, so you’re able to use the action planning template in future projects. This minimizes the need to repeat work, saving a lot of time and reducing errors.

Who needs to write an action plan?

Action plans aren’t just for project managers — they’re handy for all sorts of professionals and individuals tackling personal or business projects. Action plans can also be used alone or with a team. When working with a team, the leader puts together the action plan with everyone’s input.

Developing an action plan helps individuals, managers, and organizations finish their projects more successfully. They’re great for getting started, keeping track of what needs to be done, and maintaining progress on any project. Remember to check off tasks as they are done, update the plans, and communicate with your team as your project progresses.

A variation of a traditional action plan is a corrective action plan. Project managers and individuals use corrective action plans when they need to fix recurring problems or deviations in a project, process, or organization, so they don’t happen again in the future.

An example of an action plan 

Action plans are quick and easy to create. It’s all about putting down what you need to accomplish your goal or project. 

Here’s a simple action plan example for a marketing team working on a new campaign:

Action plan objective: Increase brand awareness and boost product sales by 30% by the end of Q4 2023 through a localized multimedia marketing campaign.

Other action plan examples in project management include:

• Launching a new product
• Organizing an event
• Improving customer service
• Enhancing employee training
• Expanding into new markets
• Increasing your social media following

Maximizing efficiency with action plan templates

A project action plan template is a preformatted document providing a framework to outline, execute, and track the tasks and specific actions needed to accomplish your larger goal. It streamlines the action planning process by providing a ready-to-use format you can quickly fill out to create a robust action plan. This way, you don’t waste time making one from scratch using Excel, Google Docs, or Microsoft Word. 

Wrike’s simple action plan template manages projects and goals with an intuitive interface designed to help plan and launch projects with teams of any size. This template’s features enable real-time collaboration, easy task assignments, time tracking, and reporting.

Common issues like a lack of visibility on remote workers’ assignments and confusing project priorities are mitigated with functionalities such as: 

• Organizing tasks by departments into folders, making the journey from “To Do” to “In Progress” to “Completed” smooth
• Identifying dependencies and defining the priority of tasks to determine which tasks need to be done first
• Providing a snapshot of the tasks due now and in the coming weeks, ensuring the project schedule is adhered to
• Securing sensitive data from unauthorized personnel with permissions offering various levels of access and visibility for collaborators and stakeholders

How to create an action plan with Wrike

Using project management tools helps to organize your business action plan visually and make it feel more achievable. With project management software like Wrike , you get a free action plan template included with your subscription — so you can easily input your project resources, requirements, and timelines, and track your progress throughout the project. 

As outlined above, the best way to jump-start your action plan is to use our prebuilt plan of action and milestones template . It helps you take control of your task management by providing sample folders to organize tasks, a calendar for project scheduling, and prebuilt dashboards for monitoring progress. All you have to do is add your tasks and due dates to get a complete overview of all project work. 

Our template works for all different types of action plans. You can use it as:

• A personal action plan template for personal projects
• A business action plan template to simplify project management
• A corrective action plan template to fix issues with an existing project

If you’re ready to develop action plans and track your progress while better managing your projects, you need Wrike. We make it easy to plan, execute, and ensure success, even when you’re on the go.

Click here to start your free two-week trial and kick off your action plan today.

Kelechi Udoagwu

Kelechi is a freelance writer and founder of Week of Saturdays, a platform for digital freelancers and remote workers living in Africa.

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Increasing Efficiencies

How to improve bank branch performance & streamline branch operations processes.

The last two years have called for undeniable change in the financial industry. They’ve called for forced branch closures, highlighted the importance of contact centers, and accelerated adoption of digital channels. They’ve shined a spotlight on the need for banks and credit unions to have technology in place that will improve branch performance so they can offer the service their accountholders deserve.

By improving branch performance, you can be there for your accountholders where they need you to be – whether that’s at the branch, on the phone, or through a digital channel. After all, branch support doesn’t stop at the branch doors.

To streamline your branch operations and enhance accountholder service through the speed, accuracy, and convenience that comes with automation, start by:

• Improving staff mobility and accountholder convenience.
• Empowering contact center agents to provide high quality service.
• Optimizing your core and complementary solutions to enhance accountholder service, convenience, and loyalty.

Improve Staff Mobility & Accountholder Convenience

“In an industry built on having human connection at branches, the coronavirus pandemic has and will continue to change the way [people] interact with their bank or credit union,” said Connie Hancock, Technical Product Manager at Jack Henry SM . By offering branch employees a modern mobile application that has seamless integrations to multiple back-end systems, they’ll be able to offer the technology, speed, and convenience accountholders have become accustomed to in their everyday lives – during and even before the pandemic.

What if you or your employees could walk up to a branch visitor and help them open an account using a tablet? Or meet them down the street to discuss a home or business loan? (With a connection to your core system in hand.) How much easier would it be for your employees? How much more convenient would it be for your customers and members?

When your employees can support sales and operational processes from anywhere with real-time accountholder information at their fingertips in the branch or remotely, these digitally empowered employees can respond to requests in a more personable way – taking the conversation to the branch lobby, to a coffee shop, or over a Zoom call. “Having the ability to engage with the [accountholder] from anywhere inside or outside the branch and build those relationships makes doing business more efficient and appealing.”

How to improve bank branch performance using this? Look for a solution that improves the mobility of your staff, allowing for personal service at the moment of need.

Empower Contact Center Agents to Provide High Quality Service

As its adoption and usage continues to grow in popularity, digital bankin g has become the new lobby. Banks and credit unions are fast-tracking transformation efforts and increasing investments in digital experience enhancements with a strong focus on service and engagement – looking for the optimal balance between self-service automation and high-touch personal service when and where the accountholder needs it. And where they need it is everywhere: a consumer expectations survey published found that when it comes to user engagement, 82% of consumers reach out by phone (making it crucial for banks and credit unions to offer live phone support even outside of regular business hours), 62% contact via email, and 43% use live chat.

As the role of traditional banks and credit unions continue to evolve, improving digital agility and maintaining your ability to create authentic connections will require improved integration of contact center and branch channels with a holistic digital-first strategy. That’s why you’ll see traditional call centers evolving into true contact centers – with banks and credit unions upskilling their agents and empowering them with the tools they need (quick and easy access to information, single logins, and authentication – to name a few) to improve the service they deliver.

How to improve bank branch performance using this? Be proactive when it comes to accountholder engagement by implement ing solutions with deep digital capabilities, covering channels like phone support, online and mobile, and live chat.

Optimize Your Technology Platform to Enhance Accountholder Service, Convenience & Loyalty

Your core platform is the heart of your service, innovation, efficiency, and future. And when paired with automated, accountholder- and employee-friendly complementary solutions like payments and lending, it stands to be the difference between accountholders who leave and ones who stay for life. Because at the end of the day, when branches offer automated solutions for repetitive processes, there’s more time for financial counseling, relationship development, and learning about real accountholder needs.

All systems require some type of regular investment, and this is particularly true for your core. Whether you’re on a cloud-based platform or in-house, it’s important to stay up to date. Things are changing at a hurried pace in the industry and it’s paramount that you stay at the forefront. To maximize your most significant investment, regularly review it, keep it clean, keep it in the know, and keep it up to date.

How to improve bank branch performance using this? Make sure your core processes are functioning at their optimum levels to best support your accountholders and your employees. Consider partnering with a consulting service that knows your core and can help you increase its efficiency, implement automation, and assist with planning, design, or re-engineering of your banking processes.

Why Streamlining Branch Operations Processes Is Key

When it comes to streamlining branch operations and improving branch performance, the right technology in the hands of your branch employees can provide more than automated workflows and processes. Without multiple logins, lengthy information searches, or being confined to a desk, tellers and advisors can offer faster service – creating a more satisfying experience for everyone involved.

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• April 28, 2023

10-Step Sales Action Plan to Crush Quota

• Sales Enablement , Sales Performance

WANT TO IMPROVE YOUR TEAM'S PERFORMANCE?

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Whether you’re a software entrepreneur, an executive, or a sales manager , one of the best things that you can do to set yourself up for success is to write a sales action plan that supports your company and helps it to grow.

Unfortunately, a lot of business leaders struggle with developing a strategy that can enrich and empower their operations.

A sales action plan is the easiest way to lay out your objectives, strategies, and tactics for success, in a way that your whole team can understand. Your sales plan also helps you to identify potential obstacles and roadblocks so that you can come up with ways to overcome challenges.

What is a Sales Action Plan?

A sales action plan highlights what you’re going to do to achieve your sales goals , focusing specifically on the transactions and relationships that you can cultivate with customers.

Sales plans contain information about who you want to sell to, what your revenue goals look like, and how you’re going to structure your teams for success.

An effective sales plan:

• Communicates your sales objectives and goals
• Outlines responsibilities and roles for both your staff and leadership
• Delivers strategic direction for your sales team
• Guides your decision-making strategy to help you progress towards organizational goals

While a sales action plan is excellent for month-to-month guidance, it can also help you conduct a more long-term analysis of your sales team. Over time, you can compare your action plans against your outcomes to see if you’re achieving your targets.

10-Step Action Plan to Reach Short and Long Term Sales Targets

As a manager, how do you create a sales action plan that delivers real, measurable results for your team?

An action plan needs to give your employees direction and purpose. It should ensure that your staff have everything they need to achieve their goals when it comes to things like quotas and prospecting . The more detailed your action plan is, the less likely it is that your team will end up confused and struggling to make decisions for themselves.

Here are just some of the crucial activities that should appear in a strategic sales plan.

1. Identify Your Ideal Clients

If you want to achieve success in any aspect of your sales strategy , you need to start by identifying the people that you want to target. Get together with your sales team and ask:

• Which clients deliver the most long-term value?
• What company size are you targeting?
• How did your clients find success with your solution?
• Where did your best customers come from (i.e. cold calls, canvassing , word of mouth)
• What is your target industry ?

Once you know who you’re targeting, the next step is to consider how you’re going to interact with clients to encourage sales. What do your prospects need most from you, and how can you help them to achieve their goals? Where are the best places to engage with your clients? Do they respond best to telephone calls, emails, or face-to-face interactions?

Your sales action plan needs to include a complete overview of how to find and nurture your clients.

2. Assess Historical Performance

Unless you’re a brand-new business, you should have some room to learn from your past mistakes and successes. Look back over your previous wins and losses and ask yourself:

• Which strategies led to the most revenue for your company?
• What kind of customers were most likely to respond to your sales pitch ?
• Were there certain months or seasons where you were more likely to reach your quota?
• Which of your team members were most successful, and why?
• Which areas delivered the most ROI for your team?

Examining your historical performance will help you to get a better idea of where your current customers and prospects come from.

Sales tracking software can give you a more complete history of this information . Make sure that you examine not just when and where inbound and outbound leads convert, but also how your teams prospected with these clients, and which tactics were most successful.

3. Chart your Destination (Choose a Goal)

Failing to plan is planning to fail.

Once you know what you’ve accomplished, you begin to determine what you need to do next. For instance, you might have achieved your sales quota 60% of the time in the last year, but by the end of this year, you want to achieve an 80% success rate.

Having a target or goal that you want to reach will help to guide your decision-making for your sales quota. Remember, before you get into the details, you need to be specific about what you want to achieve both long-term and short-term.

Ask yourself:

• What is the big picture destination for my team? (A 100% quota success rate)
• Annual sales goals? (Maybe a 20% increase per year)
• Quarterly objectives? (Something closer to 5%)
• What can sales teams do to improve monthly?
• What is my team going to aim for each day?
• What activity metrics will we measure in order to keep the entire team

Outline what you want to go and how you’re going to get there.

For instance, if your big picture goal is to generate more closed sales overall, then you might need to start by asking your reps to complete more outbound calls each day.

The more calls you make, the more chances you have of sales. On a monthly basis, your team can work on improving their success rate, and you can measure your overall growth quarterly, aiming for greater results each year.

4. Put Resources in Place

Now you know where you’re going, what tools do you need to accelerate your opportunities and empower your teams?

The most essential resource you have is your salespeople, so ensure that you have the right number of people on board to reach your target. This includes building an enticing commission structure that motivates employees to succeed.

Next, invest in the tools and technologies that will power your success:

CRM tools: How will your teams track their interactions with crucial clients and customers?

Prospecting tools: How will reps find new prospects that meet your ideal customer profile across different sales channels and territories?

Once you know which tools your employees need, make sure that your team members are well-equipped to use them. This could mean implementing training sessions, assigning mentors to new team members, or holding one-on-one meetings.

5. Prospect with ICP data

Not all prospects are created equal. Sales reps need to understand who has the greatest need for what they’re selling. i.e. their ideal customer profile (ICP). Once created, reps can use this ICP data to uncover other consumers (B2C) or companies (B2B) who meet this criteria. This helps ensure reps are only engaging prospects with the highest likelihood of converting into a qualified lead.

Here’s a simple way to build an ICP:

• Identify your best customers : who gets the most value from your product/service?
• Make a list of attributes : what are the similarities across these customers?
• Understand the pain points : what problems does your solution solve?
• Create an ICP document : a simple one-page document that lists the demographics, firmographics, pain points, and key objectives of your ICP.

Once armed with an ICP, sales reps should use this data to uncover new prospects to engage across different sales channels.

For example, field sales reps can use the SPOTIO Lead Machine to find potential prospects and then use 200+ data attributes – age, business type, revenue, credit capacity etc – to pre-qualify the best opportunities within a given sales territory.

