Photo by Sarah Pflug from Burst
Sales Strategy
The strongest sales growth comes from optimising the quality of each customer’s experience of your sales team to differentiate them as one that delivers value.
Sales Strategy Methodology
Define the best sales model for your business
Your ability to implement your sales strategy depends largely on having the right sales model. We’ll look at your business goals, growth aspirations and brand strategy to help you to define the optimum sales channel and model for your business: self-service, transactional, direct, channelled, tiered or a blended approach.
Build the right team structure
The right structure for your sales team will help you to implement your sales strategy more rapidly. This step also includes looking at your current sales team’s roles, skill sets and performance to identify gaps and design a plan to remediate them. This will also include identifying broad sales roles such as new business, account management, channel managers, telesales & telemarketing. We’ll also be looking at sales management roles and how sales managers can best support and coach team members.
Design a repeatable sales process
Having a repeatable sales process included in your sales strategy helps your business to grow by sharing best practises and speeding-up onboarding of new team members and resellers.
We’ll start this step by looking at your market research and interviewing the sales team and any sales support teams (e.g. pre-sales, operations and customer success) and customers to understand how your customers buy. We’ll then review your current policies and standards, sales process definitions and related tools and systems.
We’ll map these onto your customers’ buying process to identify areas for improvement and generate an initial recommendation which we’ll workshop together with your sales team to define and document your new sales process. This could involve a new business focus, the use of account managers, an account-based marketing approach or a combination of these.
Ensure marketing and sales alignment
Ensuring that marketing and sales are aligned on targets, positioning, messaging, pricing and lead management is essential to the success of your sales strategy and the growth of your business.
If you feel that there is a gap between your marketing and sales teams that is preventing growth, we can run a parallel project to synchronise the two teams.
Implement a robust forecasting process
As part of the documentation we’ll also implement a forecasting system based on gates and thresholds that allows the sales team and their leaders to regularly and consistently review and report on opportunities as they progress through the sales process, align resources and accurately forecast close dates and values.
This will help you to ensure that your sales strategy remains on track as well as providing a reliable planning tool for other teams in your company such as implementation, operations, finance etc.
Improve pipeline management
Sales teams often struggle to maintain a sufficient volume of opportunities at each stage of their sales funnel which will eventually lead to missed targets. Together we’ll also implement a pipeline review process so that sales managers get a far horizon view of the health of each sales person’s pipeline and can identify the support needed to ensure that individual pipelines are full of opportunities at every sales stage. If your sales managers are not familiar with the concept of managing via the pipeline, I can arrange training via a third-party organisation.
Optional Sales Strategy Services
Ensure that your CRM is optimised to support your team
In order to maximise the efficiency of your sales strategy and processes we’ll work with your CRM solution provider to align your sales strategy and sales process within the application to increase its use, enforce compliance with the new process, ease reporting and ensure sharing of accurate information with sales supporting functions, marketing and business operation teams. This is normally delivered as an optional final step.
Close any sales skill gaps
If during the process we identify training needs, we’ll work together with one of our specialist sales training contractors to design a training programme to bring your sales team’s skills up to the required level.
Create a sales recruitment plan
If you need to bring people into the business, I can ease the recruitment process by creating job descriptions and advertisements, benchmarking compensation plans so you know how much to pay, reviewing CVs, and shortlisting and interviewing candidates to uncover their sales skills, experience and ambitions.
Sales Strategy Deliverables
- Agreed definition of your sales channels and model
- Analysis of your current sales teams skills and performance and a plan to remediate any gaps
- An organisational plan identifying roles and responsibilities and a plan to fill any vacancies
- Documentation of the agreed sales process(es) and map(s)
- Changes required to sales policies in order to implement the new strategy
- New or additional supporting tools or systems
- Areas of concerns relating to marketing and sales alignment
- Forecasting system aligned with your sales funnel with threshold definitions delivered as an Excel document
- Pipeline review and management process
My 5-point Client Satisfaction Promise
- Your sales strategy will be customised to your business and its unique challenges.
- Your investment and your payment schedule will be clear. If I can save you money by using what you already have, I won’t reinvent the wheel.
- We’ll discuss, agree on and document each step in the process. If I need you to pull together data or documents I’ll ask you before the relevant step begins.
- The work plan will comprise a number of milestones that will be clearly identified. At the end of each milestone we will evaluate the progress of the project together
- Sometimes the unexpected happens. If something extra is requested or required I’ll ensure you’re fully informed about the implications before you commit.
