Effective sales strategies are developed through careful evaluation and constant improvement. At Highspot, we work with sales and marketing leaders every day to enable their success, so we know firsthand the importance of a great sales strategy.
Below, we've answered some of the most frequently asked questions about creating a sales strategy that drives more profit for revenue-focused teams.
WHAT IS A SALES STRATEGY?
A sales strategy is a detailed plan that outlines the sales tactics and processes that a sales organization can use to achieve business goals and lead with competitive advantage. The strategy educates your sellers on how to position your business and your products or services to meaningfully engage buyers and further convert qualified leads into actual customers.
Any small business or organization can succeed or fail depending on its sales strategy. You must therefore constantly review yours while leaving room for developments based on new market trends, new business objectives, etc. / or the changing requirements of potential customers.
WHO DEVELOPS A SALES STRATEGY?
- Marketing, sales support and sales play a crucial role in the development and implementation of business strategy. The best sales strategies align the processes of sales and marketing teams to achieve desired sales goals. Indeed, many marketing activities (and resulting content assets) can help generate new leads and ultimately close more deals.
- Sales enablement connects these two teams and promotes greater efficiency, speed and continuity of operations when implementing business strategy. Sales enablement team members can plan and execute initiatives guided by their sales strategy, which in turn can help train their salespeople to ensure all marketing resources are used appropriately.
HOW TO CREATE A BUSINESS STRATEGY?
Designing a new strategy can be difficult, but any successful sales strategy starts with the following steps:
1. Define your business goals
Formulate clear sales and sales performance goals early on so that you can then measure success as accurately as possible. Remember that a good goal is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound) and reflects the overall goals of the organization.
To effectively achieve SMART goals, sales leaders should meet regularly with company executives to ensure that overall sales strategies align directly with current market trends and business needs. Leaders must then evaluate past performance measures to determine if current goals are realistically achievable.
Sales managers should ask questions such as:
- "How much did my team sell last year?"
- "Which customers generated the most sales?"
- "What's the next logical step for growth?"
- "What resources does my team need to support the next phase of growth?"
- Use your answers to provide a clear path to your stated goals. This will help you understand how to get from your current location to your desired destination.
2. Check your product range and create an optimal customer profile
You must always adapt your product to the customer's needs. A close product-to-market fit gives sellers the best opportunity to deliver value and close deals. How to start:
Start building your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) by studying market trends and feedback from existing customers. Also assess your target demographic and benefit from typical KPI characteristics such as industry, company size and general region.
Consider how your product creates value and ask yourself if this value proposition still addresses the pain points of the target customer discovered when creating your KPI.
Take your time. Product messages are the backbone of your sales strategy and underpin your next move...
3. Review your customer acquisition strategy
Once you've invested a lot of time and resources into developing your KPI (and making the necessary changes to your product), acquiring new customers should be next on your priority list.
Prospecting is the process sales reps follow to find leads that match their company's KPI. The overall goal is to identify the people most likely to become customers and move them down the sales funnel. Once that's done, sales reps are ready to nurture those leads until they're ready to close.
Effective sales acquisition is critical to the sales cycle, especially since more opportunities in your sales pipeline increase the likelihood of hitting quota. And since expanding or maintaining your pipeline coverage requires generating 3-4x more leads (i.e. delivering 3-4x more leads), a solid prospecting strategy can best position yourself for sales success.
To improve your prospecting technique, think about the types of accounts you identified in the previous step (i.e. your KPI) and ask yourself these questions:
"What outbound methods will you use to communicate with these accounts?"
There are many ways to reach out such as: B. Social selling through social media platforms (e.g. LinkedIn), asking for referrals from existing customers, or even making a simple cold call. All of these can be helpful, but whichever method you choose, be sure to always follow up.
- "Are your current KPIs effective and up to date?"