6. Assign Territories

Now it’s time to make sure that there’s limited overlap in your teams. It’s hard to reach your goals when everyone is focused on selling to the same area.

Assigning territories ensures that your sales team is targeting the right customers, in the right areas, and ultimately eliminates costly redundancies.

Make sure your most valuable and profitable reps are working on the biggest accounts. Remember, you can assign your territories by everything from geography, to customer type, sales potential, and industry.

Clearly defined territories help sales teams to work more strategically to address the needs and expectations of their clients. You can:

• Assign to top-performers to the highest value accounts
• Align salespeople to the segments or regions best-suited to their talents
• Ensure all reps have an adequate number of lead to work and accounts to service
• Open the door for stronger long-term relationships between your brand and customers.

7. Develop Scripts

Now your sales team knows where it’s going to be focusing; it’s time to guide them in accelerating their chances of sales. For instance, you can build templates for phone calls, follow ups, emails, voicemails, and more.

To guide your scripts , remember to focus on addressing the pain points of your customers. Remember – people buy emotionally, and justify rationally.

The Sandler pain funnel can help with prospecting, qualifying and closing more deals.

Encourage your team members to find out about the pain points that your customers face and discover solutions to their problems in the scripts that you create. As a general rule, the conversation should have a 70:30 split on the side of the customer.

Think about how your sales team can use the scripts you give them to qualify the leads that you generate. Can you ask questions that will help with segmenting customers and improving your chances of bigger upsells and cross-sells?

8. Set Minimum Daily Sales Activities

With support and guidance , your sales teams should have everything they need to accomplish real, measurable goals within your sales strategy. This is when you can begin to put teams to work by setting minimum daily sales activities .

Remember, although it’s valuable to challenge employees, you still need to be realistic. Asking staff to accomplish more than they’re reasonably capable of could lead to disengagement.

Measure and track activity-based metrics such as:

New prospects : How many new leads should your employees be finding to contact every day? How will they qualify and nurture those leads? The Lead machine from SPOTIO can make it easier for agents to find new batches of leads every day.

Contacts: How many people will your sales teams contact each day? This can include contact such as in-person visits, emails, phone calls, or social media connections. It’s all about working leads across multiple channels to build a relationship.

Follow-ups: How will salespeople attempt to improve their chances of a sale to people who haven’t answered the phone or responded to an email? You can also look at “follow ups” in terms of upsells and cross-sells to existing customers.

Referral requests: How will your employees follow up with clients to ensure that they’re as satisfied as possible? What can you do to improve your chances of positive testimonials, and referrals to new clients?

Field sales teams can use a solution like AutoPlays to sequence many of the sales activities that are critical to maintaining pipeline velocity.

9. Enforce Accountability

Once you have defined the kind of things that your employees should be accomplishing with their work each day, how are you going to make sure that they’re delivering? Do you have lead nurturing pipelines and software in place which shows you which team members are reaching their targets?

Tracking all of the sales activities that your employees engage in each day has a number of benefits. First, it means that managers can see if goals are being met, and which strategies should change if not. Additionally, a dashboard also allows individual employees to track their own performance.

Salespeople are often competitive, and like a chance to prove themselves against their peers. You could use a leaderboard in your workplace to celebrate and showcase your most successful salespeople.

Tip : once you have identified the top sales reps, consider pairing them up with new or lower performing reps for some cross-training.

10. Track Performance

Tracking performance is something that you need to do at a team level, individual rep level , and business level too. Are your reps hitting their activity targets? If they’re not, what’s causing them to fall short of the mark? What kind of opportunities are they missing out on?

Tracking your performance will help you to see the friction points in your sales pipeline. A lot of sales teams fail to track crucial data and KPIs, and this often means that they don’t know what they need to do to improve their chances of success.

By tracking the performance of your team at every level, you can uncover your top-performing reps, figure out which reps need more training, and even pinpoint which sales strategies aren’t impacting the bottom line.

Aside from looking at individual reps, ask yourself:

• Which territories are performing best?
• Which sales actions are driving the best results?
• Are there any bottlenecks in our pipeline?
• How can we rectify these issues?

SPOTIO’s My Reports feature makes it quick and easy for sales admins, managers and reps to generate custom reports containing only the most important metrics. Sales reports can be customized, saved as a reusable template, and accessed from any device while on-the-go. This ensures everyone in the company has access to the insights they need to confidently allocate resources and hit quota.

The Meetings, Pitches and Deals Should Follow

Your Sales Action Plan is all about giving your sales team the guidance that they need to make smart business decisions. When you can support sales team members by addressing issues that are within your direct control, such as a lack of guidance and direction, you can improve results.

If your sales strategy works for reps, and make sure that they have everything that they need to follow each step correctly, then reaching your targets should become a lot easier. You’ll find that the meetings, demos, and closed deals will follow naturally.

A successful sales action plan is all about focusing on the proactive actions that your business can invest in, and letting the process develop for everyone. Don’t be afraid to accept feedback from your employees, as well as examining the quantitative data in your sales activity tracker.

Your employees might be able to offer some insights into the steps that they need to take to improve their chances of closing deals and achieving better outcomes.

Ready to Take Action?

Ultimately, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy to delivering excellent sales numbers and outcomes. The key to success is to figure out what works for your team by examining your processes, employees, and even your customers.

Designing a sales action plan will help to guide your employees towards more successful results, while making sure that they have the guidance that they need to thrive.

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22 Best Sales Strategies, Plans, & Initiatives for Success [Templates]

Discover sales strategy examples, templates, and plans used by top sales teams worldwide.

FREE SALES PLAN TEMPLATE

Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent plan.

Updated: 03/07/24

Published: 03/07/24

A strong sales strategy plan creates the foundation for a cohesive and successful sales organization.

Sales strategies and initiatives also align salespeople on shared goals and empower them to do their best work — keeping them happy and successful, too.

In this guide, I’ll dig into some sales strategies and initiatives that I’ve found can help you generate more leads and close more deals. But first, let’s define what a sales strategy is.

Table of Contents

What is a sales strategy?

Why is a sales strategy important, the most effective sales strategies, sales strategy types, sales planning: how to build a sales strategy plan, sales initiatives, sales strategy examples from successful sales teams.

A sales strategy is a set of decisions, actions, and goals that inform how your sales team positions the organization and its products to close new customers. It acts as a guide for sales reps to follow, with clear goals for sales processes, product positioning, and competitive analysis.

A clear sales strategy serves as a map for the growth of your business. Your sales strategy is key to future planning, problem-solving, goal-setting, and management.

An effective sales strategy can help you:

• Give your team direction and focus. Strategic clarity can help your sales reps and managers understand which goals and activities to prioritize. This can lead to improved productivity and outcomes.
• Ensure consistent messaging. Your sales strategy can help your team deliver a consistent message to prospects, partners, and customers. This can increase both trust and effectiveness.
• Optimize opportunities. Strong sales strategies will help you target the right prospects and customize your approach. This can help your team make the most of every sales opportunity.
• Improve resource allocation. Your sales strategy outlines your priorities and resources. In turn, this can help your sales team use their time, effort, and other resources more efficiently, boosting your team’s ability to focus on high-potential deals.

Next, let’s cover some of the sales strategies that I’ve found can be most effective.

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2. Become a thought leader.

Sharing your advice, tried-and-true best practices, and niche expertise are some of the most long-lasting ways to build your personal brand and lend more credibility to your organization. After all, nobody wants to feel like they’re being sold to. Instead, it’s better to help people by offering solutions to their problems.

That’s what thought leaders do. Indeed, a recent report found that “Thought leadership is one of the most effective tools an organization can use to demonstrate its value to customers during a tough economy — even more so than traditional advertising or product marketing, according to B2B buyers.”

According to the study, 61% of decision-makers believed that thought leadership could be moderately or very effective in demonstrating the value of a company’s products. Moreover, more than half of C-suite executives in the study believed that thought leadership has a greater impact on purchases during an economic downturn, making this an even more important element of a sales strategy in today’s uncertain economic times.

So what’s the catch?

Not all thought leadership content is created equal.

When done right, thought leadership can have a huge positive impact, but poor thought leadership can be devastating to a company’s sales goals. So, before you plan a spree of LinkedIn posts to drive leads, consider who your audience is, what they need to know, and how your organization can help.

Also, it may not hurt to have a second set of eyes from your marketing, communication, and PR departments review your plan first to make sure everything is on-brand (and trackable!).

3. Prioritize inbound sales calls as hot leads.

There’s an age-old question in sales: “Should I discuss product pricing with a prospect on the first sales call?” The honest answer is: It depends.

You and your sales team know your process better than anyone. So take it from me — if you’ve seen success with pitching with pricing first, last, or somewhere in between, stick with what’s working for you.

But beyond that, your team should always prioritize the prospects who come to you. These hot leads are definitely interested in what you have to sell, and before they make a decision, they want to get the information they need about how it will benefit them.

By prioritizing talking to these prospects as soon as they call in or send an email, you’re putting your best foot forward and showing them that you’re helpful, solutions-oriented, and considerate of their time. And if that means closing a deal on the first call, there’s nothing wrong with that — as long as the customer has the information they need to make an informed decision.

4. Properly research and qualify prospects.

I’ve personally discovered that even the strongest sales strategy can’t compensate for targeting the wrong customers. To ensure your team is selling to the right type of customer, encourage reps to research and qualify prospects before attempting to discuss your product. Indeed, throughout my career, I’ve found that more work on the front end can lead to smoother closing conversations later on.

Outline the criteria a prospect needs to meet to be qualified as a high-probability potential customer. These criteria will depend on your unique business and target audience, but they should generally be based on a prospect’s engagement history and demographics.

Free Guide: 101 Sales Qualification Questions

101 Questions to Ask Contacts When Qualifying, Closing, Negotiating, and Upselling.

• Budget Questions
• Business Impact Questions
• Competitor Questions

5. Implement a free trial.

Offering a free trial or freemium version of your product can be a highly effective way to convert prospects. In fact, HubSpot’s sales strategy report found that 76% of sales professionals feel that free trials are effective in converting prospects into paying customers, while 69% of professionals believe that freemium offerings are effective.

Keeping a list of proven, go-to closing techniques will help salespeople routinely win deals. Some of my favorite techniques include the ‘now or never close’ — i.e., “If you commit now, I can get you a 20% discount” — or the ‘question close,’ i.e., “In your opinion, does what I am offering solve your problem?”

Free Sales Closing Guide

An easy-to-use sales closing guide with three tactics you can use right away.

• Using an ROI calculator for your prospects
• How to ask confirmation questions
• Sales question templates you can use today

To further improve your closing techniques and learn to close deals with confidence, check out this free, downloadable Sales Closing Guide .

11. Nurture existing accounts for future selling opportunities.

Once a deal is done, there’s no need for a sales strategy, right? Wrong.

Account management is an incredibly important part of the sales process, as this is how you foster loyal, happy customers and identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

So, after your sales team sees success with its sales strategy, it’s vital to form a partnership between the sales team and customer service/success teams.

Remember: Ensuring customers’ continued satisfaction with your product or service will make them more likely to do business with your company again. You may even inspire them to advocate for it proactively.

Free Sales Plan Template

Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent sales plan.

• Target Market
• Prospecting Strategy

Inbound Sales Strategy

In contrast, inbound sales strategies are the modern methodology for sales teams. Companies following an inbound approach base their sales processes on buyer actions.

These organizations automatically capture seller and buyer data to monitor their pipelines and coach their salespeople. Inbound sales strategies connect reps’ activities to the three stages of the buyer journey — awareness, consideration, and decision — encouraging sales teams to map their tactics to the right step in the customer journey.

The inbound methodology also aligns sales and marketing, creating a seamless experience for buyers. Check out this post to learn more about inbound sales and how to develop an inbound sales process.

In addition, many popular sales strategies take a customer-centric approach, including:

• Account-based selling .
• SPIN selling .
• Value-based selling .
• Consultative selling .

You can learn more about these approaches in this post about customer-centric selling systems .

Inbound vs. Outbound Sales Methodology

In the past, buyers were often forced to suffer through evaluating a product and deciding whether to buy it using only the information offered to them by the seller. But today, much of the information needed to evaluate a product is available online — meaning that buyers are no longer nearly as dependent on the seller.

That means that if sales teams don’t align with the modern buyer’s process. If they fail to add value beyond the information already available online, then buyers will have no reason to engage with a sales team.

As mentioned above, inbound sales benefits buyers at each stage of the buyer process, including:

• Consideration.

Inbound sales teams help buyers become aware of potential problems or opportunities and discover strategies to solve those problems.

Then, buyers evaluate whether the salesperson can help with their problem, and if the buyer thinks they can, they’ll purchase a solution to their problem. Inbound sales reps are helpful and trustworthy, creating partnerships rather than power struggles.

Not sure how to get started with inbound selling? Every sales team should have a sales strategy plan outlining its goals, best practices, and processes designed to align the team and create consistency.

Below, I’ll walk through how to create a sales strategy plan for your team.

Now that you have the template you need, let’s go over how you can build a sales strategy.

How to Build a Sales Strategy

• Develop organizational goals.
• Create a customer profile that is tailored to a specific product offering.
• Hire, onboard, and compensate sales team members adequately.
• Create a plan to generate demand.
• Measure individual and team performance.
• Track sales activities.

To build a comprehensive sales plan, I’d recommend starting with the following activities:

1. Develop organizational goals.

Setting goals is a no-brainer for most sales teams. Otherwise, how will you know whether you’re executing the right activities or achieving the best results? There are three strategies that I’ve found can be particularly helpful in developing clear organizational goals for a sales strategy.

