Strategic planning has nothing to do with sales if you enjoy working hard, and struggling day in and day out to hit your sales targets. If you'd rather make more and work less then strategic planning has everything to do with sales. There are two distinct approaches to sales, and the choice is yours to make. Most sales people follow an approach that focuses on high levels of activity hoping that all that activity will result in sales. Both you and I know people who tried that approach, worked nearly night and day yet they still failed. That contradicts what you're constantly being told by sales managers, broker dealers, underwriters, and others.



Why does that approach fail, or at best provide not much more than a very meager living? It fails because just being highly active is never enough. You have to be focused on the right activities.

When you focus on right activities you position yourself with the right people so when you meet you're meeting: for the right reasons, people who are highly likely to do business with you, and people who've preselected themselves as being ideal customers for you. When you focus on activity rather than productivity you're meeting: anyone who can fog a mirror, people who aren't likely to do business with you, and people you have to try and coerce into doing business with you. As you see it written out it's pretty obvious the activity based approach just isn't a good business model for anyone.

The second approach is based on limiting your activities to those that are highly productive for you. Now you're focused on learning and doing the right things that put money in the bank for you. You have a whole lot more time and money because you aren't running around like a starving wolf trying to find some fresh game each day.

Even though you understand there is definitely a difference and that one approach produces better results, you may not see how strategic planning fits in. You may think strategic planning is something only large corporations do, but it's something you need to do too on a smaller and more focused scale. Through the strategic planning process you develop the clarity you need to effectively attract customers.

You know you have more potential than you're achieving now and the strategic planning process helps you to get the clarity you need to develop a plan for how you'll reach that potential. You end up with a dash board that helps you to know exactly what you need to do when. From your dashboard you can track, measure, and adapt so you hit your sales targets.

Rather than starting each day wondering what you're going to do and what you should do, you know exactly what you need to do to get the results you want. You know who you want to do it with, and you have a clear plan for how to attract those people. You no longer have to constantly hunt for people to appoint because you've developed plans and systems that filter out the people who aren't right for you and gather in the people who are.