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Copywrite free excerpt of Sales Strategy: 7 Essential Steps to Building a Successful Process

Sales strategies can be divided into inbound and outbound strategies.

Inbound sales strategy: An inbound sales strategy relies on catering the sales process to buyer actions. It prioritizes customers’ interests, pain points, needs, and goals. Sales reps that use an inbound sales strategy don’t try to push prospects to make a decision to purchase. Instead, they focus on creating a personalized sales approach that’s tailored to each specific prospect. This usually involves informing, educating, and nurturing prospects through the decision-making process. Companies that take an inbound approach to sales have automated ways of capturing buyer and seller data and monitoring their pipeline, and strive to integrate their marketing and sales teams to create a seamless buying experience. These companies have a sales process that supports prospects throughout their customer journey. They participate in online conversations with potential buyers and offer personalized advice.

Outbound sales strategy: An outbound sales strategy is based on seller actions. It takes advantage of tactics such as cold calling and cold emailing to spread the message about a company’s product or service to a large number of people. If you’re using an outbound sales strategy, you’re contacting leads instead of having them come to you. This is the main difference between inbound and outbound sales. Companies that use an outbound sales strategy usually rely on manual data entry to keep track of their pipeline, and have sales and marketing teams that work independently. The main advantage of an outbound sales strategy is that it provides immediate feedback and results. It’s also easier to scale compared to an inbound strategy – once you find what’s working, you just reach out to more prospects. Successful B2B companies understand that both inbound and outbound sales strategies have their pros and cons. That’s why as much as 84% of them use a mix of both to reach their business goals.

Seven key steps to understand to learn how to write a sales strategy, so you can plan, aim and fire to propel yourself to success.??

Sales strategy vs. marketing strategy: While sales strategy and marketing strategy work in unison, it’s important to understand the differences between these two strategies. Your marketing strategy outlines the how you’re going to reach your target audience, including all the ways you’re going to promote your offering, as well as how you’ll achieve an advantage over your competition. Your sales strategy, on the other hand, describes how you’re going to sell your product or service to your target audience. The purpose of your sales strategy should be to outline the most effective way of converting prospects into customers, as well as describe ways of converting one-time buyers into repeat customers

Crucial sales metrics such as

Opportunity win rate — The percentage of sales opportunities that your sales team converts into customers. Having an idea of your average opportunity win rate will allow you to produce more accurate sales forecasts, as well as set challenging sales targets to motivate your team.?

Sales pipeline coverage (SPC) — A metric that shows if your team has enough opportunities to meet sales quota for a given period. Knowing your SPC allows you to understand how many opportunities your sales team needs to have at any given point.

Sales velocity — Shows how quickly leads are moving through your sales pipeline (i.e. how fast you’re making money)

SWOT analysis is an important tool to implement into your business.?

Sales goals and revenue targets are a crucial part of your sales strategy.

They help to: Establish expectations — Revenue targets give your sales team an idea of how much they’re expected to sell, as well as allow you to forecast sales more realistically. Motivate your sales team — By setting revenue targets, you’re also giving your sales team something to aim for, which, when combined with bonus incentives, can be very motivating. Improve your sales process — Having clear revenue targets and being able to compare them with actual results your sales team is generating allows you to improve your sales process by pinpointing any specific issues or bottlenecks that might be making your sales process less effective.

Expert sales tactics you can incorporate into your sales strategy.

Target a smaller market: Targeting a smaller market allows your company to develop a better understanding of your target audience and their specific needs and challenges. It also makes it easier for you to cater your product or service to suit your target audience perfectly, which, in turn, allows you to have an easier time getting customers and dominating your market.

Use Storytelling as a great way to both explain and sell your offering to your target audience. Creating a story for your product or service will give it meaning and help to differentiate it from the competition. Stories engage prospects and customers. They’re a great way to grab attention and elicit an emotional response. Delivering your sales pitch in the form of a story gives it structure and makes it easier to understand and remember.

Focus on articulating the end result People aren’t interested in products or services, they’re interested in results. This means that, if you want to sell your offering effectively, you should focus on capturing your prospects’ attention by showing them what your product or service can deliver. Once you’ve done that, make sure to clearly explain how your offering can deliver the results they want, as well as what they’re going to get after they sign up or make a purchase.

Be a problem-solver Build your sales strategy around being genuinely helpful to your target audience. By educating your prospects and offering them personalized, creative solutions to their challenges, you’ll win their trust and have an easier time selling to them. Even if you don’t win their business, you might be able to get referrals from prospects who’ve been impressed with how helpful you’ve been.

Use lead scoring: a point system designed to rank prospects in regards to the value they represent for your company. It works on a scale of 1 to 10. With lead scoring, high-authority leads such as company CEOs would be assigned a rank 10 while manager-level leads would be assigned a rank 4 or 5. Lead scoring allows you to understand which prospects you should focus on at the moment based on how likely they are to convert.

Following up with prospects is a crucial tactic of any good sales strategy. You should be following up with prospects as many times as is necessary to get a response. If the prospect doesn’t give you a definite “no”, keep following up with them until you close them. If you do get a “no”, however, you should certainly stop following up and focus on other prospects.

Get back to leads as soon as possible: It’s crucial that you reach out to your inbound leads as soon as possible, preferably within the first 24 hours. Since modern buyers are highly informed, your leads are most likely already comparing your solution with your competitors’ offering. This means that you need to close them as soon as possible to not risk them going over to a competitor. By reaching out to your leads quickly, you’ll be able to answer their questions and meet their objections, as well as show them why your product or service is the best solution for their specific needs and challenges.?

Source LeadFuze

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?Any opinions expressed are those of the authors.

Published by #NHGBe & Linked Selling 2022-09-18 - CEST 09:30 AM