Sales Plan: How to Write One Your Team Can Run Without You

You've got a number for next year. You can close deals; your team can't, not without you in the meeting. That's where most of the CEOs who call me are when they ask about a sales plan. The revenue target is in the budget. The plan to reach it, in practice, is you: closing the biggest deals, chasing the stalled ones, deciding who sells what.

Below is how I'd write one your team can run without you: your number worked back to the deals and reps it takes, with a name next to every line. If your name is next to most of them, it's a plan to keep doing the selling yourself.

I've had a quota on me for 27 years and never missed, most of it in leadership. I've built or rebuilt the sales organization at every company that's employed me.

Reps and new sales managers looking for a 30-60-90-day or territory plan: that's a different document, and the difference is below.

What Is a Sales Plan?

A sales plan is the written plan for hitting your revenue goals over a set period, usually a year: the number, which customer segments you'll sell it to, through which sales channels, with which people, and what you'll check along the way. It's often the sales section of a business plan.

Most guides define a sales plan by its sections: sales goals, the target market, the team, the sales budget. I'd define an effective sales plan by who runs it: a sales plan your team can't run without you on the call is a forecast with your name on it.

Sales Plan vs. Sales Strategy vs. Sales Playbook

Your sales strategy is the decisions underneath the plan; the sales plan is this year's targets and who chases them; the playbook is how your sales reps run each deal.

The strategy covers decisions like which kinds of sales you make, which channels sell for you, how your sales team is structured and how leads get qualified. The complete guide to sales strategy consulting walks through all eight decisions. For the deal-by-deal part: Sales playbook →

Sales Plan vs. 30-60-90-Day Sales Plan

A 30-60-90-day sales plan is a new rep's or sales manager's plan for their first three months. A territory plan is one rep's plan for their accounts. This page is about the company's plan, written for the CEO: the number, and how your team reaches it.

Why Sales Plans Don't Get Run

In my experience, sales plans at companies under $15M don't get run for one of four reasons: they start from the number, skip who you sell to and what you say, live in a spreadsheet, or run every line through you.

1. It starts from the number. The revenue target comes down from the budget and gets split into sales targets and quotas. Nobody works it back to how many deals that takes, so nobody knows whether the team can reach it until the quarter is gone. Step 4 works it back.
2. It skips who you sell to and what you say. All of it sits on those two decisions. If they aren't settled, no sales plan holds, whoever writes it. Step 2 settles them before any number.
3. It lives in a spreadsheet. A slide in the board deck or a sheet in a shared drive sits outside the CRM, where your sales reps work. I've watched teams ignore a process that only lives in a document. Step 6 puts it in the CRM.
4. Every line runs through you. If it does, you're still in the biggest deals and the stalled ones. If the plan only works while you're on the call, the reps sell the way they did before, sales performance stays where it was, and you're back in the deals. Steps 1 and 5 move those lines off you.

The fourth comes first, because it takes a person: while that person is you, the other three can't move without you.

Sales Plan Template: What a Sales Plan Should Include, and Who Owns Each Part

A sales plan should include ten things, from the revenue target to the weekly review, each with an owner, because the owner decides whether that line runs without you. Copy the ten below as your sales plan template. Settle 2 and 3 before you put a number in 1.

