Speaker 1: Today, I'm going to talk about how to build an actionable sales plan. And I'm going to tell you the story about how we built this plan for Ascend. But the principles that I'm going to talk about can be applied to any kind of business, whether you have a service-based business or a product you sell. I tried to organize this presentation in such a way that everybody can get something out of it. So I'm going to start with our story and then move on from there. But just to give you guys a little bit of background on Ascend Inbound Marketing, we are a marketing agency, but we primarily focus on inbound marketing, which is basically internet-based marketing. And the principles around inbound are to attract customers to your business using methods like search engine optimization, social media, blogging, video content, etc. And so if you want to learn more about inbound, I'd be happy to talk to you at length about inbound, but that's not what this session is about. So just wanted to give you a little bit of background on that. So we started Ascend, we're a division of NextUp Technology Services, which is an IT business company here in Valdosta. And I worked for NextUp for many, many years and was their marketing director. Somewhere along the way, I started building websites for our clients, it was just something that I enjoyed doing, but we found that once we built the websites for our clients, they just kind of took them and nothing else happened. And so that was frustrating from our standpoint, because we wanted to watch their businesses grow and we knew that there were inbound marketing methods, like the ones that we were using at NextUp, that could help them. And so in late 2015, we decided to really go all in and develop this inbound marketing agency. That's when Stephen Carter, he's sitting in the back, he came along and we officially started Ascend Inbound Marketing. And you know, when Stephen and I were first starting out, we set some pretty aggressive revenue goals and we were like fired up, we were ready to hit the ground running and just bust our tails to win a lot of new business and a lot of new projects and a lot of new clients. And so, you know, we really took on any project that came along, any client that came along. And we were extremely busy. And so with that, it would seem like, you know, that, oh, Stephen, did you change that? No, it's not supposed to look like that. Oh, well, that's supposed to be like a money face emoji, just FYI, just envision that in your head. So is it, oh, it is not supposed to be a sad face, but that we're getting to that part. But anyway, so yeah, so that's supposed to be a money face emoji, because, you know, we really did generate a lot of revenue, a lot of clients, a lot of projects that year. But unfortunately, we didn't turn a profit. And you know, we were pretty surprised by that, because it just seemed like we were super busy, we had a lot going on. That's the thinking face emoji. So just picture that. And and so we had to do some soul searching to figure out, you know, how do we take on all this work and not make any money? Like, that's, it was very disheartening. And by that point, we had John Fuller with us, he's sitting up front, and he is our front end developer. And so John and Stephen, and I really sat down for a day, and then had longer meetings after that, to really define what was going on, you know, what we needed to do. And so we took our clients. And we evaluated them, we basically categorized them in terms of which clients were the most profitable for us and the best to work with. And usually those went hand in hand. And then which ones which projects didn't do so well, and which ones, you know, we're not helping us make money. And we were able to come up basically with with a list of characteristics that our best clients fit. And really what this strategy is, is the development of buyer personas. And being an inbound marketing agency, this is what we get our clients to do all the time. But, you know, we had to take some time to build our agency to understand really what our buyer personas were before we could define them. And you know, that's taking these lessons from the first year that we had to learn the hard way and figure out, okay, who do we really want to go after now? Which clients are not a good fit? Which ones are costing us the most money? Which ones don't really value what we do? And which ones do? And so from that, we were able to come up with a set of buyer personas. So you know, we have one that might be a smaller midsize business owner, maybe he is the owner of a law firm. We have one that is a marketing manager of a larger company. And you know, we have several others from there. But there are some resources out there if you if you look up buyer personas, in Google, there's some templates and things like that, that you can go through this exercise to identify the demographics, the behavior patterns, the motivations, etc, that make up the audience that you're trying to target. And that was a very useful exercise for us. Not just because it helped us define who we wanted to target, but it also helped us define who we didn't want to target. And you know, in terms of our service offerings, we realized, hey, we've taken on a lot of projects. And, and, you know, we, we have basically two types of work that we do, we have project based work and retainer based work. And the projects are like one time website designs, etc. And the retainer based work is like when a company hires us to be pretty much what their marketing department would do. And while the projects were okay, that wasn't the most fruitful kind of work that we had on both ends, like the clients that had us on a retainer tended to do a lot better tended to be a lot happier, because they were getting the, you know, long term results that they wanted to see, whereas the projects tended to drag on maybe longer than they needed to. And so, you know, just being able to identify, maybe we need to focus more on our retainers versus projects, maybe, you know, if we do take on projects, we only need to do this type or this