A few months ago, I had a discussion with one of my coaching clients. We were chatting about industry trends when I learned they had bought a particular piece of equipment. I didn't even know they had this, as they never spoke about it before.
They bought it because it was a "great deal" at a trade show. Spent about $40,000 on it. Which was considerably less than retail for this machine. They had it installed in their shop the next week. To be fair, they weren't wrong about the machine. They saw a real opportunity for their customers. They just never got around to pushing sales to it.
It's been sitting there for two years now. They've never used it once for a customer's order.
Let's do some quick math on that "great deal." The machine loses value every year it sits there, about $5,700 a year. It takes up floor space they're paying rent on. And that $40,000 had a cost too, whether it was a loan or cash that could have been working somewhere else.
Add it up, and that idle machine has cost them roughly $21,000 over 2 years. That's about $900 a month.
On top of the $40,000 they already spent.
It works fine. That's not the problem. The problem is that the shop doesn't sell to it. There was never a plan for who would buy what it produces, who would actively sell orders to it, or how customers would even know it had production capacity for it.
They had what I call "The Hope Plan."
What is The Hope Plan?
The Hope Plan is when your sales strategy is based on waiting on the phone to ring or an email to come in for your next order. There really isn’t much of an organized sales effort for the shop. Sure, it might feel comfortable when orders are dropping in without much effort.
I hear it all the time, “We’ve never had to have a sales team before. Now, we’ve lost some customers and sales have dried up and we’re struggling.”
Equipment bought on the Hope Plan sits in the corner gathering lint. Salespeople hired on the Hope Plan spend their day quoting whatever walks in the door.
Hope is not a strategy. It’s a coin flip with your payroll.
What does ROI mean?
I talk about this a lot in the classes I teach at trade shows. ROI used to mean "Return on Investment." When you buy equipment, that’s probably what you're thinking as you are stroking a check to the company selling it.
But to me, it means "Return on Intent."
Return on Intent is what you get back from an investment when you pair it with a deliberate plan and the effort to work it.
Both halves matter. If you want to learn to play the guitar, you have to practice playing the guitar. If you want to master baking your own bread, you have to spend a lot of time kneading dough. And if you want more sales for your business, you (or someone at your company) have to actually do the work of selling. But effort without a plan is just busy. You have to point the effort at the right target.
That unused machine in the corner? The owner saw the opportunity. That part was right. What was missing was the plan and the effort to build sales to it.
Return on Intent applies to everything in your business that needs a positive outcome. New equipment. A new salesperson or marketing hire. Your website. Even a trade show booth.
You are what you repeatedly do. Guitar players play the guitar. Bakers bake. Salespeople sell.
No effort with intent, no return.
What is a Sales Plan?
A sales plan is a written decision about where your business's growth will come from, who owns it, who does the work, and how you’ll know it’s working. It’s a decision you make in advance, so you aren’t making it up every Monday morning or buying equipment you aren’t tying sales effort to.
It’s not a budget, and it’s not a revenue number written on a whiteboard at the start of the month.
A solid sales plan for a decorated apparel shop is built around:
- What matters most to your shop
- Why customers choose you
- Where your growth should come from
- Who you are going after
- Who owns the results of the effort
- How you’ll track results each week
It should be concise enough that you can review it in 15 minutes.
Why does a Sales Plan matter?
A sales plan matters because the activity you complete today shows up as revenue 60 to 90 days from now. Sales trainers call this the 30-day Rule. The prospecting you do in any 30-day period pays off over the following 90 days.
When you stop filling the pipeline in October and November because you are busy with holiday orders, you’ve just scheduled for yourself a dismal January. That’s why the pipeline has to get filled constantly, busy or not.
The feast-and-famine sales rollercoaster your shop has been riding over the years is probably due to not aligning a sales plan to your market.
Your plan has to fit your shop. If you’re the owner and the only salesperson, your plan will look different from a shop with 5 outside sales reps. A 4-person shop might only have a few hours a day for outreach. A 100-person shop with an active sales team might have daily targets for each rep. Both are real sales plans.
What matters most to your shop?
Before you set a single sales goal, decide what a good order looks like for your shop. Every other decision in the plan flows from this one.
Is it net profit margin? Filling open capacity on the production floor? Constant reorders? Growing a specific decoration method? Reducing how much revenue depends on 2 or 3 huge customers? Selling online merch stores as a product?
This obviously is an incomplete list and may not match what makes sense for you. Make your own list, and then rank them. You can’t chase everything at once, especially if you are a smaller shop.
Then decide which jobs you want less of. You know them already. That 50-piece order where the customer shops thrift stores and brings you a garbage bag of garments to embroider. A gigantic order from a big brand, but you have to match their price, and they have 60 days to pay. Maybe it is the “I’m starting my own t-shirt line, and I need 2 samples of 25 designs by Friday” dreamer.
A sales plan gives you permission to stop chasing work that costs you money, headaches, or sleepless nights.
