It's tempting to dive right into strategies and tactics when building a sales and/or marketing plan. But before you do that, to ensure you get it right and improve your chances of success, I recommend the following four steps:
1. Do the math (i.e. Quantify what success looks like)
Twelve months from now, what should the business look like? What top-line revenue for 2012, what 12-month run rate, and with what margins? Translate that then down to the number of new customers (at an average monthly invoice size) per month so you have a very crisp sense of what the sales and marketing efforts need to produce to achieve year-end goals. Here is a model I've used in the past to help calculate this on a quarter-by-quarter basis, which also works back to help estimate the size of the quarterly qualified prospect pipeline, as well as the number of raw inbound leads needed to hit sales goals.
2. Create a clear customer profile
Before you do any sales or marketing work, you need a clear picture of who you're selling to. Who are they, what do they look like, what common attributes do they have that can help us more effectively find them and influence them? Who are the likely decision-makers in target organizations, and what do they specifically care about? What are their primary professional drivers, objectives and needs relative to the situation or problem you're addressing or solving for them? What may be missing or wrong or painful about whatever they're doing today, that would make them want to 1) try something new, or 2) switch from another service? The more crisp this understanding is (which inherently includes a light, customer-centric competitive analysis), the more you can hone messaging and the more you can translate that profile into a succinct and actionable marketing plan to find, influence and convert prospects into new business. Here is another template we often use to help specify messaging points by audience.
3. Map the lead capture, triage and sales process
Before you start driving inbound interest, it's critical that you know what you'll do with that interest once it's captured. You need to define a qualified lead, understand how to triage for immediate vs. long-term interest, then either move them into an active sales process or nurture them until they are ready down the road. Here is a template I like to start with, that clarifies specific lead and opportunity stages, plus adds definitions for each stage and specific sales and marketing responsibilities to ultimately move the prospect forward.
4. Build an initial sales and marketing plan full of "bullets"
Jim Collins talks about the difference between bullets and cannonballs in his new book Great by Choice. The premise is that the most successful companies in the world (especially in difficult market conditions) fire a lot of test bullets to validate decisions and measure results. Plenty of bullets won't hit their mark. But with those you do, after firing a couple additional bullets to validate and gather more data, you put down the gun and get the cannon. After working through steps 1-3 above, you'll want to quickly build a plan that puts a number of well-planned but fast/light/lean execution tactics in the field. See what works, measure and improve, test some more. Then you may decide to add gas to a portion of these tests, scale those up, and go on to test more bullets.