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Sales Strategy

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A sales strategy is a plan by a business or individual on how to go about selling products and services and increasing profits. Sales strategies are typically developed by a company’s administration, along with its sales, marketing and advertising managers.[1]

Developing a Successful Sales Strategy

  • Build a Powerful Value Proposition in Your Messaging: Most prospects either don’t recognize or can’t articulate the root challenges they struggle with on a daily basis. So, even if you sell a truly remarkable product, your buyers probably won’t recognize the real value you offer to their organization. That’s why you need to create your value with a powerful and persuasive message. In fact, Forrester research found that 74 percent of executive buyers will give their business to a company that illustrates a buying vision, compared to vendors among a group of commodity suppliers. This isn’t just about touting your product’s features, hoping that your buyer chooses you over your competition. That approach only puts you at value parity with similar solutions, and it forces a competitive bake-off.

Instead of talking about what you do and why you think you can do it better, create a buying vision that defines a new set of challenges which align to your distinct strengths. This powerful value proposition will uncover previously unconsidered needs for your prospect, create contrast, and drive the urgency to change using stories and insights.

  • Create the Urgency to Change: Most companies unknowingly position themselves for a competitive bake-off of features and benefits. They answer the “why should I choose you?” question for their prospects. But in doing so, they miss a critical first step. The truth is that the majority of buyers prefer to do nothing instead of change. In fact, 60 percent of deals in the pipeline are lost to “no decision” rather than to competitors. Staying the same is safe and comfortable, while change is associated with threat and risk. To break through Status Quo Bias and get prospects to leave their current situation, you need to tell a story that makes a compelling case for why they should change, and why they should change now. Successful sales strategy requires you to understand your real competitor—the status quo. Help your prospects make the decision to change before you help them make the decision to choose you. Answering these questions are what creates your unique value, differentiates your solution, and sets the tone for your buyer’s entire Deciding Journey.
  • Tell a Compelling and Memorable Story: When salespeople prepare for conversations with prospects, they usually focus on getting all the facts straight about their offerings. But the most accurate information in the world won’t resonate if you can’t connect with your customers in a memorable way. Telling personal stories and using metaphors and analogies helps bring your message alive in a more compelling way than simply reciting facts and data. Storytelling paints a vivid picture for your buyers, illustrating the contrast between their current situation versus what’s possible, and connecting what you offer directly to their unique situation. Once you start sharing stories in your sales conversations, your customer relationships will become deeper and more rewarding.
  • Speak to the Deciding Journey, Not Your Sales Process: A sales process is a set of repeatable steps that a salesperson uses to lead a prospect to purchase. Typically, the sales process involves several steps like prospecting, qualifying, discovering needs, negotiating, and closing. This would be an ideal checklist to follow if all your buyers were robots being taken through an assembly line. But that’s just not the reality. Marketing and selling today isn’t a predictable progression that you’ve decided is how your prospects and customers should buy. What you’re really up against today is a Customer Deciding Journey—a series of key questions your buyers are asking as they look to address specific business goals. Instead of being “program-centric” with a one-size-fits-all sales strategy, you need to be problem-centric, addressing the specific needs of your buyers as they arise with situationally relevant messages, content, and the skills to deliver them.
  • Don’t Rely on Buyer Personas in Your Sales Strategy: Customer profiles and buyer personas sound good in theory. The idea is to collect common demographic attributes, attitudes, and behaviors of your target audience to help frame and target your messages. But when used as a superficial profiling approach, personas can lead your messaging astray. Persona-based selling assumes that the behaviors or actions of your target buyer are motivated by their internal characteristics. In reality, buyers are motivated by outside influences that challenge their status quo and convince them to change. These outside influences might include rapid growth within the company, inefficient or unsustainable processes, or broader changes that affect their industry as a whole. The real drivers behind behaviors and behavior change are the challenges within your buyer’s situation, not their professional disposition. So, instead of focusing your sales strategy on a lot of inconsequential attributes, speak to your buyer’s situation and why their current approach is putting their business at risk.
  • Avoid the “Commodity Trap” in Your Sales Strategy: Too often, salespeople base their messaging on the needs that prospects tell them they have. Then, they connect those identified needs to corresponding capabilities, in standard “solution selling” fashion. The problem with this approach? You fall into the trap of commodity messaging along with your competitors, who are likely constructing their value message in response to the same set of inputs. As a result, you sound just like everyone else, leaving your prospects indecisive and without any real urgency to change. Instead, you need to introduce Unconsidered Needs that extend beyond the identified, known needs and solve for those. Introduce prospects to problems or missed opportunities they’ve underappreciated or don’t even know about. Then, connect the Unconsidered Needs you’ve identified to your differentiated strengths, which are uniquely suited to resolve those risks. Research conducted by Corporate Visions found that a provocative messaging approach that begins by introducing an Unconsidered Need enhances your persuasive impact by 10 percent.

