Sales plan template: targets, territories and the activity that has to happen weekly

A sales plan template is a structure for turning a revenue target into weekly behaviour. It answers four questions in order: what number, from which customers, through what activity, owned by whom. Most documents called sales plans answer only the first, which is why they are read in January and never again — a number without an activity model attached is a wish with a deadline.

It is worth separating three documents that constantly get merged. A sales forecast estimates what will close and when. A go-to-market strategy decides how a product reaches a new buyer. A sales plan sits between them: given the target and the market, what does the team do on Tuesdays.

What goes in a sales plan template

• The target, split by quarter and by rep. An annual company number that has never been divided is not a target anybody can act on.
• Segments and territories. Who owns which accounts, by geography, size or industry — and what happens with an account nobody obviously owns.
• The mix: new business against expansion and renewal. These need different activity and often different people, and merging them hides an unhealthy dependence on one of the two.
• Conversion assumptions per stage. If ten qualified conversations produce two deals, the required activity is arithmetic rather than ambition.
• Weekly activity commitments derived from those assumptions — conversations, demos, proposals — not vanity counts like emails sent.
• Pricing and discount authority. Who may discount, by how much, and who has to be asked beyond that.
• Named owners and a review cadence. Weekly for pipeline, monthly for the plan itself.

Working backwards from the target

1. Start with the number and subtract what you reasonably expect from existing customers. What remains is the new-business requirement, and it is usually smaller than people assume.
2. Divide by average deal size to get deals needed. Use the median rather than the mean — one large deal last year distorts the average and every plan built on it.
3. Apply your win rate to get qualified opportunities needed. If you do not know your win rate, estimate it and write down that it is an estimate.
4. Apply the conversation-to-opportunity rate to get conversations needed, then divide by the weeks available.
5. Compare that weekly number to what the team currently does. If the gap is more than about a third, the plan needs more people, a better conversion rate, or a smaller target — and saying so now is cheaper than discovering it in the third quarter.

The step teams skip is the last one. A plan that requires each rep to hold forty qualified conversations a week when they currently hold twelve is not ambitious, it is arithmetic that has already failed. Catching that in the planning hour costs nothing; catching it at the half-year review costs two quarters.

Reviewing it so it stays true

A sales plan has two review rhythms and confusing them is the common failure. The weekly review is about the pipeline — which deals moved, which stalled, what activity happened — and it never reopens the plan. The monthly or quarterly review is about the assumptions: is the win rate what we said, is the deal size holding, is the mix between new and existing drifting. Assumptions get revised there, in writing, with the date, so that a missed number can be traced to which assumption broke.

Where it lives

The accounts, the conversations and the pipeline stages belong in Ettex CRM, since the activity numbers in the plan are only as good as the record of what actually happened. The plan document itself — targets, territories, assumptions, discount authority — sits in Ettex Docs where it can be revised and commented, and the quarterly arithmetic is easier to keep in Ettex Sheets next to the forecast.

The limits are worth naming. There is no territory optimisation engine, no quota management module, no commission calculation and no sales forecasting model that predicts on your behalf. The pipeline is what your team records; the arithmetic above is arithmetic you do. Anyone selling a system that removes the judgement from those steps is selling a confident number rather than a plan.