Do you know that your sales strategy could make or break your business? Well, if you didn’t, then it’s probably high time to adopt one.
From a numbers perspective, there’s good research showing that 60% of salespersons stick to a particular sales strategy to achieve success.
Of course, finding one can be a tad bit difficult, but, once those pearly gates open and you find your formula, there’s no stopping you. In our review today, we’ll be looking to share a couple of sales strategy examples that are sure to positively impact your business. It’s going to be a fun ride. Buckle up!
11 Sales Strategy Examples and How They Can Elevate Your Business
1. Formulating a Consistent Sales Message
Fresh off the bat, the message you send out to members of your sales team needs to be clearly spelt out in black and white. By doing so, you’ll be able to avert possible confusion about the true intentions of the firm.
To formulate a bulletproof sales message, you need to think about the value you’re providing to your target audience. In addition to this, you also need to carefully evaluate what sets you apart from the competition.
Once you’re able to accurately describe these two ideas, it becomes easier for your sales team to chow down these concepts. If they’ve fully grasped the message, they’ll likely have a field day selling the brand to prospects.
Differentiation is a key selling point when it comes to steering organizations in the right direction. That said, the centerpiece of it all is ensuring that your salespeople can succinctly convince buyers why they need your solution.
While it may be true that you have unique product and services, your buyers won’t care much about this if it doesn’t impact their bottom line. At the same time, overly expounding on all the features of your product may be a bit of an overkill.
Essentially, you need to always focus your efforts on the client’s needs when formulating your sales message.
2. Targeting the Right Audience
Your sales team needs to recognize the ideal buyer that your solution is aimed at helping. To find the right buyer, you need to train your sales reps on the characteristics of your target audience. For that to happen, they need to first internalize the problem your solution remedies. Once that is done, they’ll be able to zoom in on the right prospects.
Tempting as it may be, it’s not a good practice to tell your reps to generalize on the audience. Not only does this ambiguous approach leave you open to mistakes, but it also hurts the odds of success.
You’re unlikely going to have such hitches if you’ve identified the traits that the ideal buyer possesses. Narrowing down on the perfect prospects also enables you to cope with the times as the market changes. This is because you’ll be better able to tailor your approach and offer bespoke solutions that resonate with your ideal buyers.
3. Refine Your Processes
Obviously, you want your sales reps to register massive selling numbers. It’s nigh impossible for this to happen if you’ve equipped them with cumbersome tools and processes.
In a perfect world, you want to have consistency all across the board. This makes it easy to track result, monitor progress of prospects along the buyer’s journey, and issue real-time solutions. This facilitates you to spot emergent issues before they become real headaches.
A streamlined process also allows you to identify where extra training is necessary. You’ll also be better informed on which members of the sales team are inefficient and may need replacing.
4. Technology for the Win
Among sales strategy examples, this is probably the most pertinent in the current era. With technology having grown in leaps and bounds in recent years, it’s crucially important that all sales teams adopt it.
By choosing to automate repetitive tasks, you’ll be freeing up the schedule of your sales reps. In effect, they’ll have plenty more time to drive their sales agenda forward with momentum.
Powerful mediums like LinkedIn can enable your sale reps to stay ahead of prospects. Since it’s a social network, members will be able to exchange ideas freely and actively engage with prospects with ease.
You need to be active on social channels especially if the competition is also doing it. If not, it’s an excellent way to differentiate how you communicate.
Leveraging the power of technology is vitally important if you’re looking to expand your reach. Through social media platforms, you can better resonate with audiences and educate your prospects on the brand.
5. Determining Engagement Levels
An important sales strategy example is knowing when a prospect is really interested in doing business with you.
Not every visit to your webpage should be equated to mean interest. At times, people just check out webpages out of curiosity. The same applies when they fill out forms on your website. While this may be grounds to proclaim that your site is exhibiting high engagement levels, don’t jump the gun just yet.
Instead, you need to be on full alert to spot those people who fill out multiple forms, click through numerous emails and keep going to vital pages on your platform. Only then, can you conclusively rank them as a highly engaged marketing qualified lead (MQL).
Of course, these parameters will vary from one organization to the next. As a manager, you want to ensure that you properly utilize your sales team’s time. For maximum productivity levels, you need to avoid forwarding every lead through the door to them. It’s better to send them MQLs that are there for the taking.
By doing so, you’ll be boosting their morale as they’ll find it a breeze to convince buyers to close a sale. It’s the classic case of willing-seller, willing-buyer.
The key to establishing grounds for a good qualified lead strategy is through defining the bare minimum conditions for a lead to transform into an MQL. As alluded earlier, this varies from company to company.
6. Bespoke Automation Solutions for Your MQLs
In marketing, it can be somewhat tricky to transition prospects from the awareness stage to the consideration stage in the sales funnel.