Involve cross-departmental stakeholders.

Avoid developing sales goals in a silo. Instead, be sure to get input from stakeholders across the organization, since every department is held accountable to the company’s bottom line.

Create SMART goals.

SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Setting SMART goals can help your team simplify and track complex, long-term sales goals .

For example, a specific, measurable, and time-bound goal could be to sell 150% of the projected sales quota in Q2. Your internal team can propose this goal and then decide whether it is both relevant and attainable (attainability is particularly important because setting unrealistic goals can harm team motivation).

At the end of the day, SMART goals help reduce confusion when it’s time to review your strategy, helping to ensure you know what worked and what didn’t.

Connect individual goals to organizational goals.

Finally, if you’re creating a team-specific strategy, you may also want to set goals for individual team members. Building ownership and accountability into sales goals can help keep your team aligned, and it also makes your sales strategy more cohesive.

2. Create a customer profile that is tailored to a specific product offering.

A detailed profile of your target customer — a buyer persona — is an essential component of an effective sales strategy. Below, I’ve outlined the key steps to take when creating a buyer persona to ensure you come up with a useful profile:

Find target markets and segments.

First, look at your industry as a whole. Get a sense of your ideal customer’s company size, psychographics, and buying process. You may want to look at industry trends, too.

Conduct market research to understand customer needs and preferences.

Next, do some market research. This template can help you streamline the process and understand which types of research will be best for your business.

You may also want to do some competitor analysis at this stage. Once you know the strengths and weaknesses of competing brands, you can more easily find gaps that you can fill for specific customers.

Create a clear value proposition to attract your ideal customer to your product or service.

Finally, make sure your product offering outlines the benefits of your product for your target customer. It’s important to use insights from your customer profile to emphasize features that solve your target customer’s pain points.

Your business may already have a clear value proposition — but if not, you can use these free value proposition templates to draft one.

Quick tip : Be sure to schedule time to update and refine your buyer persona to make sure it stays aligned with current customer trends and expectations.

3. Hire, onboard, and compensate sales team members adequately.

To develop an effective sales strategy, you need to have a powerful sales team in place. That means investing in hiring, onboarding, and retaining top talent. Specifically, I have learned that there are three key components of building (and keeping) a supportive, successful sales team:

Create great processes for hiring new members of your sales team.

First and foremost, create a list of criteria for sales managers to screen for when interviewing candidates. A well-defined job description and competency framework are also useful. These tools can help your team recruit and retain top talent.

Develop sales onboarding, training, and development programs.

Your training and onboarding program should prepare your sales team to sell effectively and efficiently. It should also help sales reps build advanced skills and industry knowledge.

But what if you don’t have the resources to develop comprehensive training in-house? In these situations, it may be worth considering combining organization-specific training with online sales training programs .

Create a motivational compensation and rewards plan.

Finally, once you’ve built a strong team, it’s vital to ensure your compensation plan is set up to motivate and retain them.

Many organizations connect sales compensation to organizational sales goals, but regardless of the specific compensation plan you choose, make sure that it meets or exceeds industry expectations. It should also inspire your team to celebrate individual and team achievements.

4. Create a plan to generate demand.

Now, it’s time to put together a detailed plan for how to target potential customers and increase their awareness of your offering. This may include using paid social acquisition channels, creating e-books, hosting webinars, and the many other strategies laid out in this article.

Featured Resource: Sales Plan Template

Think about real-time performance tracking.

Of course, while business KPIs are useful for the long-term, fast-moving industries may need real-time tracking as well. To get an at-a-glance look at sales team performance, I’d suggest looking into tools that can give you instant visibility, such as HubSpot’s Sales Hub .

Real-time insights can help you quickly find and address issues, creating opportunities for proactive sales performance management.

Create a process for sharing performance data.

Ultimately, tracking performance metrics gives you the data you need to offer constructive feedback and coaching to each member of your team.

Whether you communicate via one-on-one meetings, performance reviews, or team huddles, it’s important to make space for these conversations. Regularly sharing and discussing performance data is a great way to understand performance gaps, offer guidance, and share best practices.

A process like this supports both individual and team development. Moreover, when issues inevitably arise, effective metrics can help you understand whether it’s your team or your strategy (or both) that needs extra attention.

6. Track sales activities.

Data is key to an effective sales strategy plan. With sales activity metrics, you can go beyond individual team performance to understand your entire sales operation.

Collect a range of sales activity data.

Sales activity metrics can help you understand how the team approaches day-to-day sales as a whole. As such, I’ve found that it can be helpful to track everything from the sales presentation to closing techniques.

Specifically, collect data to see how your sales team performs beyond call or deal numbers in activities, such as:

• Meetings scheduled.
• Presentations delivered.
• Proposals submitted.
• Sales presentation success rates.
• Closing techniques.

Then, comparing this data to other goal metrics can show you patterns, best practices, and areas for improvement.

Track, lead, and prospect sources.

It’s also vital to make sure you’re tracking where your prospects are coming from. For example, if you’ll be publishing thought leadership content or sourcing leads from social media, make sure that any link you share is trackable with a UTM parameter.

Trackable links aren’t just valuable for learning which channels are generating the most leads. They can also help you focus your resources on the channels that generate the most relevant, qualified leads for driving sales.

Focus on continuous improvement.

Once you have a complete set of analytics to track your strategy, use that data to refine your sales strategies, team knowledge, and plans. A clear, data-driven process will make it easier to use customer feedback to grow your sales. It will also give your sales team the agility to adapt to industry and market changes that may impact your business down the road.

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4. Listen to your prospects.

Just because prospects aren’t customers yet doesn’t mean they don’t have valuable feedback to offer.

As you move prospects through the sales funnel (and especially when they drop off), ask for candid feedback about their experience with your team and products. Even if they’ve lost interest, you may learn something that can help you convert your next prospect.

5. Invest in sales development and team-building.

The best sales teams align not only with their customers but also with their coworkers.

Sales is a difficult career, and without proper encouragement and camaraderie, people can easily become burned out. So, to keep your sales team feeling satisfied and supported, don’t forget to invest in sales development and team-building activities.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Create an action plan that drives results

An action plan outlines precisely how you’re planning to accomplish your goals. It’s the perfect way to approach goals systematically and keep your team on target. In this article, we will cover how to create an action plan in six steps and how to implement it successfully. Plus, learn more about the differences between action plans, project plans, and to-do lists.

It can feel good to make goals. After all, you’re defining what you want to accomplish. But goals won’t do much without clear action steps. ​​An action plan is a popular project management technique that lists your action steps so you know exactly how you’re going to accomplish your goals. 

We’re going to show you how to create this clear roadmap step by step and other tools you should utilize to get the most out of your action plan. Let’s dive in.

What is an action plan?

An action plan is a list of tasks or steps you need to complete to achieve your goals. An effective action plan works like a management plan for your company’s initiatives, outlining the steps you need to take to make these larger goals a success. Once you go through the goal-setting process, create an action plan with specific tasks and timeframes to reach each goal. 

Who needs an action plan?

An action plan is useful for anyone who needs a step-by-step planning process. When you create an action plan, you detail exactly what actions you'll take to accomplish your project goals. These plans can help you organize your to-dos and ensure you have the necessary information and resources to accomplish your goals.

But you can create action plans for more than just strategic planning. Use this tool to reach any specific goals in a systematic way. Try setting up:

Business action plan

Marketing action plan

Corrective action plan

Sales action plan

Project action plan

Personal development action plan

Regardless of the type of action plan you create, make sure you create it in task management software . That way, you can easily share action items and timelines with your team to track progress. Instead of manual status updates and unclear deliverables, your team has one central source of truth for everything they need to do in order to hit their goals. 

Now let’s get into how you can create an action plan that increases your team’s efficiency and accountability.

6 steps to create an action plan

Step 1: set a smart goal.

When it comes to setting goals, clarity is the single most important quality. With the SMART goal method, your goal is clearly defined and attainable. Set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound goals to benefit from this tactic.

For example, your goal could be to deliver your current project (measurable) in four months (time-bound) without overspending (specific). Assuming this goal is both achievable and realistic based on your available resources, it’s a great SMART goal to set for yourself.

Step 2: Identify tasks

Now that your goal is clearly defined and written down, you’ll want to identify the steps you have to take to reach it. Identify all of the tasks that you and your team need to complete to reach milestones and, eventually, the main objective.

Here are a few action plan examples with tasks for different kinds of goals:

Goal: Expand team from seven to nine team members by June.

Meet with Human Resources to discuss the recruitment campaign.

Create a template project to track candidates.

Schedule three interviews per week.

Goal: Select and onboard new work management software to the entire company by the end of Q2.

Apply for the budget.

Create a roll-out plan for Q2.

Schedule training for team members.

Goal: Host 5k charity run in May to raise $15,000 for the local food bank.

Find volunteers and determine responsibilities

Prepare marketing materials and PR plans

Secure sponsors

Step 3: Allocate resources

Once you’ve outlined all of your tasks, you can allocate resources like team members, project budget, or necessary equipment. Whether it’s assigning team members to certain tasks, applying for a budget, or gathering helpful tools—now is the time to plan and prepare.

Sometimes, you can’t allocate all of your resources before you put your action plan in motion. Perhaps you have to apply for funding first or need executive approval before you can move on with a task. In that case, make the resource an action item in your plan so you can take care of it later.

Step 4: Prioritize tasks

When your team is clear on their priorities, they know what work to do first and what work they can reschedule if necessary. No action plan is set in stone, so the best way to empower your team is to let them know what tasks have a high priority and which ones are a bit more flexible.

To make this clear, sort all of your action items by priority and sequence:

Priority: Important and less important tasks.

Sequence: Order in which tasks have to be completed so others can start.

When you’re organizing and prioritizing your action items , you’ll notice that some action items are dependent on others. In other words, one task can’t begin until the previous task is completed. Highlight these dependencies and factor the sequence into your prioritization. This reduces bottlenecks , removing obstacles that would make a less important action item delay a high-priority item.  

Step 5: Set deadlines and milestones

When your team knows what they're working towards, they have the context to effectively prioritize work and the motivation to get great work done. Team members tend to be more motivated when they directly understand how their work is contributing to larger goals.

To engage your teammates from the get go, assign deadlines to all action items and define milestones . Milestones mark specific points along your project timeline that identify when activities have been completed or when a new phase starts

Create a timeline or Gantt chart to get a better overview of your prioritized tasks, milestones, and deadlines. Your timeline also serves as a visual way to track the start and end dates of every task in your action plan. You can use it as a baseline to make sure your team stays on track.

Step 6: Monitor and revise your action plan

Your ability to stay on top of and adapt to changes is what makes you a great project manager. It’s crucial that you monitor your team’s progress and revise the plan when necessary.

Luckily, your action plan isn’t set in stone. The best way to track potentially changing priorities or deadlines is to use a dynamic tool like a work management software . That way, you can update to-dos and dependencies in real time, keep your team on the same page, and your action plan moving.

Action plan vs. plan B vs. project plan vs. to-do list

So how exactly does an action plan differ from all these other plans and lists? To clear this up once and for all, we’re going to explain what these plans are and when to use which plan to maximize your team’s efforts.

Action plan vs. plan B

You may have heard the terms action plan and plan B used interchangeably. But in fact, an action plan and plan B are two completely different types of plans. Here’s how to tell them apart:

Your action plan outlines actions in much detail so you and your team know exactly what steps to take to reach your goal.

A plan B is a secondary action plan, an alternative strategy, that your team can apply if your original plan fails. Whether that’s because of an internal issue or an external factor—having a plan B is a great way to be prepared for the worst case scenario.

Action plan vs. project plan

A project plan is a bit more complicated than an action plan. Project plans are blueprints of the key elements your team needs to accomplish to successfully achieve your project goals. A project plan includes seven elements:

Goals and project objectives

Success metrics

Stakeholders and roles

Scope and budget

Milestones and deliverables

Timeline and schedule

Communication plan

Once you’ve created a project plan, use an action plan to outline and document how your team will execute your tasks and hit your goals. This will ensure that everyone on your team knows what their responsibilities are and what to get done by when.

Action plan vs. to-do list

A to-do list is typically used to write down single tasks that don’t necessarily lead to one common goal. To-do lists can change daily and are much less organized than action plans. An action plan will follow specific steps and include tasks that all lead to the completion of a common goal.

How to implement your action plan successfully

You know how to create an action plan, but in order to implement it successfully, you need to use the right tools and use them correctly. Here are our top five tips to ensure your action plan is effective:

Use task management software

Streamline your action plan by keeping all of your tasks and timelines in one central source of truth. Task management software, like Asana , is perfect for your action plan because it allows you to keep track of pending tasks, declare task ownership, assign dependencies, and connect with your team in real time or asynchronously .

Use or create templates

Create or use a template that lists all the action items with notes, status, priority, and ownership. When you create a template that fits your project type, you can reuse it time and time again.

Set up real-time alerts and assign dependencies

Make sure all action items are time-bound and that you assign dependencies. That way, your team can react when an item is ready for them and easily track what other items depend on theirs. 

Check action items off as you complete them

When action items are completed, check them off! Make sure it’s visible to everyone and happens in real time so the person responsible for the next action item can start their work as soon as possible.

Discuss late or pending tasks

If you run into issues or delays, talk to your team to uncover potential bottlenecks and find solutions that keep the action plan on track. You can add notes directly into your action plan or set up calls to discuss more complex issues.

Ready, set, action plan

Like Benjamin Franklin once said: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” Creating an action plan helps you stay focused, on track, and brings your goals to life.