1. The revenue target, by kind of sale. How much revenue comes from new business, expansion, renewals and account management, by quarter and month. They're different jobs, so they get different targets. Owner: whoever runs sales answers for it; you approve the number.
2. Who you sell to. Your ideal customer and target market, and who inside each account signs, uses it or can stop the deal. Owner: your head of marketing and whoever runs sales, settled first; you approve it.
3. What you say. The pain points and customer needs your target customers describe, in their words, and the value proposition that answers them. Owner: marketing writes it; sales tests it on live calls.
4. Where deals come from. Each source of new business (inbound from marketing, outbound from your reps or business development, referrals, partners, existing customers) and how many qualified opportunities each has to deliver. Marketing is supposed to deliver leads, and sales is supposed to find its own, so the plan says who does what. Owner: marketing for inbound; whoever runs sales for the rest.
5. The team, and what it can carry. Who prospects, who closes, who manages accounts, which sales activities each one is measured on, who carries a quota and how much, and your hiring plans, with how long a new rep takes to close on their own. Owner: whoever runs sales.
6. How a deal moves. The stages of your sales process, what has to be true before a deal moves, the sales methodology your reps use, and the sales training plan for getting every rep to run it the same way without you in the meeting. The detail belongs in the playbook. Owner: whoever runs sales.
7. Quotas and comp. What each rep carries, and what they're paid for. In my experience, when new business and account management are paid as one job, the comp plan ends up paying reps for the wrong one. Owner: whoever runs sales designs it; you approve it.
8. Sales tools. Your CRM first, then whatever handles outbound, sales forecasting and the repetitive work. Add tools only after the process works. If nobody owns the CRM, you're back at reason 3. Owner: whoever runs sales, or sales operations if you have it.
9. The sales budget. Headcount, tools, marketing spend and travel, against the revenue they're meant to produce. Owner: you, the one line I'd leave in your name.
10. The numbers, and the weekly review. The key performance indicators (KPIs) you manage by: pipeline coverage, win rate, average deal size, sales cycle length and the sales forecast, read the same way every week, in a review you can sit in on without running it. Owner: whoever runs sales.

Now go down the ten and count the ones you run yourself today, not just approve. That's how many lines of next year's plan wait the week you're out.

Sales Plan Examples vs. Your Own Plan

Sales plan examples are worth reading for structure. Their numbers come from someone else's target audience, market conditions and win rates, though. When you create a sales plan, copy the headings, then fill the numbers from your own historical data: your deal sizes, win rates, sales cycles and sources.

How to Write a Sales Plan, Step by Step

To write a sales plan your team can run, take the sales planning process in this order: decide who runs it, settle who you sell to and what you say, start from last year's deals, work the target backward, put a name on every line, build it into your CRM, and check its assumptions monthly.

1. Decide who runs it. Whoever will run the sales team this year and answer for the number, ideally someone other than you. In my experience, under $15M there's rarely a sales operations team for this, and the plan falls to whoever runs sales. If that's still you, the plan is one more thing that waits for you. Read who should write it, below, before step 2.
2. Settle who you sell to and what you say. Have your head of marketing and the person from step 1 write down your ideal customer and who inside each account signs, for you to approve. Marketing writes the problems they buy to solve, in their words, and sales tests them on live calls. Do it before anyone touches a number; every number below depends on them. That's why I fix revenue in four steps, always in the same order: positioning, messaging, prospecting, sales. The order the work goes in →
3. Start from the deals you closed last year. Past performance first: how many, how big, from which sources, how long each took, and your conversion rates from qualified opportunity to closed deal. Then count how many you closed yourself. If your CRM's sales data is clean, pull it from there. If you've ended up running two CRMs, the old one and the new one, count from the signed contracts.
4. Work the target backward. Say the target is $3 million in new business and your average deal is $60,000. That's 50 deals at the bottom of the sales funnel. If your reps win one qualified opportunity in four, you need 200 qualified opportunities, created early enough to close inside the year. If your sales cycle runs six months, the last of them have to exist by midyear. Split the 200 by source: say 80 from marketing, 80 from outbound and 40 from referrals. Then the reps: if one rep can close 15 deals a year, 50 deals takes four reps, because three cover only 45. If you have two, the plan needs hires, and hires take months, plus the time a new rep needs to close on their own. Last, hold the 50 against step 3. If you closed half of last year's deals yourself, then at that share 25 of this year's 50 would run through you: more than a full rep's year at 15 deals each, and the plan has to move them off your calendar.
5. Put a name on every line. Each source, each quota, each number in the weekly review. Any line where you do the work yourself, rather than approve it, goes to the owner the template names. The budget stays yours.
6. Build it into your CRM. Have whoever runs sales put in the targets by source and by rep, the stages, and a dashboard that shows pipeline against the plan, so anyone can track progress without asking you. If someone has to open a spreadsheet to see where the plan stands, it's back in a document.
7. Check the assumptions every month. Have whoever runs sales hold step 4's numbers against what happened: deal size, win rate, sales cycle, and what each source delivered. When an assumption breaks or market conditions shift, change the plan itself. Moving the forecast date doesn't count.