financial level, for it to make sense for us. And so this is the kind of soul searching before you build any sales plan that I think any organization should do, just to make sure that you have the right service offering or the right product offering, and that you have that you're targeting it to the right people. All right, so there's a little Okay, one thing we did, after we develop these buyer personas, is we developed SMART goals. And you know, this outlines what SMART goals are, we're going to go through an example in just a minute. But, you know, the first year, I think we set some loose revenue goals, it's like we want to make X amount of money the first year. But that that really just didn't even scratch the surface of what we needed to think about as a business as an organization. And so when we developed our sales plan for the next year, we started to develop SMART goals. And, you know, there's specific measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. And not only did we develop SMART goals for our revenue projections, but we developed other SMART goals that maybe didn't relate to revenue, but that would help the the organization really be a better organization as a whole. All right, so this is like a little worksheet, and I can email this to anybody who is interested in it. I didn't bring a printout of it today. But this is a good outline for you to determine how to create a SMART goal. And what we're going to do right now is just go through a quick example of a SMART goal. This is not a SMART goal. This is a really bad generic goal. And so we're going to take this and work some magic and turn it into a SMART goal. So let's say every business wants to increase revenue. So that's a start. But how can we be more specific about that? Like how much do you want to increase your revenue by? Let's say $18,000. And then how are we going to measure that? Well, you know, if each of our clients brings in an average of $3,600, then we need to bring in five. So that's how we're going to measure that. How are we going to achieve that? Well, you know, to work backwards, we know that we generally need to bring in about 50 leads, and then five of those will turn into customers. So that's how many leads we're going to have to talk to. And that's achievable. We can do that. Why is this relevant? Why do we need to increase revenue? You know, this seems like a silly question, but you need to reflect on this with any goal that you set. And then for this is to improve cash flow and profitability. And then time bound, we want to achieve our revenue goals in Q2. So set yourself a deadline for these SMART goals. When you're going to achieve them. So we put all that together. Our SMART goal is this to improve cash flow and profitability. We will add $18,000 and build revenue to our business in the second quarter by acquiring five new clients. To acquire five new clients, we will talk to 50 new leads by attending two networking events per week in Valdosta during April, May and June. So I know it's kind of a long drawn out run on sentence, but you get the idea of what you need to do, why you need to do it and how you need to get there when you look at this. And so, you know, as we were crafting our sales plan, we took our SMART goals and we filled out a template that looks just like this. So we outlined our priorities in terms of how much revenue we wanted to generate, which new hires we wanted to bring on, which types of service offerings we would start to push or promote. We identified who we're going to sell to. So that's where we're talking about our buyer personas, you know, whether that's a certain type of business or a certain age group, et cetera. Who is going to be responsible for this? Who's going to sell? You know, I sell probably the most for a send, but I have a lot of support with Steven and Gretchen and even the team at NextUp chipping in to help as well. So you know, it doesn't all have to fall on you. You can delegate certain aspects of the sales process or the sales role to your coworkers. And I recommend you do that when you can, because, you know, if most of us in this room are business owners, then it can be hard to make time for sales in addition to everything else that you're doing. And then looking at, you know, our 12 month sales goals, this is kind of where we get to the time bound aspect. How many new deals do we need to bring in? How big are those deals needing to be? And then, you know, how we're going to get there. What activities are we going to generate to get there? And a little bit later in this presentation, I'm going to go through this template with an example that is filled out. But just to kind of break down some of the aspects of this, going back to the previous slide, this 30 to 90 day milestones and quick wins, this is a, you know, more of a technical piece of your sales plan. But I think it's very important to have some quick wins because it's such a good motivator. Like if you know that you have some deals coming down the pipeline that you can close that, you know, can generate some momentum and some confidence in your team, try to focus in on those. And within the first few months of initiating your sales plan, it might be running a special sale or a promotion to just generate some more quick revenue. And, you know, while this is not like a long term strategy by any means, it's important to keep the fire going and, you know, keep that momentum up really throughout your sales process. So one thing that you do when you're setting smart goals is that you work backwards to define the path that you want to take. You know, we talked a little bit earlier about defining our buyer personas and our ideal clients, etc. So one of the things that we identified is that some of our best clients came from a directory listing that we have on the HubSpot partner agency website, which, you know, we wouldn't have thought that, but then we were doing our backwards math that turned out to be the case. And so, you know, if you have a good source of customers or leads, make sure you're doing everything you can to maximize that. Because we had