Questions to keep in mind while creating your sales strategy

Retrospection of your sales strategy is necessary for generating the much-needed revenue.

• Sales managers stay pre-occupied deciding the various sales strategies for the year ahead.
• The stats of previous years get pulled out to find out the progress your team has made till now.
• What verticals need your immediate attention for overcoming any drawback that the team faced in the previous strategies!

Unless you ask the right questions, it just gets difficult to find the actual problem and have a solution for it.

We are listing down some of the questions that every sales driven organization must keep in mind while creating their sales strategy.

#1. Did we use the right sales strategy?

Start with assessing the strategies that you had for the previous years and compare the results that were achieved using them.

Motivation

• Was I able to motivate my team enough?
• Was the impact enough to merge their interest with the organization’s goal of increasing the revenue?

Convincing sales teams about carrying out a sales strategy is like approaching a prospect with your sales pitch.

You must ask yourself whether your sales team indeed worked with motivation.

Did the benefits of achieving sales targets made them work towards the revenue goal.

Pep talk the Team

• At the start of the year you will :
• sit down with your team and discuss the target market
• set various sales goal with a deadline in mind
• ask for nurturing strategies for existing customers
• gauge the health of your sales pipeline
• ask for high quality leads from the marketing department
• try to have an equilibrium beteeen marketing and sales process
• base your sales approach on the marketing strategy
• want to push more marketing qualified leads through your sales funnel

and the strategies to be followed is not going to get them to work straight away. Salespeople never forget that they work as a single entity and are against the idea of ’’team’’ many times.

Were you able to make them understand how the new strategies are going to be a game changer?

Did they know that the strategies have been developed for the growth of the organization and it is imperative to make it work so that the generated revenue is up to the mark?

Have proper KPI’s in place

To find out if the strategies that were set last year have worked or not, actual data is required to be collected by the sales managers.

Various sales metrics help sales managers measure the success of their strategies:

• number of calls
• number of scheduled appointments
• total sales made by sales team
• number of referrals received and closed
• overall sales cycle
• number of attempts made before the sale was closed
• amount of time spent on non-sales activities
• up-sell attempt and the success ratio

After compiling all these data, you will have the required information that will help you compare the performance of your strategies of the past year.

Based on this comparison, you will be able to get the much-required answer to ’’are we using the right sales strategy?’’

#2. Is my sales and marketing team functional?

As per Forrester Research, a meager 8% of B2B companies feel there is complete alignment between their sales and marketing department.

Every sales manager has endless concern for this alignment because marketing and sales are co-related.

This is where their role gets one step ahead.

They need to educate the individuals in both the department about the importance of a cross-functional sales and marketing team.

You can adopt these tactics if team alignment is one of your concerns:

The Starting Point

• Develop a momentum between your sales and marketing team.
• Bring them onboard for the same challenge and ask them to work on overcoming it as if their life depends on it.
• No, it’s not too harsh, tell them about the bonus they get after solving the challenge in a united manner.
• When they work on this challenge, observe the way they work with each other and point out the weak points that were slowing them down during the completion of the task.
• The next step is to resolve any issues in any of the team members has while they worked on the challenge.
• Educate them about the importance of alignment between the two departments and why it is so much necessary for making the customer’s journey a beautiful one.

Adopt the Right Goal

• For marketing team, the primary goal is to get website visits and to the get the prospects to their list.
• Sales, on the other hand, needs to convert the maximum of these prospects into sales.
• Don’t ask them to unify their goals because that will create more issues.
• Show them the diversity in the goals is their strength.
• They need to realize they have two different sets of goals
• Relentless dedication towards completion of these goals is necessary.

#3. Are we working with a consultative attitude towards customers?

Sales reps and marketers are the points of contact between customers and organization.

You have a duty of being the consultant who represents the organization in front of the customer.

Deal with the customers in a way that he feels you are a genuine organization.

You want to provide them with the product and service that will solve their current problem.

• Your targets are essential but do not be in a rush for the prospect-customer “conversion rate”.
• Understand that prospects can feel if they are customers or just a sales figure in the sale representative’s task sheet.
• Be humble while replying to the prospects query and let them get comfortable with you.
• Do not rush the next appointment on them.
• Drop a friendly message about the need of having a meeting or a call to discuss your product or service further.

#4. Do we have the correct target customer base?

Most businesses do market research before they start developing the product. They have an ideal customer profile (ICP) that helps them select their target audience based on various factors.

• The actual challenge that companies face is the unexpected surge in demand.
• It is worrying when the deamn is from a customer type which was never your target.
• These non-ICP customer base come with their hidden costs.
• While trying to manage various customer bases, the brand gets divided.

#5. Is the work culture activity-based or result-based?

Sales managers know that there are achievers and then there are certain people who work hard all week but still do not deliver the desired result.

They also fear that their organization may fall into the vicious activity trap.

The significant disadvantage of working based on activities is that your sales reps are dialing those numbers just for the dollars.

To complete their sales quota and get the churn rate moving, they will push hard on the customers so that they sell more.

Moreover, there will be discounts on volume that will slowly hurt your organization’s overall revenue.

Working with a culture more focused on results means your sales reps will be working smarter.

They will be giving proper attention to the needs of the customer.

With such a work culture, the sales rep can help in providing value for money to the customers.

Conclusion

Now that’s what we call an actionable plan for setting up sales strategy.

Your sales success depends on numerous factors.

Asking yourself the right questions at the right time is worth it because your revenue depends on the success of your sales strategies.

When you gather your team for discussing past success and failures,  have a clear goal in mind.

We hope this article helped you get a direction towards developing better strategies.

Sometimes all these labor is the primary concern for the manager.

And why not, he must sit down and pull all the numbers together from various sources and sometimes get half-baked output.

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