Plan to succeed with a structured action plan and helpful tools like Asana’s task management software. Connect and align with your team in a central source of truth while staying flexible enough to revise your action plan when necessary.

Related resources

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What is management by objectives (MBO)?

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How to accomplish big things with long-term goals

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Top 10 Sales Action Plan Templates with Samples and Examples

Deepika Dhaka

Black Friday is around the corner, the busiest shopping festival that gets its name from the fact that it turns retailer’s accounts from being “in the red” to being back “in the black.” Marking the start of the Christmas shopping season, most consumers have started planning and creating their list of purchases for Thanksgiving 2022.

As a business owner, however, are you prepared to capture their attention and fulfill demand? If not, begin now, or you might lose business to your competitors. Planning for Black Friday Sales is the key to standing out in a large crowd of retail businesses. Think about it! Every store, whether brick-and-mortar or e-commerce, is already coming up with promotional activities. Customers are busy searching for these. How do you catch their attention?

You can turn this Black Friday sale into significant profits for your business with the creation of a Sales Action Plan to help you prepare and roll out some effective sales tactics. And yes! Don’t let creating your Black Friday Sales plan frustrate you. It’s easier than you think to brand yourself as a class apart. All you need is a definitive Sales Action Plan that helps your business draw in the crowds and have cash registers ringing.

Sales Action Plan Templates

Before, we tour the PPT Templates, are you looking for a comprehensive module to train your sales team and improve their performance? Access our Sales Training Curriculum with content-ready, well-researched slides that will make your training program a terrific success!

Click Here to Download our Comprehensive Curriculum for Sales Training

SlideTeam presents the most popular Sales Action Plan Templates that global marketing leaders have found indispensable. The Black Friday Sale is just one instance of the application of these PowerPoint Templates, you can use these content-ready samples for all sales campaigns of the year.

Let’s explore these customizable templates!

Template 1: Sales Action Plan PowerPoint Presentation

Boost your top-line revenue growth and increase profitability with this Sales Action Plan Template, which is packed with content related to components, steps, and types of sales strategies. It will educate you on the benefits of sales strategies and the costs involved in the implementation. This PowerPoint Presentation also includes a strategic action timeline and guides on digital tools for enhancing the effectiveness of your sales strategies. Here you will also find slides to display statistics related to sales and a dashboard for your busy CEO. Grab it today if you are looking for a consolidated PPT Presentation on Sales Action Plan!

Download this template

Template 2: Yearly Sales Action Plan Template

This one-pager PowerPoint Template will help you hone in on tactics that will define how you can reach your set objectives. With this consolidated layout, you can talk about key sales channels, including online, wholesale, and in-store channels. Present your revenue targets, target customers, and budget allocation with this content-ready PowerPoint Template. At the top of the slide, you can mention your sales goals and the plan year, along with its budget. Display the products and services you offer to your customers along with the budgeted sales and the devised distribution strategy. You can download this pre-developed sales planning one-pager PPT Template instead of wasting time writing any presentation from scratch.

Template 3 : One-Pager Sales Action Plan Sheet

Are you struggling to develop a sales plan that can enrich and empower your business? This sales action plan template is the easiest and most graceful way to lay out your objectives, strategies, and tactics to optimize your sales channels. The strength of this one-page sales plan is that all your team members can understand it. It can help you identify potential obstacles and roadblocks so that you can come up with ways to overcome challenges. It includes six key parameters that will help you understand and study your sales channels. These are products and services, budgeted cost categories, projected sales, distribution strategies, proposed deadlines, and KPIs.  Download it today!

Template 4: Building an Actionable Sales Plan PPT Set

The PowerPoint Bundle provides a comprehensive framework for crafting a robust sales strategy. Encompassing key elements such as competitor analysis, distribution channel evaluation, and marketing strategy development, the template guides users through a systematic approach to understanding customer and market dynamics. The inclusion of a detailed channel marketing plan, launch strategy, and exploration of the buyer's journey ensures a holistic view of the sales process. Additionally, the template digs deep into effective lead-generation processes and activities, equipping users with the tools needed to drive successful sales outcomes. Download now!

Template 5 : Yearly Strategic Sales Action Plan Template

Peppered with eye-catching graphics, this Bi-Fold Yearly Strategic Sales Action Plan Template is a remarkable visual communication and promotion tool to bring attention to your business offerings. Use it to devise a successful sales campaign that speaks volumes about your products and grabs consumer interest. With plenty of industry-specific customizable shapes, visuals, graphics, and many more, this A4-size bi-fold design will help you create strategies and improve your customer engagement. Grab it today!

Template 6: 30-60-90 Day Sales Action Plan Template

Sales managers and new sales representatives will benefit from this stunning 30-60-90 Day Sales Plan because it documents the progress, challenges, and victories you record as you do business, day in and day out. You can use this PPT Template to ensure members of the sales team are growing in their roles and to identify any need for additional training or guidance. With this PPT Template documenting goals and accomplishments, it becomes easier to carry out the sales performance review process. Managers and their team members can see details of their work that they might have otherwise forgotten over time. Get it now!

Template 7: Sales Action Plan Steps Template

Presenting a six-step Sales Action Plan Template for an easy understanding of the concept and providing directions to the entire team. The first step is defining the sales objective, evaluating the current situation, listing barriers to success, assessing strengths and assets, creating a sales call strategy, and outlining an action plan. This complete and comprehensive process is presented here in a foolproof manner. Download it today to get started!

Template 8: Sales Action Plan with Brand Development and Advertisement

Use this Sales Action Plan Template to create a strong brand presence and reach the maximum target audience. This PPT Slide highlights vital elements of developing a brand. These elements focus on identifying top customers, advertising, increasing networks, and updating and developing a plan. It also offers suggestions on how to identify prospects and create a personalized approach plan. This presentation template also includes appealing icons to help you recall all these stages when needed. Download it now!

Template 9: 10-steps to Develop an Effective Sales Action Plan

Deploy this 10-step sales action plan template to give your employees direction and purpose. It will ensure that your staff have everything they need to achieve their goals when it comes to sales quotas and prospecting. The more detailed your action plan is, the less likely it is that your team will end up confused and struggling to make decisions for themselves. Using this foolproof plan, then, becomes a necessity. This PPT Slide entails activities that are a must-have for any sales plan. Grab it now!

Template 10: Sales and Marketing Action Plan Sample

Are you looking for a well-structured and easy-to-use sample to display your sales and marketing action plan? This PPT layout is an ideal pick to chart your online advertising and market research action plan. Use this template to track performance and make informed decisions for future sales planning, as it offers you the option of adding sub-categories. This table will help everyone stay on the same page and suggest necessary changes to bridge the gap between potential and performance. Download it now to speed up the process!

Template 11: Sales Action Plan T emplate for Online and Offline Channels

Increase your sales with the help of this strategic sales action plan for online and offline channels. It includes a comprehensive layout to tabulate the products and services to offer and the budgeted costs of in-store, online and wholesale channels. It will help you make informed calls regarding who you want to sell to, what your revenue goals are, and how you’re going to structure and prime your teams for success. Download it today to futureproof your business!

SALES SPELL SUCCESS

A sales action plan is the easiest way to draft your objectives, strategies, and tactics in a way that your team can understand and work effectively to achieve success. It helps you identify likely obstacles and roadblocks so that you can come up with ways to bridge the gaps and overcome challenges.

Now you are aware of how to create a compelling and practical sales action plan, it’s time to put your knowledge into action by downloading these powerful PPT Templates.

FAQs on Sales Action Plan

What is a sales action plan.

A sales action plan highlights your tactics to achieve your sales goals, focusing on transactions and relationships that you can develop with customers. It gives information about who you want to sell to, what your revenue goals are, and how you’re going to prepare an effective team to achieve success. An effective sales plan should communicate your sales objectives and goals and outline the roles and responsibilities of the team. It should also be able to deliver strategic direction to your sales team.

What are the steps of preparing a sales action plan?

The ten crucial steps of preparing an effective sales plan are:

• Identify yourself to customers; what do you stand for, and what do you offer
• Identify prospects; who will or should buy from you and why? Be clear on this
• Identify team members
• Create an approach plan
• Use the power of advertisements well
• Invest in brand Development
• Increase Network
• Take Feedback
• Update and develop Plan
• Track Performance

Why having a Sales Action Plan is important?

A Sales Action Plan helps you give your sales team the guidance that they need to make smart business decisions. With a Sales Action Plan, you support your sales team members by addressing issues that are within your direct control, such as a lack of guidance and direction. Once you are in the game, improved results are a given.

A sales plan includes a strategy that works for your representatives and ensures that they have everything they need to follow to achieve the targets that are handed out. With a robust sales plan in hand, you’ll find that the meetings, demos, and closed deals will be natural results that will help enter the success cycle; most importantly, you will be able to stay there as well.

Related posts:

• How To Draft A Yearly Sale Plan With Sample Templates To Boost Your Annual Sales! [Free PDF Attached]
• Top 10 Sales Strategy Plan Templates with Samples and Examples
• Top 10 Sales Growth Plan Templates with Samples and Examples 
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Thought Leadership

The 4-step action plan to increase sales.

There is no ‘one size fits all’ in sales. However, there are some basics principles that can help businesses lay the foundations of an effective action plan to increase sales.

Sales can be incredibly overwhelming for first-time entrepreneurs. Because unlike other functions of business, you can’t cookie-cutter a sales strategy from another business to use as a starting point to increase sales. Business owners need to be creative and resourceful in figuring out the best sales plan for their products or services.

You can add as many steps and planning decisions to your sales strategy, but there are 4 steps in particular which shouldn’t be ignored.

Step 1 – Research

You can’t sell to new customers if you don’t know your existing customers. Define your target market and build a customer profile from within it. You can gather data from resources available online or from analysis of purchasing habits of existing customers.

Step 2 – Diversify

Don’t limit yourself to one platform. Spread marketing efforts across multiple channels and target it to more than one audience. This way you not only lessen risk but are able to find out which platform is most lucrative and should demand a larger share of your marketing and sales budget.

Step 3 – Set goals that increase sales

The mark of good management lies in performance measurement. Therefore, set sales targets before executing your sales plan and determine what metrics can be used to measure it. Goals include both the objectives of your sales strategy and the numbers you wish to achieve.

Step 4 – Monitor and adjust

Once you’ve created and implemented your sales plan, you need to begin monitoring results. Are the numbers matching what you expected? Are there additional unforeseen costs in a campaign? What’s the customer feedback? Ask questions and adjust your sales plan accordingly.

Learn how we can help your business grow profitably today.

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I n sales, goals are everything.

They motivate sellers and hold them accountable. They create benchmarks and set standards for what success should look like.

Additionally, sales goals keep managers and reps focused on objectives that align with the big-picture plan.

While goals play a crucial role in the sales strategy, defining measurable objectives that drive wins isn’t exactly easy.

According to the Harvard Business Review , most goals are missed because there’s a problem with the goals. By contrast, only about 10-20% of missed goals were missed because of the salesperson.

SMART (an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timebound) is a goal-setting framework for setting quantifiable goals. It not only defines the target outcome, but it also tells you how you’re supposed to get there.

In this article, I’ll explain how (and why) to use SMART goals for sales.

What are SMART goals?

In sales, SMART represents a series of steps designed to guide the goal-setting process, much like how lead qualification methodologies like BANT or MEDDIC help sellers determine whether a prospect is the right fit.

Instead of qualifying leads, SMART essentially helps you “qualify” goals so that you stay focused on tasks that move the needle in the right direction.

Each letter in “SMART” represents a step in the goal-setting process. I’ll explain each of them in these next few sections.

Goals must be clear, with no room for ambiguity.

For example, if a sales goal contains words like “more” or “less,” it’s not specific. As such, goals like “increase revenue” or “make more calls” won’t cut it by a long shot.

Instead, set goals by working through the “five W’s.”

• What do you want to accomplish?
• Why does this goal matter?
• Where is it located?
• Who is involved?
• Which resources are required?

Failing to set specific goals makes it difficult to achieve desired outcomes and can cause sellers to become frustrated or lose momentum . This first step helps teams avoid wasting time chasing vague objectives that don’t mean anything.

Sales SMART goals must also be “measurable,” which means that you can quantify and track progress using tangible numbers. As such, something like “increase average deal size” alone isn’t a SMART goal, because you don’t have enough information to measure that increase.

Measurement can be used as a tool for outlining objectives by requiring you to answer the following questions:

• Where’s the starting point?
• What’s your desired outcome?
• How will you know when you hit your target?

Being able to measure sales processes and results is essential for making consistent progress and not stagnating. In the modern age of digital sales, that calls for tools that can make sense of the large variety and quantity of data that even small organizations generate. Take Revenue Grid, for example, which turns your sales teams’ activity with opportunities and accounts into easy to understand charts and graphs for quick reporting.

SMART goals are also realistic.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Goals should be challenging but not impossible. If you set the bar too high, your reps are likely to get frustrated or ignore goals altogether. On the other hand, you don’t want to set goals that are too easy. 
• Set goals based on data, using factors like rep performance and the numbers you need to hit in order to break even, and what needs to happen in order to grow.
• Stick to what you can control—meaning, goals should focus on actions over results. Focusing too much on outcomes can actually hinder rep performance, and by extension, hurt the bottom line. For example, instead of telling reps that they need to close 15 deals this quarter, tell them they need to make 20 calls this week or send 30 emails.

It’s worth mentioning that “stretch goals,” a term used to describe the ambitious targets companies set for solving “moonshot-level” challenges belong in a different category.

