This is how you create a winning sales strategy: a complete guide.
A Complete Guide To A Winning Sales Strategy
Creating a sales strategy is unique for every business. It is a tested process that generates deals and revenue over and over again. It might sound like a concept that large companies toss around. However, everyone from a small business owner to enterprises can benefit from a solid sales strategy.
Because no, unfortunately the product does not sell itself. It is always a great sales strategy that makes any product fly off the shelves.
In this article, we explore everything you need to know about a sales strategy you can immediately kick off, including what a sales strategy is, keys to developing a sales strategy and how to build one.
What is a sales strategy?
A sales strategy is a plan by an individual or a company to sell products or services to generate and increase revenue. It enables you to sell your products or services successfully. This strategy is always tested, evaluated and optimised to achieve the desired results.
Why do you need a sales strategy?
When developing a product or service, the ultimate measure of its success is sales. However, many business owners hyper-focus on product development, leaving little room for developing a successful sales strategy which should bring their sales to the next level. Before we start, let’s split the difference between a marketing strategy and a sales strategy:
A marketing strategy focuses on increasing the product/service’s visibility and a sales strategy concentrates on actually selling the product/service.
A sales strategy is focused on generating real, quantifiable profits. No matter how good your product or marketing plan is, it will be for nothing if your sales process can’t produce results.
Tip: once you know which outbound techniques work for you, it’s easier to scale your business with that outbound approach.
So, how do you create a good sales strategy?
Firstly, it’s good to notice that there are different types of sales strategies. We have inbound strategies and outbound strategies. An inbound strategy involves attracting prospects to your website, where they can download a whitepaper or make an appointment through your Calendly calendar. They would already have a broad idea about your company and product and as a company you should therefore provide your prospects to take the next step. It is also aligned with marketing strategies, where the marketing team attracts leads using online content. In this method, prospects are already actively looking for a solution of information regarding their challenge.
Outbound sales strategies focus on potential customers who are not necessarily aware of your product or service yet. They’re maybe not even aware of the need for your solution. With outbound sales strategies, you know who your prospects are. Hence, the first step for a solid outbound strategy is creating a Buyer Persona or Ideal Customer Profile. If you don’t know who your ideal customer is, you can use an outbound sales strategy to discover which persona fits your market the best.
After creating these profiles, you follow up with a lead generation strategy, which enables you to generate qualified leads for your salespeople to connect with. Connecting with these prospects comes with different techniques, such as cold calling, cold emailing or social selling through LinkedIn to get your prospect’s attention. And once you have their attention, pique their interest with your killer sales pitch and close the deal. Testing multiple channels is crucial, as comparing them really shows you what works best for you and your business.
Keys to develop a sales strategy plan
Every business is unique. Therefore, you have to come up with the best sales strategy that suits your business model and identity. To develop a sales strategy, determine the following:
- Company vision
A clear declaration of your company’s future direction helps you determine what you need to achieve now, this month, this quarter, and so on. Everything that you’re doing now and in the future must bring you closer to your vision. - Revenue goals
Your revenue goals have to be aligned with your company vision. What do you want to achieve each quarter and how does that line up with your yearly goals? Also, make sure you calculate how many deals you need per buyer persona, and wire back to how many leads this is per deal and so on. - Ideal customer profile
Create an archetype of your ideal customer. It’s not only about demographics, interests and associations anymore. Think about your customer’s background and pain points. This will help your sales team quickly qualify prospects. - Value proposition
Your customers need to understand how your product/service fills their needs, the benefits it provides them and specifics of how it is different from the competition. An ideal value proposition is to the point and talks directly to the challenges of the prospect, and is not solely about how good you or your product is. - Budget
Sales strategy involves various activities such as the tools and software for salespeople and the training they would need to be able to sell more and efficiently. You need to allocate a dedicated budget and invest in your salespeople to boost your revenue.
How to build your sales strategy
Now that you have a sales strategy plan for your business, it’s time to put it into action. Here’s a seven-step guide to build a successful sales strategy.
1. Find the right market and persona
One of the easiest ways to generate more sales is to look at what’s already working. Look at your current customers and understand who is actually buying your product. This is critical because in business there’s often a gap between your target customers and your actual customers. The former is whom you’re trying to market to while the latter are the ones buying your product or service. Get to know your actual buyers and create a customer persona that creates an identity and is not a mere compilation of figures. Have a story behind the faces of your persona and give your sales team a glimpse of their lives.
