6 Tips to Create an Effective Sales Strategy

What’s the key to selling something? Killer marketing? Clear goals? Turns out, it’s actually a combination of elements that starts with taking a close look at your company and how it operates.

In this post, we’ll walk you through a comprehensive list of tips to help you not only increase your sales, but land lifelong customers as well.

Before we get into it, it’s important to understand what a sales strategy is. At its roots, a sales strategy is an optimized plan designed to boost sales of whatever it is you’re selling — be it a car washing service or designer watch.

A good sales strategy is born by identifying your brand’s special qualities, emphasizing them, then attracting new customers or bringing back those you’ve already served. Your sales strategy is to be implemented by your entire sales team with the goal to land deals, contracts, or sales with comfort and ease. Basically, the aim is to make sales second nature to your crew and it can only be done with a well-oiled strategy.

So what can you expect in this post on Creating an Effective Sales Strategy? 6 tips to identify your strengths, target ideal customers, and plot out your plan of action. Here’s a peek at what’s to come:

1. Take a look at your company — Where have you BEEN? Where are you NOW?
2. IMAGINE your ideal customer & UNDERSTAND how to attract them
3. SWOT it out: You can only prepare for what you know
4. CREATE a precise market strategy & DEFINE revenue goals
5. How will you POSITION your business?
6. Make a REALISTIC action plan

Now, let’s break it down.

1. Take a Look at Your Company

Understanding where you’ve come from is essential to where your business will go in the coming year. Analyze your previous business year, including your total sales, who on your team sold the most, and who the customers were that they sold it to. Ask questions like:

• Which one of your customers bought the most? What did they buy?
• Do you have any repeat customers? Are any of them sure to come back for another sale?
• Based on your sales, is there one area that stands out that can be grown? How will your team do this?

Answering these questions will help you determine who your target customer is and which product(s) or service(s) you should put your effort into maximizing. Once you identify this information, the next step of your business assessment will come much easier.

2. Imagine & Create Your Sales Strategy

Based on what you found out during the analysis of your previous sales year, picture what your perfect customer looks like. Go ahead and imagine them head to toe, what kind of business they’re in, if they have family, hobbies, etc. The more you get to know your ideal customer, the better you can target them.

Understanding what they’re like means that your sales team can better identify them when they come along, and spend more time landing the sale or following up.

3. SWOT Analysis

Business 101: success comes from maximizing your strengths with taking action on your opportunities. If you’re new to the world of SWOT, the acronym stands for:

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Threats

Now that you know where most of your sales come from, you understand what your strengths are. For any elements of your business that aren’t big sellers or draws to the company itself, consider discontinuing or spending less time, money, and space trying to market them.

When doing a SWOT analysis, it’s important to hear from all of your staff — in the office and on the sales floor. So call a meeting and cue the coffee, everyone’s opinion is crucial here.

The basic purpose of a SWOT analysis is to identify what sells and what doesn’t. What’s building your business and what may be harming it.

4. Create & Define Your Sales Strategy

You know your strengths. You know your weaknesses. With that in mind, what can you do to market the right products and grow your sales?

When developing a marketing strategy, it’s important to ask the right questions. If you’re thinking of bringing new products on board, is this something existing customers would be interested in or will it draw only new clients? Is there a way to keep selling your current products to new and old customers?

Now that you’ve got a plan on who you’ll attract, what’s going to attract them, and how you’ll do it, it’s time to get real about revenue.

Defining revenue goals means taking your current estimated revenue and adding the new projections you determined when creating your marketing strategy.

Break these goals up into individual accounts or clients and figure out how your sales team can attain them. You can’t have projections without a realistic means to reach them, so carefully thought out steps will not only make you feel more confident but your sales team too.

5. Position Your Business

Positioning is all about figuring out where your product stands in a certain market. For example, a skincare brand may position itself as organic, and clean, or someone who makes watches may position themselves in the luxury category.

Being clear on exactly where your product stands will better help you attract the kind of people who are more likely to buy something.

6. Take Action

You know who you are as a brand, your strengths, your goals, and who your product or service is for. You know your revenue goals, so what’s left to do? Come up with an action plan.

Though armed with knowledge, all of it means nothing if you cannot create a realistic plan to get you where you need to be. Identify your revenue streams and how many sales you’ll need to make to reach your target. How long will it take to get there based on your current projections?

Follow this process down the line, continuing all the way down to how many customers you’ll need to serve to do it. Create a timeline for your sales team, and with them, come up with a step-by-step plan as to how they’re going to reach their targets.

Once you see your action plan laid out before your eyes, the process will look doable. It’s much less intimidating than looking at a big number without any idea of how you’ll reach it.

You’ve finished reading, now what? All that’s left to do is get moving. If you need any help along the way, send our team an email and we can talk through the process with you. As your business grows, just remember, your sales strategy will need adjustments too.