According to HBR , stretch goals are often misused by sales leaders who view them as a way to challenge and energize salespeople. The article states that missing stretch goals can create a culture of fear and helplessness that can undermine performance and incentivize unethical behavior a la Wells Fargo’s 2013 fraudulent cross-selling scandal .

When used appropriately, stretch goals can drive innovation. However, by definition, they go beyond existing capabilities, meaning they’re not realistic.

The next thing you’ll want to look at is relevance.

Focus on goals that make sense for both your reps and align with the big-picture business strategy. SMART goals for sales should always focus on moving the organization toward a vision of the future.

Even if you’re setting short-term goals, you’ll want to make sure that you do so with the long-term plan in mind.

Check for relevance by working through the following questions:

• Does this goal support organization-wide objectives?
• Does it align with other initiatives in progress?
• Does this seem worthwhile?
• Is now the right time?
• Are there other areas we should be focusing on instead?
• Does it make sense based on the current state of the market?

Finally, every goal should have a definitive deadline attached. Setting a timeline makes it easier to report your progress and allows you to set smaller milestones to hit along the way to ensure you’re moving in the right direction.

Setting SMART goals for sales is about more than establishing one final deadline, it also helps teams prioritize tasks and get more done—plus it adds an element of urgency.

You can use time to understand when and where to break down steps within each goal by answering the following questions:

• When does this need to be done?
• What can sellers do today?
• Where should we be in a month?
• In six months?

While deadlines will vary by project length and complexity, the aim here is to determine what can be accomplished within a specific timeframe. With longer projects, it’s useful to define expectations at key milestones.

SMART action plan for sales: how to get started

Now that we’ve covered the basics of the SMART goals, here are some tips to help you implement this strategy right.

Focus on “activity goals”

Activity goals are often considered the most actionable SMART goals because you can control the main variable. While you can’t control conversion rates or revenue, activity goals tend to be an effective way to increase sales numbers.

For example, you might set: “run five guided demos per week” as a goal. Although that number might change based on the persona or segment, the target number remains directly connected to a measurable desired outcome.

• Are there any limitations you need to consider?
• What is the result of achieving this goal? 
• What happens if we don’t reach this goal?

From there, you’ll want to determine which goals have the biggest impact on the bottom line and progress toward high-level objectives. Set those “high-impact goals” as your top priority and use them to set team-level targets.

Find the best way to incentivize individual reps

Sales goals aren’t just about revenue.

You’ll also want to take individuals’ professional goals into account, and use them to inform your coaching strategy.

Establish sales goals that will inspire your team to challenge themselves and improve. Talk to each of your reps on an individual level about their strengths, weaknesses and professional goals. What do they hope to improve?

While development might not have a direct impact on the bottom line in the near-term, investing in your reps can boost retention and drive major performance gains.

Define how you’ll measure success

If you’re focusing on improving sales productivity with activity-based goals, you’ll want to track KPIs that quantify what reps are doing all day including:

• Time-spent prospecting 
• Emails sent
• Demos hosted
• Meetings booked

To measure the impact of your efforts, you can work backward to arrive at the goal.

Let’s say a rep needs one more sale per week to hit quota. You might then focus on increasing the number of calls they make each day.

So, if that rep averages one sale every 15 calls, they’ll need to make three more calls a day to get that extra deal.

From there, you can update that individual’s targets to reflect that change and see if things improve. If they’re still struggling, you can build phone sales tactics into that person’s coaching sessions.

Develop a plan for failed goals

Sadly, a lot of goals fail.

Make sure that your strategy makes room for learning from failures so that you don’t repeat past mistakes and helps you get up and running with a new and improved plan.

“Specific,” “measurable” goals allow you to evaluate failed objectives and pinpoint what went wrong. Ideally, you’ll be able to look at your numbers and answer the following questions:

• What roadblocks did the team encounter?
• Did the sales team have the resources needed to achieve target objectives?
• Did reps have the right experience/capabilities to take this on?

Make sure sellers have the tools they need

According to Forrester Research , B2B sellers are up against a long list of roadblocks as they work toward key milestones. If sellers are struggling to hit targets, there might be a problem with your sales enablement strategy .

Consider the following as you evaluate your team’s ability to hit goals:

• Do sellers have access to the data they need to personalize customer experiences? 
• Can they find sales collateral?
• Are there internal silos that prevent sellers from accessing critical information?
• Are marketing & sales teams in alignment?

Final thoughts

Without well-defined goals to work toward, sales reps can get frustrated and lose steam, which in turn, can have a negative impact on sales performance and revenue.

SMART goals offer sales leaders a system for setting objectives that contribute to the organization’s success and help them figure out exactly what it takes to hit those targets.

Ultimately, sales SMART goals ensure that your sales team has something to strive for, and helps leaders benchmark performance, measure progress and determine what’s working and what isn’t.

Grace is an experienced B2B content writer & strategist for SaaS, digital marketing, & tech brands from Los Angeles, California. With a knack for turning complex concepts into compelling narratives, she has assisted numerous brands in developing impactful content strategies that engage audiences and drive business growth. Her wealth of experience in the ever-evolving tech world has equipped her with a unique perspective on industry trends and dynamics, enabling her to deliver content that resonates with a tech-savvy audience.

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• 17 SMART Sales Goals Examples for 2024 [With an Action Plan]

Sales goals are important.

Hit your goals, and you’re more likely to grow.

Fail to meet your sales goals though, and growth plateaus.

When we asked 138 sales professionals from different business verticals about their yearly revenue targets they achieved by September 2021, the response was alarming.

More than 60% of sales reps weren’t even close to achieving their yearly sales quota .

A HubSpot survey reported similar results as nearly 40% of companies stated that they failed to achieve their sales goals in 2020.

Shocked? We were.

And it left us wondering if there’s a way to help people achieve their sales goals.

After all, we’re a sales execution platform. 

Our goal is to help our customers achieve their sales goals.

So, we decided to put together a easy to follow action plan for companies to achieve their sales goals.

Here we go!

What are sales goals?

Sales goals are the objectives a company or a team wants to achieve in a given time. It gives sales teams a roadmap of what they need to do to help their company achieve specific targets.

There can be different types of sales goals. For example, revenue goals, customer acquisition goals, customer retention goals, and more. For example,

• Increase sales revenue by 15% in the next quarter.
• $15,000 in sales revenue per representative per month.
• Increase customer acquisition rate by 10%.

Reduce customer defection rate by 3% in the next year.

• Reduce the churn rate to 5%.
• ACV of $180k per sales rep in 2024.
• Make 40 cold calls per day.
• Reduce response time to a maximum of 4 minutes.

In the subsequent sections, we will discuss sales goals examples in detail. But first, let’s look at why it is necessary to set up goals.

Why create sales goals?

Simply put, those who have goals are 10 times more successful than those without them.

And those who have written goals are 3 times more successful than those with unwritten goals.

Interesting, right?

But does this happen in reality?

I’m worried; it doesn’t.

Whether it’s a personal or professional goal, we fail because we don’t know what we’re doing and why.

Let’s look at it from an organization’s perspective.

Many individuals contribute to the organization’s goals.

For example, to achieve $$ revenue goals of a company, every team member is assigned a target, and they work towards achieving them.

Seems pretty straightforward, isn’t it?

But it’s not.

In reality, you’ll find a lot of moving parts between planning and execution.

Let’s say you’ve set sales goals for the coming year.

You have also set up your team and assigned them tasks. But, in the middle of the quarter, one of your team members decides to switch. In that case, if you don’t take appropriate action in time, the goal you’ve set will be in jeopardy.

That’s why setting up sales goals, having an action plan and tracking progress is important.

But not just any goals. The goals you set for your team must be SMART.

Let’s discuss the components of a SMART sales goal in detail.

How to create SMART sales goals

In the context of sales goals, SMART refers to:

• Specific: The goals should clearly define the expectations
• Measurable: The metrics and criteria you define for the goals should be measurable
• Attainable: The goals should be challenging yet attainable
• Relevant: Makes sense for your business and team
• Time-bound: Should have a timeline to accomplish them

Here’s an example of a SMART sales goal.

Specific: Your goal is to acquire 600 customers by the end of March 2024. It’s specific and sets a target.

Measurable: You know that you’ll have to make 40 calls per day (assuming 1 in 4 prospects you call converts).

So, 10 customers per day for 60 working days = 600 customers in 3 months.

Note, you can easily measure the number of calls made per day.

Attainable: Making 40 calls in a day is doable. Setting a target of 100 calls is unrealistic.

Relevant: It should fit with the mission of your company. In this case, it makes sense if your sales process depends on cold calling.

Time-bound: 40 calls per day until March 2024 gives a clear timeline to achieve the goal.

Now follow these steps to define and execute your sales goals.

3 Steps to create successful sales goals

Let’s break it down into three main steps:

• Define goals

Create an action plan

Track performance, define your goals.

You’ll need to define (set) goals:

1. To track metrics: You must set goals on metrics that are important for your business growth. For example, lead generated, the number of calls or meetings scheduled, the number of deals closed, etc.

2. Across the organization’s hierarchy : In an organization, team members will have different roles and KRAs. So, you must set goals and KPIs for individuals as well. For example, revenue targets may not be relevant to the graphic designer.

3. For various cycles : Different KPIs have different timelines. For example, revenue goals are measured on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. Whereas lead generation goals are measured on a daily/weekly basis.

The goals you define should be fact-based . It shouldn’t be based on whims.

You should evaluate your previous year’s performance, average order value, conversion rate, sales cycle , resources, etc., and accordingly set a realistic goal.

Note that a goal without an action plan is just another new year resolution – unattended and unaccomplished.

So, the next step is to put your plan into action.

An action plan is a well-defined description of goals. It describes the steps that need to be carried out to achieve the goal within a specified time.

For example, if your goal is to bring $100k in revenues next year, your action plan should look like this:

1. Form a team for different aspects of your sales process , such as:

• Lead generation (marketing)
• Lead qualification (SDRs)
• Inside sales for follow ups.

2. Define KPIs for teams and individuals

• Marketing should generate at least X leads/week
• Every SDR (Sales development representative) must do Y discovery calls per day and qualify leads
• The inside sales team must nurture and add Z qualified leads to the pipeline per week.
• The sales representatives or account executives must follow up and close XY deals per month.
• Assign goals to the individuals.
• Equip your teams with the required tools and technology to help them in their day-to-day tasks.

Once the team members are on the same page, know their goals, and are ready to perform, the next thing you must do is track the progress.

As we said, there are several moving parts between planning and execution. Sometimes you might fall short of resources, while other times, external factors like competition, socio-political or environmental conditions might disrupt your business.

That’s why you need to keep a tab on the sales metrics and whether or not you’re on track to achieve your goals.

Now, if you plan to do this manually, you’ll end up deploying more resources in data crunching.

Instead, you can use CRM software to manage your leads, sales reps, and more in one place. With this, you can also generate automated reports and dashboards to keep an eye on the achievements.

So, now you know what’s happening in your team. How far you are from achieving your sales goals. If the destination seems hazy, the obvious step you must take is – improve.

Improve performance

Keeping a tab on sales KPIs will help you spot underachievers and overachievers. While the strategies of star performers can inspire others, training and support can help underachievers.

The following are the ways to improve your team members’ performances.

• Nudges : Motivate users at the right time using relevant nudges via web notifications, mobile, and emails.
• Gamification : Inspire your teams to perform more, break the records using leaderboards , incentives (e.g., SPIFF ), and more.

So, now you know how to create and execute goals. Let’s look at the sales goals examples you can use for your business.

17 SMART sales goals examples

Revenue goals are the targets to increase the gross or net profits of the company. They reflect the cash flow a business needs to generate each year to cover all expenses while making profits. Revenue goals can be set for a team, region, or product line for a specific timeline.

Here are some examples.

• $15,000 in sales revenue for each representative per month.
• Generate $1.2M in 2024 from Alaska.

2. Unit sales

This sales goal applies to all businesses that sell physical products or services. You can set a quota for your sales team to achieve within a timeline.

For example, you can set a sales goal of 100 units per week for your sales reps .

3. Customer acquisition

Companies drive revenues from both – new and existing customers. Customer acquisition as a sales goal focuses solely on acquiring (gaining) new customers.

• Increase customer acquisition rate by 10% per quarter.
• Acquire 100k new customers from Florida.

4. Lower the customer acquisition cost

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total cost you incur to acquire a customer. When your CAC is lower, you can make more profit from a sale.

CAC involves all costs like-

• Wages and commissions of sales reps
• Calling costs
• Marketing and sales expenses
• Tools and software costs

To calculate CAC, divide the total cost of acquiring customers by the number of customers acquired.

That is, if you spend $100 to acquire 100 customers in a year, your CAC is $1.

You can create sales goals to lower the CAC.

Reduce the customer acquisition cost to 80% by next quarter.

You can also refer to the following industry benchmarks for the CAC .

5. Market share

Usually, large enterprises and aggressive start-ups target market share as a sales goal. For instance, you must have heard of Amazon’s relentless strategies to capture market share across several segments.

6. Customer retention

Customer retention refers to the activities to reduce customer defections.

In contrast, customer defection rate is the number of customers who cancel their subscription or stop making regular purchases. The lower the defection rate, the higher is your customer retention and spend.

An example of this goal could be:

7. Improve NPS

NPS or Net Promoter Score is an important sales KPI to boost customer loyalty and retention.

It indicates customer satisfaction and the likelihood of customers to recommend your products or services to others.

