What Is Sales? Discover Secrets Behind Successful Deals

Have you ever wondered what sales really means? How do you see sales and the different ways businesses sell products or services? Let’s explain it in a simple way. 🗣️

• Sales— A Fundamental Human Activity
• Sales Definition— What Is Sales?
• 10 Common Types of Sales
• What Is a Sales Strategy?
• The Role of Sales Strategy— Why It Matters
• 5 Types of Sales Methodologies That Drive Results
• 9+ Proven Sales Strategies for Closing Deals
• 6 Clear Steps to Improve Your Sales Process
• How to Build and Manage a Sales Funnel?
• In Closing 
• FAQs

Sales is all about persuading someone (prospect) to buy something like a product, a service, or an idea. There are different types of sales, and companies use various methods to attract customers. 

In this guide, I’ll cover what sales is, its different forms, sales methodologies, and the best practices that make selling more effective.

Keep reading to learn everything you need to know! 👀

Sales— A Fundamental Human Activity

Since ancient times, selling has been one of the most basic human activities—people have always exchanged products or services to meet their needs.

Every successful business knows one simple truth ➜ If there is no sales, there is no income, and without income, a business can not survive.

Now that you understand how vital sales is, let’s get to know the scientific and precise definition.

Sales Definition— What Is Sales?

Sales is a set of activities that a person – a seller – performs to help the buyer choose the desired product. This product is either a physical product or a type of service that the potential buyer selects and uses through the seller.

However, the meaning of sales is not the same as the definitions provided but rather, it has a process that can be divided into three stages. ⤵

1. Pre-sale activities and processes
2. Sales or selling operations
3. Post-sale activities and processes

10 Common Types of Sales

Sales types are divided into different categories based on the nature of the deal, type of customer, sales environment, and sales approach. Knowing them can help you choose the right sales career path that fits your business needs.

Here are some of the most common types you’ll hear about in the industry. ⤵

1. Inside sales: This sales happens when a sales team communicates with customers remotely, often through email, phone, or social media. 
2. Outside sales: This happens when sales reps interact with clients face-to-face, traveling to meet customers in person and giving presentations or product demos.
3. B2B sales: Business-to-business (B2B) sales is used by businesses that sell their products or services to another business, not individuals.
4. B2C sales: Unlike B2B sales, in business-to-consumer (B2C) sales, companies sell their products or services to individuals.
5. Business development sales: In this type of sales, businesses try to connect with various stakeholders and create demand for a stagnant product.
6. Agency sales: This type of sales involves generating and converting new leads from an agency.
7. Consultative sales: This sales focuses on building trust with the customer by first understanding the customer’s need or problem and then recommending a specific product or service.
8. eCommerce sales: If you sell your product or service online and the customer can order and purchase a product entirely online, you’re using eCommerce sales.
9. Direct sales: Individuals can sell their product or service directly to the customer, even outside the business environment.
10. Account-based sales: Businesses with large institutional accounts with multiple touchpoints use account-based sales to serve these customers.

What Is a Sales Strategy?

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. 

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.

The Role of Sales Strategy— Why It Matters

A strong sales 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 ⤵

1. Know your target audience.
2. Develop your business idea.
3. Manage the stresses of selling.
4. Identify your best sales channels.
5. Improve the way you interact with your customers.
6. Find the right vendors to help you achieve your goals.
7. Understand the needs of customers at every point of their buying journey.
8. Use strong sales techniques and create a good sales process.
9. Understand your unique sales points and manage your selling pain points.

5 Types of Sales Methodologies That Drive Results

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:

1. Situation: Ask questions to understand the customer’s situation clearly.
2. Problem: Focus on learning prospects’ unique challenges and pain points to match your value proposition.
3. Implication: Identify the implications of these challenges for your potential customer, then present your brand as the ideal way to solve them.
4. 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 Sale” by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. 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.

9+ Proven Sales Strategies for Closing Deals

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.

Harvard Business Review Analytic Services research shows that 81% of happy sales teams have better annual performance & higher annual sales and gain more market share.

📌 You can read our article: 10 Top SDR Tips and Strategies 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 🎥

91% of businesses used video as a marketing channel in 2023. Also, 92% of sales reps and marketing teams believe that video prospecting strategy will play a key and important role in sales processes in the future. 

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.  

🎁 Bonus Suggestion: More Sales with CUFinder! 

CUFinder is one of the best and most AI-powerful B2B sales intelligence tools. This lead generation and data enrichment 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 like HubSpot, Pipedrive, Outreach, etc.  

🛠️ The main features of CUFinder are ⤵

1. Accuracy and quality of more than 98%
2. A comprehensive and extensive database (269+ M company data & 419+M contact data)
3. The most up-to-date data
4. Global data coverage
5. Free monthly credits and a free trial
6. Transparent & affordable pricing plans for any type of business
7. Excel export 
8. Unlimited verified email leads
9. 24/7/365 customer support
10. User-friendly dashboard interface

📌 Still not convinced? If you want to learn more about CUFinder, try it out for a free trial.

6 Clear Steps to Improve Your 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. ⤵

1️⃣ 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.

2️⃣ 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.

3️⃣ 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.

4️⃣ 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.

5️⃣ 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.

6️⃣ 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 ⤵

1. Create an attractive landing page to increase your brand awareness. 
2. Offer something valuable like a free e-book or article to get the customer’s contact information.
3. Cultivate new customers by providing valuable and informative content. 
4. Provide your best offerings to close the deal, such as a product sales demo or a discount code.
5. Continue the engagement process to build a relationship with the customer.
6. 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, know the types of sales, the latest sales methodologies or strategies, and how to create a sales funnel or process before the competition. In this article, I tried to cover all these things.

FAQs