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.

Right activities position you 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. That’s very different from the approach that focuses on activity because with that approach 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 talk into doing business with you. When you see it spelled out like that it’s pretty clear the activity based approach just isn’t a good business model for you, or anyone.

The better approach is to focus and limit your activities to those that are highly productive for you. As you focus on doing the right things it’s much easier to put money in the bank for you. You’ll find you’ll have a whole lot more time and money because you aren’t running around like a chicken scratching everywhere trying to find the worms.

Ok, you get there is definitely a difference and that one approach produces better results than the other, but you may not get how strategic planning fits in. You probably think strategic planning is something that only large corporations and international conglomerates do, but it’s something you need to do too on a much smaller and much more focused scale. The strategic planning process helps you to develop the clarity about your business that 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.

Instead of 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. Instead of constantly hunting for appointments you develop plans and systems that filter out the people who aren’t right for you and gather in the people who are.