• Reduce detractors by 5%
• Increase promoters by 5%

Note that assigning absolute number targets for NPS may lead to score-begging. So, instead, assign relative targets to your reps to understand if you’re actually improving the service quality or not.

8. Reduce customer churn

Customer churn is the number of customers who stopped using your company’s product or service during a certain period.

Churn is unavoidable.

However, if your churn rate is above the industry average, you should be alarmed.

You must find out why your customers churn and ways to make them stay.

Anything like competitor pricing, new market entrants, outdated product features, poor customer service, etc., could lead to churn. But sustainable brands ensure a balance between customer acquisition and retention.

For example, you can set goals to reduce the churn rate to 5%.

9. Customer lifetime value

A customer lifetime value (CLV) is a long-term prediction of the future values of your customers’ interactions.

It is an important business metric that measures how much a business can earn from the average customer over the course of the relationship.

Increasing CLV as a sales goal looks something like this:

• Increase the average customer lifetime value from $80k to $100k.
• Increase the average customer relationship period from 3 years to 5 years.

10. Annual contract value

Annual contract value or ACV is the average annual revenue generated from each customer contract.

Businesses that depend on subscriptions or rentals can use the annual contract value to set targets and commissions.

You can multiply the monthly target of a rep in his annual contract value to get the final value.

So, if a rep’s monthly target is $15,000, then annual contract value is $15,000 x 12 = $1,80,000. You can also include one-time sales in the yearly contract value.

• ACV of $6 million from North America in 2024.

11. Lead generation goals/prospecting

Qualified leads are more likely to convert. The more qualified leads you get, the more deals you can close . You can set a target for your sales team to generate, say, 50 qualified leads per month with at least 75% on the qualification score .

12. Sales cycle goals

A sales cycle refers to the time it takes to convert a lead into a customer. Companies that have shorter sales cycles sell more and earn more revenues.

Let’s say your sales cycle is 6 weeks. You can set a goal to cut it down to 4.5 weeks.

Note that some industries incur longer sales cycles . So be aware of the optimum sales cycle for your business to create a sales cycle goal.

13. Sales activities: email marketing

You can turn the activities of your reps or sales team into targets. These are applicable when you set goals for people down the organizational hierarchy.

Here are some examples of email marketing goals.

• Increase demo sign-ups from email campaigns by 20%.
• Hit 5% email open rate target.

For this, you’ll need to track email KPIs closely.

You can either use email marketing software or CRM software like LeadSquared that supports marketing campaigns.

The following screenshot illustrates how LeadSquared CRM helps you keep an eye on your email metrics and devise strategies to improve them.

14. Sales activities: cold calling

Similar to the above sales goals example, you can give cold calling targets to your inside sales teams. For example,

• Increase cold calling by 20 leads per day.

You can also use LeadSquared CRM software to manage contacts and cold calling activities on a single platform.

15. Sales activities: speed-to-lead

Speed-to-lead, or the average lead response time, is the average time it takes for a sales rep to respond to an inbound lead.

It is advised to contact a lead within 5 minutes of the inquiry. Not doing so decreases the odds of qualifying the lead by 80% .

So, improving lead response time or increasing the speed-to-lead can be a sales goal for an individual. Here are some examples.

• Increase speed-to-lead by 50%

If you’re wondering if this is a call-center metric , you’re wrong.

Speed-to-lead as a sales goal applies to all sales and customer service departments.

16. Sales activities: meetings/demos

Again, this is an individual sales goal, generally given to the SDR (Sales Development Representatives) teams.

The aim is to build a sales pipeline for the account executives. For example, you can give your reps a target to schedule 20 meetings per week .

17. Business expansion goals

Business expansion goals are similar to the revenue and market share goals but with a strong focus on the region. For example,

• Drive $6 million ARR from the United States in 2024.
• Capture 40% consumer durable market share in Texas by 2025.

So, these were some of the sales goals examples that you can set for your teams.

However, it’s essential to use software to track sales goals and measure every individual’s contribution towards achieving those goals.

I’d like to share a story of how LeadSquared helped a leading travel booking company track its sales performances.

How LeadSquared helped a leading travel company plan and act on sales goals

One of our customers in the travel segment was facing challenges in creating sales goals and monitoring them. The problem became serious when they started expanding across geographics.

Some of the pressing challenges were:

• Managing employees and tracking their progress /work log on excel sheets was ineffective
• Data loss due to multiple sheets and inconsistent data flow across systems.
• Monitoring achievements on the whiteboard was just not right.
• The management wasn’t able to track individual and team performances .

“Keeping track of our agents’ conversations, monitoring our teams, and evaluation of productivity became tedious as the operations scaled,” says the company’s Inside Sales Head.

After implementing LeadSquared, the management was able to set clear objectives for the team. Monitoring them regularly helped them improve critical business metrics. The main functional areas that contributed to increased sales efficiency are:

• Setting up talk time targets
• Setting up meeting activity targets
• Tracking lead activities

With LeadSquared, they were able to:

“We were able to configure all the required targets for our team like how many leads we are getting, what actioning has been done, what is conversion rate, how many leads have been closed by the team w.r.t their target. Being able to configure all different kinds of targets makes goals a very critical feature for us now,” says the company’s spokesperson.

In conclusion

While setting up sales goals gives clarity and direction to organizational success, tracking progress ensures that you have everything you need to achieve your goals.

If you have a plan but are not able to track progress, it’s high time to invest in a tool that helps you just do that. And while you do, do check out LeadSquared sales performance suite. LeadSquared has helped leading organizations like BYJU’S, Dunzo, and many more achieve and exceed their sales goals. To see it in action,

Nidhi is a content writer/editor at LeadSquared. She works closely with sales professionals and senior management to bring their outlook into her write-ups. Connect with her on LinkedIn or write to her at [email protected].

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7 Bulletproof Strategies to Increase Sales and Make More Money Use these sales strategies to fuel exponential growth for your business.

By R.L. Adams Edited by Dan Bova May 15, 2019

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Sales. It's the lifeblood of a business. The proverbial heartbeat of an organization. Without it? A business would cease to exist. With it? Endless opportunities await for expansion and world domination. But try as they might, most business owners struggle with sales. Entrepreneurs around the world grapple with the inability to make more money . The truth? It's not easy. Especially when you don't understand the mechanics of what it takes to increase sales in any business.

So why is this so complex? Why is it a problem that's plagued business owners since the dawn of time? Today, in the so-called digital age, the struggle is most certainly real. Is it for lack of information? Certainly not. There's plenty of information out there. In fact, there's so much information that it's often overwhelming. Add that to all the misguided information out there, and it's enough to frustrate any entrepreneur trying to drum up more sales. In the end, who do you trust? Where do you turn to? What method or sales strategy do you implement without breaking the proverbial bank?

You see, here's the thing. It doesn't matter where you start. Most entrepreneurs think that in order to increase top-line revenue, they need to have a massive marketing budget or major influence in an industry. You don't. In fact, the evidence is all around us. What you do need to understand are the key performance indicators (KPIs) in your business. Things like traffic, leads and conversions. Clearly, sales don't come automatically. But you certainly don't need a massive budget to get the proverbial word out. Especially these days.

How to Increase Your Sales

My good friend, Maritza Meza Giusti, co-founder of the Meza group, came to this country as an immigrant and decided to sell real estate. With no money, no connections and zero resources, she managed to become a top real estate agent in South Florida and recently sold the most-expensive condo resale in Fort Lauderdale history . I asked her what were the skills that led to her ability to build such a thriving business. Her answer? The ability to build rapport and understand the needs of her customers. That's it.

Related: The 9 Best Shopify Apps to Increase Sales Available for Free

Parham Donyai, the founder of LA Muscle, one of the leading supplement companies in the world, has a similar immigrant story. His family moved from Iran when he was 14. They lost their home and struggled immensely. Growing up, he wasn't handed anything on a silver platter. Yet, with no money and no connections, he built a supplement empire. I asked him how he took a concept and entered into a crowded market to dominate the sphere. His answer? Add an immense amount of value to the marketplace.

Donyai also tells me that it's not about the price you sell your products or your services at. He introduced products that were sometimes 500% higher in price than his competitors. Yet, he managed to secure a huge market share. Sure, some consumers are very price-aware. They'll shop for the best deal. But when you add an exceedingly large amount of value to the marketplace, price objections begin to fall like dominoes. Add to that your ability to gain the market's attention, and it's a winning recipe for skyrocketing sales.

That got me really thinking about the mechanics of sales and what it takes to exponentiate results in business. You don't need formal education. Nor do you need a massive budget. But, whether we're talking about the real estate industry, supplements or any other business or niche, you do need real discipline and the ability to stay motivated no matter what. We're talking about real commitment here. Because let's face it, it's really easy to get discouraged and give up. We all want to throw in the towel from time to time. But that's where the real gains happen.

1. Solve the customer's problems

If you're not solving problems for your customers, then the likelihood of you increasing your sales over time will dwindle. However, if your products and services solve major problems, your chances of exponentiated sales climb substantially. In business, it's all about problem-solving. Find the pain point, and then solve that pain. Clearly, pain equates to problems. And the bigger the problem, the bigger the potential for earning a windfall of cash by solving it.

So how do you implement this into a sales process? Easy. Talk to your customers. Understand them better. What are they struggling with? How well does your current products or services solve their problems? Are there things that you could be missing? Until you actually talk to your customers, there's no way of knowing firsthand. Don't just chalk this up to something you know and don't want to do. If you don't take massive action, you can't expect massive results.

Related: How Marketers Are Using Chatbots to Increase Sales

2. Money follows attention

There is no such thing as overexposure. Often, we think about scaling things back. Especially when we get criticism. But the truth is that money follows attention. So why would you scale things back rather than push things forward? What does that mean? Write that article. Record that podcast . Shoot that video. Post on social media 5 to 10 times per day. If you're afraid that you might be over-doing it, think again. That's not your problem. Your problem is obscurity.

Don't shy away from attention. Take every chance you can get to be in the spotlight. Whether that means social media or big media, do whatever it takes. Give a resounding yes to those podcast interviews. Say yes when asked to speak in front of a group, no matter what the size. You see, the more attention you get, the more people know your name. And the more people know your name, the more chance they have to buy more of whatever it is that you're selling.

3. Handle objections like a pro

Objections are the not-so-silent killers of the sale . Ever have a potential customer tell you that they need time to think about it? Maybe they told you that it was too much money and they had to talk to their spouse. Or, maybe it was that they're already using your competitor's products or services. Whatever it is, these objections can destroy the sale. And it's your job to handle those objections like a pro. How? This is not just about what you're selling or the industry or the niche. This is about understanding the customer implicitly.

Why do we buy things in the first place? How come one person can justify spending $10,000 on a watch while another can't bear to spend $100? You see, price is merely an objection. It's not about the price. If price becomes the focus, you move into dangerous waters. It then becomes transactional and not based on what value the product or service can deliver. Like Donyai, you can introduce expensive products or services into the marketplace as long as they add sincere value.

Oftentimes, the best way to overcome any of these objections is to use customer testimonials or examples of how your products and services have helped others. Social proof is one of the strongest factors that help overcome these types of objections, along with your ability to provide a bulletproof guarantee that it will deliver. In that way, you can easily crush most objections that come your way and increase sales in your business as a result.

4. Utilize old-school persuasion techniques

Sometimes, we need to be persuaded to buy. Now, there's nothing wrong with persuasion. It boils down to a true understanding of human nature and why we do the things that we do. If you want to persuade someone to buy something, you have to understand the nature of human beings in the first place. Understand things like influence through micro-commitments , you can literally crush your sales goals. When you can get someone to agree to very small things, they are far more likely to agree to something bigger (like the offer or the sale).

This is where your ability to build rapport, much like Giusti, will help to skyrocket your chances of closing the sale. Why? Because people buy from those that they like, and with who they can find common ground. It's very much about understanding the customer. Yet, it's also about finding commonalities and building rapport. The best salespeople in the world instantly work to build rapport off the bat. Even if this means simply using the person's name if you don't have any common ground or looking them in the eyes confidently.

Related: How to Use Google Reviews to Increase Customers and Sales

5. Create an affiliate army

Affiliates are the key to massive rollouts of any product or launch. If you can successfully leverage an affiliate army, you can substantially increase your chances for securing any sale. That's especially true when your affiliates are influencers in your field. How do you do it? First of all, you have to create an affiliate program and define a percentage that you're willing to give up from the sale. Keep in mind that even if you have to give away half of the sale to an affiliate, it's far better than having no sales at all.

Some affiliates can also drive substantial amounts of traffic towards your products, services and offers. Yet, not all affiliates will want to help you sell whatever it is that you're peddling. You can use existing websites to find affiliates or you can simply build out your own affiliate program and do it on your own. Either way, affiliates can certainly add fuel to the fire in any sales scenario. However, vetting the right affiliates is certainly the key to success in the arena of affiliate marketing .

6. Use urgency and ethical scarcity

Two of the most powerful forces when it comes to sales are both urgency and scarcity. How does it work? You see it all the time. There's a sale that's going to end soon. That gives some urgency to take action. Or, there are only 10 spots left for a particular event. That's scarcity at play. These two forces play off of basic human behavior. As humans, we often want what we can't have (or soon can't have). And, when there's a deadline for action, it forces us to act. Plain and simple.

