Sales Strategy to Grow Your Business

You want to grow your business, right? What’s your plan? What are you going to do differently or better? Let’s talk about types of sales strategies and a few recommendations. 

What is a Sales Strategy?

A sales strategy is a method that informs how your sales team positions your company and products/services to target your customers. It should be meaningful and unique to your business. To make it more concise, every business wants more sales or sales efficiency but it requires direction. 

Your sales strategy shouldn't be generic, your business isn’t!  Every customer is different so different companies should implement different strategies. What’s your plan to improve sales growth? 

Types of Sales Strategies

A sales strategy can be separated into inbound and outbound strategies as well as a hybrid approach.

• Inbound Sales Strategy: tailors the sales process to buyer actions. It is important to understand the customers’ interests, challenges, needs, and goals.
• Outbound Sales Strategy: is based on seller actions. An outbound sales process includes tactics such as cold calling and cold emailing.  It spreads the message about a company’s product or service to a large number of people.
• Hybrid Sales Strategy: is a combination of inbound and outbound strategies. This often happens when an organization is transitioning from outbound to inbound. 

Why is a Sales Strategy Important?

The growth of your company depends on the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales strategy.  The strategy helps you to:

• Hire the right sales reps
• Maximize the ROI of your sales team
• Address all your customer challenges, needs, or pain points
• Identify issues within your sales process

A sales strategy provides insight into your ideal customer profile and reasons why your target audience should buy from your company.  It provides content that makes sense to your prospects and unique selling points.  It clearly states how you are different, and communicates the value of your business as well as the products and services offered.

Sales and Marketing Alignment, NOT Versus!  

It’s critical that you understand the difference between a sales strategy and a marketing strategy.  Keep in mind, it’s not sales versus marketing.  It should be sales and marketing together! Your marketing strategy outlines how you will reach your target audience and promote your products and services, messaging, etc. 

Your sales strategy describes how you’re going to sell your product or service to your target audience. The sales strategy outlines the most effective way of attracting prospects, converting prospects into customers, and ways of getting repeat customers.

According to HubSpot, sales and marketing alignment can help your company become 67% better at closing deals and can help generate 209% more revenue from marketing. Allocate time for sales and marketing alignment within your company. They should be working together towards a common goal! 

You’ll want to define qualified leads, target market, and the buying journey to provide valuable content at every step. Sales & Marketing can collaborate on inbound marketing and identify what information should be on contact information. They can identify what information is on sales pitch presentations as well as graphics to tell the story. 

Metrics To Determine Sales Success 

Below are a few metrics so that you can measure the success of your sales pipeline:

• Sales velocity shows how quickly leads are moving through your sales pipeline and how fast you are making money. 
• Opportunity win rate is the percentage of sales opportunities that your sales team converts into customers. Having an idea of your average opportunity win rate will allow you to produce more accurate sales forecasts and set challenging sales targets to motivate your team.
• Sales pipeline coverage shows if your team has enough opportunities to meet the sales quota for a given period.

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