this listing and it wasn't really fleshed out. We didn't have, you know, a lot of text or information about what we do. So we really filled that out, tried to get reviews from our clients and beef it up a little bit. And since then, we've generated more leads from that source. So that's just an example of, you know, kind of working backwards and seeing where you can go or where you should go. And then activity metrics. So, you know, this is different for every organization. But with working backwards, you sort of begin to identify, OK, how many leads do I need to get to get this many customers? OK, well, how how many phone calls do I need to make to get that many leads? How many networking events do I need to go to to get that many leads? You sort of outline those activities and figure out a game plan to get there. And then you got to hold yourself accountable. So for us, that meant, you know, we use a CRM and we measure all of these things in our CRM. So we know how many leads are coming in, how many of those are turning into opportunities and closing as customers. And then, you know, taking it a step back, even from that, we can see, you know, what level of activity do we need to have to get there? How many emails do we need to send? How many emails are we sending? How many notes, you know, are we are we making on customers or meetings? Do we have etc.? So, you know, and just a note on this, this is a CRM that we use. It's the HubSpot CRM and it's free. So if you guys are in an organization where it makes sense to have a database of your customers, I would highly recommend this one. You know, you can't lose anything if if it's free. So what is it? It's the HubSpot CRM. And what does CRM stand for? Good question. Customer Relationship Management. That's right. Yep. Yes, it's Customer Relationship Management. And it's basically a database of your customers and prospects, like an Excel spreadsheet on steroids that you can refer to, to pull information about your customers and log activity, etc. All right. And then finally, of course, we got to measure our revenue metrics. We got to make sure that we're hitting our revenue goals and, you know, keeping that in some kind of system, whether that is your accounting system or your CRM, etc. You know, we also I think a very important note, we sit down with our CFO at least once a quarter to review our financials and make sure that we are on the right track to remain profitable and to hit our revenue goals. And I think any business needs to have a good accountant, whether that is somebody internal to your organization or if it's somebody who, you know, is a CPA that you hire and meet with them on a regular basis and try to get an understanding of the costs that you're incurring and what it's going to take for you to become more profitable and how much you need to sell to get to your goals. That was really one of the most insightful things for us was to get a true understanding of the costs that we have, of the overhead and the value of our services, and then be able to put together some more realistic projections from there. So now we're going to put it all together. This is this is an example, a completely fictional example that we're going to talk about with a sales plan, Diego's Barker Shop. And this is I got to give credit to Steven on this one. He came up with this logo and concept and about, I guess, like 20 minutes this morning. So really good job on that. And that cute little dog is actually Gretchen's dog. And she didn't know that we were going to do this. I'm sure she's really excited now. So yeah, Diego. So this is yeah, and that's that's Diego. But this is an example sales plan with Diego's Grooming or Diego's Barker Shop. It's a little hard to read. I can see that from from here. But let's say that our top priorities for Diego's is to increase revenues by $50,000. And we want to hire one new part time groomer. We want to hire a receptionist to handle appointments and payments. And we want to purchase more grooming equipment. So those are our big priorities at Diego's. So you know, how how are we going to get there? How many new customers do we need to get? And by the way, I don't know anything necessarily about grooming shops. So I may be way off with these numbers and everything. But this is just an example. So let's say we need to get seven new customers a month. And the average customer is going to spend $50 a month to get to that $50,000 increase. So you know, additionally, we want to be sure to promote that we accommodate large dogs. That's something that some low hanging fruit that we're not capitalizing on right now. Moving into who we sell to. We're going to be targeting mostly young professionals and retirees. These folks consider their pets as family members. I know that Gretchen does. And then, you know, what is our approach going to be? Well, our grooming salon, we just need to we need to generate more awareness. That's our big push for this year. Because we've only gotten or we've gotten most of our business so far out of referrals. So we want to make sure that more people know about us. We're going to start a social media strategy. We're going to start putting out more video content so people can see the, you know, the cute animals that we groom and, you know, maybe some before and after pictures and things like that. And then looking at activity metrics. So we want to generate 60 grooming appointments and 20 bath appointments per month. We want to attend at least one networking event per week. We want to ask for five referrals from customers every week. And then we want to make sure that we're being super responsive to our website inquiries and try to get all of those in within 15 minutes. And then for our quick wins, we want to implement a formal referral program and then sign up 10 customers for a theoretical loyalty program. So that is Diego's Bark-Berr Shop. I think great things are in store for them. And that, I mean, I think I ran through that pretty quickly. So I apologize if I was too fast, but that is my presentation that I have all the time in the world to answer questions now.