For any company to be successful, they need a strategy and specifically a sales strategy. A strategy can be defined as the art of coordinating resources for their most efficient and effective use. An effective sales strategy is an essential part of building a growing business. A well-thought out strategy lets you manage multiple resources across different sectors with the same approach.
Your strategy should be underpinned by clear objectives, knowledge of what you are selling and a thorough understanding of your customers and the market. Key elements of the strategy include deciding how best to sell, making sure you have the right resources and managing sales performance.
Why?
The first part of the strategy should answer why you are developing the strategy in the first place. It may be you are a brand new company, a new sales director or there is a new company strategy. Whatever the reason, you should know why you are developing your sales strategy. Implicit in this is understanding why you exist as a company – what is your purpose? There has to be a good reason otherwise you will be unable to communicate well with customers.
Issues
A customer will only buy from you if they have a problem that you can help to solve. Knowing the sorts of problems that you can help with allows you to focus in on those customers with those problems and avoid wasting time with companies without those problems. You need to know what to look for, how does the problem manifest itself, so that you can screen customers in advance. You also need to understand the impact that the problems are having on the customer to be able to assign a value to the solution.
Value
Why would your customers use your product or service? What will they be able to do in the future that they cannot do now? What is the value to them? At a strategy level, this will be a generic reason – more detail will be required when you talk to individual customers. However, you must know what value your customer could gain from using your products and why they should care about it. If you cannot articulate this, then they will not be interested in listening to you.
Customers
Not everyone is a good customer all of the time. Identifying the characteristics of the good ones will help you to focus on those that will deliver you a return on your investment in sales. Both the target customer list and their characteristics will change over time so this is something that needs to be revisited on a regular basis. Good customers generally have known problems that you can help to solve and are open and willing to engage with you. This short list of customers will then give you a set of targets to go after.
SWOT
Positioning yourself to the customer so that you are considered the most appropriate solution involves understanding not only what you are good at but what you are less good at and what the competition is good and bad at. You need to focus on what is unique about your solution. It is unlikely that you will be the only possible solution so you need to focus on the overlap between the customer’s needs and the exclusive parts of your solutions. That way, you define why you are unique and no one else can help in the way that you can.
Once you have completed your strategy, you need a plan to deliver it. This should focus on how you are organised, who is responsible for what and how you are going to measure success. When measuring success, measure metrics that you can impact, not outcomes for which you have limited control.
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