One of the best ways to succeed in sales is with a repeatable, measurable, and dynamic system. But, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all all strategy for every sales team.
What works for others might not be effective for you. You need to create your own. We’re here to help! In this article, we’ll be going over:
- The importance of developing a dynamic sales strategy
- Examples of proven sales strategies
- Step-by-step guide on creating your unique sales strategy
Why is a Sales Strategy Important
Without a sales strategy, you’re going in blind. Intuition is necessary. But trusting your gut won’t work for every scenario. Instead, decisions need to be data-driven.
With data on your side, you can create the fundamentals for a solid sales strategy. Doing so provides your sales team with the following benefits:
Long-term Growth
In every sales playbook, the goal will always be achieving long-term growth. A clear and defined strategy helps you get there. That’s because sales don’t have a linear path—it’s dynamic.
Strategies need to be flexible. Assess issues from different angles. You might need a strategy that works across multiple platforms. Other times, a strategic relationship with other businesses.
Improved Buyer Personas
Buyer personas allow you to attract and retain the customers you want. It boosts engagement, streamlines the sales process, and lets you focus on your customers’ needs.
Remember, one of the most powerful tools in sales is personalization. A strategy with improved buyer personas allows you to segment customers better, making personalization streamlined.
Diving deeper into your buyer personas ensures your business decisions are driven by the voice of your buyers. This grants you the ability to understand buyer expectations and market for it.
Revenue Boost
You can boost revenue through a variety of methods. A sales strategy helps you find the most efficient and cost-effective one. With a system in place, you can make data-driven decisions on increasing revenue.
Can you increase prices? Should you focus more on cold email outreach? Or is it time to branch out and develop new products or services? A solid sales strategy answers all of this for you.
Reduced Acquisition Costs
Customers are the lifeblood of any business. They keep businesses running and help them scale. However, finding new customers can be costly.
With a sales strategy, your business can focus on how you can reduce acquisition costs whether that be lead nurturing, creating loyalty programs, or customer feedback loops.
Sales and Marketing Language Stay Consistent
Your brand image doesn’t start and stop with your ads on social media. It extends across the entire customer journey. From the get-go, you need to deliver consistent and clear messages.
This starts with identifying your target audience. Once that’s done, your sales team needs to strategize on how to bring them value as they go further down the sales funnel.
But, the language has to be consistent. Emphasize certain words, phrases, and themes. Done right, it helps keep your brand top-of-mind.
Sales Strategies You Should Steal
The High-Low Strategy
This strategy plays into our psychology. You don’t give a potential customer what they want immediately.
Instead, you show them something out of their price range and then show them the product they want. The stark contrast creates that illusion of choice.
Let’s take Apple as an example, they make it work on both ends. They show you something expensive then show you something more affordable.
So, are you going for the more affordable iPhone 14 for $799? The Plus variant is only $100 more! But you’d get more features with the iPhone Pro. And, for another $100, you can get the Pro Max. Now, the choice to go higher seems way more justifiable.
Freemium Pricing
The strategy is quite simple: offer free services and charge customers for advanced features. You offer free use of your core services—but if customers want to do more, they’d need to pay up.
Google and Apple are great examples. Google Drive and iCloud are free cloud storage services available to all Google and Apple users. However, customers need to pay a regular subscription plan monthly or yearly for bigger storage.
Nurturing Existing Customers
Most of the time, the best source of revenue is right under our noses. In this case, it’s our existing customers. They already trust our brand and are more likely to buy our products.
So, we should always nurture customers even after a sale is closed. Happy customers have higher average order values (AOV) and are easier to cross-sell or upsell.
With a CRM tool, you can easily personalize email nurture campaigns to keep them in the loop for product updates, promotions, and discounts.
Don’t forget to offer excellent customer support. Your customers will be more inclined to go to your business. They can even become advocates of your brand through word-of-mouth.
How to Create Your Own Sales Strategy
As mentioned earlier, strategies that work for others might not work for you. But, you can always create your strategy with these simple steps:
Set Goals
Goal setting is the most important step in any sales strategy. To streamline goal setting, use the SMART method. It outlines a strategy that’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
But, before setting your goal, you still need to assess your own business. What are the resources available to your department? Do you have the right email marketing tools to find leads? Aside from goal setting, make sure you’ve put your team in the perfect conditions to succeed.
Understand Your Unique Value Proposition
In most markets, pricing for similar products and services is competitive. You’d often find products A and B having almost identical pricing.
What makes you stand out is your unique value proposition. To identify what this is, you can start by answering the following questions:
- Who are our ideal customers?
- What specific issues can we solve for them?
- What can our competitors give our target customers?
