As it often goes, too many businesses starting out focus mostly on marketing and product development strategies while hardly paying any attention to actual ‘sales’.
This can be a very costly mistake to make though.
Sales is the lifeblood of your business. Knowing how to find customers and sell your products or services to your ideal customer is the key to your success and to the survival of your business.
Without sales you don’t have customers, you don’t have money coming in, you can’t grow and eventually you won’t have a company anymore.
You need a defined way, a concrete plan on how you are going to find new customers, expand existing relationships and sell more products or services.
Reason 1: Revenue Growth
A well-defined sales strategy is the primary driver of your revenue and will make it possible for your business to gain competitive advantage.
The revenue generation of every business revolves around the efficiency of its sales strategy, no business can thrive without it.
A lot of companies start out with networking as a sales activity to find their first customers and then work hard to keep them happy. They get referrals, word-of-mouth, but as the business evolves and they want to grow it properly, it is important for any entrepreneur to formalize their sales strategy and to have a structure, so they can secure the future of their business by pushing sales and having control over their own revenue growth.
If you want to get sustainable traction in your market and see an increase in your sales, you will need to develop a sales strategy and make it the main focus of your business at some point.
Reason 2: Building Your Sales Team
It doesn’t matter if you have a sales team of one, 100 or 1000 people, a properly defined sales strategy is essential to closing deals quickly and being able to predict your sales numbers.
You need a clear vision of what you want, the revenue goal you have in mind for your sales team and the activity goals to help you achieve your revenue goals.
Even if you are not planning to keep doing sales by yourself, a clearly defined sales strategy will give you the tools to hire salespeople much more effectively.
As you have well-defined goals and methods for your sales, you will have all the clarity you need to hire the right people with the right skills and experience to achieve the goals you have set out.
Reason 3: Structure and Measurability
A sales strategy gives you a benchmark to see if the sales methods and tools that are being used are effectively successful.
It’s a way to understand that what you are doing is keeping you on target to reach your goals and a way to know when you need to change certain elements and adjust your strategy.
Often goals are set in the overall strategic plan of a business, but not ‘how’ those goals and sales objectives will be met. Having goals and objectives is not enough to make it a sales strategy.
It is so important to clearly define what needs to be done to get those sales objectives: “Which customers will you focus on?” , “What is it exactly that you will be selling?” , “Why should people care?”, and then the most important part “How will you sell it?”.
Knowing these different factors in your sales strategy makes it possible to tweak your sales process to have the highest ROI on your sales efforts.
Don’t be mistaken, a sales strategy is not a marketing strategy.
Your sales strategy will help you focus on the most important aspect of your business, which is making the sale (over and over again). A marketing strategy will focus on branding, increasing visibility and making the product or service you are selling visible to your ideal customer.
CONCLUSION
A sales strategy will improve the ROI of your overall sales efforts. Clarity around your sales process will help you focus on growing your business.
Everything in your company has a certain strategy or structure, so the one thing that actually will keep your business going needs it more than anything and that is your sales strategy and sales process.
When done correctly your sales strategy will help you focus and will make it possible to measure what you are doing and improve so you can exponentially increase your sales and grow your business faster.
Make sure to incorporate the following things in your sales strategy:
- Target market
- Ideal customer profile
- Competition
- Methodology
- Messaging
To get you on the way to setting up your own bespoke sales strategy, ask yourself the following questions:
1) Do I know exactly who my ideal client is, in detail?
2) How will I find new customers?
3) How will I sell my products or services?
4) Have I got the right messaging that will appeal to my ideal customer?
5) How will I close the deal in the quickest and most productive way?
Thank you for taking the time to read this article, I hope it was useful to you.
Get In Touch if you are struggling with the questions above or you are ready to take your sales to the next level.
I help entrepreneurs to create their own BESPOKE SALES STRATEGY, so they have a tailor made, fail safe way of winning at sales.
My mission is to help entrepreneurs to find their own style in selling and to feel confident and comfortable in doing it, so that they can increase sales and grow their business.
Speak soon, Liesbeth.