What is the primary goal of every sales leader? We’d argue it’s profitable revenue growth. How can a sales leader achieve profitable revenue growth? By implementing a solid sales strategy. In this blog, we will cover the 5 essential criteria of a successful sales strategy to increase sales and out-perform your competitors:
Share Best Practices
Every sales team has a preferred set of best practices they tend to use in their sales strategy. A few of these could include: contacting their prospects during specific business hours, using a professional business language and tone, targeting specific decision makers within an organization, or using a specific set of sales tips. For optimal success, an organization must define and then use a set of best practices to achieve their business objectives. According to The Center for Sales Strategy, identifying and sharing best practices based on previous experience amongst a sales team is a great way to increase productivity and improve upon an organization’s success.
Size Up The Market And The Competition
One of the most important aspects of a sales strategy is knowing the market your organization plays in as well as your competition. There are 3 main steps to take when sizing up the overall market to understand where your organization fits and how you can utilize that position to grow:
Assess The Market
Define the market size and where you want to dedicate your efforts to gain customers. Ask yourself questions like: How large is the overall market? How quickly is it growing? What customer segments are most interested?
Identify Your Target Customer
Identify customers who are going to adopt your solution to ultimately help you grow. Your goal is to target the customers who understand your value proposition and will eagerly adopt your product.
Analyze The Competition
Identify your competition and know how they will compete with you to gain customers. Knowing your competitors’ value propositions will allow you to take your next strategic steps accordingly.
Protect Existing Customers
According to the Harvard Business Review, attracting new customers will cost a company at least five times more than it costs to keep an existing customer. In fact, procuring customers is one of the more difficult aspects of running any business. A Gartner Group study states that 80% of a company’s future revenue will come from 20% of their existing customers. With the variety of options available to prospects today to address their business needs, it is incredibly important that a company keeps their customers satisfied so that they eventually become evangelists of their solution.
Enhance Sales Coaching
Harvard Business Review states that most sales and service organizations have invested more time and effort in the past 5 years to improve managers’ coaching of sales reps than they did in the previous 50 years. Coaching creates an environment where all the sales reps can have the same presentation skills, a platform for introspection and raise the overall awareness bar. It is not only important to have a good coaching program when the sales reps are hired, it is also imperative to train these reps throughout their tenure. A recent Coach4Growth, 87% of sales rep training is lost when this training isn’t followed by a manager’s consistent and ongoing coaching.
Enable Sales Teams With The Right Technology
Today there is an overwhelming variety of options in the field of cloud-based technology and an explosion of information. Sales teams need to be mobile, content up-to-date, fueled with information and available to prospects through sales enablement technologies in order to compete. According to Forbes, 1/3 of sales leaders, believe they should be spending more of their budget on technology as these applications prove to solve a majority of a sales teams’ pain points. A study conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and Capgemini Consulting noted that achieving digital transformation within an organization is critical to their success. Despite this, 63% of the sales force admits that technological advancement and adoption in their workplace is slow primarily due to ‘lack of urgency’ and poor communication regarding the strategic benefits of new technology tools.
To meet their number one goal, sales leaders need to ensure implementation of a reliable sales strategy. Sharing best practices, keeping a close eye on the competition, protecting existing customers and continually coaching and enabling an organization’s sales team are all essential ingredients for leaders to achieve their sales goals.
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This article originally appeared on the Showpad Blog.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: 5 Essential Criteria Of A Successful Sales Strategy
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