According to surveys, most sales reps and managers focus on closing sales opportunities. But most of these businesses don’t have a clear sales strategy. So, it’s necessary for them to use tested sales strategies, a defined sales process, or a cycle to create non-stop sales opportunities. In this article, we’re going to cover everything you need to know about sales strategy.
Let’s dive in!
Definition of Sales Strategy
With a proper sales strategy, you can succeed and accelerate your sales. It’s only important to choose the right product sales strategies that suit your business.
So, what does sales strategy mean?
A sales strategy is a plan for achieving sales objectives and guiding sales activities. In other words, sales strategy describes how a business wins in a competitive market and reviews retaining and increasing customers for that business.
Why Is Sales Strategy Important?
A strong sales strategy plan can lay the foundation for a cohesive and successful sales organization. Therefore, you should try to discover and use the patterns, plans, and sales & marketing strategies the top sales teams use worldwide.
In a nutshell, a sales strategy helps:
- Know your target audience.
- Develop your business idea.
- Manage the stresses of selling.
- Identify your best sales channels.
- Improve the way you interact with your customers.
- Find the right vendors to help you achieve your goals.
- Understand the needs of customers at every point of their buying journey.
- Use strong sales techniques and create a good sales process.
- Understand your unique sales points and manage your selling pain points.
Types of Sales Strategies
As you know, customers are different from each other. For this reason, businesses should choose and implement their sales strategies according to their audiences’ persona and the customer’s needs and preferences.
1. Inbound Sales Strategy
An inbound sales strategy, like inbound marketing, emphasizes actionable content. By using content marketing, the audience is attracted to your brand.
In this way, customers interested in your business show their willingness to buy. Your sales teams will address the audience’s questions and concerns as a consultant and influence their decision-making process. Finally, according to the interactions between the seller & the customer, they become buyers.
2. Outbound Sales Strategy
Outbound sales strategy is different from inbound. An inbound sales strategy attracts customers interested in your product or service. But this method may not be enough to increase your revenue. An outbound sales strategy allows you to engage more and better with your prospects. This strategy focuses on more sales through promotional campaigns.
Hot tip: The first step in creating an outbound strategy is to equip the sales team with buyer personas (BP) and ideal customer profiles (ICP).
3. Value-Based Selling
Other sales strategies focus on what the product is. However, value-based selling emphasizes how to respond to the unique needs of potential customers through products or services.
In value-based selling, you must be able to capture your prospects’ challenges, needs, and preferences. In addition, you need to have a correct and accurate understanding of your target market. Without this knowledge, you can’t have the right targeting and provide the most appropriate value proposition to your potential customers.
4. SPIN Selling
SPIN selling is a sales strategy that creates strong emotional bonds between sales professionals and prospects via engaging conversation.
One of the purposes of the SPIN sales strategy, besides asking many questions and quickly identifying customer needs, is to create a barrier to exiting the sales process. SPIN is derived from the keywords of the four words Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-payoff, which we explain below:
- Situation: Ask questions to understand the customer’s situation clearly.
- Problem: Focus on learning prospects’ unique challenges and pain points to match your value proposition.
- Implication: Identify the implications of these challenges for your potential customer, then present your brand as the ideal way to solve them.
- Need-payoff: Explain your product or service’s value to a potential client in a specific way, preferably using statistics and figures.
5. Challenging Selling
This strategy is inspired by the book “Challenger Selling” by Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon. The two studied over 1,000 sales managers in various industries to write a challenging sales book.
This strategy focuses on finding opportunities to introduce a new business model to a potential customer. In other words, the sales professional tries to challenge the prospect’s business model and determine where the product or service offering can create new or additional value.
Proven Sales Strategies for Success
The sales strategy is a roadmap or structured plan that helps all members of the sales team have a common and right understanding of what they need to do. When a new member joins the team, it’s easier to adapt to the business goals. Well, in order to choose an appropriate strategy for your sales, you must first identify winning and proven selling strategies.
Let’s get started!
1. Invest in Your Sales Team and SDRs
In today’s competitive business world, sales development representatives (SDRs) play a vital role in business success and sales growth. Successful SDRs are at the forefront of engaging with prospects, identifying sales opportunities, creating effective sales strategies, and driving sales goals. Therefore, hiring professional SDRs and investing in the training of an SDR manager can be a priority for any organization and company that seeks to grow its business further.
