What is a sales strategy and how is it designed?

Having a strong and effective sales strategy is essential to achieve sustainable growth and stand out in the market. While it’s possible that a company can acquire its first customers without a structured plan, there will come a time when it will be necessary to design an appropriate sales strategy to drive growth and ensure sustainability.

In this article, we examine the importance of a well-designed sales strategy, highlighting its role in achieving business goals. This guide focuses on establishing a solid foundation that allows capturing potential customers and closing deals quickly, fostering a culture of efficiency and empowerment of sales representatives. If you’re looking to establish a well-coordinated system for your company to thrive in today’s market, keep reading.

What is a sales strategy?

A sales strategy is a systematic and well-planned approach that seeks to increase the revenue of a company or individual through the successful marketing of products or services. This strategy is essential to ensure consistent success in sales, and it must be continually analyzed, evaluated, and refined to achieve the desired results.

An effective sales strategy is crucial for optimizing the sales performance of any product or service. Regardless of the size of the sales team, a solid strategy is fundamental to fill the sales funnel and close deals efficiently and predictably. It’s important to remember that successful sales strategies are grounded in the specific principles and competitive advantages of a company, with the aim of attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.

A company’s commercial strategy must be aligned with factors such as the target market, the ideal customer profile, the individuals involved in the purchase, market positioning, sales tactics, methodology, and distribution channels. It’s essential to identify the needs and problems of the customers and show how the product or service offered can solve them.

Finally, it’s crucial to adapt and evolve the sales strategy as the business grows and develops.

Why is a sales strategy necessary?

The success of a product or service is ultimately determined by its sales. However, many entrepreneurs invest most of their time in developing the product and devising a marketing plan, neglecting the creation and optimization of a solid sales strategy, which can lead to negative consequences.

It’s crucial to differentiate between marketing and sales strategies. While the former seeks to increase the visibility of the product or service, the latter focuses on finalizing the sale itself. The sales strategy aims to generate real and quantifiable revenue, being fundamental to complement the marketing plan and ensure consistent results.

A well-defined sales process is essential to provide clarity and focus to the sales team, allowing them to seize opportunities and improve performance. Moreover, this process provides greater visibility of the sales flow, the team’s activities, and information about successful strategies and areas that require improvements. In the absence of a sales process, the only metric tracked would be the number of deals closed and their value, which could hinder the identification of the causes of fluctuations in the revenue generated by the sales team.

How to design your sales strategy

Every business has its own identity and model, so it’s important to develop a personalized sales strategy that adapts to your specific needs. Once you have a plan, it’s time to implement it in your business.

To build a successful sales strategy, you can follow these seven steps:

1. Determine your sales goals

Revenue objectives should be aligned with your company’s vision. A clear vision of your business’s future helps establish goals and priorities that bring you closer to a target.

To achieve them, sales and marketing functions must work together. Both teams can share learnings and resources to improve their work, and collaboration should focus on developing a coherent and consistent value proposition message across all platforms used to reach prospects.

2. Understand your target audience and create a buyer profile

To generate more sales, it’s important to know your current customers and create a detailed buyer persona to understand who is actually buying your product. Defining an accurate Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), as well as knowing the customer lifecycle, is crucial for any company’s success and allows you to quickly identify a suitable prospect.

3. Analyze your competition and differentiate yourself from them

Next, analyze your position in the current market. One method is to implement a SWOT analysis, i.e., analyze the current situation of your business and paint a clear picture of the weaknesses in contrast to your competitors and point out the areas of strength. With these two factors, you can leverage opportunities and threats to your business and industry.

It’s also important to establish our position in the market by creating a positioning map. This analysis provides a retrospective on where you can further expand your business and the risks involved. Thanks to this, it’s possible to find the right market niche, identifying saturated niches and those with particular problems that your product or solution can solve.

4. Identify key touchpoints in your sales cycle and define the sales process

A sales process is a structured set of actions that sales teams follow to convert prospects into paying customers. It differs from the sales strategy, which describes the approach to achieving sales objectives and provides actionable tasks for the sales department.

To visualize your sales process, you can use templates that help you draw the customer journey where you determine the most important customer touchpoints. Subsequently, for the development of the sales process, you can interview other representatives and stakeholders in your organization in order to fill any gaps that may exist in your sales strategy. The final step is to establish objectives for each stage of the process based on activities and results to increase performance throughout your organization.