7. Lead with Insights, Not Discovery Questions Many salespeople try to be a “trusted advisor”—asking their buyers discovery questions, diagnosing the customer’s needs, and then presenting a solution that fits the criteria. But this approach does you and your customer a disservice.

To be of real value to your buyers, it’s not enough to say, “Tell me what you want; I’ll get it for you.” Buyers want salespeople who will tell them what they should want. They want you to sift through all the information that’s out there and deliver insight into what they’re missing that will improve their performance.

This means more than just finding data and statistics online. A fact without a story is just a data point. To make it real for your buyer, wrap your insights in a story that connects the dots for them and provides context within their world.

8. Align Sales and Marketing Too often, sales and marketing are siloed departments, each with individual goals that appear compatible. Marketing creates sales messaging and tools and generates leads for the sales team. Sales teams use the messaging and tools to transform those leads into revenue. But a lack of alignment and gaps in your process can sabotage your efforts.

You might hear the following complaint from both sides: “We’re doing our job, but they just don’t get it.” The problem with these goals is that they foster an us-versus-them attitude and miss the big picture. Sales is a design point for better marketing. If Sales is the storyteller of your organization, then Marketing is the story builder.

Ultimately, these two teams share—and must be aligned to achieve—one purpose: to persuade buyers to choose you. 9. Tailor Your Sales Strategy for Customer Expansion Most sales and marketing teams spend the majority of their budgets and effort on customer acquisition and demand generation. Meanwhile, the majority of your annual revenue likely comes from your existing customers, through renewals and upsells.

Nearly half of the companies surveyed by Corporate Visions invest less than 10 percent of their marketing budgets in customer retention and expansion. Clearly, your customers are highly underrated yet powerful growth engines within your company. And you shouldn’t overlook the potential of this untapped revenue stream.

The challenge is, retention and expansion require a distinct messaging and customer conversation approach. Existing customers are in a different position than your prospects—one that carries a unique buying psychology.

While customer acquisition is all about challenging the status quo to highlight the benefits of switching to your solution, customer retention and expansion requires you to reinforce your position as their status quo. In fact, research shows that using a provocative, challenging message when you’re trying to renew or expand business with your customers will increase the likelihood that they’ll shop around by at least 10-16 percent. 10. Enable Ongoing Situational Training Most training and learning efforts are based on a collection of competencies, supported by a curriculum and catalog that gets scheduled on calendar-based interest and availability. But what does that have to do with helping the company’s business strategy, responding to shifting market demands and intervening to fix emergent needs when they arise?

To be as effective and efficient as you need to be today, your sales training has to rise to a new level of flexibility, customization, and situational relevance. Using a flexible, on-demand training model enables you to deploy it at a moment’s notice to solve problems as they occur, and tackle initiatives as they arise. Training your sales team for situational agility equips them with the messaging and skills they need relative to the customer conversations they’re having. 10 Keys to Developing a Successful Sales Strategy https://corporatevisions.com/sales-strategy/

  1. Definition - What is a Sales Strategy? Chron