Essential Steps for Developing a Winning Sales Strategy

The importance of developing a sales strategy for your business cannot be overstated. The time you’ll invest in developing a sales strategy depends on the complexity of your offerings, services, or products. Regardless of your industry or the size of your market, creating a sales strategy plays a significant role in your business success.

What is a sales strategy?

Your company's sales strategy is your plan for reaching sales goals. Sales strategy is essentially your company's long-term plan for increasing sales revenue — and part of your overall plan for scaling and growing your business. A sales strategy must include the processes and techniques you plan to use to reach your established goals.

A sales strategy should hold the answers to several essential questions, such as: 

• What do you sell? 
• Who are your customers?
• What are your sales goals?
• What techniques will your company use to increase sales and reach designated goals? 

Techniques vs. strategy

It's essential to understand the difference between sales techniques and a sales strategy.

Sales techniques are how you take action or engage with potential customers to increase your sales and reach your sales goals. A sales strategy is an organization's detailed plan, including sales team techniques, to achieve sales goals and objectives.

You will also want to have a good grasp of the different types of sales strategies your business needs to grow and scale effectively. Sales strategies fall into two broad categories: inbound and outbound.

Inbound sales strategies are centered on buyer action. With inbound sales, you are relying on the buyer to take action after they have already identified their problem or need. Inbound sales tend to be more nuanced as the methods typically explain how your product or service fills a need or solves a problem.

Outbound sales strategies rely on the seller to take action and help the buyer identify their problem or realize their need for your company’s product or service. This is the more traditional method of going out and selling a product with a more persuasive sales approach.

It's crucial to develop sound sales strategies for both inbound and outbound customer interactions.

Types of sales strategies

Whether you're developing sales strategies for inbound sales, outbound sales, or both, there are several proven methods for reaching the sales goals laid out in your strategy.

Here are a few of the most successful sales strategies to consider applying to your business:

• Value-based sales strategy. This sales strategy involves selling your customer on the value your product or service offers for them. This is a tried-and-true strategy for increasing sales by comparing the price of your product or service to the value it provides for your customers.
• Solution-based sales strategy. This sales strategy is rooted in solving a problem for your customer by offering your product or service. This strategy is becoming more popular among top sales professionals as the internet continues to make it easier for customers to compare prices and features without interacting with sales associates. Instead, customers try to find information about how your products and services can solve their problems.
• Challenge-based sales strategy. This sales strategy is relatively new compared to others and extremely popular among business-to-business (B2B) sales professionals, especially in technology and software solutions. The premise of this sales strategy is to challenge potential customers or clients to try your product or service, and demonstrate how its innovative value or unique features will benefit them, to transform their perception.

These are all proven sales strategies for boosting your sales numbers and improving your sales team's rate of closing deals. But developing your sales strategy and reaching your sales goals is not as simple as picking an option from the list. The best approach is to use these proven methods to build a unique sales strategy to suit your company’s products or services.

How to develop a sales strategy 

Developing a sales strategy starts with looking at your company's current sales goals and where you are in relation to those goals. This usually means sitting down with various departments, such as marketing and sales teams, to determine your company’s current performance. From there, focus on setting realistic sales goals, or refining those already in place, and identify the necessary steps for reaching those goals. Essentially, sales strategies that work are rooted in realistic plans for achieving well-defined sales objectives. 

If you aren't sure where to start, here are a few steps you can take to develop a successful sales strategy:

1. Set realistic organizational goals and sales goals to match.
2. Create customer profiles or buyer personas for the specific goods, products, or services your company offers.
3. Hire, train, and compensate top sales talent who will understand your goals and make meaningful contributions.
4. Measure, track, and monitor sales and sales team progress toward the goals you have set.

Developing a sales strategy by partnering with SalesVista

Developing a sales strategy for your business often means finding an easier way to gather and track vital organizational data and sales statistics. SalesVista offers industry-leading software solutions designed to collect, store, and organize crucial sales data for businesses of every type, size, and industry. 

Book a demo with SalesVista today, and unlock the tools your business needs to develop a proven sales strategy to help you grow and scale.