Think about it yourself. It comes back to basic supply and demand. When supply is low, demand often increases. When there's a so-called run on the banks, that's scarcity at play. We often call this FOMO in pop-culture. When you have the fear of missing out on something, it forces you to act, and often rather quickly. However, you have to use ethical scarcity. It has to be legitimate. Otherwise, you risk the chance of upsetting customers. You can't say that a sale is ending tomorrow then restart that sale two days later. It's simply not ethical scarcity.

7. Provide something for free to get customers in the door

There is real power in the word "free." It gets customers in the door. And it's a powerful motivator for taking action on many levels. Dan Ariely, a Duke behavioral economist and author of Predictably Irrational , conducted an experiment using Hershey's Kisses and Lindt Truffles. The goal? To see how powerful of a motivator "free" actually is. Test subjects were offered a Lindt truffle for 15 cents or a Hershey's Kiss for one cent . Smelling a bargain, 73% bought the truffle. Then the price dropped a penny off of each — a 14 cent truffle or a free Hershey's Kiss. Now, only 31% choose the truffle. Although the difference was merely a penny, suddenly people couldn't resist the lure of a free snack.

There is real power in the word free, and it's hard to acquire new customers. And anything you can do to increase your odds of getting those customers is something you should consider. But you can't just give something away for free. That free offer should start in a sales funnel and lead into things like one-click up-sells, order bumps and even one-time offers. This way, your free front-end offer ends up yielding a substantial increase in sales across the board.

Entrepreneur, software engineer, author, blogger and founder of WanderlustWorker.com

Robert Adams is a writer, blogger, serial entrepreneur, software engineer and best-selling author of dozens of technology, SEO, online marketing and self-development books, audiobooks and courses.

Want to be an Entrepreneur Leadership Network contributor? Apply now to join.

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4-Step Action Plan to Achieve Sales Targets

As we round out the first half of the year, it’s a great time to regroup, recalibrate, and prepare our sales teams to hit the year-end sales goals we’ve set for them.

Maybe your sales team has veered slightly off track since the target was set? By assessing your current situation and creating an updated action plan, your team will have a roadmap to follow and a renewed motivation for how to achieve your sales target.

Follow this 4-step action plan for sales target achievement:

Step 1- Analyze the Past

Analyzing trends in your results up to this point in the year allows you to pinpoint challenge areas and determine the next steps for improvement. (It also reveals what is working well.)

Ideally, your team is regularly conducting post-sale analyses and documenting the findings. This sales action plan process is often overlooked as salespeople are eager to move on to the next business opportunity, but the results are extremely effective for creating a sales strategy moving forward. Make it a point to learn from your losses and repeat the things that have been successful in the past.

It’s also important to analyze your sales funnel by stage. That allows you to look back and see where your salespeople are losing opportunities. Is it in the early stages or in the late stages? Knowing the answer to that will show you where to focus on skills training and coaching.

Step 2- Identify Challenge Areas

Based on the information you gathered in Step 1, determine where skill gaps exist. For example, if conversion rates are low in the early stages, your team likely needs support with a pre-call investigation, qualifying prospects, questioning, or establishing trust early on.

And if conversion rates are low in the later stages of the sales funnel, you may need to focus on skills such as building value,  managing objections , gaining commitment, and  negotiating  price.

Metrics aren’t the only way to identify obstacles that stand in the way of maximum output for your team. One of the most effective methods is simply to ask them!

Ask each salesperson what challenges they’re facing out in the field with prospects and customers and get their input on what sort of tools or resources would help them improve their performance. Soliciting feedback  will also make your reps more receptive to any sales action plan training or coaching you move forward with.

SPEAK TO A SALES PERFORMANCE EXPERT ABOUT IMPACT SALES TRAINING TODAY

Step 3 – implement steps to help sales reps achieve sales goals.

Once you’ve identified your challenge areas, you need to decide the best ways to support your team to reach the sales goals you’ve set for them. Focus on the development areas that will lead to the highest return on your investment of time and resources and get you closer to achieving your sales target.

It may be that your team is struggling with a lack of qualified leads. If so, your first step needs to be improving sales and marketing alignment by discussing ways to align your marketing strategy with sales goals. Or, if your team is consistently struggling with price pressure, you may decide they need some sales skills training to help them build value and hold their ground with prospects and customers.

Whatever strategy your unique situation calls for, you should work with each salesperson individually to create a detailed business development plan. Work backward from the goal, and then decide and record the activities and objectives that need to be accomplished on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis in order to achieve sales targets.

Step 4 – Sales Coaching for Ongoing Success

It’s widely accepted by this point that sales coaching is the activity with the greatest impact on sales effectiveness. But according to the Sales Management Association, formal sales coaching strategies tend to be poorly executed or non-existent.

Establish a regular coaching cadence with your sales reps and make the meetings about development, not inspection. You can use this time together to ensure they’re on track with their sales action plans, reinforce new skills they’ve learned, and look for trends in what they’re doing well and where they can improve. You can find more information about how to hold effective one-to-one sales meetings in this blog post.

And if an aggressive sales target is causing them stress, make it seem more manageable by breaking the goal into smaller, easier to digest chunks.

Let’s work together to achieve your sales goals.

When it comes to maximizing sales and meeting your company’s revenue goals, creating a sales action plan should be your top priority.

If you need help defining your course of action or setting it into motion, The Brooks Group has a team of sales effectiveness experts who can help you define and achieve your sales goals. Get in touch today.  

Written By Lisa Rose

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FDIC revises resolution planning requirements for larger banks

The final rule contains changes from the original proposal last year, which FDIC staff said came as a result of public feedback. For example, most banks covered by the rule must submit resolution plans or information filings to the FDIC every three years instead of two, although they must submit regular updates on those plans. Globally systemically important banks must submit resolution plans every two years. Another change is a “tiered” approach to regulatory feedback about weaknesses in submitted plans, including the creation of a “significant finding” as a step between informal observations and a “finding of material weakness” that requires corrective action. However, the final rule would require demonstration of capabilities to value and market expeditiously assets and parts of the institution’s franchise.

The information filing requirements for banks between $50 billion and $100 billion would not be as detailed as the plans submitted by those over $100 billion. In particular, banks under $100 billion would not be required to submit resolution strategies based upon a failure scenario, according to FDIC staff.

The American Bankers Association had previously raised multiple concerns about the original proposal. In a statement after yesterday’s vote, ABA president and CEO Rob Nichols said the FDIC’s final rule includes some modest improvements in response to comments from banks and the public, but it still raises serious concerns. “The rule’s overly broad and impractical mandates are piled on top of a number of other recent regulatory changes that will ultimately come at a cost to bank customers without meaningfully improving resiliency,” he said.

FDIC board split on changes

The FDIC board was divided about the necessity of the new resolution planning requirements, with the three Democratic members viewing the final rule as a much-needed adjustment following last year’s regional bank failures, and the two Republican members seeing it as overreach.

“The development of such a strategy, together with the supporting information and analysis, will materially improve the ability of the FDIC to prepare for and execute resolutions of the largest banks in a manner that preserves stability in the banking system and reduces costs to the Deposit Insurance Fund and other stakeholders,” FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg said. “In light of our experience in the spring of last year, the need for strengthened resolution plans for institutions in this category is compelling.”

In voting against the final rule, FDIC Vice Chairman Travis Hill questioned whether the expected benefits from making banks submit written plans justified the costs to institutions for preparing them. Board member Jonathan McKernan questioned whether the agency had the authority to implement some of the requirements. “If we have the authority to enforce this rule, we also have the authority to compel very significant changes in bank’s business models,” McKernan said. “I think Congress would have been clear if we were supposed to have that authority as it relates to resolution.”

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'It's not over until it's over': England gives Rishi Sunak hope of glorious comeback

After England's glorious last-minute comeback - Rishi Sunak has sent a message to the country as he tries to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in this general election.

Sunday 30 June 2024 23:04, UK

• General Election 2024

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• England gives Sunak hope of a glorious comeback
• Reform candidate disowns party amid racism row - and backs Tories | Which comes after party dropped three candidates
• Farage says he 'doesn't want to know' racists | And finally rules out joining Tory party after election
• Rob Powell:  With more coverage comes more scrutiny
• Sunak insists he can still win election
• Has Labour chosen wealthy pensioners over children in poverty?
• 'Extremely troubling' footage emerges of Tory association students singing Nazi song | But party says group 'not affiliated' to them
• Live reporting by Ben Bloch  and (earlier)  Faith Ridler

Election essentials

• Manifesto pledges: Conservatives | Greens | Labour | Lib Dems | Plaid | Reform | SNP
• Trackers:  Who's leading polls? | Is PM keeping promises?
• Campaign Heritage:  Memorable moments from elections gone by
• Follow Sky's politics podcasts:  Electoral Dysfunction | Politics At Jack And Sam's
• Read more:  Who is standing down? | Key seats to watch | What counts as voter ID? | Check if your constituency is changing | Guide to election lingo
• How to watch election on Sky News

Thank you for joining us on the Politics Hub for live coverage of events on the general election campaign trail today.

Polls open in 3 days and 8 hours - and the campaign is about to enter a frantic phase as politicians spend every last moment fighting for your vote.

Scroll down for all of today's developments - and we'll be back from 6am with the very latest.

Pledges and promises are coming thick and fast from every party as the general election approaches. 

Struggling to keep up with who is saying what?

Here is a summary of where the main parties stand on major issues.

For a more in-depth look at what each party has pledged, scour our  manifesto checker ...

The final weekend of the general election campaign is over, with three days and nine hours left until polls open.

Today has seen a slight lull in the pace of campaigning ahead of the frantic final days as the politicians fight for every last vote.

Here's what you need to know about what happened today:

• Nigel Farage held a vast Reform UK rally in Birmingham as he tries to stabilise his party's position after a slew of racism allegations this week;
• Speaking to Sky's political editor Beth Rigby , Mr Farage described homophobic remarks by a close aide of his as "crass, drunken, vulgar, rude, wrong" - but also that "people say all sorts of things when they're drunk";
• Also in his interview with Beth, he finally ruled out joining the Tories after the election if he enters parliament, saying they are "ghastly";
• But the racism row engulfing the party continued, with one of his candidates quitting to back the Tories, citing "widespread racism and sexism" in the party, and "the failure of the party's leadership to not only take this matter seriously, but also to fundamentally address it".
• Rishi Sunak  started the day with a tough interview in which he was challenged on his party's record in power;
• He insisted on BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show that the UK is "a better place to live than it was in 2010", despite a "difficult" last few years;
• He also insisted that his party can still win the general election;
• In the afternoon, he visited a synagogue in north London and met community members;
• He pledged that a Conservative  government under his leadership would show "steadfast" support for Israel, and said he was "proud" that British forces helped defend Israel from Iran's attack in April;
• The PM hit out at the "sickness" of antisemitism, and pledged to "lead a long term effort" to tackle, and "change our culture so we tackle the root causes of this hatred";
• Speaking to Sky's Trevor Phillips this morning, Mr Sunak's deputy, Oliver Dowden , warned that Russia is using bots to boost Reform UK on social media (a spokesman for the party said Mr Dowden must think voters are "stupid").
• Sir Keir Starmer  was not seen on the campaign trail today, but his national campaign coordinator Pat McFadden was challenged by Sky's Trevor Phillips  about whether they would owe a potential victory on Thursday to Reform UK;
• He replied that the power is in the hands of the electorate, and dismissed any questions over the legitimacy of a potential Labour win;
• SNP  leader John Swinney  told Sky News that Scots have been "disenfranchised" by the timing of the election, because school holidays in Scotland have already started in large parts of the country;
• The first minister also made the case for independence with the SNP - but did concede his party has had a "tough time" in recent months.

Follow along for the latest political updates throughout the evening.

TV presenter Rylan Clark has said he would "love" to become a politician - and replace the party system with a "Power Rangers of government" model.

The TV personality, 35, joined political editor Beth Rigby and former Scottish Conservative leader Baroness Ruth Davidson for this week's Sky News Electoral Dysfunction podcast.

Asked if he would ever consider the career change, he said: "If I wasn't in the job that I was in, I would love nothing more."

Rylan, who won Celebrity Big Brother and also appeared on the X Factor, appeared on the podcast in place of Labour candidate Jess Phillips after tweeting his praise for Rigby on the day Rishi Sunak announced the general election.

Sharing a clip of her and Sky presenter Sophy Ridge outside a rainy Downing Street waiting for Mr Sunak to appear at the lectern, he said: "Obsessed with the Rigby."

Speaking to her and Davidson, he said his "obsession" with politics began with Brexit - "as we've seen so many promises which weren't fulfilled" since then.

He added: "I lie there at night sometimes, and I think about [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy. He hosted one of the same shows I've hosted in Ukraine."

The TV presenter also shared his idea of abandoning political parties altogether.

Read the full story here: 

Our live poll tracker collates the results of opinion surveys carried out by all the main polling organisations - and allows you to see how the political parties are performing in the run-up to the general election.

With under a week to go, the Tories and Labour have taken a drop, while support for Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats is on the rise.

Read more about the tracker  here .

Avid football fan Sir Keir Starmer has tweeted his reaction to England's win over Slovakia to reach the quarter-finals of the Euros.

Although England came a matter of minutes from losing before Jude Bellingham's stunning overhead kick in added time took it to extra time, the Labour leader tweeted that the win was "never in doubt".

Labour would definitely want to steer us away from inferring any commentary about the general election from that tweet as they fight for every last vote - unlike Rishi Sunak's more pointed message ...

The Financial Times (FT) announced today that it is backing the Labour Party at this general election, and on Politics Hub With Ali Fortescue , we spoke to the paper's Whitehall Editor, Lucy Fisher, about that decision.

