The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 117: Your 2021 Sales Plan

In today’s episode I am going to dive into how you can prepare ahead in your business for the next year. Things feel more doable with a plan and we are going to be talking all about how to map out that plan, what your goals are and so much more!

Your 2021 Sales Plan

By: Melissa Lin

The new year is right around the corner, literally right around the corner, which means it's time to start planning for the next year if you haven't yet. And if you have, that's awesome. You may can still get some information on how to scale or add to your 2021 calendar. So here we come, 2021.

Now, something that I love to teach my clients is that we could prep ahead. If you are still in the hustle of working only a few hours ahead, or a few days ahead in your business, it's okay, I've been there. I can get you to the point of working months ahead, just like my clients and myself. So if you're sitting there asking yourself, “Well how in the world, or why would you even want to think about next year, if you only want to be thinking about next month, or maybe quarter one?” My answer to you is, that things simply feel more doable with a plan. Can you pivot and adjust after we have your plan put together? Yes, always.

Why We Plan Ahead

So, when you're working your day to day in your business, sometimes you may feel, and if you're in the beginning stages of your business you may feel this way too, “You know, Melissa, why should I plan things in my business, if things aren't working yet?”, or if, “I'm still kind of getting things ready and still in the beginning stages”. This is what a lot of entrepreneurs in the early phases think. Something I'm going to share with you is a research experiment I read about in a book I just read, it was conducted at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. They drop people off in the middle of a forest and ask them to go home or go in a certain direction. So let's pretend that this is you. Let's pretend that you get dropped off in the middle of a forest and asked to get home. What ended up happening in this experiment was people started to, I believe it was after an hour or so, they started a walk in full circles. They thought they were going in a straight line. So this would be like putting a blindfold on and trying to walk across a football field. Now, what did they learn in this experience? In the experiment, they learned that in the absence of clear markers of distance or direction, what to do, people were making micro adjustments and constantly changing their sense of direction. You can overcome this if you have a distinct landmark, like a plan or a goal to work towards, and you can get there even faster with a compass or a GPS.

So why does this matter? Why am I sharing this experiment as an example? Our business, right? A business that doesn't devote time to determine where it wants to go, what the plan is going to be, how they're going to get there and identify landmarks that they want to get to in your business. Those businesses, without that, will start to spin in circles and continue to stay in circles. We don't want you to be in circles. It's not fun. So we want to create a plan so that you have an idea of where you're headed. You can always pivot, but you want to have an idea if you're heading in the right direction or not. So looking into 2021 and wondering what to sell, when to sell, how to sell. It might feel overwhelming. Today I want to help break it down for you so that it does not feel so scary.

Your 2021 Income Goals

Now, the way that I recommend we do this is first, I want you to think about your income goal for the next year, for 2021, and the number that you would like to hit. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to reverse engineer that, and number two, we're going to also map out your current offers and lay them out to see where the income can actually come from and what adjustments we may need to make.

So, first is first. How much do you want to bring into your business next year? We first get to establish this, determine what that number could be, $100,000 next year, 200k, 250k. And as I'm saying these numbers or asking what your number can be, if you start to tell yourself the story of, “Well, Melissa, that's too much too early in my business. I can't achieve that. There's no way I can do that. That feels impossible.” I want to share with you that you truly can achieve anything in life that you want, anything in your business that you want to. I have created the evidence myself, my clients have created the evidence. It is so, so possible for you too.

Mapping Out Your Existing Product Suites

Now that you have a number in mind, you've got it jotted down in your notebook. We're going to go in and start to actually map out your year. You want to ask yourself, “what am I going to sell?” Now, I want you to map out your existing product suites, plus any additional offers you might create and sell. So, if you're in the beginning stages, maybe you only have private coaching as an offer in your product suite, that's okay, put it down. And then we're going to start to map out a few other things, but if you have other items in your product suite, like a group coaching program, or a course, or an ebook download let's jot that down too. I want you to map out your existing product suites, plus any additional offers that you might create. If you have an idea of wanting to create a group coaching program down the road in 2021 let's put that down too. And then I want you, next to each of those, map out what they're going to be priced at or what you feel they'll be priced at. Are they going to be increasing each cohort? For example, if you have your first group coaching program and maybe it's $997. I'm just kind of throwing random numbers out there, but maybe it's $997 the first round, then you launch again in the middle of 2021, it's not the early bird pricing anymore. Maybe you're not doing the founding members price the second round, so then your price is probably going to go up. Put down what you feel the price is going to be. Then also, on top of that, what is the capacity for the program?

