The business world is a fluid one. Every aspect of your entrepreneurial endeavor is prone to change rapidly at a moment’s notice. Just look at how unexpected and fast the COVID-19 pandemic changed the entire economy. Cataclysms like that can severely influence crucial aspects of your business, like customer behavior, supply lines, product placements, and anything in between. In such turbulent times, a well-designed sales strategy can act like a North Star and not only lead you through the storm but help you emerge more robust and more prosperous.

Naturally, building such a strategy is not a mere stroke of luck. It’s a carefully crafted system that allows you to maneuver depending on the business climate. As usual, we are here to help, as your success is our success. So, let’s go through our step-by-step guide to building a winning sales strategy.

What’s a sales strategy?

Just like any building needs a written construction plan in the form of a blueprint, so does every company that aims to sell products or services. In other words, your sales strategy is essentially the blueprint to your success. A well-designed blueprint will account for unexpected disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, or floods. Thus, the building will stand tall through them. The same goes for your sales strategy. If it’s done properly with enough data and strategic planning, it can become resilient to most unexpected changes in the market.

So, a sales strategy is basically a document outlining the rules of conduct between the sales team and the customer. It’s a fundamental cornerstone of the overall business strategy. Its main goal is to guide the sales team in their efforts to generate revenue and grow your business.

Why do you need a sales strategy?

First and foremost, you need a sales strategy so you won’t be shooting blind when it comes to offering your products. Utilizing data and statistics in your sales process is the only secure way to have more sales, better revenues, and business growth. Of course, a sales representative should be free to do their craft, but it shouldn’t be limitless. They should stick to a predetermined plan based on facts, not feelings.

Moreover, a good sales plan will efficiently allocate your resources and won’t waste them on audiences that have little to no interest in your product or service. For example, if you offer prime beef, promoting it to Vegans is absurd. Still, offering it to low-income homes, though counterintuitive, is not that crazy. If the stats show that your beef is being sold predominantly by low-income neighborhoods, your gut feeling that this is not right is meaningless.

Moreover, a good sales strategy will help you polish your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), giving you an immense competitive advantage in your niche.

Most important, however, is your consistency in your messaging and offering. Consistency is key to establishing authority, credibility, and loyalty. Those are the three pillars of business growth.

So, the question is not whether you need a sales strategy. The question is how to build one that can achieve the desired results.

Building such a strategy can roughly be divided into three major phases.

Phase 1: Preparation

The first part of building your winning sales strategy is undoubtedly the most important. A mistake in this phase will render your entire strategy useless. So take your time and don’t rush through it. It’s essential to be punctual and data-oriented. In the preparation phase, you will gather a lot of information and have to make informed decisions about your product, business, and strategy. There are six key steps you need to take during this phase.

Define your sales objectives

This is the first and most crucial step in building your strategy. A precise objective will give you a clear picture of what you must do next. So, most sales experts prefer to go with the SMART method. This means that your sales goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-based.

Specificity is instrumental to your success as this won’t leave any gray area and place for interpretation by the team. Give a specific, measurable number so there is no confusion about the goal. This is what makes your goal measurable. You can pinpoint your progress at any given moment by adding quantifiable values.

To make your goal achievable and realistic, you must address many other factors outside the sales department’s scope. If you are a small business and you take care of the marketing, sales, and finances, this is somewhat easier, as you have a full scope of the resources and capabilities of your company. However, if you have a bigger company with different departments, you must make an all-hands-on-deck meeting. There, the different stakeholders can communicate directly and develop achievable plans for their own divisions.

From a sales perspective, the strategy should account for the marketing goals (meaning how many leads they plan to provide), the financial situation of the company, and, naturally, the product department’s plans. For example, if the marketing team is planning on providing 300 leads, you can’t expect your team to make 400 sales. If finances are cut, and you can’t support eight salespeople, you should account for how many deals one can make daily. Finally, if the production department plans to produce 20 units of your product, you can’t expect your team to sell 25 units.

Most often, sales strategies have a one-year scope, so it is better to stick to that.

Identify your Ideal Customer Profile

Once you have your goal, it’s time to look at those who will help you achieve it – the customers. After all, it’s them you need to impress.

Every product or service is based on a customer’s needs. Naturally, each product has a target audience that shares specific characteristics and problems. The more detailed these characteristics are, the tighter your audience will get. However, a narrower audience will allow you to customize your sales messaging precisely and increase your conversion rates.

So, even if you offer products or services for broad consumption, such as bed sheets, you must examine and determine your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This will help you narrow down your audience and know whom to address.

