Is Your Sales Plan on Life Support? Here’s How to Revive It
If you are leading a company, you’ve spent countless hours developing your sales plan, aligning your team, and mapping the path to success. But if your sales plan isn’t working as expected, it’s time to take a hard look at the reasons why. Acting swiftly to course-correct is crucial before the gaps become insurmountable. A broken sales plan can waste time, money, and resources that could otherwise be better invested.
We’ve seen many companies make the same mistakes when it comes to creating and executing their sales plans. Some of these issues are subtle, while others are glaring. Don’t worry—this isn’t a death sentence for your growth ambitions. It’s simply an opportunity to reassess and optimize. Let’s dive into the five key reasons why sales plans fail—and how to fix them.
1. Unrealistic Revenue Targets or Sales Goals
One of the most common and damaging reasons sales plans fail is setting unrealistic revenue targets. A study by McKinsey & Company found that only 25% of sales organizations consistently hit their targets. More often than not, goals that are overly ambitious, disconnected from market realities, or don’t account for seasonality and other external factors are set.
In many cases, leadership may set overly optimistic quotas in an attempt to drive motivation, but this approach often backfires. When sales teams can’t hit the mark, morale takes a hit, which further erodes productivity.
The Solution:
It’s critical to set ambitious but realistic goals. Start by using data-driven insights—historical sales data, customer behavior trends, and market forecasts—to determine what is achievable. Break down larger, high-level revenue targets into smaller, incremental goals that are easier to track and achieve.
For example, rather than saying, “We need to generate $5 million in revenue this year,” break it down by quarter, sales rep, and region. This provides a more granular view that is easier to manage and measure. Setting realistic goals that your sales team can consistently achieve will lead to higher morale and better long-term performance.
2. Lack of Clear Sales Processes and Methodologies
Sales processes in many companies are far too vague or inconsistent. Without a clear methodology, sales teams can struggle to effectively move prospects through the pipeline. According to Forrester, 60% of B2B buyers prefer to research and make decisions on their own before even engaging with a salesperson. This shift in buyer behavior makes it even more critical for SaaS sales teams to have a structured approach that addresses each stage of the customer journey. If you ask three people on your team to describe your sales process and they have different answers, or it’s not described with extreme clarity, that’s a big red flag.
A sales process that’s unclear or inconsistent can cause confusion, wasted time, and missed opportunities. If sales reps don’t know how to qualify leads, handle objections, or close deals, they’ll lack the confidence to drive revenue.
The Solution:
Develop a well-defined, repeatable sales process. This includes mapping every step of the customer journey—from lead generation to qualification to proposal to closing. Ensure your team is trained on proven sales methodologies (such as SPIN Selling, GAP Selling, MEDDIC, etc.) that resonate with your target prospects.
Standardizing your sales process ensures clarity, alignment, and better results, building confidence for your team and trust with your prospects. The goal is to make the sales process so straightforward that any rep, regardless of experience, can follow it and succeed.
3. Poor Alignment Between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success
A lack of alignment between sales, marketing, and customer success teams is a silent killer of sales effectiveness. Research from HubSpot revealed that companies with aligned sales and marketing teams achieve 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates. When sales, marketing, and customer success teams work in silos, leads get lost in the handoff, messaging becomes inconsistent, and opportunities for upselling or cross-selling go unnoticed.
The Solution:
Communication is key. Hold regular meetings between the sales, marketing, and customer success teams to discuss lead quality, customer feedback, and ongoing opportunities. You want to deliver a consistent narrative across departments and foster an environment where the focus is always on solving the customer’s pain points.
For example, marketing should provide sales with highly qualified, sales-ready leads, while customer success should feed sales with information about customer needs, enabling better upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Collaboration ensures a seamless customer experience and a greater chance for sales success.
4. Inadequate Training, Coaching, and Sales Enablement
Training and enablement are often overlooked, but even the best sales plans will fail without them. A Salesforce study found that 84% of high-performing sales teams have ongoing training, coaching, and development programs in place. On the flip side, organizations without a strong enablement program see a significant drop in sales productivity.
Many sales reps receive initial training and are left to figure things out independently, which can be disastrous in an ever-evolving SaaS environment. Reps need continual coaching to stay on top of new features, customer objections, and changing market conditions.
The Solution:
Invest in ongoing sales enablement and coaching. Create a robust onboarding process that includes product knowledge, customer persona training, and sales methodologies. More importantly, implement a culture of continuous coaching where managers regularly meet with sales reps as a part of their operating rhythm to review their pipeline, address challenges, and improve skills.
Provide your sales team with the right tools and resources—such as case studies, objection-handling scripts, and sales playbooks—to help them close more deals. The easier it is for your team to access these resources, the more efficient and effective they will be.
5. Failure to Track Key Sales Metrics and Adjust the Plan
A major reason many sales plans fail is the inability to track key metrics and adjust strategies in real-time. A HubSpot report found that 46% of sales teams do not clearly understand their sales metrics. Without clear visibility into performance, sales leaders can’t identify what’s working and what’s not, leading to poor decision-making and missed opportunities.
The sales cycle in B2B sales is often long, so it’s important to track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as lead conversion rates, customer acquisition costs (CAC), lifetime value (LTV), churn rate, and average deal size. This data helps you assess whether your sales strategy is on track or adjustments are needed.
The Solution:
Invest in analytics tools that give you a real-time view of sales performance. Set up a dashboard that tracks your KPIs and allows you to quickly identify trends, gaps, and areas for improvement. Your sales plan should be dynamic—adapt and iterate based on your collected data.
By measuring KPIs and continuously tweaking your sales strategy based on data-driven insights, you can optimize your sales efforts for better performance.
Conclusion: Fixing Your Sales Plan for Success
It’s easy to overlook these common mistakes when you’re deep in the trenches of scaling your organization. However, identifying and correcting these issues will not only fix a broken sales plan, it will help you build a stronger, more sustainable revenue engine.
Sales success isn’t about luck. It’s about having the right plan and discipline to execute and adjust when necessary. As you assess your current sales plan, analyze your goals, processes, alignment, training, and metrics. Don’t be afraid to make changes as needed.
By setting realistic goals, clarifying your sales process, aligning your teams, investing in continuous development, and using data to track and refine your strategy, you can fix your sales plan and set your company on the path to long-term success.
TeamRevenue, empowers businesses to drive sustainable growth. We provide our clients with the revenue enablement experts, best practices, and an accountability framework to optimize revenue teams, systems, and processes to drive results. We’ve worked with hundreds of B2B companies worldwide, breaking the cycle of underperformance. Helping them grow faster, communicate better and bring new energy to their organizations.