This is something I want to spend a minute or two to talk about because capacity is really important as you continue to scale. As you continue to scale, you want to look at the capacity of your programs, the pricing of your programs. It's usually for you to scale, you either get to expand your products, add more offers, or increase your capacity. So, if you're a group coaching program, for example, can only bring in five people right now. That's amazing. And that's five people you get to create incredible impact with and huge transformation. But, how can we increase our capacity to 10 people next round, 15 people next round? Because for you to scale, you could help more people. You get to serve more people. And so you get to increase your capacity or create something new where you can have more capacity. Maybe you tweak your group coaching program in a way that you can bring in more people. Maybe you're giving everybody one-on-one coaching calls right now on top of the group coaching calls.Okay. Let's reframe and see how you can increase capacity by potentially removing the one-on-one coaching aspect of it and adding in a few more modules so that they don't need that one-on-one support if it's a group coaching program. Definitely things we can talk about.

Mapping Out Your Sales

So, you've got your products we mapped out. You know what the price is going to be for each of them, how many people you can bring into the program, now start to ask, how many of each program, or product, or course, whatever it is, will you sell? Let's start to set targets out, and say if your goal was 100k for the year. Then, if we reverse engineered, map out for 12 months in a year, if I want to hit 100K, six figures, I need to bring in a little over 8,000 per month. Some months, let's say, maybe you've got a group coaching program you launched and that's going to be a 20K launch. Not every month needs to be 8K exactly. Some month’s maybe a little higher. Some maybe a little lower. My goal for you is to always be bringing it up and having them higher and higher, of course. But start to map out how many of each product will you sell? Set targets on how many of each product you'll sell with capacity. Then how many you feel, based off of past launches, you'll be able to fill? If your program, your group program, as I mentioned right now is at five, will you be able to tweak it by next year to make it 10? How can you turn it into a scalable program? We know how much the offers are. We know what the targets are. Now we get to determine when are we going to sell them? What does this look like? Most of your programs are probably live launches at this point, they may be evergreen, and we're going to talk about that in a minute, but ask yourself, “How often am I going to launch this program? How often do I want to enroll people into this offer?” Let's just say, for example, if your private coaching package is six months long and can hold 10 people at a time, then you have an annual capacity of 20 people. And so you may consider doing two big launches for it. Maybe once in January to fill the first 10, and then once in July to fill a second 10. Same with the group coaching program.

Another example, let's say our capacity is 10 people per round, and it's a three month coaching program. Well, you could either launch it three times per year or even four times per year. But ask yourself, how often do you see yourself launching it and how often do you want to fill it, if it's a live launch, not an evergreen offer. So determine how frequently you want to launch something and then schedule the time to do this on your sales calendar. Start to map out your game plan for when you're going to sell them. Don't even worry about the how, just worry about when is it going to happen. January private coaching and July private coaching. What's going to happen in February, March, maybe you have some courses in there. As you're doing this, I want you to also consider your upsells and down sells. For example, if in January you launched private coaching, not everybody in your audience will be ready for one-on-one private coaching and that's okay. There are people in your audience who are ready for something at all levels. So there are people who are going to be a little more ready for a low ticket offer, a mid ticket offer, a high ticket offer, so you want to be thinking about them as well. So if you launched private coaching, your highest ticket offer in January, then in February, you may want to consider a down sell, cause you probably won't have an upsell. Your one-on-one coaching is usually your highest offer. So start to consider, “what can I down sell those who weren't quite ready for one-on-one coaching? What can I down sell them into?” Maybe a group coaching program because it's probably going to be a little less of an investment, it will be a mid ticket, most likely. Maybe a course, start to think about that. I would recommend definitely downselling after that, if you're starting with private coaching. So what can you down sell into after that private coaching launch?