Naturally, the process of identifying your ICP is anything but easy. Start by examining market trends, search engine trends, and customer feedback. It would be helpful if they are your customers, but you can also tap into your competitor reviews to see what kind of people primarily communicate with them. Once you identify a specific group of people, ask yourself what is their main problem and whether your product solves it completely. This will help you improve your product and messaging in the later phases. Once you’ve identified your ICP, make sure to create a profile. Give them a name, specify their age, education level, and profession, and add a picture. This will help your sales team visualize who they are communicating with.

Analyze your competitors

Your next step is to analyze your competitor’s sales strategies. Naturally, you won’t have all the information, but through their messaging, you can deduce whom they are targeting. Most importantly, you can identify some of their mistakes and avoid them. The best way to do that is to read their customer’s feedback and learn from their mistakes.

By analyzing all aspects of your competitors’ strategy, you can find their strengths and weaknesses. This will help you find a niche where you can thrive instead of competing with others where they are strongest.

Define your Unique Selling Proposition

All of the work you’ve done so far leads to probably the most crucial decision you will have to make in your entire sales strategy. This is the one that can make or break your business. Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is what gives you an edge over your competitors. It’s the thing that should speak loudest to your customers.

Naturally, listing your product’s features is far from enough to create a winning USP. Instead, focus on the benefits the product or service will bring your customers. So, for example, if you are offering cordless vacuums, featuring their engine, how big their container is, and what their battery is, won’t do the trick. You need to show the benefits. Mentioning that your customers won’t have to deal with cables or that they can clean their apartment three times with a single charge is far more appealing. So, find that extra feature on your product that helps customers like no other product can. Focus on the benefits rather than the features, and make it memorable and compelling.

Set a numerical definition of success.

Setting KPIs or specific metrics used to measure performance and efficiency is crucial for monitoring your success and fixing problems on the go. This will give you an unembellished view of your team’s performance. More importantly, it will show you where they need to improve. For example, if you place a KPI of 10% annual sales revenue, and for the first quarter, the increase is just over 2%, then you must adjust your strategy.

KPIs can be revenue-oriented, conversion-oriented, sales-stream-oriented, or customer satisfaction-oriented. The revenue KPIs are most often a number that is usually a percentage higher than what you earned last year. For example, if you made 1 million and want a 10% increase this year, at the end of the year, you should have earned 1.1 million.

The conversion rate has much to do with the quality of the marketing team’s leads. So, setting a higher conversion rate often requires going into a tighter niche or updating your sales messaging. Regardless, this is something that involves the marketing team as well, as they are the ones who provide the leads, and it’s their job to forward only quality leads.

Another type of KPI can be directed towards the increase of income streams. For example, if you enter a new market, you may set a specific goal and KPI for this market alone. For example, if you are a US company but you’ve just branched out to the EU, you may set a specific goal to retain US sales and focus on expanding your market share in the EU.

Finally, we have customer satisfaction KPIs. They most often target the repeat purchase rate, showing what percentage of your customers buy from you again.

Invest in a motivated sales team

The only way to grow your business is to have your team’s dedication to the task. Now, many brilliant managers will insist that money is not everything, but money is the main pillar of your relationship with your employees. So, offering a bonus upon reaching the annual sales goals is a great way to motivate them. This is a small investment that’s practically paying for itself. If the sales team brings higher revenues, they will get a cut. If you are tight on money, you can offer other preferences, like additional vacation days for the best salesperson, a special retreat for them and their family, or anything to boost morale.

Most importantly, don’t blame the sales team alone if they are not reaching their monthly quota. Instead, find out the problem and fix it without raising your voice or threatening anyone with termination. No one works well with a gun against their heads.

Sometimes, investing in a motivated sales team is just giving them the proper respect they deserve and building an environment of trust and cooperation.

Phase 2: Analysis

After you are done with building the infrastructure within, it’s time to plan where you will implement your strategy.

Segment your Market

First and foremost, you must understand that your niche can be segmented even further, no matter how tight it is. Yes, you will target everyone in your niche, but segmenting your market into various characteristics, like age, sex, demographics, specific needs, and so on, can help you personalize your sales messages even better. Imagine you are selling women’s scarves. This is a pretty tight niche already. Still, you can segment your audience further by age and location. For example, the younger generation may like brighter colors, while the older generation may prefer more stylish dyes.

Moreover, you can target your customers based on the occasion on which they will wear the scarf. For example, they will need a more formal scarf if they are going to a wedding. However, if they need one for leisure time, walking the dog, or just keeping warm at home, they might go for a more colorful or playful dye.

Thus, segmenting your market will allow you to create better, more targeted messaging. Naturally, how you will divide your market niche depends on your product and the data you’ve collected.

