Imagine, you have an excellent marketing team, management decisions and a great customer service, but still you are not growing as business. It is possible that there is something wrong with sales strategy.
“It’s not about having the right opportunities. It’s about handling the opportunities right.” – Mark Hunter
The goal of every sales organization is to close more deals faster. In order to accomplish this, every organization needs a strong and effective sales strategy. Building and developing a solid sales strategy will help you to generate more leads and win more deals.
Sales strategy is not just for large organizations or multinationals. Small businesses as well need a good sales strategy to stay in the game and win.
We will walk you through the importance of sales strategy and how to build one that can help small businesses such as yours to make a real quantifiable growth.
What is a sales strategy?
A sales strategy is an approach by an individual or a business to sell their products or services for generating and maximizing revenue. It supports your sales efforts and helps you to achieve desired results.
In other words, a sales strategy involves understanding your unique selling methods, identifying your target market, knowing your competitors, analysing trends and staying organized. A well-defined sales strategy shows you a clear path for achieving desired sales goals quickly.
Why is it important to have a sales strategy?
Having a solid sales strategy is important for the growth of your company. One of the biggest mistakes we often make is forgetting to build a sales strategy. Creating a sales strategy can help you get more customers, build strong customer relationships and sell more products/ services.
A well-crafted sales strategy helps you to address the needs of customers at every stage, allows you to focus on areas that lead to closing more deals and enables you to find the right people for your team.
An efficient sales strategy can benefit your business by providing a clear-cut guide to streamlining your sales and marketing efforts.
Whether you deploy inbound sales or outbound sales, you can have sales strategies that can give you results.
Inbound sales strategy focuses on attracting prospects to your business and building strong relationship. The prospect is already aware of your business and initiates the contact.
One of the most popular ways to attract prospects is to provide best online contents such as blogs, e-books and other insightful information.
Prospects are actively looking for a solution or information regarding their challenge. They are almost ready to purchase from you. At this stage, you can clearly communicate how your product or service meets their needs. You can actively demonstrate the features and benefits of your product / service offerings connecting with their needs. Depending on these interactions, prospects convert into customers.
In outbound sales, the seller actively seeks a potential buyer, then reaches out to the prospect via cold calls, emails and finally sell their product / service through a process of follow-ups and demos. Outbound strategy depends on having the right Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for your business.
Once you have your Ideal Customer Profile, you can generate a database of potential leads that match that profile and reach out to those leads to find whether they are interested in your products and services.
You can employ various prospecting methods including social media, digital marketing, cold calling, and email to get your prospect’s attention. Once you grab your prospects attention, you will need to understand their needs to close a deal and build a strong relationship with them.
How to build a successful sales strategy plan that fits your business?
Every business must have a unique approach that suits their business identity and model. To build a plan that fits your business, you have to determine the following:
These are the basis of an executable sales strategy. At the end, your sales team will have clear priorities, measurable outcomes, strong guidelines and clear goals toward which everyone can work.
How to build a sales strategy?
Now you have a sales strategy plan and it’s time to put your strategy into action. Here is a 7-step process to build a successful sales strategy:
1. Understand your target audience
The goal here is to attract more customers who have similar challenges as your current customers.
The best way to reach your target audience is to look at your current customers and understand why they purchased your product / service. Ask yourself,
- What caused these customers look for a solution like our product or service?
- Why did they purchase our product or service instead of a competitor?
Create a customer persona of your actual buyers to achieve consistent sales. In addition to understanding general demographics information such as business size and team size, you can collect details like why they approached us. For example, you can go for a customer survey to understand your current customers better.
2. Implementing SWOT analysis
SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threat) analysis is an important tool to analyze your current situation considering your business strength and weakness and help you develop a strong business strategy.
It helps you to identify whether you’re able to expand your business further. SWOT analysis can be performed by anyone familiar with your business processes.
SWOT analysis highlights your areas of strength which you can use to make the most of the opportunities that you have in the future. It also shows your weakness so that you have the opportunity to address some of the weaknesses and threats that your business has or may face.
You can use your strength and improve your weakness to take advantage of opportunities and work to minimize threats.
3. Aligning sales and marketing
Aligning sales and marketing plays a crucial role in the success of your business. It helps you in customer acquisition and increasing your revenue. To properly manage every lead, you need sales and marketing to be united.
To get better at their work, both teams can share their learnings so that both could benefit from each other.
Few ways for both teams to work together
- Arrange for regular joint meetings for both teams
- Ensure open communication between both the teams
- Facilitate sharing information between both the teams
Once you have aligned both the teams, produce a consistent message that both teams can use. Now you can send your consistent message to all your prospects for winning more deals.
4. Define a sales process
A sales process is a repeatable set of steps that a sales team can perform to turn potential leads into paying customers. It acts as a roadmap for your sales team so they can know what steps to take next, to close a deal.
Having an effective sales process shows a clear path for sales team to follow and gives them much more consistency in winning deals.
Related blog: Sales Process – A roadmap to close deals faster!
5. Get the right team
To achieve your sales target, you need the right sales talent. Creating an ideal hiring strategy and using it during the interview process is an excellent way to identify the best candidates.
Another way is to have a happy and healthy sales culture. Happy salespeople convert more leads and are generally more successful.
Once you have identified the right people train them on the necessary skills such as cold calling prospects, handling objections, and negotiations.
You can train them with necessary resources such as sales email templates to close more deals.
6. Action plan
Set up a workflow that involves all tasks involved to achieve your goals. Assign the tasks to right persons and provide a timeline for the completion of these tasks. Your timeline should be in sync with your revenue goals.
7. Best tools and software
Provide the best tools and software to your salesperson to close more deals with less work. A customer relationship management (CRM) software enables you to achieve this.
With a CRM software, you’ll be able to automatically capture and record lead information.
You can even create automated sales campaign and send blog posts or invitations to free webinars based on predefined intervals. This would encourage the customer to purchase your product or service.
CRM such as HelloLeads.io provides you an option to capture, track and record lead information. The app can also help you with on-time follow-up reminders. You can also have a complete track of conversation history.
You can also track your sales team’s performance using its real time Custom Analytics (Live Reports). You can even track whether daily sales happened or not and who (sales person) is in connection with whom (lead) and who is performing well on a daily basis.
Whether you’re a start-up or an established player, building a well-defined sales strategy will help you to achieve your sales goals quickly.
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