So you can start to map out those things and then start to plug in the other offers where maybe it's a course and it's not necessarily going to be big launches, it's going to be evergreen courses. And maybe you want to fill five core spots every single month. Start to fill that into your calendar as well, so we can get a good idea of what your income potential is going to be. That's a big reason why we're creating this plan so that we can see what your income potential for the year is going to be. Then we're going to start to create a game plan for how you're going to promote and how you're going to sell your offers.

I made a quick mention earlier that you may have a mix of evergreen offers and live offers that launch throughout the year. Similar to what we have in our business. And that's amazing. Let's also place that into your sales calendar, as I mentioned earlier, if it's a course or maybe it's a group coaching program. Maybe you have some coaching programs that are live launches a few times throughout the year, and a course that you sell passively. Set a goal for how many of those you plan to sell each month. And then as you continue to grow your business, it's probably going to naturally happen along with your continued contact marketing strategy. But it's probably natural that you'll continue to add more systems and automation to increase those sales over time with the continued marketing strategies.

So now that we have an idea of how you can map out your calendar, what it can look like. I want to give you a few more sales planning tips as you get going and start to map out your 2021 sales calendar. As you're mapping this out, you're really going to have such a great understanding of your income potential. And you may surprise yourself. You may surpass, if you had a 100K goal, you may see that it won't take too much more for you to surpass that and hit 150 or 200. I’m so excited for you. I do want to just note that just because your sales plan doesn't bring in half a million dollars or 250K, whatever that big goal is for you, it doesn't make it a bad sales plan. If you want more, shoot for more, but something I want you to keep in mind and just be careful of not falling in that trap of thinking you should be doing more. Do what feels best to you and your business and what's going to be most aligned for that.

Focusing On The Most Profitable Products

If you're not sure, maybe you're someone like me and you've got a ton of different courses. We have quite a few different courses. We have quite a few different coaching programs. What realistically, should I put my focus on? So I want to recommend, put your focus on whatever offers you have that are the most profitable in your business. Take a look at 2020. What was most profitable in your business? 2019? Was it a certain course? Was it a certain coaching program? Take a look at those and make sure that those are definitely on your calendar for 2020. Your most profitable products. We definitely get to put more focus there. Also, know that sales plans can definitely change. I was chatting with my mastermind ladies yesterday on a group coaching call and sharing with them that our 2020 sales calendar, I mean, we had it mapped out before 2020 even started. We had no idea COVID was going to be coming. Did we pivot a little bit because of COVID? Yes, definitely. And just keep in mind, your sales plans can change. It's definitely okay to make pivots, make adjustments, make tweaks, but we want to have something in place so that we have something to help guide our actions. And again, it just feels so much more doable with that in place, ready to go. So create that sales plan. What I want you to do is as you map it out, literally map it out in a Google doc. So January, this is what I'm going to launch. You know it's going to be two private coaching spots, pay in full, two private coaching spots, maybe payment plan options. Then February is going to be a group coaching program. Map out each month in a huge Google doc, and then put it on a Google calendar. Love having it on a Google calendar. I personally love Google calendar. Or put it onto your handwritten calendar, whatever that is so that you can visually see your plan mapped out for the year as well. Again, it's just going to feel so much more doable.

I’m so excited to see your 2021 sales calendar come to life. I would love to hear all about your sales calendar and any other takeaways you got from this. Let me know your honest opinion, any questions you might have, thoughts, takeaways, all of the goodies that you want to send my way. Feel free to screenshot this and tag me on Instagram @TheMelissaLin. I'm always going to be your biggest cheerleader. I’ll see you next time!

Topics we cover include:

Think about your income goal for 2021
Mapping out your existing product suites
How many of each program or product will you sell?
Focus on most profitable offers in your business.

And so much more!

Times to check out:

(9:34) Your income goal for 2021.

(10:47) Mapping out your existing product suites.

(13:31) How many of each program or product will you sell?

(19:57) Focus on the most profitable offers in your business.

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