Sales Strategy Guide: 6 Elements of Successful Sales Strategies

A sales strategy is a business's planned approach to selling its products or services. The goal is to lay out explicit guidelines and objectives for the sales organization to follow in order to maximize sales and ensure its sales force is on the same page. An effective sales strategy involves identifying a target market, qualifying leads, and creating meaningful messaging that shows prospective customers the value of a product or service.

A sales strategy is a subset of a company's overall business strategy. While a sales strategy is purely focused on increasing revenue, a business strategy focuses on both increasing revenue and decreasing costs.

The two most common basic sales strategies are inbound sales and outbound sales. To achieve its sales goals, a sales organization may incorporate both inbound and outbound sales into its overall sales strategy, or it can focus on only one or the other. The main difference between inside and outside sales strategies is the source of the leads.

• Inbound Sales: An inbound sales strategy revolves around pulling in leads who have already expressed interest in your company's product or service. In other words, the buyer is the one who starts the conversation. Inbound sales focuses specifically on personalizing the sales process to the needs and desires of the buyer. This method requires sales teams and marketing teams to align to generate sales. It's the job of the marketing team to collect digital information and create visibility in your target market via methods like social media marketing, SEO, and content marketing. Equipped with the information collected by the marketing team, sales reps are better prepared to address the needs of the buyer.
• Outbound Sales: An outbound sales strategy focuses on prospecting leads who have not already expressed interest in your company's product or service. In the outbound sales process, sales reps first initiate communication with potential customers, often through cold calling or emailing. Outbound sales is a more aggressive sales strategy where the seller seeks to get their general sales message out to a wide net of potential customers rather than personalizing a message for prospects who are already considering a purchase.

You'll need to tailor your sales strategy specifically to your business's needs and goals, but there are three common examples of sales strategies that you can implement within your overall plan.

1. 1. Social Selling: Social selling is a method used by sales teams and sales professionals to build relationships with potential buyers. This sales strategy originally depended heavily on generating new leads through cold calling, but today social sellers also use social media networks. Important aspects of social selling include sharing relevant content with new prospects, developing a personal brand to stand out from other competitors, and implementing a social listening strategy to more effectively engage with your target audience. B2B sales (business-to-business) are most likely to incorporate social selling as part of the sales process, as are companies that specialize in products or services with significant financial stakes to the buyer (such as real estate). With social selling, a sales rep can increase their number of potential leads, shorten their sales cycle, increase their sales conversion rate, and monitor their leads' accounts for signals indicating that it's an optimal time to follow up.
2. 2. Personal Selling: Personal selling is a sales method that uses person-to-person communication between sales representatives and prospective customers, either through face-to-face meetings, sales calls, or emails. In personal selling, the salesperson uses a customized sales strategy to identify the customer's needs, inform the customer how the product or service can resolve their problems, and address any of the customer's questions or concerns. Personal selling is most frequently a business-to-business (B2B) selling technique, but it's also used in trade and retail sales. With personal selling, a salesperson can tailor their message to a prospect in order to create a more persuasive pitch, initiate a long-term relationship, and hold the potential customer's attention better than impersonal selling methods. Due to the extra individual attention sales reps must give to their customers, personal selling is an expensive and labor-intensive strategy. It also generates a smaller pool of potential customers since sales reps must weed out unqualified leads and then reach out to every qualified lead individually.
3. 3. SMB Sales: SMB stands for "small and medium-sized business," and SMB sales is the act of selling products and services specifically to SMBs. Small businesses employ 100 or fewer employees, while medium businesses employ 100 to 999 employees. These SMBs are typically local businesses or startups, and they often have very different needs and pain points than large enterprises. This requires SMB salespeople to use a unique B2B sales process to land clients compared to the strategy they'd use for enterprise sales. While deals with large companies can be lucrative, contracts with large enterprises are difficult to close, and you can end up wasting sales resources on deals that never pan out. With SMB sales, sales cycles are short because SMBs typically have less bureaucracy involved in closing a contract, and it's easier to communicate directly with a business's top decision-maker.

No matter what sales strategy you create for your business, make sure you take into account the following essential elements.

1. 1. Measurable objectives: A successful sales strategy contains specific goals that are measurable so you can track whether or not your strategy is working. Your goal might be to hit a certain sales quota or gain a specific number of customers. In addition to setting objectives, it's important to create a system for tracking your sales team’s progress—using data dashboards, quarterly key performance indicators (KPIs), and monthly sales reviews.
2. 2. Buyer persona: Create a detailed and clear customer profile in order to determine who your ideal buyer is. A buyer persona should include your target market's demographics, psychographics, company size, and how they approach the buying process.
3. 3. A value proposition: A value proposition is a summary of your service or product that essentially explains why a customer should do business with your company. It should outline the value your service or product brings to the customer and show how it solves common pain points for buyers in your target market.
4. 4. A comprehensive sales process: This should be a detailed outline of each stage of your sales process. Beginning with prospect qualification, you'll need to create guidelines to determine which prospects have a high-probability of buying your product (e.g., is the prospect involved in the decision-making process, can they afford the product, etc.). You'll also need to generate a basic sales pitch for your salespeople to use when connecting with prospects, prepare responses to common objections, highlight proven closing techniques, and determine the ideal length for a sales cycle.
5. 5. Hiring criteria: A sales strategy is worthless without a talented sales team. That's why it's essential to develop specific guidelines for sales managers to follow when recruiting and interviewing sales rep candidates. In addition, you'll need to develop a comprehensive onboarding and training program to prepare your sales reps to execute your strategy.
6. 6. A CRM database: You'll need to decide how you want to set up your customer relationship management (CRM) database. A CRM database is a comprehensive software system that provides a sales force with tools for contact management, customer support, customer retention, and even marketing automation. Some startups develop their own CRM databases in-house, but others turn to outside vendors that specialize in software as a service (SaaS). A CRM is essential because as a business grows, it builds out a customer base and sales pipeline that are impractical to manage with a simple ledger or spreadsheet. By using a CRM database as an all-in-one repository of customer information, a sales manager can turn their focus to other tasks, such as forecasting sales cycle goals, setting sales quotas, managing pricing, and motivating team members.

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