5. Determine your value proposition and prepare your sales message

Providing a clear and concise value proposition that speaks of the customer’s needs and how the product/service can help solve their challenges is key to differentiate yourself from the competition. This should include the market gaps identified in sales conversations with our current and potential customers.

The value proposition should be included in our sales arguments so that our message resonates with the customer and they recognize that we truly understand their needs. To build an effective sales pitch, you can use the following structure:

• Introduction: The introduction should be brief and explain who you are and why you’re calling.
• Opening: In the opening, you can use personalization to connect with the prospect and find something in common.
• Reason: You should explain why you’re calling and how you can help them.
• Value Proposition: The offer should highlight your value proposition and how you’ve helped others in their situation.
• Questions: Questions can be used to qualify the prospect and measure their interest.
• Closing: Finally, the closing should provide a call to action and guide the conversation to the next step of the sales process.

6. Create a lead qualification system

An efficient sales strategy requires a good qualification system to focus on the most solid potential customers and avoid wasting time on unqualified opportunities. To create a qualification system, it’s important to establish clear criteria that determine whether a potential customer is a valuable opportunity or not, considering the three stages of qualification: organization, interest, and opportunity. Asking appropriate questions is an important part of the qualification process to collect necessary information to determine whether a sales opportunity is solid or not.

The BANT framework is a useful tool for measuring opportunities that are most likely to lead to won business. This involves assessing whether the potential customer has an adequate budget, the necessary authority to make decisions, a need that your solution can resolve, and a timeline to invest in a solution.

However, it’s also important to be alert to certain signals, such as brief responses or a lack of interest in seeking a solution. Disqualification is key to an efficient sales strategy and avoid being fooled by signs that may seem attractive, but do not fit the established criteria.

7. Set up an evaluation and feedback process

Sometimes, leaders get excited about multiple new ideas, which can generate confusion and hinder progress. It’s important to establish a culture of experimentation and allow space to test and learn from mistakes. When conducting experiments, you should start with a hypothesis, identify factors, design a process, set a timeline, and define clear goals and metrics to evaluate success. After rigorously reviewing the results, you should determine how to leverage and scale the successful approach.

To achieve this, it’s essential to measure the right metrics and establish data-based sales goals, as well as to identify strengths and weaknesses in the sales process. Setting quantifiable goals in the sales process motivates the team to achieve the set objectives.

By following these steps, you can create an effective and personalized sales strategy that will help you achieve your business goals.

Technology at the service of designing and implementing the sales strategy

Leveraging the right technology and processes to automate many steps of the follow-up process allows us to save time and close more sales. Moreover, it’s necessary to gather data on customers and prospects to adapt our solution to different types of buyers and address sales objections considering the goals and motivations of the prospect.

Sales software is an essential tool for designing an effective sales strategy, managing opportunities in a scalable way, enriching data, and personalizing sales messages. One way to do this is by using business intelligence platforms like Upbe.

Upbe performs automatic listening and analysis of 100% of the sales team’s calls, providing:

1. Data analysis and performance monitoring: Our platform analyzes sales interactions and provides detailed information about the performance of the sellers. This helps salespeople identify their strengths and weaknesses, and adjust their approaches accordingly to increase the effectiveness of their sales calls.
2. Training and education: Upbe provides sellers with training resources based on their company’s best sales practices. This allows sellers to continuously improve their skills and knowledge, which in turn enables them to close more deals and generate more revenue.
3. Insights and experiences: Upbe facilitates collaboration and the exchange of ideas among sellers through objective data. This allows them to learn from each other and adopt proven sales best practices in the field.
4. Technology integration: The platform contains tools and technologies that facilitate making sales calls, such as automatic dialing systems, call recording, voice analysis, and CRM integration, which optimize the time and resources of sellers, allowing them to focus on closing deals instead of dealing with administrative tasks.
5. Personalization and adaptability: Upbe is a customizable platform that adapts to the specific needs of each company and sales team. In this way, each seller can benefit from the most relevant sales best practices for their industry and target customers.

Want more information? Don’t hesitate to contact us.