When you hear the term sales strategy, what comes to your mind? If you think of it as a plan or guide on how the sales team makes decisions and achieves team goals then you are correct.
A business or sales strategy should address and deliver these results:
- Clear Priorities everyone understands
- Clear outcomes everyone can measure
- Clear guidelines everyone can follow
- Clear goals everyone can work toward
Without a strategy, your sales team would be uncoordinated and shooting in the air. Not having a big picture and a goal in mind leads to poor sales and stunted growth of a business.
A Sales strategy involves:
- An accurate ideal customer profile
- A SWOT analysis
- A well-thought-out market strategy
- Specific revenue goals
- Clear Business Positioning
- Detailed action plan
Let’s consider 7 steps you can take when creating a sales strategy for your business
Step 1: Assess Where You’ve been and Where you are now.
Before you start planning your future, first of all, look towards the past. Carry out an assessment of the past year and ask questions like:
- What did I do last year? Dig into your sales numbers as well and look at key indicators.
- How much did your team sell?
- Who sold it?
- When did they sell it?
- How much will result in repeat business?
- Which Clients had the highest revenue?
By understanding these and other facts, you can start determining where you should go.
Step 2: Create A Clear Ideal Customer Profile
For many companies, 80% of revenue comes from 20% of clients. By reviewing your previous year, you can figure out which clients spend the most money, who buy more than one product, are easier to work with, and have the shortest sales cycle.
Step 3: Time for A SWOT Analysis
A SWOT Analysis reveals to you as the sales manager or business owner how well you are positioned to grow your business. A SWOT consists of an assessment of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threat. A SWOT is not an exercise but rooted in reality so you have to gather your sales, marketing, and product teams together to do the SWOT.
The aim of the SWOT is to leverage your strengths and increase opportunities. It is imperative that you consider your weaknesses and threats, the internal and external obstacles that would prevent your ability to achieve those goals.
Step 4: Set A Clear Market Strategy
By the time you have gotten to this stage, you must have assessed where you have been and what has worked. Then you would start thinking of where you are going. Now is the time to figure out a market strategy. To do this, consider these questions below
- How much can you grow existing customers?
- How can you leverage existing customers to get referrals?
- How much can you increase revenue inside territories with existing products?
- How much can you increase revenue inside existing territories with new products?
- How much can you increase revenue outside existing territories with existing products?
- How much can you increase revenue outside existing territories with new products?
Step 5: Create Clear Revenue Goals
You need a goal to work towards. When you combine your given revenue targets with the market strategy you’ve created based on an assessment of the past and present situation, it enables you to generate realistic goals. Get your sales, marketing, and product team to work on a plan to achieve the set goal.
Step 6: Initiate and Communicate Clear Positioning
The Market strategy you created will help you determine the position you need your company and products to achieve the desired growth. Consider these areas when initiating and positioning:
- High profile Customer or large accounts
- Opportunities inside existing customer accounts with different lines of product
- Opportunities inside your existing territory and markets
- Companies that meet your ideal customer profile
- How to identify your target audience, make them aware of your product, prospect and sell to them
Step 7: Clear Action plan
The Action plan plays a huge role in ensuring you achieve your sales goals. This is the time to implement a well-functioning funnel and opportunity planning process.
This final stage involves each sales rep creating a funnel that shows how they intend to generate the projected revenue and achieve the goals set. As a Sales Manager or business owner, when your sales rep creates their funnel, coach them to ask themselves the following questions:
- How much each type of revenue do I need to make?
- How many sales does that represent?
- How many calls does that represent?
- How much time does that represent?
Getting the answers to this question would guide the person’s next lines of action to achieve the target.
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Read Also: The 4 Ps of Marketing and How They Affect Your Business.