One of the best ways to effectively do this is by sharing content that is tailored around solving their specific problem areas. These custom-made solutions need to properly address the key pain points whilst forwarding the leads to your sales team.
If you’re looking to enhance your marketing strategies, you need to change your thinking. Typically, most people expect the process to be tiring and time-consuming.
In truth, all it takes is a solid stepping stone for all the right pieces to fit into the sales jigsaw.
7. Internal Sales Growth Strategies
It wouldn’t hurt to try out everything. Yeap…you heard that right.
In most scenarios, managers tend to be overwhelmed with so many opportunities to explore that they end up doing zilch.
To counter this, it’s crucial that you list out the different categories you can dabble in. It’s not advisable to directly ape what the competition is doing because what works for others may not necessarily work for you.
Therefore, make sure you venture into email, make videos, book direct appointments with prospects, test lead flows, blog, whatever it takes to get the conversation going.
After about a month of doing all testing the waters, you’ll be able to ascertain what works. That will form better grounds for you to keep running your business without losing too much time and money.
If you’re a newbie to the concept of internal sales growth strategies, it’s best to explore different content types. Things like eBooks, podcasts and downloadable guides are quite popular among the masses. As such, you need to try producing content that is evergreen. To get started on this, review your best performing content in the last couple of months and find clever ways to repurpose them.
While at it, ensure that you have the right tool in place to track the performance of your content. In doing so, you’ll have a good idea of how your audience likes to consume content. In the end, you’ll be better placed when it comes to content creation.
8. The Perfect “Yes Man”
Once your sales reps know the pitch in and out, you’re ready to go hunting for prospects. Even with the right lingo and tailor-made solutions for your clients, there’s always going to be a couple of situations where the best response to prospects is a definite no.
While conventional wisdom would dictate that you respond with the typical “sorry, no”, it’s essential to take a step back from this approach. It’s best to put yourself in the shoes of the buyer. Usually, when someone says no to you, the natural reaction is to get dismayed or even get embarrassed for asking the question in the first place.
Already, you’re encountering issues with the prospect, thus, it’s not advisable to take them through all that. Instead, you need to twist your response to sound and feel like something they’re looking to hear.
Importantly, you should make any false promises, rather, express yourself differently. You can even proceed to suggest how you think it’s best to sort out their situation without expressly telling them no.
9. The Narrator
Unfortunately, most people seem to have the notion that all salespersons are distant and money-driven. As such, it’s best to steer clear of this stereotype. How do you do this? Well, it all depends on your execution.
Captivating audiences is a skill that the most successful salespersons have been doing of eons now. Weaving a story into a pitch tend to hook prospects right from the onset. Since they’re so engrossed with what you’re saying, they’ll forget that it’s all business for you.
Spinning a yarn also makes the pitch memorable in the hearts and minds of prospects, long after you’ve told it. By introducing this fun element to your pitch, it becomes easy to lure in more prospects to your enterprise. You may find yourself landing leads from even the most unimaginable of audiences.
That’s the true power of great narration.
10. The Exclusive Tag Line
Think about it, what makes companies like Apple uber-successful? Their products? Probably. The hype? Sure. Service? Maybe. Truthfully speaking, there’s plenty that makes specific businesses stand out.
Some companies like Apple have mastered the art of creating an impressionable exclusive tag line with all their products. With each new release of a product, they make it known that the items are available in limited quantities. Next thing you know, people are queueing up in line just to lay their hands on an exclusive product.
Given the fact that they’ve been doing it since the launch of their flagship iPhone in 2007, it’s safe to say that it works.
As an entrepreneur, you can do the same for your business. You simply need to make better use of certain tools to foster an air of exclusivity. For one, you can build the hype by formulating waiting lists for upcoming offers and events.
Alternatively, you can set deadlines for registration to particular events you’re organizing. This tends to create a sense of emergency which compels your customers to act quick before it’s too late.
By qualifying people and limiting the opportunities available, you’ll be encouraging people to take an interest in what you have to say. If well executed, this is one of the best sales strategy examples out there.
11. Mentorship
Once your entire team is on board with these strategies, it’s time to bring in your front-line managers into the mix. These are the people you should depend on to provide guidance by monitoring your sales reps’ engagements. It is through these coaching sessions that they will be able to ascertain the most productive members of the team.
The skill/model concept tends to work wonders in most coaching setups. This is because it evaluates different sales reps’ motivations against their abilities. From this, you’ll be able to learn which sales reps you need to spend more of your time with which ones are ready for promotion.
Conclusion
You can end the year with a bang once you implement the aforementioned key sales strategy examples.
If you act now, you’ll spawn an efficacious and dynamic sales team that is able to meet your quarterly and annual objectives.