Here’s an example of a customer profile for an e-commerce consulting business:
Stephen is a 36-year-old retail store owner who is fairly successful selling healthy homemade chips to local customers. However, he knows he can achieve more sales and grow faster if he can sell his product online. Unfortunately, Stephen has no idea where to begin. He has a website but it’s not making a lot of sales because it is not search engine optimised. He needs an expert to show him the ropes.
2. Analyse risks and opportunities
Next, analyse the situation of your current position. One method is to implement the SWOT analysis. It is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threat. This analysis should provide hindsight on what your position is regarding your product and your potential client.
It analyses your business’s current situation and paints a clear picture of the weaknesses in contrast to your competitors and pinpoints the areas of strength. With these two factors, you can build on the opportunities and threats for your business and industry.
3. Align sales and marketing
Once you know your current position, align the sales and marketing functions to work side by side. Both these functions have the same business goal—to drive customer acquisition and revenue.
Although these two functions are often at conflict, the two teams can help each other get better at their work.
For example, salespeople can share their learnings from customer interactions with marketers, who can use this valuable information to target new leads. Marketers can provide salespeople with resources that are much needed to engage with prospects such as case studies and battle cards. Aligning these two forces these two departments to work together, which will create a stronger collaboration in lead generation and sales.
4. Define a sales process
A sales process is a structured set of repeatable actions that sales teams follow to convert prospects to paying customers. It covers what a salesperson should do at every stage of a prospect’s buying process. It is crucial to understand how this is different from the sales strategy.
An effective sales strategy outlines the approach to attain the sales goals. It provides actionable tasks for everyone in the sales function by taking into account the competition, the opportunities, and the obstacles. On the other hand, the sales process, a part of the sales strategy, is a set of activities that salespeople need to follow to attain the defined goal.
Your sales team has to perform various sales activities each day across different accounts and deals. Without a sales process, the only metric tracked is the number of deals closed and their value. There is no visibility into the sales pipeline. And when the revenue produced by the sales team fluctuates, no one understands why.
Having a defined sales process provides much-needed visibility into your sales pipeline, your sales team’s activities and insights into what worked and the areas that need improvement.
How to map out a sales process?
Mapping your sales process is the practice of walking through each step in real-time and understanding how it applies to your business, sales team, and customers.
When you map your sales process, you answer the “why” behind every decision you make — which is critical because your sales process is the foundation of everything your team does.
Need more help mapping out your sales process? Hubspot provides a great template that can help you get started. We’ve linked it for you here.
5. Hire the perfect team
A recent research by Harvard Business Review found that 81% of happy sales teams report annual increases in business performance. Keeping this in mind, you need to hire the right people who fit in your team and the company’s culture to drive your sales revenue. Creating a list of qualities in your ideal salesperson and using it during the interview process is an excellent way to identify the best candidates for the role. Another method is to have initiatives such as downtimes or happy hours for the salespeople in your team to blow off some steam. A happy sales culture not just encourages people to join your organisation but also helps retain your best salespeople.
Once you have your A-team, it is imperative that you coach them on the necessary skills such as cold calling prospects, handling objections, and negotiations. You also need to provide them with the resources required to close deals, such as case study documents, battle cards, and sales email templates. These are called sales enablement content.
6. Have an action plan
As everything falls into place, come up with a workflow that breaks down all the tasks involved in bringing you closer to your goals. Assign the tasks to team members with the right skills and experience. Put together a timeline for the completion of these tasks. Your timeline should be in sync with your revenue goals. Moreover, this is also the moment where you want to start reporting to actually track results of your efforts. Sales report templates help you with this. They can generate a visual summary of your sales team’s and company’s progress towards the sales goals. Sales reports provide actionable insights that can enable decision-making.
7. Invest in tools and software
With all hands on deck to implement your sales strategy, you need an application that can help capture, track, and nurture prospective customers or leads. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software enables you to do all those and more. With a CRM software, you’ll be able to automatically capture and record lead information. Instead of manually entering data, the best CRMs in the market capture lead information and record them on your database.
A sales CRM also enables you to nurture leads down your sales funnel through various sales campaigns. Through this process, you can educate or provide value by sending relevant content or promotional offers. For example, you can create an automated campaign that sends blog posts or invitations to free webinars based on predefined intervals. This helps demonstrate your expertise and would encourage the customer to purchase your product or service.
There you go, a guide to a winning sales strategy. Also check out our blog on lead generation through content creation for more leads to close the deal on!
