2022 Sales Plan Development Guide
Cheryl Peltekis, RN “The Solutionist”
As the calendar year draws to a rapid end, many of us are eager to have 2021 be in the rearview mirror. The fourth quarter is the time of the year that sales teams start to plan for the upcoming year.
Like most sales executives, you are focused on using the precious few selling days between now and year-end. Unfortunately, you are also tasked with creating your 2022 business development plans. Hopefully, this guide will help you make it with a little more ease.
The most important thing to know before anything else gets done is what you will be responsible for next year.
What is your mandate?
What are you accountable for accomplishing?
Are your bonuses structured for 2022?
What will make your boss pat you on the back and proclaim you are a rock star?
First things first, nail down the goals of your VP, CEO, CFO, COO (whatever the title you report to), so you understand what they expect from you!
What growth goals have been set for the company?
What part of the growth goals are you and your team are responsible for?
What services will be emphasized?
What markets will be targeted?
What major sales initiatives will be started in 2002?
Ideally, there is a well-structured plan or system for setting and hitting the company’s goals. A strong plan provides you with the direction to build action steps to hit 2022 goals. Once you have the goals set, you need to think about the overall framework for planning.
Start building your Strategy!
Strategy is all about how. It is how you are going to achieve those goals that are primarily dictated by your leadership. They could include things like:
Key Accounts to target
Growth percentages
Growing Gross Margins by seeking certain client / Patient types that have higher reimbursement
Improving public image by doing more community events
New products / program launch
Structure: Structure follows Strategy. Structure describes the pieces related to how your sales resources will be organized, distributed, layered, and compensated.
Territory management and expansion
Inside sales development
Sales Budget
New and expansion business (Hunters/Farmers)
Sales: This is where you want your most valuable resources, your clinical team, to benefit from the new business coming in the door.
This is the time of year to have your sales reps have a virtual meeting with the caregivers providing services in their market space and discuss what doctors do they want more patients from? What is the best facility for them to work with?
When you support growth where the clinical teams what to do business it is a win-win for everyone. You can also suggest that the sales executives take the clinicians out to meet the accounts! These meetings can be remarkably successful.
Training needs for 2022: consider new product training
Resources for 2022 such as promo items, marketing materials
Compensation and Quota setting for 2022
Reward and Recognition for 2022
People: Your organization will succeed or fail based on the strength of your people. You need to plan on recruiting and retaining exceptional clinical talent. To hit growth projections, you need additional clinical team members to grow!
Recruitment Process Improvement Program
Retention Program and Committee
Allocation for the budget to include additional recruiting
Orientation programs that produce highly qualified staff
Ongoing personal development, training, and coaching
Process: Process is at the heart of getting things done. A good process removes friction! Process is not a bad word. Process makes getting to your goals easier.
As you start to think about next year, start looking around your organization and ask, are the current processes making things easier or more difficult? Could we make changes that would save us time? What needs an upgrade?
Stop and take the time to evaluate your existing processes and determine if they are going to help you achieve your goals or create another problem that needs to be fixed? Could you onboard 40 new employees a week? If you can’t answer that with a resounding YES, then you need to fix your onboarding system. (see our recruiting and retention program here)
Build Your Roadmap To Hitting Your Goals
# Step One:
Start by listing each category, Strategy, Structure, People, and Process. Under each category list the appropriate measures that apply in your organization.
# Step Two:
Scan down the list of measures and identify what components are currently out of alignment with your 2022 goals. They are the ones you need to allocate more of your time to get them in alignment or you will set yourself up for failure.
# Step Three:
Now it is time to assess each of the problem areas based on some key metrics.
Complexity: Challenges are associated with timing, resources scarcity, or cultural barrier from within the organization’s leadership. Use a ranking system 1 – 10 where 1 is an easy fix, and 10 will require specific efforts and buy-in from all levels of the organization.
Impact: This refers to the positive effect this initiative would have on attaining your goals if time and energy were invested. Here you are trying to assess how much benefit you would gain by focusing on this process issue. Again use 1-10 scale where 1 means focusing here would barely move the needle and 10 means it would significantly impact your year.
# Step Four:
This is the most challenging part of the planning. Since we all know there is never enough time or money to do everything we want, it’s time to prioritize all of your potential initiatives. Start at the top of your list and assign each potential initiative a letter grade of A, B, or C.
An “A” means this initiative is critical to your success, and you will unlikely reach your goal if this is not addressed.
A “B” means important but not essential, and “C” refers to something that, in all likelihood, will have to wait for another year.
Be careful here – the usual tendency is to rate most or every this as an “A”.
Unfortunately, you need to be brutally honest with yourself here. You may need to go back over the list a couple of times, but you should aim for an even distribution of As, Bx, and Cs.
I made you a quick spreadsheet that you can download and make your own. Download 2022 Business Development Guide Here!
# Step Five:
Create the Plan: Goal #1
Initiative 1:
TACTICS LEAD/SUPPORT TIMELINE SUCCESS MEASURE
Initiative 2:
TACTICS LEAD/SUPPORT TIMELINE SUCCESS MEASURE
Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing how and what, questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability.
It includes making assumptions about the business environment, assessing the organization’s capabilities, linking Strategy to operations and the people who are going to implement the Strategy. Synchronizing those people and their various disciplines and aligning rewards to outcomes.
It also includes mechanisms for changing assumptions as the environment changes and upgrading the company’s capabilities to meet the challenges of an ambitious strategy. In its most fundamental sense, execution is a systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it!
Be successful in 2022! Have a plan and execute it! If you find that your plan includes having a sales team, don’t forget that we can be your sales manager!
Want to learn more email [email protected] or reach out to me directly at [email protected]. We are here for you!
Keep Helping, Keep Serving,
Cheryl Pelekis, RN “The Solutionist”