- Be sure to review your buyer personas to make sure they're in sync with your eligible buyer personas. (Every buyer has their own buying process and pain points, so make sure any profile criteria you've set still apply to your current audience.) "How will you prioritize your accounts?"
- Organization is the key to the qualification of executives. Create a list of sales accounts based on priorities and qualify leads to define their urgency. So you can close the most important deals faster.
- "What types of business assurance and resources do your reps need to achieve their business strategy goals?"
Evaluating these types of assets will allow you to make more meaningful demands each time you collaborate with your marketing peers.
4. Align your business strategy plan with marketing initiatives
When sales and marketing work in separate silos, executing a sales strategy is often difficult. So, at this point in developing your sales strategy, it's time to assess your marketing team's activities, from content to lead generation, and make sure they're designed to effectively support your sales goals. .
Because the success of your sales strategy depends on the success of your alignment strategy. As part of your targeting efforts, marketing activities should be optimized to attract inbound leads similar to your KPIs. This will allow marketers to convert these leads by creating and displaying valuable content specifically tailored to ICP's needs and concerns.
Modern teams often rely on sales enablement technology to foster constructive alignment between marketing and sales teams. A sales enablement platform can even improve targeting processes by creating a single source of truth for marketer-approved content, allowing marketers to find, personalize and showcase content assets easily and efficiently. .
While these solutions are very powerful, their success is ultimately determined by the strength of the sales strategy and process. You can help increase the impact of your sales strategy by involving marketing during the development phase of your strategy and providing ongoing feedback to marketers as you work to implement and execute. your strategy going forward.
5. Train and coach your sales team
Being an experienced salesperson is one thing. Understanding product messages, target markets, value propositions, KPIs and competitive advantages is something else entirely. Salespeople need comprehensive onboarding, training and coaching programs to maximize their potential and
- Support their organization's sales strategy.
- Make sure your business uses sales training systems that include:
- Onboarding and acceleration programs for every new seller
- An overview of your company's favorite selling technologies (and how to use them)
- Modules to access promotional material
- Optimal Sales Presentation Techniques and Best Practices in
Additionally, sales managers should also provide ongoing mentorship and training to help salespeople navigate and improve their sales pitches, emails, and general sales skills. A robust sales enablement tool can support both comprehensive sales training and sales training systems, laying the
- Foundation for simple construction:
- Just in time training process
- On-demand video tutorials
- Routine workouts
- Reports and performance assessment tools
6. Implement, Evaluate, & Iterate
After completing steps 1-5, your final task is to set a timeline and communicate your strategy to all stakeholder teams. Every team needs a deep understanding of every part of their sales plan: from their goals to their strategic initiatives to their timeline for execution.
Once your strategy is fully implemented, create a schedule for continuous evaluation over time. This will help identify areas for improvement that can drive growth.
HOW TO MEASURE SALES STRATEGY SUCCESS
Setting goals and measuring sales success starts with creating an infrastructure that allows you to regularly review sales performance. You do not know where to start ? First, focus on the sales metrics and KPIs that matter most to you.
For example, Salesforce suggests measuring recurring revenue, customer lifetime value, customer retention, lead quality, and win rate changes. Hubspot, on the other hand, recommends only measuring lead conversions and lead close rates.
The choice of what to track and what to ignore is up to you. Just be sure to find metrics that support data-driven decision making and can help you quantify performance in terms that make sense for your business.
After defining your desired KPIs, ensure that your CRM and sales enablement technology has adequate reporting capabilities. Detailed reports can help support proper monitoring, which can further inform practices to improve performance.
SELL SUCCESSFULLY
Are you ready to build an effective business strategy? While there are many types of sales strategies, these steps can serve as the foundation for your sales department's success in any size business, from start-up to established business.
After creating and implementing your sales strategy, you will be in a better position to increase conversion rates; Align your marketing, sales and activation teams; and collaborate at scale to achieve company sales goals. Do you want to deepen your business strategy?
White Clover Markets