Why do your customers choose you?
Your customers choose to work with you for reasons that may be different than the messaging on your website.
Have you ever asked, “Hey, what made you pick us in the first place?” or “What is your favorite thing about us?” You want to know why your best customers rely on you before you start building a target list.
Also think about customers or deals you lost. Why did they leave or choose to work with someone else?
This information is crucial for determining an Ideal Customer Profile, as it comes directly from the people who already love you.
Where will your growth come from?
Your growth can come from 5 places, and only 1 of them is new customers. I call these the 5 Growth Levers. By the way, every lever works better when you look at it from your customer's side of the counter. If the customer isn't better off, it isn't a lever. It's a sales pitch.
- New Customers. Find the companies that have the same problems your best customers had before they found you, and show them how you solved it.
- Reactivation. Reach back out to customers who stopped ordering and find out what changed. Maybe their needs shifted, or a past order missed the mark. Give them a reason to trust you again.
- Upselling. Help your customers get more out of what they're already buying. A better blank that holds up wash after wash, or a custom inside-the-neck label that reinforces the brand and includes a QR code anyone can use to buy more merch.
- Frequency. Make it easier for your customers to order more often. A seasonal calendar, a reorder program, or an online store means they aren't scrambling at the last minute every time they need something.
- Cross-sell. Solve more of your customer's problems in one place. If they buy screen-printed tees from you and embroidered polos from someone else, you can save them the second vendor.
Let's take reactivation for a second, because it might be the fastest money in your building.
Pull a list of every customer who hasn't ordered from you in the past 12 months. Now add up what they spent with you in the year before they stopped.
Let's say it's 14 customers who averaged $6,000 a year. That's $84,000 that walked out the door. And you may not even know why.
These customers already know you. They've already trusted you with an order. Finding out what changed is a phone call, not a cold call.
Should you work all 5 levers at once?
No. Pick 1 or 2 levers to try for the next 90 days and work them consistently. A sales plan that tries to do everything freezes up about 3 weeks into the plan. Especially when the shop gets busier.
Decide on fewer things to work on, but work them every week. This beats a perfect plan you never take action on.
Can your shop deliver what you sell?
This seems obvious. “Of course we can,” you say. But let’s take a deeper look here. If your embroidery department is already booked 2 weeks out, pushing more embroidery orders into the system doesn’t make you more profitable. It makes you late.
So, your sales plan has to be connected to your shop’s actual available capacity. Look at each decoration method in the building. How full is it? Where’s the bottleneck? Any open room?
And again, that idle machine sitting in the corner? That’s where your Return on Intent (ROI) is waiting.
Who should you clone?
The fastest way to find new customers is to clone the best ones you already work with consistently. Pull your sales report. Rank your customers by revenue and profitability, and study the top 20%. By the way, profitability can tell you more than revenue, since revenue can make a demanding, low-margin customer look like a great account.
A $100,000 customer seems like a great find. But what if you only make 7% net profit? That gets you $7,000.
A $40,000 customer, at a 25% net profit, brings you $10,000. So you actually make more money with less effort.
A simple way to organize this information is through RFM:
- Recency: When did they last order?
- Frequency: How often do they order?
- Monetary: How much do they spend over a period of time?
This is great data to use for your sales planning. Your top 20% will often have data points or facts in common. Industry. Size. Who makes the buying decisions. Frequency of orders. Decoration methods. How they discovered you. Those traits can become your clone profile.
One quick warning. If your shop management software has the same customer entered 3 different ways (“ABC Company,” “ABC Co,” and “ABC Co. - Jim”), your analysis could be wrong. Clean up the duplicates or other weird bits of information before you use this data to clone your profile and trust the results.
Also, before you upload your customer data into any AI, take a few minutes to anonymize the list. Use customer numbers instead of names, or make up your own and keep a key on your own computer separate from the upload.
Then build a target list of the companies that match the clone profile to go after. Try to get 25 to 100 on the list.
Who owns the sales result?
This is crucial to your sales plan success. Accountability.
Every lever, every target list, and every KPI number needs one person’s name attached to the result.
Not “the sales team.” A real person’s name.
Then ask the hard question. Is this person in the right seat to achieve the success you want? Do they actually want to sell, have time to sell, and are willing to do the work to sell?
A plan without a named owner, or with the wrong person running it, is just a document.
And if you want better results, you have to protect the time it takes to sell. Block outreach hours on the calendar every day, by every person attached to the sales plan and outcome. If you are the owner and the only salesperson, the plan has to carve those hours out for you. Otherwise, when you are busy with other tasks, your sales hours are chewed up and spit out.
And this is how you can go through weeks or months without any new sales. You are crazy busy until suddenly you aren’t. Then you panic and do anything to book sales just to keep the lights on.
How do you track sales?
You don’t have to measure everything, but you should keep a set of sales metrics handy to evaluate progress and keep your sales efforts accountable.
