By Nadia Bulcourt – October 17, 2022
The keys to a successful sales strategy
Developing an effective sales strategy is critical to the success of your business. Nowadays, many factors make selling more and more difficult: customer demands, the importance of competition, more and more marketing tools, the evolution of communication channels…
In order for your clients to call upon your services and decide to do business with you, you must therefore implement communication, prospecting and sales tactics that will allow them to get to know you better and realize that you have the best solution to solve their problems.
Before anything else, it is essential to ask yourself the right questions in order to identify your customers’ needs and define your strategy. We will see the 6 steps to follow to develop an effective sales strategy that will contribute to the sustainability of your company in the medium and long term.
1. Set relevant objectives
To implement an effective strategy, you must start by defining relevant objectives. What are the goals you want to achieve in the short, medium and long term? What is achievable and what is not?
To do this, you can rely on the SMART method. This will allow you to align and channel all the actions that will lead your company in the right direction.
There is a wide range of objectives and you will make sure to choose the ones that best suit your company.
Specific objectives
The first step is to define specific objectives. These should be clear and concise, i.e., you should be as specific as possible.
Know how to measure your objectives
It is essential to think about the goal you want to reach in terms of numbers: how many customers do you want to win over the year? What percentage of sales do you want to achieve in 6 months? Numerical data will give you the opportunity to make the necessary decisions in the evolution of your actions.
Realistic and achievable goals
Be realistic: your goal should not be unattainable, otherwise it will not be of much use to you. You can of course set a goal of 15% growth for the year, but if you have no idea how you will achieve it, it will be difficult to achieve. On the other hand, if you set sales targets that are too low, it can create financial instability for both your company and your employees. Your job is to find a balance to avoid frustration and demotivation of your team.
Define your intentions over time
This is about setting a deadline to achieve your goals. It is a way to avoid postponing an action and to fully concentrate on your project.
2. Identify and know how to talk to your ideal client
It is essential to identify your ideal customer in order to offer him products or services that meet his expectations. Without a better knowledge of your customers, you will not be able to offer them a service that is both tailored and adapted to their needs.
Define your buyer persona
Defining a buyer persona is not limited to criteria such as gender, age, family and professional situation or geographical area. It goes much further.
In order for your prospects to become customers, you will also ask yourself what problems they have, and to which you could bring a solution. You will also work on their emotions, their fears, their frustrations, anticipate their buying behaviors…
All this analysis may seem time-consuming, but in reality, it will save you a lot of time in establishing your sales strategy.
Your future customers must feel the interest you have for them, but you must also show them that you understand and master their problems perfectly.
It is recommended to regularly update the profile of your buyer personas. Indeed, consumers’ expectations and their way of getting information, watching and deciding are constantly evolving.
Adapt your sales pitch to your interlocutor
Once you have determined who your ideal customer really is, you will have to adapt your speech. Here, it is not a question of centering your words around your product or your services. Indeed, consumers tend to want to identify with your company. It is therefore essential to turn your speech on the human or simply the psychology of your interlocutor.
Start a “discovery” phase by taking an interest in them. You will gather information about his projects, his objectives in life, but also his expectations, his needs and his problems. In fact, his answers will allow you to find the right arguments, those likely to convince him to buy your products.
With such elements in hand, you will only have to prepare your sales pitch!
3. Know your company's environment well
This is a very important step in the implementation of an effective sales strategy. Indeed, the analysis of your environment will allow you to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of your company. Following this, you will be able to adapt your actions to take advantage of your strengths and deal with what is not working.
SWOT analysis for an effective sales strategy
You have probably already heard of this method which consists of analyzing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats related to your environment. It is a very common and useful tool in decision making. In order to implement an effective sales strategy, the SWOT analysis will allow you to bring solutions to take advantage of your strengths and overcome your weaknesses. It will also highlight the obstacles to your development. You will then be able to analyze the situation and adopt the necessary measures to obtain better results.
4. Establish a sales action plan
A real roadmap, this tool allows you to plan all the actions to be taken to reach the objectives you have set. The budget, the marketing strategy, the positioning and other key points are detailed. A sales action plan will help you choose the most effective route to increase your sales. It contains the objectives to be reached, the operational actions, the means deployed for the actions, the results and the follow-up indicators.
The company's priorities
It is important to know why you are doing this or that. You will therefore have to define the company’s priorities so that your sales strategy makes sense.
ChoisirChoose and structure the appropriate actions et structurer les actions appropriées
This part presents the selected axes, the means that are implemented, the budget allocated for each action and the indicators to monitor their success.
Plan the actions
The creation of a calendar to plan future actions is useful. It includes the essential elements and will help you to manage the performance of your company. Never lose sight of the fact that this schedule must remain operational.
5. Prepare for the aspects of the sale
Selling is a bit like being a runner. You have to prepare and train if you want to get results.
Equip yourself with good marketing tools
Marketing tools can, if well chosen, be useful to increase your productivity and save time. It is therefore important to choose carefully among the many solutions available on the market and find those that best suit your needs.
The example of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). This tool favors the optimization of your customer relations. The advantages of CRM are numerous. For example, it allows you to centralize all data and interactions with your customers in one place. Thanks to it, the management of marketing actions is facilitated.
Coaching in business strategy
Finelis Coaching offers support in the development of an effective sales strategy to help executives, managers and salespeople achieve their sales objectives. The idea is to get off the beaten track of commercial prospecting and avoid using the same actions as the majority of companies.
To succeed, you must stand out from your competitors by adopting your own sales strategy. By calling on our services, we help you to put the cursor where you want it according to your own maturity and sales organization.
6. Monitor actions and results
As part of a sales strategy, it is essential to check whether the actions that are carried out are proving effective. Only by analyzing the results can you make adjustments if necessary.
Performance indicators (KPI) useful for sales performance
To manage your company, you will follow certain commercial indicators such as your turnover, sales volume, profitability rate, etc. Here, it is a question of quantifying your commercial performance.
But quantitative indicators are not enough to measure your performance. You will also need to monitor your commercial efficiency by noting, for example, the customer satisfaction index, the objections of prospects, the complaints…
It is therefore important to define KPIs that are relevant to your sales objectives in order to boost the effectiveness of your sales strategy.
A sales strategy cannot be improvised and requires a minimum of preparation and follow-up. The objective of a good sales strategy is to be in the right place, surrounded by the right people, at the right time, which will allow you to conduct an adequate tactical presentation.
Finelis Coaching is here to help you develop a sales strategy that respects your style, your culture and your well-being. The idea is not to learn for the sake of learning, but to progressively integrate concepts that help the salesperson on a daily basis, a bit like a great athlete who discovers one day that he or she can also take care of his or her diet to be more efficient or as efficient but with less effort.
Contact us to find out more and discover how our Finelis Coaching teams can help you reach your goals and boost your business.