Developing a sales strategy by identifying target customers and sales channels, determines a path to achieving revenue goals, and then creates a sales process to match. A sales strategy never ends. Must constantly adapt to business and market changes and always seek to do more. This means that sales leaders must look at data such as customer performance. Also, to read more articles about business organization, you can refer to the articles page.
Why Do We Need to Formulate a Sales Strategy?
A great sales strategy aligns our salespeople with common goals. It also helps them identify risks and trends while trading, and trains them to get better day by day. Without a sales strategy, our salespeople operate alone. This is without a vision and having a shared sales process to know the best next course of action.
How to Develop a Sales Strategy?
In formulating a sales strategy, we start by understanding our sales goals and the customers we want to target, and then we choose a sales channel to reach them. Ultimately, we create a sales process that we can study, learn from, and improve over time. Here’s how to create a sales strategy in five steps:
1) Define Our Sales Goals
As a sales leader, we should start the year with a goal of how much revenue it will generate. This will help determine which customers to target and how many deals to close in the coming year. Let’s imagine our goal is 100 million in monthly revenue. Now we need to determine the target customer and the right sales channel to achieve our goal.
2) Define Our Customer and Sales Channel
In this phase of developing a sales strategy, we first determine our target customer based on how we will capture the market and what will bring us to our revenue goal. As we mentioned above, we can focus on company size, region, industry, or the product we sell. Second, we conduct competitor research and learn more about the customer’s operating methods (online and through network resources) to determine how our target customer likes to shop. This defines our sales channel.
For example, let’s say we sell accounting software to enterprise business customers and see a big opportunity among financial services companies. We know from experience that these buyers like to buy from experts who understand the nuances of their regulatory environment. We need to train our salespeople to speak the language of this particular industry and proceed with direct sales.
3) Create the most efficient sales strategy formulation process to reach our target number of customers.
In this phase of developing a sales strategy, we identify the steps our sales team can follow to complete a sale (the sales process) with the type of customer and channel we have chosen. Think of it as a road map between the first customer contact and the sale.
The steps we choose depend on the customer and the sales channel. Here’s an example of a sales process in the best sales strategy that might fit your target customer (financial services) and channel (direct sales):
• Prospecting
We find new leads through online resources or our professional network.
• Eligibility
By contacting bank managers, we determine whether your product is suitable for potential customers.
• Research
Learn more about your potential customer through online resources and industry research.
• Communicate
We reconnect with our potential customer to demonstrate the value of our proposition.
• Overcoming Opposition
We answer questions and address concerns. We include a demo to show how our product will help.
• Signing a Contract
We negotiate the terms and sign the contract.
• Cultivating and Continuing Sales
We focus on post-sales activities, such as customer adoption and success, renewals, and marketing partnerships such as events and referrals.
4) Fill Our Sales List with Enough Leads to Reach Our Goal
Now that we have defined the steps of developing our sales strategy, we fill our sales list with potential customers. Based on the possible transaction size for the desired customer types and the past conversion rate, determine the required number. Then, use marketing and network expansion channels to communicate with them.
We know that many of the decision makers of the big banks attend financial conferences, so we register several of our agents for the main agencies in our area to network and identify prospects.
5) Implement Our Sales Process and Improve as We Go.
As we execute our sales strategy, our team moves to sales, moving from routine sales to good opportunities to hot deals. At the same time, our business and market will be disrupted and changed. So it’s important to constantly monitor your sales strategy, and make adjustments if things aren’t going as expected.
Many of our potential clients suffer from tight budgets. Here we start by recommending a middle and cheaper level of our products that can be easily upgraded at the right time to generate sales.
Up to Sum
Developing a basic sales strategy is a must for any sales leader or any company manager who is looking to sell their services or products. By setting up a sales strategy, the steps of which we have explained in detail and step by step above, you can reach your desired high level of sales. In this article, we’ve walked you through building the foundations of a solid sales strategy so you can reach your sales goals for leads and close deals at a higher rate. Stay with the specialists of Uprodemy website to get business advice and international trade.