Recent Harvard research shows that 81% of happy and strong sales teams have higher and better annual performance and gain more market share.
You can read our article for many hot tips related to SDRs for winning sales.
2. Prioritize Sales Leads
Spending time on sales leads that are less likely to buy is a waste of resources. Poor-quality leads are always one of the main challenges in the sales process.
When the number of leads increases, eliminating poor-quality leads should be one of the key strategies of the sales team. As such, to access high-quality leads for sales, you need to score them.
You can spend more time and energy on quality leads by scoring and evaluating sales leads with a higher conversion probability. This simple strategy will multiply your sales.
3. Know the Sales Cycle and Shorten It
The sales cycle is a repeatable process that salespeople follow to convert a lead into a customer. In various businesses, the speed of each stage in the sales cycle is different. If you know the sales cycle, you can find the right solutions to shorten the sales cycle.
Shortening the sales cycle length helps companies increase sales speed, simplify the customer journey, qualify leads, save costs, drive efficiency, etc.
There are many techniques to shorten the sales cycle, including lead scoring, identifying customers’ pain points, improving sales reps’ or managers’ skills, dealing with objections, preparing for each conversation, and more.
4. Use Outbound Sales Automation Software
Outbound sales automation, often referred to as customer relationship management or CRM systems, helps B2B sales teams accelerate their sales.
CRM systems offer numerous benefits to business growth. Instead of entering sales data manually, CRM platforms, such as HubSpot or Salesforce, can simplify and speed up the sales processes by automating, integrating, tracking, nurturing sales leads, and prioritizing customer data.
Also, using outbound sales automation systems allows you to improve your marketing campaigns and enhance your sales pipeline appropriately and easily.
5. Leverage Account Based Selling (ABS) Strategy
Do you know what ABS is? Account-based selling (ABS) is a strategic selling technique in B2B sales and marketing that aims to create personalized and targeted relationships with high-value accounts. The ABS strategy is accomplished through targeted development sales efforts and campaigns, including sending personalized messages and creating customized content, such as sales podcasts, videos, infographics, etc.
You can use the ABS technique to identify a specific group of ICPs instead of mass contacts. This strategy allows you to understand your customers’ unique needs, pain points, and challenges.
6. Collaborate B2B Sales with Marketing
Marketing and B2B sales may seem inextricably linked. However, often in large organizations, we see that their relationship can be challenging. Sales are dominant in B2B segments, while marketing is more dominant in B2C.
Recent research has shown that 61% of companies that use both B2B sales and marketing strategies have higher sales conversion rates, revenue, and profitability.
7. Embrace Video Prospecting
92% of sales reps and marketers believe that video prospecting strategy will play a key and important role in sales processes in the future. Also, 90% of them say that video content has helped them get sales leads.
Video is the best and easiest way to introduce products and services to customers. This allows you to check all the features of your brand and show the application of the product or service in practice.
8. Cultivate a Diverse Sales Team
Your sales team’s diversity can bring many benefits to your business. This diversity in sales teams includes experiences, skills, expertise, perspectives, unique sales ideas, and so on.
In the B2B sales team, hiring candidates with varying personalities, views, and ideas can help you maintain & increase relationships with a wide range of different customers, close contracts, analyze customer data, create creativity and innovation in sales & marketing campaigns, etc.
9. Use AI and Automation in Sales
Today, technology, including automation and AI, plays a significant role in sales and marketing opportunities, as well as helps to facilitate cooperation between these two areas.
Sales intelligence software is an excellent example of using automation and AI technology in the field of sales. These platforms act as a source and database of customer information.
With the help of sales intelligence technology used in these tools, the sales team can instantly find accurate and up-to-date information on their potential customers in bulk without any trouble.
Expert Tip: More Sales with CUFinder
CUFinder is one of the best and most AI-powerful sales automation tools. This B2B sales intelligence and lead generation platform helps B2B and B2C businesses quickly build lists of potential customers.
With CUFinder, sales teams find high-quality and accurate corporate and individual leads with advanced prospecting and data enrichment services.
This sales data is seamlessly integrated with CRM sales automation platforms, such as HubSpot, Pipedrive, Outreach, etc.
The main features of CUFinder are:
- Accuracy and quality of more than 98%
- A comprehensive and extensive business and contact database
- The most up-to-date data
- Global data coverage
- Free monthly credits and trial
- Transparent and affordable pricing plans for any type of businesses
- CSV export
- Unlimited verified email leads
6 Simple Steps in the Sales Process
Would you like to be able to achieve all the goals you’ve planned for more sales? Undoubtedly, your answer is yes. The sales process makes it easier and faster for companies and sellers.
