7 Step Guide To Building a Successful Sales Strategy

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of a Successful sales strategy?

Is it increased sales revenue? Increased website traffic? Or Increasing brand value?

Only a sales/ marketing team is aware of the challenges and importance of an effective sales strategy. A team that is well-organized, planned, and aware of the right strategies has greater chances to attain its goals.

It’s always “Increasing” when you have the right strategy in place and I’ll ensure that you have one by the end of the article.

Why Do you Need an Effective Sales Strategy?

A sales team that has completed their homework is more likely to build an effective sales strategy. Now, your homework should include:

• A clear list of priorities that everyone in your team understands
• An action plan that will boost your sales strategy
• A clear set of overall and revenue goals to work towards
• The precise set of guidelines for your team to follow

To make your sales strategy successful in the long run, it is very essential to plan the whole process before applying it. If you’re going ahead with a plan that is best for your brand at the moment, it will work. But if you’re thinking of something in a long run then it is better to plan for the long term.

7 Step Guide to Build a Successful Sales Strategy

Step 1- Hire a Sales team that Boosts Your Growth

For a successful sales strategy, you need a team that helps you grow. The role that an inside salesperson plays can either impact your business positively or negatively.

A job of an inside salesperson is a lot more than just conducting sales calls. The right candidate should have patience, persistence, and skills to quickly learn everything.

Your sales team should have people that are qualified to do the job as they will be dealing with all the prospect calls, creating marketing campaigns, and a lot more. A job of a salesperson requires volume, tons of emails, calls, follow-ups, etc.

Only a professional marketer has the quality to manage everything and hiring the right person for the role is always a great move so you could achieve your long-term goals.

Step 2- Analyse Your Previous Sales Strategy

It’s clearly not possible to set up a successful sales strategy without analyzing your past strategy so you don’t repeat the same mistakes. Analyze your sales revenue, strategy, sales cycle to know where you stand right now.

• Which of your offerings made the highest sales?
• What strategy performed well?
• What was the longest and the shortest sales cycle?
• How many sales did your company made last year?

Hold meetings and discuss with your team, so you have a robust foundation for your sales strategy. Analyze everything and then get started with your sales strategy.

Step 3- Create a Detailed Customer Profile

Prioritizing your regular customers is beneficial because as per a study, 80% of the revenue of a company comes from 20% of the customers. These are the customers that spend most on your offerings and are genuinely interested to invest in the long run.

Your existing customers are the ones that are going to have the shortest sales cycle while helping your sales team save a lot of time to focus on prospecting.

Create a customer persona of your existing customers which should include location, company name, designation, full name, email Id, etc.

A detailed customer profile will help your sales rep to spend time on the customers and prospects that are more likely to get converted.

Step 4- Build Your Sales Plan

Every type of industry would require a different kind of sales plan and hence you’d need to create a plan that suits your business needs and revenue goals. This sales plan will be carried out by your sales rep to build a successful sales strategy.

Your sales plan will be your roadmap to a successful sales strategy where you customize your plan with a specific game plan that will work best for your brand. If you haven’t already created your sales plan then it’s predictable that you don’t have an inside sales process too.

Here are some things that you need to take care of in your sales plan:

• Who is your ideal customer/ client?
• What are the difficulties faced by your prospects?
• How can you solve their problems with a unique approach?
• How can you make the process of purchase easy for your prospect?
• Is your software user-friendly for your prospects?

Sales prospecting is almost everything in your sales plan so make sure your team takes care of it in an effective way by understanding your target audience and reaching out to them with personalized messages

Step 5- Set Attainable Goals

Till now, you have known where you actually stand and you have already analyzed your past sales strategy. Now is the time when you have to set goals for your sales strategy and by setting goals, I mean “attainable goals.”

There’s no point to set goals that you cannot achieve, it will be discouraging for your team as well as you. Once your sales team knows the volume of work and what it’s going to take to reach the goal, they will work towards it efficiently.

While setting your annual goals, hold a meeting with your sales, marketing, and production team to hear what they have to say about the goals. You can also use the analyzed information while setting your goals.

Step 6- Invest in Tools that Automates the process

Using technology when it is needed is always better than doing everything on your own manually. It automates the process by making it easy and time-saving so your team can focus on other aspects that genuinely need attention.

CRM tools and Email extractors are the software that will allow you to get rid of the trial and error phase. Aeroleads can help you find emails of your prospects for you to reach out to them with a creative email that showcases your brand offerings.

CRM’s today is getting really amazing with every technology as your inside sales process can be pre-built inside the tool for your team to follow. You can also export the emails that you extracted from Aeroleads into your CRM tool so you have all the customer data in one place.

Step 7- Management & Follow Ups

You might have great people in your sales team but if don’t have a good manager to manage inside sales and your sales reps, it might be challenging to build a successful sales strategy.

The manager of your company will ensure if everyone is working towards the goals by ensuring if the inside sales process is being followed effectively. A good manager will build a healthy relationship with the team and will give the right direction to the team that enforces the inside sales process.

It’s that simple!

You’ve planned your sales strategy by now and the only thing that’s left is the application and implementation of the plan. These steps for building an effective sales strategy will help your sales team to have a clear set of goals and priorities to work on without getting confused.

An effective inside sales and sales strategy will not only result in increased sales but will also give measurable outcomes, a clear set of guidelines, and an encouraged sales team.