Who Should Write Your Sales Plan

Whoever will run it after it's written, and answer for the number. Here's who usually does it, and when each one is right.

You. If you founded the company, you know the product and the customer best. It's right if you have the hours to write it, build it into the CRM and run the review every week. Most CEOs who call me don't.

Your sales manager, or a rep you promote. Pick this when one of your team members already coaches the others and wants the job. As I tell CEOs, every great rep doesn't make a great leader, and every great leader isn't always your best rep. Pair them with Advisory, below, if they've never set a target they had to answer for.

A sales consulting firm. Hire one when you already have a sales leader waiting to run the plan, and have that leader write it with the firm. In this market, a 90-day sprint (diagnosis, playbook and CRM rebuild) runs $15,000 to $35,000. Then your team runs the plan, and nobody from the firm stays to lead it. What happens after the handoff →

A full-time VP of sales. Worth it when the sales process already works, so the person you hire runs it instead of inventing it, and when you need someone in the building every day, committed for years. In this market, at a company under $15M, that's $360,000 to $520,000 a year fully loaded, plus equity, after a search of three to six months. Weighing that against fractional first: Fractional vs. Full-Time →

A fractional VP of sales. Right when nobody inside can run the plan and you're still the one closing. A fractional VP of sales is a sales executive you bring in instead of hiring full-time. In this market, most are sold by the hours a week, at $4,000 to $15,000 a month.

I'm rarely the first fix a CEO has tried. Usually it's been one train wreck after another. This time it's one person: me, with no associates and no bench.

Done my way, I write the plan with your team, and the sales lines you run yourself today move to me. The marketing lines go to your head of marketing, as the template says. The budget stays yours. Your sales team reports to me, I report to you, and your head of marketing stays my peer.

The new revenue the team closes is my number, and I take no accounts of my own, so deals don't start waiting on me instead of you. When the number misses, you hear it from me first, with the reason and what changes next month.

Since 2020, averaged across my fractional clients: three times as many leads turning into opportunities, and two to six times the pipeline.

From month one it's aimed at one of two endings: someone on your team grows into leading sales, or you hire a full-time VP of sales into a process that already works. I help write the job description and sit in on the interviews.

Mine is $10,000 to $18,000 a month, remote, month to month, with no minimum term and no notice period. That starts where the market's $6,000 to $10,000 middle ends, because your number is mine, no excuses: Fractional VP of Sales →

Advisory. If someone on your team can run the plan once they know where to start, you need advice, not a leader. In Advisory, I tell you what to fix, in what order and why, and your team builds it; nothing reports to me, and I answer to you. It's $6,000 to $8,000 a month, remote: Advisory →

How to Tell Your Sales Plan Is Working

It's working when the numbers in step 4 hold and fewer of them depend on you. Sales teams don't improve overnight, so to measure performance, read these in the weekly review, and have whoever runs sales check them against those assumptions every month:

• Deals closed without you on the call. The number I'd read first. Take this month's count before you write the plan.
• Pipeline against the plan: enough qualified opportunities, early enough, to close next quarter's number. If it's thin now, next quarter is already short, whatever the forecast says.
• Each source against its share: whether marketing, outbound and referrals each delivered what the plan said, so a miss has a name on it instead of landing back on you.
• Win rate, conversion rates by stage and sales cycle against your assumptions. If any of them moves, the backward math moves with it.
• The forecast: deals closing in the month your reps said they would, without you chasing the stalled ones.

Read revenue growth last. Pipeline, sources, win rate and the forecast show a miss coming; revenue shows it once it's happened, and by then you're where CEOs are when they tell me they worked harder this year and made less than last year.

How Often Should You Update a Sales Plan?

Read the numbers every week, check the assumptions every month, re-plan every quarter, and rewrite the plan once a year. Change it sooner when what closes changes: a new product, a new kind of buyer, a source that stops delivering.

The update to watch for is one your team brings to the monthly check without you asking, and all it needs from you is a yes.