Students of the Sales Training Institute will learn to:

• Generate increased top line sales training revenue through sales skills development
• Learn to close more sales in a sales consultative approach by becoming business consultants
• Create better margins for sales training efforts while learning effective probing, supporting and closing skills
• Lower sales operating costs by increasing effective sales interviewing skills by quickly following up on sales leads
• Develop stronger telephone and face to face selling skills through high impact sales training seminars based on extensive in class practice
• Strengthen company’s identification of their strategic sales opportunities
• Design and optimize sales strategies for selling and winning business
• Become more productive at their sales jobs through pre-call planning and better handling
• Implement more effective sales communication skills through effective and efficient time usage in our sales training seminars
• Generate and practice more powerful customer sales presentations training
• Increase sales force training skills and become immediately more productive on their sales jobs
• Be more effective in their sales communications with their internal and external customers
• Apply the skills learned in our sales training seminars while energizing their fellow sales force members  

Sales planning has many different levels, each one a crucial link in the chain between your goal and the achievement of it. The planning process is important because, unlike many technical functions, the sales function is both open-ended and unstructured:

Open-ended - because there are always more opportunities to pursue;

Unstructured - because in most organizations the sales function's job is to bridge the gap between the two givens in the job - a territory and a target - in many organizations whatever the salespeople do to meet target is acceptable, as long as they meet target.

This type of organization, the sales driven, "if it moves sell it something" company, is typically also deal-oriented rather than customer oriented, has difficulty maintaining profitability (some jobs are more profitable than others) and usually lacks differentiation so ends up competing or price thereby putting even further pressure on margins.

Many sales people are uncomfortable with planning, feeling that sales is about people and relationships rather than plans. Our experience, however, is that the people most successful in selling, plan at several levels:

Territory Plan - this is an assessment of the effort and relative time required in each phase of sales for each target market sector. The territory plan lends itself to basic modeling of the activities and effort required in each phase both as a tool to direct resources and as an indication of the effectiveness of the activity on the territory;

Planning your sales activities

Prospecting Plan - split by the two key activities - List Building and Contacting Prospects. Many companies fail to recognize the difference in these two activities and as a consequence end up spending too much time in ineffective canvassing on an inadequate list when they should be spending more time in building the list

Account Plan - for anything other than a small, low-value sale, an account plan is a useful tool to help the salesperson manage his/her way to a sale. There is a section on account management, particularly Key Account Management, but for the moment it is worth pointing out a simple six step process which everyone can use in account planning, whether you have a formal account management system in place or not

The Account Plan Process can be broken down into several areas:

Status
outlook
objectives
strategy
actions (tactics)
controls (indicators)

Let’s look at each one in more detail;

Status
Many salespeople can ascertain their status by asking the following questions:

Where are you in the sales process: qualifying/ building the case/ getting the order?
Who and what do you know of the account: who likes you/ who does not?
What are the roles of the individuals in the account: how do you know/ what is the need?
What is your solution: how does your solution match the need/ how does it compare to the alternatives (both direct competition and in-house)?
What gaps are there in your understanding of the account?
What is their Decision Making Process? (note: this is not what you have to do; this is what customer has to do to give you the order).
What contacts have there been already in this account?

Source: Tony Lockwood link