The last question can easily be answered by conducting a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis. Talk with your team and strategize.
Build Buyer Personas
Understanding customer needs is only half the battle. Once you do, segment the customers who are most likely to buy. To do this, you need to gather information on your ideal customer.
Get demographic, behavioral, or psychographic information. This is best done through a mix of surveys, interviews, or gathering data from your CRM.
Paid databases are an option, but you’d need to be extremely careful. Ensure the data is from a legitimate source. Use email validation tools to make sure you’re sending to the right people.
Here’s a quick checklist of what to look for:
- How old is your persona?
- What are the potential job titles they might have?
- What are their career goals?
- Where are they located?
- What hobbies do they like outside work?
Create Action Plan
After figuring out what to go for, you need to ensure your sales team is on the right page. This is best done through an action plan. It outlines what your sales team should do based on the research you did in the previous steps. Here are some examples:
- Conduct lead generation campaigns through Quora, LinkedIn, and Reddit social platforms.
- Run through support tickets and determine the customers who could benefit most from your offer.
- Upsell or cross-sell previous customers. Highlight the benefits; don’t focus too much on the features. Emphasize straight away how the upsell or cross-sell adds value.
Maintain Sales Pipeline
Your sales team should be prepared to handle each step of the sales pipeline. Each pipeline differs depending on the business, but as a rule of thumb, it should look something like this:
- Prospecting: Lead generation through social media, email marketing, or website.
- Qualifying Leads: Using buyer personas as a template to identify sales-ready leads.
- Demos: Scheduling a demo with qualified leads
- Proposals: Defining the price of products, services, or custom-made solutions.
- Closing the sale: Explaining what’s next after the sale (onboarding, implementation, expectation setting).
- Nurturing: Following up with customers to ensure satisfaction with products or services.
Measure and Analyze Performance
Set your key performance indicators (KPIs) based on your goals. Review sales performance quarterly or annually to identify what strategies work, what needs fine-tuning, and which strategies to let go of.
Best Practices in Building Your Own Sales Strategy
Now that we know the step-by-step outline, let’s make sure we make the most out of it. Here are five best practices to help you create your best sales strategy:
Add Context To Data
It’s easy to cite statistics and data online. But, without the proper context, even the most helpful cold sales statistics become boring old numbers.
To add context, try incorporating a story. Make it relatable. You can’t just ask people what they want and say you’ve got what they’re looking for.
They’ve probably heard that spiel a hundred times over. Instead, tell them what they need through context. Include case studies and real-life examples. Compare your customer’s data with yours and show them what’s missing.
Sales and Marketing Should be a Team
When creating your sales strategy, the marketing team should be a key player. You don’t want sales and marketing to be individual departments doing their own thing.
Businesses need marketing and lead-generation tools to help sales find the right sales-ready leads. If they’re not on the same page, it can create gaps in your strategy that lead to failure.
Sales should become the starting point for any marketing campaign. The brand message, tone, and overall image should be consistent.
Build a Strategy Around Customer Expansion
A lot of businesses spend a chunk of their resources on lead generation or customer acquisition. But, most revenue comes from existing customers.
Even after closing a sale, your existing customers have a lot of untapped revenue. The challenge is getting the right message across.
You need to reinforce your brand as the ultimate solution to their problems. Be proactive when it comes to delivering these messages. Stay consistent with the messages across all platforms.
Avoid Choice Overload
You need to be careful if your sales strategy involves additional or premium services. As a rule of thumb, you don’t want to complicate your buyers’ decision-making.
Adding more “value” through extra services might seem like the differentiator between you and a competitor. But, there will be a chance that customers will go into choice overload.
Don’t go overboard. Instead, try to look into your prospect’s unconsidered needs. For the same service or product, prospects get added value from these “unconsidered needs”.
Create Urgency Through Change
Committing to change is difficult. As they say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. That’s why emphasizing features and benefits isn’t as effective as it should be.
On paper, even if you’ve got better features than competitors, prospects would still be reluctant to change. That’s because change is often associated with risk.
We mentioned earlier that we should create context around our data. We’ll use that here to break through to our prospects. Make a compelling case for change.
Compell them to change first before trying to convince them to switch to you. Try offering alternative solutions. But, position yourself as the ultimate choice.
Key Takeaways
Sales strategies can easily define how successful a business can become. Without it, businesses remain stagnant. To ensure growth for the long term, follow these sales strategy best practices:
- Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals.
- Lead generation should always be paired with lead qualifying to build buyer personas.
- Always nurture existing customers to improve their AOV.
- Measure and analyze performance to fine-tune and optimize your sales.
- Utilize CRM and email marketing tools to support your sales endeavors.