Leading indicators tell you what’s coming. Lagging indicators tell you what happened.
Here are some ideas for you to use:
- New Customers
- Leading Indicator: The number of human-to-human conversations with targeted accounts per week.
- Lagging Indicator: The number of new accounts per month.
- Reactivation
- Leading Indicator: The number of dormant customers contacted per week.
- Lagging Indicator: The number of customers reactivated.
- Upselling
- Leading Indicator: The number of quotes with an upgraded option.
- Lagging Indicator: The average order value for the week.
- Frequency
- Leading Indicator: The number of programs or online stores proposed.
- Lagging Indicator: The number of orders per customer per year.
- Cross-Selling
- Leading Indicator: The number of cross-sell offers made.
- Lagging Indicator: The number of customers buying 2 or more different decoration methods
Now let’s run some example math for one month so I can show you how this works:
| Step | Example |
|---|---|
| New customer revenue goal per month | $20,000 |
| Average order value | $1,000 |
| Orders needed | 20 |
| Quote close rate | 35% |
| Quotes needed | 57 |
| Conversation-to-quote rate | 50% |
| Conversations needed | 114 |
| Working days per month | 21 |
| Conversations needed per day | About 6 |
Breaking this down. “We need more sales” is a reactive gut feeling. “We need 6 conversations a day” is a to-do list objective. Conversations are real dialogs with a human. Not a voicemail. I wrote about this before if you want to dig into how conversations can drive sales. Read this.
Take a look at the numbers above. There isn’t any mystery to them. You can put your own numbers like these on a dashboard. It can be a spreadsheet, a whiteboard, or a sales app. Decide where it lives, who updates it, and when.
One more thought here on sales. Visibility. Your customers research you and your competitors before they reach out. If you want to grow your cross-selling into laser engraving, what will your customers see from you regarding laser engraving over the next 90 days? Emails, samples, social media posts, maybe a case study. Plan it.
What does a Sales Plan 15-minute weekly routine look like?
Want to keep your sales plan alive? Develop the weekly habit of reviewing your sales metrics on the same day, at the same time, with the same set of KPI numbers. Just set a recurring appointment on your calendar.
- Review the dashboard numbers against your target goal (5 minutes)
- What worked, and what didn’t? (5 minutes)
- Commit to next week’s actions, by name. (5 minutes)
That's it. Keep it simple. A plan with weekly actions works. One that only gets looked at once a quarter doesn't.
What happens on day 91?
Your plan runs for 90 days. Then you reset it. Pull your new numbers, look at what worked and what didn't, and run the AI interview again. Maybe you keep the same levers. Maybe you're ready to add a third. Either way, every 90 days builds on the last one.
A one-time plan is a project. A plan you reset every quarter is a system.
How to use AI to build a sales plan
Using AI to help write or build things is becoming more prominent these days. Using the tool to help build out your sales plan is exactly what you need to do, but let’s review some tips.
First, don’t ask AI to “write me a sales plan.” You’ll get a generic template that won’t align with your business needs.
Instead, have AI interview you. One question at a time. You want to have a deep interview so you can produce a lean, actionable plan customized to your shop.
I’ve taken all of these ideas and more and turned them into a prompt. It works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or whatever AI tool you use. With this prompt, the AI interview will ask open-ended “how” and “what” questions about your business, and they are the kind that elicit real answers rather than a yes-or-no.
Also, I want to acknowledge something up front before you dig in here. Some of these questions might expose numbers you haven’t looked up in a while or even ever. That’s going to be normal. Honest answers will build a better plan.
Before you start
- Use a company AI account. Don’t paste in customer names, emails, phone numbers, or contact information. Describe customers by type instead (a regional hospital system), or anonymize the data. I wrote about this in Your Employee Handbook Has an AI Blind Spot.
- Export your customer data. For the last 12 months at least. Up to 3 years is better. Find customers, revenue, gross profit, number of orders, last order date, order frequency or count, decoration methods purchased, and any other data point relevant to your Ideal Customer Profile.
- Clean up duplicates. Merge customers entered more than one way.
- Bring your salesperson in. If you have someone selling for you, run the interview together. They know things about your customers you don't. And a plan they helped build gets effort. A plan handed to them gets compliance.
- This will likely take an hour or so. “I don’t know,” or “Explain it to me,” or “I’m confused, can you explain it to me,” are all valid answers you might post back to your AI tool. The AI will help you get through it. Don’t be shy. The AI overlords are not judging you on your questions.
- Check your math. AI can be confidently wrong. Verify every number before you build your year around it.
- Don’t have time to grab your data? Can you knock out some estimates? A good plan today is much better than a perfect plan tomorrow or one that never happens because you are waiting on time to get your data in order. Just start.
The Sales Plan Interview
Copy, paste, and let AI interview you to build your customized Sales Plan for your business. You can print this out and upload it, or copy it to your clipboard using the button.