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No Sales Plan For 2011 Yet? Get Going!
Alright gang. Listen up. We’re three weeks into 2011 and you don’t have a game plan. Still. I wrote about the importance of creating plans about a month ago, yet I continue to encounter businesses
that don’t have a plan – no sales plan, no marketing plan, no real way to achieve the non-existent goals that haven't been set forth. How do you get to where you’re going to if you don’t know where you’re going?
Now I don’t think I need to list the reasons why you need to develop plans for your business as I handily took care of that in the first paragraph.
But let’s talk for a minute about your sales plan and the things you need to take into consideration to effectively plan for this year.
Assess the past - Sales totals
With sales, you can’t go forward without looking back. You should go back at least three years and look at your sales by month at a minimum. Even better is to look week by week. Then lay those two years on top of each other. What are the trends in sales month by month. Are sales in general going up or going down? How much did you increase sales say, from January 2008 to January 2009 to January 2010? Was the average increase 5% year over year? Or was it 2% from ’08 to ’09 and 8% from ’09 to ’10.
The key is to look for trends and then apply those trends to 2011. If you saw the pace of sales pick up year over year, then be a little more aggressive and shoot for an even bigger increase in 2011. Now map this out over every week in 2011 so you can start having weekly goals to hold your team accountable for.
Assess the past – Other retail metrics
Now that you have your sales plan mapped out. It’s time to assess other retail metrics like transaction counts and average transaction. Again, assess the past in order to determine how you’ll fare in 2011 and apply the same thinking you applied to overall sales to your other metrics. The key here is to think about your business and how you think you’ll grow it. Will you grow it by getting more new customers in the door? In that case increase your transaction counts. If you think you’ll increase sales by selling more to customers walking in the door, then increase your average transaction. If you think you can do both, then more power to you. This is the way to win in retail.
Remember, your decision on how you’ll increase sales will have an impact on your marketing plans and budgets.
A plan isn’t any good if it isn’t used.
So you’ve created a sales plan. Congratulations. Now don’t throw it into the drawer and forget about it. Use it every day by segmenting your weekly sales goals into days of the week. Now you have a daily goal and even transaction counts and average transactions to hold your team accountable to. But it won’t do any good if your team isn’t aware of the goals.
The Five Minute Meeting
Start each day with a five minute meeting for employees. Review the sales and other metrics goals with each team member individually. This is a great time to review what happened in the business the day before as well. You can also use this time to review cleaning duties for the day and other tasks that the store team needs to achieve. Think of this is the start of your new year and a new way to manage your team more effectively.