Sales Strategy
Activating growth with a high-performing sales strategy
A sales strategy is what bridges the difference between your sales targets and your revenues. In other words, a sales strategy is essentially a plan to help you or your sales teams orchestrate documented processes that help them maximize their chances of selling to a prospective buyer.
In a digital-first world, modern technologies like ecommerce platforms, cloud, AI, and chatbots are playing a key role in helping brands sell their products and services to customers – and are therefore, a critical aspect of a modern sales strategy.
“It’s hard to find things that won’t sell online.”
Jeff Bezos
Founder and Former CEO, Amazon
Formulation of a sales strategy
No matter how good or unique your product or service, it is doomed to stay within your organization without a winning sales strategy.
Here are some questions that need to be answered as you formulate your sales strategy:
– Who will be responsible for executing sales, and how will they achieve that?
– Who will set the sales targets and how will you optimize that volume of sales?
– How are sales processes documented and enforced?
– What tools do your sales teams use to achieve their sales targets?
As you answer these questions, you will realize that the sales function has evolved in multiple ways. Today, digital technologies and data play a key role in helping you formulate a winning sales strategy, and to set it into motion.
Defining a sales process
One of the foremost aspects of a sales strategy is your sales process. In simple words, a sales process is a set of steps that your sales force can repeat to turn a prospective buyer into your customer. This process is underpinned by steps such as building a sales network, invoicing, issuing quotes, or implementing a sales enablement solution.
So, why is a sales process important? For two key reasons:
– Without a sales process, your sales force is left to their own skills and tools to turn leads into buyers.
– Standardizing sales boosts your revenues: according to an HBR study, a standardized sales process can increase revenues by 28%.
At Nextrday, we have helped our customers achieve commercial excellence by helping them build high-performance sales processes.
Sales excellence calls for digital
As of 2021, the global ecommerce market was worth $4.9tn. Whether you are a B2B brand or a B2C business, chances are that your customers and your competitors are already meeting online with digital handshakes. Moreover, even if your business takes place offline, enabling sales processes via digital tools is the key to preventing revenue leakage, speeding sales processes, and delighting your customers.
Here are three key elements of a winning sales strategy for the digital era:
Food For Thought
“Many companies have forgotten they sell to actual people. Humans care about the entire experience, not just the marketing or sales or service.
To really win in the modern age, you must solve for humans.”
Dharmesh Shah
Dharmesh Shah
CTO & Co-Founder, Hubspot
Turn data into actions and reach your target customers.
The foundation of a great go-to-market strategy is the data you have access to. Great data allows your to build great strategies and identify and target your customers precisely.
Turn information into actionable insights and use data, analytics and CRM to identify and connect with the right audiences.