Choose the proper sales channels.

Once you know your market niches, you must choose the proper sales channels to contact them. For example, people over a certain age are far more prone to watch television, while the younger generations are primarily on social media. Analyzing your target audience will help you determine which communication channels to use. Naturally, you can always allocate some resources to pushing through a new channel and creating a new income stream. That all depends on your vision and financial capabilities.

Create various sales messages.

Now that you’ve established your customer segments and channels, it’s time to build your messaging. Creating a sales message is a long and hard process that involves a lot of testing. Don’t expect to hit the jackpot on your very first try. Depending on the channel, the message will have various components, and each must be tested. The A/B testing is probably the best way to go for it. Write about 10 sales copies, make 10 pictures, create 10 videos with different messages, and try which one will bring the most revenue. Analyze the results and see if you can pinpoint the common factors that drive your customers to click the Buy button. Note that there is no such thing as a perfect copy. Conversion rates of 100% are impossible. So, don’t go for perfection. Go for “good enough.”

Perfect your sales process

While building your strategy, don’t forget to check if you can improve your sales process. Your sales process is a step-by-step guide that leads your sales team to closing deals. Look at the steps they are taking, the milestones, and the key actions that are set in this process and determine if you can optimize them. In this regard, your team’s feedback is invaluable, as they are the ones doing the selling. So, be open to suggestions from your team and test them out in the field to see if they are good enough.

When you are done perfecting your sales process, it’s time to implement your strategy.

Phase 3: Implementation

Many newbies falsely believe their work is done once you set your strategy. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Just as the market is fluid and every aspect is in constant motion, so should your sales strategy. So, here are four crucial things you should be doing while the strategy is being implemented.

Monitor and measure progress.

Monitoring the progress of your sales team doesn’t mean you should stick behind their backs, looking to see if they work. That’s what the KPIs are for. You should keep taps on your sales team’s success on a weekly basis and follow patterns. For example, if the sales team makes 12 on Monday but on Tuesday and Friday they make only 2, you need to see the cause of this anomaly. If that reoccurs each week, you can even take advantage and focus your resources on the day with the most sales while cutting back on the bad days. Measuring your sales team’s performance will give you invaluable information on how your product is selling. This will be of great help when you are updating your strategy or when you are creating your next one.

Implement Customer Relationship protocols

Don’t be fooled that once you’ve finalized a sale, your job is done. If you aspire to have loyal and returning customers, you need to have stellar customer relationship protocols. These will define the rules of conduct post-sale. Though they are not the seller’s job, they are still within the realm of the sales team, as they are the ones who communicate with the client. In B2C transactions, that’s not a huge deal, but in B2B sales, maintaining a relationship between the salesperson and the customer is crucial.

So, make sure to have personalized follow-up sessions, excellent customer support, and always reply to feedback, regardless of whether they are good or not.

Encourage feedback

Speaking of feedback, just replying is not enough. You must actively invite your customers to leave reviews and comments on your website or a third-party website. Reviews are the single most persuasive argument in your sales arsenal, so don’t disregard them. Even bad reviews are essential, as you can see where to improve.

Review and update your strategy.

Building a successful, winning sales strategy is an ongoing process. You can’t just drop a piece of paper on your sales team’s desk and expect them to do the job. You need to actively review and update your strategy to answer the changing trends in the market. For example, imagine if you were a masseuse. In late 2019, you made your 2020 sales strategy and started tackling it from the first day of the new year. In March, however, the Covid crisis closed everything up. If you hadn’t responded, you’d waste resources, as other factors outside your control changed the market.

While this is an extreme example, marketing changes happen ever so often. So, reviewing and updating your strategy every quarter is a good idea. This way, you will have enough data on whether the plan is working and where you can improve it. Naturally, your plan could be running smoothly, and you may not need any changes. But you can’t know that without properly reviewing all the collected data and feedback from your team.

No, it’s not easy

Building a successful sales strategy is not easy, and it doesn’t become any easier, regardless of how many you’ve made. The market is way too fluid to stick to any winning practices. Following the frame we gave you is one of the few constants to help you navigate the turbulent waters of sales strategies. Another constant is your need for fast, reliable, and secure web hosting so your sales team can intercept leads and not have them bouncing on the first touch with your website.

Thus, HostArmada is a must for any growing business. We offer high-speed hosting solutions, 99.9% guaranteed uptime, and state-of-the-art security for your client’s data. Check out our plans and choose the one that fits your strategy best. If you use your website as a sales stream, you may consider VPS Cloud Web hosting. So, do your business a favor: let us deal with your website’s hosting while your sales team is busy implementing your winning sales strategy.