She is, of course, employed by the paper as a journalist, and does not sit on the Editorial Board that decided the endorsement.

But she told Ali that it is "really significant" that the board has backed Labour, adding that it's "the first time since 2005" the paper has done so.

"The FT doesn't have a natural political allegiance, and in fact, being a very pro-free trade and private enterprise newspaper, wanting to see a very open, outward-looking Britain - [it] has more often supported the Tories than Labour.

"So it does feel significant. And the op-ed... makes clear the FT views this as a sea change moment in British politics akin to 1979 when [Margaret] Thatcher swept to power, or 1997 when Tony Blair came in."

Finally, we ask Treasury minister Bim Afolami if the Conservative Party can still defy the polls and win the election on Thursday.

He replies: "Of course we can. And, you know, we will see what happens

"But what I do know is on speaking to constituents... there are higher than normal numbers of undecided people.

"This is the fourth general election I've fought - a large number of people are still saying they don't know which way to go.

"And my message to them on the doorsteps and here today is if they want to lower their taxes, secure the borders, make sure that we have a thriving, prosperous economy going forward in the future, a Conservative vote is what they need to do."

Ali Fortescue points out to the minister that the overall tax burden will continue to rise under the Conservative Party - but he does not accept that, saying the tax cuts they want to make are targeted at ordinary working people, and the overall number factors in the wider economy.

"We are cutting taxes for working people and for pensioners as well," he insists.

In the last hour, we've had the breaking news from the French parliamentary elections that Marine Le Pen's far right National Rally party appears to have come out on top in the first round of voting, according to exit polls.

We ask minister Bim Afolami if he is worried about that at all, and he replies: "I must confess that I haven't really been following the French election as closely as I might have done because I've been focusing on my own in this country."

Asked if a Conservative government would work with Ms Le Pen and her party, he replies that "Britain has to work with whoever is chosen as the leader of other countries".

He says "of course" they would work with whoever is elected in France.

Sky's Ali Fortescue puts it to him that Rishi Sunak has previously said Nigel Farage would work with Ms Le Pen, implying it would be a bad thing to do.

Mr Afolami replies: "We're not advocating for Marine Le Pen to win.

"What I'm saying to you is you cannot choose... who leads other countries."

The first UK political guest on tonight's edition of Politics Hub With Ali Fortesue  is Treasury minister Bim Afolami, and we start by asking for his reaction to the Reform candidate in Erewash disowning his party to back the Tories.

Mr Afolami says: "Well, I'm glad he's seen the light."

He also says that he's glad that the candidate, Liam Booth-Isherwood, has made the point that only the Conservative candidate can stop Labour winning, which has been the Tory party's argument for weeks.

Asked if he would be glad if Nigel Farage decided to back the Tories, Mr Afolami says the Reform leader has "no intention" of switching sides.

He goes on: "I do find it quite curious, you know, this idea that Farage is somehow a Conservative. He spent 25 years trying to destroy the Conservative Party."

He adds that Reform is "designed to increase the power of a Labour".

Challenged on the fact that senior Conservatives like Suella Braverman and Sir Philip Davies have said they would welcome Mr Farage into the party, the minister says they are "in a small minority".

Here is the full list of candidates standing in Erewash:

• James Martin Archer, Liberal Democrats
• Liam Dane Booth-Isherwood (was Reform UK, but has quit party to back Tories)
• John William Kirby, Independent
• Brent Poland, Green Party
• Adam Thompson, Labour Party
• Maggie Throup, Conservative Party

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Benefits of Using Online Financial Advisors

Online financial advisors allow you to ditch the in-person hassle and access expert financial guidance from your phone or home computer. Online financial advisors leverage investment technology and generally low-cost compared to traditional in-person consultants.  

Not only does it make investing more affordable for many individuals, but clients can more easily adjust and monitor their investments on their own time. Robo-advisor and hybrid online advisors typically offer online dashboards and tools for convenient managing and monitoring. 

Compare the Top Online Financial Advisors 2024

For this list, we didn't consider online advisors that match clients and advisors for comprehensive financial  planning services, such as Zoe Financial or Facet Wealth . Instead, we focused on tech-driven firms where you can access an automated and personalized portfolio and consult a professional for advice when needed.

Here are our top picks for the best online financial advisors as picked by Business Insider editors in 2024.

SoFi Automated: Best Online Advisor for Low Fees 

SoFi Automated Investing supports individual investment accounts, joint accounts, traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs, SEP IRAs, and 401(k) rollovers.

• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. No account minimum or management fees to invest
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Goal planning and automatic portfolio rebalancing
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Range of other account options across SoFi website
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. SoFi offers complimentary CFP access across all accounts
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. No tax-loss harvesting
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. No socially responsible portfolio options

SoFi Invest is one of the best investment apps and the best investment apps for beginners. It's a great platform for US investors who are looking for an intuitive online trading experience, an open active or automated investing account, and assets like cryptocurrencies.

• Promotion: None at this time.
• Consider it if: You're new to investing and want to leave the trading decisions to professionals.

SoFi Automated Investing offers individual and joint taxable brokerage accounts , traditional IRA, Roth IRA, and SEP IRA.

SoFi stands out for its lack of advisory fees, free one-on-one consultations with CFPs, portfolio diversity, and goal-planning features. SoFi builds a personalized investment portfolio based on your risk tolerance, goals, and time horizon. Additional SoFi membership perks include loan discounts and career counseling. 

What to look out for: SoFi doesn't have tax-loss harvesting features and limited portfolio diversity. 

SoFi Invest review

Betterment: Best Online Advisor for Diversified Investing

Betterment offers individual or joint accounts, IRAs, trust accounts, and cash reserve or checking accounts.

$0 to open, $10 to start investing ($100,000 for premium plan)

$4 per month (or 0.25%/year) for digital plan; 0.40%/ year for premium plan; 1%/year for crypto portfolios

• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. No minimum for standard investing account
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Goal-based planning, tax-loss harvesting, charitable giving, and socially responsible investing available
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Access to certified financial planners
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Mobile app with external account syncing options
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. You'll have to pay to consult a human advisor, unless you have the premium plan
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. $4 monthly fee (or 0.25% annual fee)

Betterment is best for hands-off investors who want to take advantage of professionally built, personalized ETF and cryptocurrency portfolios. The platform offers CFP access, so it could suit those in search of additional guidance from human advisors.

• App store rating: 4.7 iOS/4.5 Android
• Consider it if: You want access to robo-advice with multiple service levels.

Betterment Investing offers individual and joint taxable brokerage, traditional IRA, Roth IRA, SEP IRA, inherited IRA, and trust.

What stands out:  Betterment is a robust trading platform offering premium plans with unlimited access to CFPs through phone or email. Investors can use the platform's goal-setting feature, ESG investing, automatic rebalancing, and easy-to-use financial dashboard. 

What to look out for:  Accounts with a $100,000 balance can upgrade to get advisor access, but the annual fee increases from 0.25% (an industry low) to 0.40%

Betterment review

Wealthfront: Best Online Advisor for 529 Plans

Fund your first taxable investment account with at least $500 in the first 30 days of account opening and earn a $50 bonus.

$1 ($500 for automated investing)

$0 for stock trades. 0.25% for automated investing (0.06% to 0.13% for fund fees)

• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Low annual fee for investment accounts; crypto trust investments available
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Tax-loss harvesting, portfolio lines of credit, 529 college savings plans available
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Cash account
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Mobile app and investing and retirement tools
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. You need at least $100,000 to utilize additional investment strategies
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. No human advisor access

Wealthfront is one of the best robo-advisor options if you're in search of low-cost automated portfolio management, and one of the best socially responsible investing apps for features like tax-loss harvesting, US direct indexing, and crypto trusts.

• Consider it if: You're balancing several goals and want to streamline your finances.
• Promotion: Fund your first taxable investment account with at least $500 in the first 30 days of account opening and earn a $50 bonus.

Wealthfront Investing offers individual and joint taxable brokerage, traditional IRA, Roth IRA, SEP IRA, trust, and 529 savings plan .

Wealthfront is one of the best online financial advisors for college education savings and cryptocurrency trusts. You can borrow up to 30% of your investment balance at a low interest rate with a portfolio line of credit. Wealthfront also offers personalized recommendations with smart financial planning software. 

What to look out for:  On-staff financial advisors don't offer personalized advice

Wealthfront review

Ellevest: Best Online Advisor for Financial Planning and Personal Development

Ellevest offers two investing portfolios to fit your needs.

$1 - $240 (varies by portfolio)

$54 - $97 annually; $5 or $9/month

• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Personalized, automated investment advice with a $0 minimum requirement
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Monthly plans include discounted access to certified financial planners
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Automated IRA accounts and 401(k)/403(b) rollovers available
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Private wealth management for individuals, families, and institutions who have at least $1 million to invest
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. No active trading opportunities available; money is mainly invested in stock ETFs and bond ETFs
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. You can only open individual investment accounts and retirement accounts; joint accounts or custodial accounts not available

Ellevest is one of the best robo-advisors for goal-focused investing. It could be a good fit if you want automated investing and retirement accounts.

• Consider it if: You're looking for a one-stop shop for financial planning.

Ellevest offers individual taxable brokerage, traditional IRA, Roth IRA, and SEP IRA (all held at Folio Investments).

Ellevest is a comprehensive financial advisor and trading platform built around women's unique needs and challenges. Investors get access to an extensive library of content and advisor-led workshops. Additionally, Ellevest offers a socially responsible investment portfolio and monthly progress reports. 

What to look out for:  Financial coaching costs extra (but members get 30%- 50% off). Access to retirement account management requires an upgrade.

Ellevest review

Ameriprise Financial Investments: Best Online Advisor for Retirement Saving

Ameriprise Financial Services has been operating for 130 years Ameriprise Financial Services is licensed in all 50 states but only has 10 physical locations throughout the US; it's currently headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Varies by account

$500 annual advisory fee, 2% AUM

• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Access to personal finance research and investment tools
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Fiduciary financial advisor access
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Various account and investment options
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. High account minimums
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. Difficult to navigate website
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. Complex fee structure

Ameriprise Financial Services is a brokerage and financial advisory firm best for experienced, passive investors interested in using the site's financial planning services, wealth management tools, and fiduciary advisor access.

Ameriprise Financial Investments offers three managed account options that can be opened as an individual brokerage account, traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs, Simple IRAs, SEP IRAs, 401(k)s, 403(b)s, 529 plans, and Coverdell education savings accounts (CESA). 

Ameriprise Financial Investments is one of the largest registered investment advisors in the US and is best for experienced investors looking for advanced charting and investing features. You'll get access to fiduciary financial advisors for consultations or account management. 

What to look out for: Ameriprise 's managed account fees are high, and it has a complex fee structure. 

Ameriprise Financial Services review

How Much Do Online Financial Advisors Cost?

Financial advisors providing financial advice often charge by the hour, typically between $100 to $300. Advisors creating a comprehensive financial plan tend to charge a flat rate between $1,000 and $3,000. 

If you hire an advisor to manage your investment portfolio, you'll be charged a percentage of your account balance, typically between 1% and 3% annually. In comparison, that's much higher than the fees that the best robo-advisors charge; you get the added benefit of building a relationship with a trusted source who can adjust your strategy as needed, provide personal recommendations, and answer questions when they arise.

How to Choose the Best Online Financial Advisors

The best online financial advisor for you depends on your goals, risk tolerance, investments, and time horizon. If you're a new investor interested in passive investing, an online robo-advisor is likely a good place to start. On the other hand, if you're looking for professional insight and a customized financial plan, you're better off with access to a human advisor through phone or video calls. 

You can also meet with an expert in person for financial guidance. So if you prefer to meet face-to-face, here are some tools to find some in your area:

• This is a database of all CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professionals who are authorized to use their CFP® marks by the CFP® Board and are accepting new clients.
• Using the advanced search function, you can choose from over 40 focus areas you're looking to get help with and include your current amount of investable assets.
• Click here to visit the CFP Board website .
• This database helps connect young professionals — those in generations X and Y (millennials) — with individual advisors.
• Every advisor holds the CFP® certification, is a fiduciary , does not require a minimum net worth to take on new clients, and does not earn commissions.
• Click here to visit XY Planning Network .
• This platform maintains a database of fee-only financial advisors, not specifically CFP® certificates, who commit to a fiduciary oath once a year. 
• You can filter by location to see a list of advisory firms in your area.
• Click here to visit the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors website .

Online financial advisors are generally trustworthy. The best advisors follow the fiduciary rule, meaning they operate in their clients' best interest and are fee-only. This means client fees are their only compensation, and they don't earn a commission when they invest in certain funds or buy financial products.

Not everyone needs a robo-advisor, but beginners or passive investors looking for a hands-off approach to stock trading may prefer how cost-effective and convenient robo-advisors are. Affordable financial advisors can be hard to come by, so robo-advisors are a great alternative for many people. However, a financial advisor may be better if you need specific advice on your finances or investment strategy or if you're too overwhelmed or confused by your money to plan for retirement or invest in the stock market. 

The cost of an online financial advisor varies from platform to platform and advisor to advisor. The cost largely depends on the services, licensing, account balance, and complexity. Robo-advisors typically charge lower fees than human advisors. 

Why You Should Trust Us: Our Methodology

We Reviewed the best online financial advisors using Business Insider's methodology for rating investment platforms . We compared a long list of Registered Investment advisors (RIAs), considering fees, investment selection, access, ethics, and customer service. The best online advisors have top marks in all five categories. Investment platforms are given a rating between 0 and 5.

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