Twenty-Eight Articles for Sales: 9 – Have a game plan.

by S. Anthony Iannarino on November 4, 2009

Have a game plan. The final preparation task is to develop a game plan: a mental picture of how you see the operation developing. You will be tempted to try to do this too early. But wait: as your knowledge improves, you will get a better idea of what needs to be done, and of your own limitations. Like any plan, this plan will change once you sit down with the prospect or customer, and may need to be scrapped if the situation requires something different to advance the sale.

But you still need a plan, and the process of planning will give you a simple robust idea of what to achieve, what will advance the sale, even if the methods change. This is pre-call planning and fits into your overall process or system. One approach is to identify the basic stages in your operation: e.g. open relationships, build local networks, uncover areas needing improvement . . . Make sure you can easily transition between phases, both forward and backward in case of setbacks. Just as your competitors can adapt their activity to yours, you must have a simple enough plan to survive setbacks without collapsing. This plan is the “solution” that matches the shared “diagnosis” you developed earlier–it must be simple and known to everyone. Twenty Eight Articles for Sales Agnostic