Despite the quality of the products or services that a company offers, they do not sell themselves. The key to success lies in the ability to link sales activity with solid, data-backed objectives. Without well-implemented sales strategies, sales representatives and managers may make decisions based on immediate factors instead of considering the company’s long-term goals, which can result in inconsistent performance and a lack of sustainable growth.
In today’s dynamic business world, developing and implementing an effective business strategy has become essential to ensure the success and survival of any company, whether it is a small or a multinational corporation. The sales strategy, in particular, is crucial for generating predictable revenue and achieving long-term company objectives.
This article will provide a framework for developing a comprehensive sales strategy that enables your team to sell successfully. By following this approach, all team members will be familiar with the objectives, strategies, and appropriate processes, giving you a competitive advantage in the market and ultimately allowing you to attract more qualified leads and generate higher revenue.
What is a business strategy?
A business strategy is a sales approach that encompasses organizational objectives, team structure, responsibilities, market information, customer profiles, and other essential factors that determine the success or failure of business initiatives. In essence, a sales strategy acts as a guide for a company, ensuring long-term steady revenue through customer retention and acquisition.
This plan covers aspects such as specific tactics, market strategies, processes, goals, forecasts, budgets, and timelines. Typically, its duration varies, extending beyond a year, even up to two years, with additional focus on each quarter.
Most sales strategies in companies are designed top-down, with revenue goals set by investors, shareholders, and high-level executives with financial interests in the company. These objectives are achieved through revenue growth, cost reduction, or a combination of both approaches.
Why is it important to have a sales strategy?
A well-designed sales strategy is essential for any growth-focused organization. The purpose of a sales plan is to develop the entire strategy in advance, allowing for future anticipation, problem prevention, direct communication with the ideal customer, and ensuring that sales tactics and market positioning are ready to be implemented. Strategic planning involves anticipating from the beginning, thus avoiding the need to constantly solve problems arising from improvisation.
How to implement a sales strategy
As mentioned earlier, sales strategies are often implemented by those in higher positions who establish revenue or growth goals based on external factors, evenly distribute figures among sales territories, and set the process in motion.
However, this simplistic approach fails to consider key aspects such as markets and territories with the highest growth potential, the evolution of the customer journey, competition, and market maturity. As a result, poorly planned strategies tend to lose momentum, create confusion in the sales team, and fail to meet the proposed objectives.
To design a successful sales strategy plan, managers should follow a framework with the following steps:
1. Set sales objectives
Sales objectives are crucial in guiding the strategy and establishing goals for your team. However, it’s important to find a balance between ambitious and realistic objectives. Striking a balance between ambition and reality results in goals that motivate sales representatives without demoralizing them.
To do this, evaluate your company’s resources, review data from previous customers, and use the SMART model. Setting SMART goals for sales representatives helps to keep their activities aligned with the overall business objectives. Goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Ensure that sales objectives align with relevant quantitative goals of the company. When setting overall sales goals, define realistic short-term goals for the steps your sales department and representatives need to take to reach those objectives.
2. Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Establishing a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is essential for differentiating your product or service from the competition. Both leaders and sales team members should understand and clearly communicate this distinctive value.
To develop an attractive USP, speak with your top sales representatives, analyze prospect pain points and factors that help close deals, and conduct a SWOT analysis to understand your position in the market.
A SWOT analysis is an essential tool in building a sales strategy plan. By examining these aspects, companies can leverage their strengths, address weaknesses, identify opportunities, and anticipate potential threats. To conduct a SWOT analysis, gather a diverse group of colleagues and company leaders and have them contribute points for each aspect, fostering a diversity of perspectives.
3. Create customer profiles
Before addressing topics such as budgets, sales forecasts, and annual goals, the entire organization and sales team should focus on the customer. Adopting an outside-in approach to the sales plan and considering the experience the company wants to provide is crucial to ensure the success of the sales strategy.