The sales process, both B2B and B2C, starts with prospecting and continues until the follow-up after the purchase. Let’s take a closer look at the sales steps process.
1. Prospecting
Prospecting for sales or discovering a sales opportunity is the first step in the sales process. You should find potential customers, research & know who they are, and collect their contact information. It’s necessary to know which products or services these clients need. Crafting a perfect sales prospecting list is also a crucial part of this step.
2. Qualification
At this stage, you can identify your target potential customers with special offerings, such as discounts or free credit. Try to understand your prospects’ needs by asking questions. These qualifying questions can relate to the customer’s budget, purchasing power, timeline, interests, and preferences. This step will help you save your time and resources. Interaction with prospects can be done in person, by phone, or by email.
3. Sales Pitch
In this stage, you should present a sales pitch tailored to demonstrate how your solution (product or service) meets the needs of potential clients. You can focus on key points of value that are relevant to them and then offer solutions accordingly.
4. Objection Handling
At this stage of the sales process, you need to listen to and address your customers’ potential concerns. Many beginner salespeople skip this step. 80% of sales may need to handle customer objections at least five times to reach the goal. Successfully handling objections and resolving concerns is the clear distinction between experienced and novice sellers.
5. Closing:
The sales process isn’t over; you still have one of the most exciting parts of your prospect’s buyer journey. In this stage, the prospect becomes a new customer. Hence, you need to utilize successful closing tactics to secure the sale. This could include finalizing contracts, negotiating prices, or providing free value-added to the deal. This will help you succeed in the long run.
6. Follow-Up
Be sure to complete the steps for the sales process. To repeat sales and upsells, you can be productive and sustainable in connections and interaction with your customers by sending follow-up emails. You need to leave a good impression of your brand. You can use the best sales email examples to succeed in this phase.
How to Build and Manage a Sales Funnel?
Nowadays, the world of sales is always changing, and it’s a big challenge for businesses, both B2B and B2C. Despite this change, the sales funnel has not grown as much. The buyer’s journey no longer follows a straight path from awareness to purchase consideration. In today’s enterprise sales world, customers take many detours. This is where a standard and appropriate sales funnel can be helpful.
In marketing science, the sales funnel is divided into four main stages, as follows:
Step 1: Awareness
People get to know your brand or product for the first time. They may hear about your business via ads, social media, and referrals.
Step 2: Interest
Once a potential customer is familiar with your brand, based on their level of interest, they’ll look for a solution to their needs. Selling triggers like special discounts or offerings can be helpful in capturing your prospects’ interests and converting them into customers quickly.
Step 3: Decision
Now that a prospect has enough information about your company and product, they’ll delve deeper into pricing options and product or service features. Webinars, email campaigns, and cold calls at this step help the prospective client make a decision to buy.
Step 4: Action
The result of all your efforts in the selling process is determined at this stage; That is, where it is known whether the customer buys or not.
There are many ways to build a sales funnel. Depending on your industry and business type, you can design a sales funnel for your brand. For this purpose:
- Create an attractive landing page to increase your brand awareness.
- Offer something valuable like a free e-book or article to get the customer’s contact information.
- Cultivate new customers by providing valuable and informative content.
- Provide your best offerings to close the deal, such as a product sales demo or a discount code.
- Continue the engagement process to build a relationship with the customer.
- Continually look for ways to improve and optimize your sales funnel and identify where you’re losing customers.
In Closing
What sets the best sales leaders apart from the rest is their ability to explore growth and sales opportunities, the latest sales strategies, and how to create a sales funnel or process before the competition. In this article, we tried to cover all these things.
FAQs:
What Does Sales Mean in Business?
Sales in business is a set of activities that a seller performs to help the buyer choose the desired product or service.
What Is the Best Definition of a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a visual representation of a customer’s journey from their first relationship as a potential customer until they make a purchase and turn into your customer.
What Is Sale in Marketing?
Sales in marketing refers to the process of exchanging products and services for money between a seller and a buyer. This process can be used to transfer goods between the wholesaler & the retailer, as well as the consumers.
How Do You Explain Sales Leads?
Sales leads are equivalent to lead generation and include potential audiences who can become your paying customers in the future and increase your income.
Comments