While it’s not solely the responsibility of the sales department, the interaction with the sales team influences customers’ perception of the brand and how they share their experience with others. Therefore, it’s crucial for sales teams to consider how they want their customers to view the brand, the core values they want to build around the customer experience, and whether their representatives are effectively communicating with them.
To achieve this, it’s very helpful to define the ideal customer profile. The buyer persona is a fictional profile representing your ideal customer, describing why they need your product or service. To create buyer personas, segment your customers based on common characteristics such as industry, location, and demographics, and create a unique profile for each segment. This profile should include data such as fictional name and position, demographic details, role in the company, goals, challenges, how your value proposition aligns with their needs, and social media preferences. Work together with your marketing team to ensure everyone is aligned regarding qualified leads.
4. Study the customer journey
Analyzing how customers progress from prospecting to purchase is essential for improving conversion strategies. Study the customer journey and discover their contact and buying preferences. Identify improvement opportunities by engaging with current customers, determining what drives or hinders purchases, and studying your competitors’ strategies. By gaining a deep understanding of the customer journey, you can implement more effective tactics.
Focusing on effectively reaching your target customer base is crucial in sales strategy plans. Consider different approaches and adjust your strategy as the market changes.
5. Develop an action plan
The sales team is crucial in executing the corporate strategy. While other areas such as marketing and customer success also play a role in brand awareness, sales are the ones who close deals. When creating a sales strategy plan, it’s essential to consider broader objectives beyond revenue, such as increasing market share, driving revenue for new products, or expanding territorially.
Establishing an action plan ensures that your team works cohesively to achieve the company’s sales objectives. To help your sales team achieve their goals, establish specific customer acquisition and retention tasks, such as generating leads through social selling on platforms like LinkedIn, reading support ticket conversations to identify opportunities, upselling when appropriate, and asking for referrals from your top customers.
6. Create a sales funnel
Once the foundation of your sales strategy is established, it’s necessary to design the sales cycle. Start by documenting your current process, identifying what works and what doesn’t. Next, create your sales funnel.
In this phase, it’s crucial to assign specific tasks for each stage of the sales funnel:
- Prospecting: detail how salespeople can find leads, develop the ideal customer profile, and create personalized contact scripts.
- Lead qualification: explain the process for evaluating prospects and indicate qualifying questions.
- Meeting and demo: describe your value proposition, sales messages, and guidelines for conducting demos.
- Proposal: determine pricing for different products and services, as well as offers or promotions that can facilitate progress in stalled negotiations.
- Negotiation: establish negotiation guidelines so that salespeople know how to effectively showcase the value of your company and when to compromise.
- Closing: explain the steps to follow after closing a deal, including payment, onboarding, and implementation expectations.
- Retention: define which role is responsible for following up with current customers and when it should be done.
7. Implement sales tools
Investing in quality sales software is valuable as it enables sales teams to close important deals more efficiently. 72% of business leaders state that sales tool integrations are crucial to maintaining the business and outperforming the competition.
Sales tools may have features such as:
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
- Sales forecasting
- Analytics and reporting
- Workflow systems and automation
- Lead management
- Prospecting
In your sales strategy, describe the available resources and how salespeople should effectively utilize them.
8. Measure performance
Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) for individual salespeople and the entire organization to ensure the achievement of performance goals.
Additionally, sales goals should have a defined timeframe. If sales representatives think they have the entire year to achieve their goals, motivation decreases. It’s necessary for deadlines to be attainable and to provide appropriate support to drive progress at the end of each quarter. It’s advisable to review performance quarterly and annually to determine what works and what doesn’t.
Upbe can assist in measuring the performance of the sales team by providing real-time insights and analytics on prospects, opportunities, and sales. With this information, managers can monitor goal progress, identify areas for improvement, and evaluate the performance of each team member through customizable reports and dashboards tailored to your organization’s specific needs and goals, providing a clear view of sales performance and enabling informed decision-making.
We hope we have provided you with a solid framework to develop your next sales strategy plan, and we remain available for any further questions.
