Complete guide to a winning sales strategy

Learn how to leverage a sales strategy to position and sell a product or service.

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What is a sales strategy?

A sales strategy is a detailed plan that outlines the approach, tactics, and activities a sales team must take to achieve their sales goals and objectives. A good sales strategy is a comprehensive roadmap that guides the sales reps through specific steps that will help them repeatedly close deals and meet revenue targets.

A good sales strategy keeps everyone in the organization on the same page, aligning the company's long-term goals with the actions the sales team must take to hit quotas. This strategy is always tested, evaluated, and optimized to achieve the desired results.

What are the types of sales strategies?

There are two types of sales strategies—inbound sales, and outbound sales. Organizations might adopt one or both:

Inbound sales strategies

Inbound strategies involve attracting prospects to your website. These customers have done their research and already have a broad idea about your company and your product.

These potential customers are actively looking for a specific solution to a problem. They’ve done their homework, know their needs, and are more likely than other customers to buy from you. At this stage, your salespeople act as consultants who educate your prospects, answer questions and concerns, and nurture them through the decision-making process— hopefully converting leads into new customers.

The inbound sales approach is closely aligned with inbound marketing strategies, in which marketing teams attract potential leads using online content, such as a website, blog, or web pages optimized to rank in SERP.

Inbound sales strategies attract the perfect customers— those who are already interested in your product— but inbound strategies won’t always connect you with your target market.

Outbound sales strategies

Outbound sales strategies give your sales team more control over the outreach process. An outbound strategy empowers you to connect with potential customers, spread the word about your product or service, and—at last—sell to them.

A successful outbound sales strategy typically involves three steps:

  1. Know your customer base: For an outbound strategy to work, your team needs to know who is most likely to buy your product. For this reason, the first step in creating an outbound strategy involves equipping your sales team with Buyer Persona (BP) and Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) documents. 

  2. Find and qualify leads: Using these documents, build a lead generation strategy that will provide qualified leads for your salespeople. This might include research online, lead scoring, networking, or using an SDR (sales development representative) to generate leads.

  3. Outreach: Your sales team can use a variety of techniques such as cold calling, cold emailing, and social selling on LinkedIn to get your prospect’s attention. Once you have their attention, pique their interest with a killer sales pitch and close the deal. 

When you understand what outbound techniques work for you, it is easier to scale your business and increase sales with an outbound approach.

What does a good sales strategy look like? Read on for examples.

5 successful sales strategy examples

There is no one way to sell; you have to build the sales strategy that works best for your company, customer, and your sales force. Below are some of the tools you can use in your strategy.

1. Customer retention

Do you know who your best prospects are? They’re the ones who have already bought from you. Happy customers are a rich source of revenue. Research finds that the average repeat customer spends 67% more in year three of their relationship with a business than they did in the first six months of that relationship.

So, how do you unlock that revenue?

  • Upselling is a sales technique in which a rep pitches a more expensive or higher-quality product to a customer, increasing the perceived value proposition of the sale. The classic example comes from the McDonalds fast food chain’s old supersize sales campaign in which customers were asked if they wanted to supersize their meal orders, generating more revenue for the business.

  • Cross-selling involves selling complementary products. You can also find this example at McDonald’s in their cashier’s signature phrase, “do you want fries with that.”

2. Bundling

When you offer products or services as a package deal at a discounted price, that’s bundling. For example, rather than selling subscriptions to individual streaming services, a telecom company might offer a subscription to several streaming services for a lower price.

This strategy is used to encourage customers to buy more, increase the average transaction value, and improve customer satisfaction by increasing the perceived value of a sale.

There are different types of bundling:

  • Pure Bundling: In pure bundling, products or services are only available as a package, and customers cannot purchase them separately. This approach is commonly used when the bundled items are complementary or when the individual products have limited value on their own.

  • Mixed Bundling: Mixed bundling allows customers to purchase items separately or as a bundle. In this approach, a sales rep gives customers a choice, catering to different preferences and needs.

3. Free trials

A free trial in sales is a sales strategy in which a business offers potential customers the opportunity to use their product or service for a limited period of time at no cost. A free trial allows customers to experience the value, features, and benefits of the product firsthand before committing to a purchase.  A free trial enables potential customers to try out your product or service for free for a limited time, and they’re a popular sales technique among SaaS companies and other subscription services.

Free trials generally include the following features:

  • Available for a limited time: Free trials have a predefined time frame during which customers can access and use the product for free. This duration can range from a few days to a few weeks, depending on the complexity of the product and the industry.

  • Full access: During the trial period, customers typically have access to the full set of features and functionalities that the product offers. This allows them to experience the product's capabilities and benefits firsthand.

  • No financial commitment: Customers are not required to pay upfront or provide credit card information to access the free trial. This reduces the barrier to entry and encourages more potential customers to try the product.

Free trials do double duty as sales and lead generation because when someone signs up for a trial, your sales team knows that person is already interested in your product.

4. Discounts

A discount is a reduction in the regular price of a product or service offered by a business. Discounts are a common promotional tactic used to incentivize customers to make a purchase, increase sales volume, attract new customers, and clear out excess inventory.

Discounts allow your sales team to offer prospective customers a lowered price on your product or service. Everyone loves to get a good deal, and empowering your sales reps to offer discounts both tempt customers and builds rapport between your salespeople and your customers.

Discounts take several forms:

  • Percentage Discount: This is a price reduction based on a percentage of the original price. For example, a 20% discount on a $100 product would result in a final price of $80.

  • Fixed Amount Discount: This is a specific dollar amount subtracted from the original price. For instance, a $10 discount on a $50 product would lead to a final price of $40.

  • Seasonal or Holiday Discounts: Discounts offered during specific seasons or holidays, such as Black Friday or Christmas sales.

  • Volume Discounts: Discounts given to customers who purchase in bulk or meet a certain order quantity threshold. This encourages customers to buy more to get a better price per unit.

  • Promotional Codes or Coupons: Customers can enter a specific code or present a coupon to receive a discount during checkout.

  • Cashback or Rebate: Customers receive a portion of their purchase price back in the form of cash or credit after the sale.

  • Trade-In Discounts: Customers receive a discount when they trade in an old product as part of their purchase of a new product.

5. Referrals

The best advertising is word of mouth.

A referral is the practice of obtaining new leads or customers through recommendations and introductions from existing customers, contacts, or business partners. They can come from a few different sources: 

  • Satisfied customers: Satisfied customers are most likely to be a source of referrals because they can vouch for you based on their personal experience. Offer incentives (like freebies or discounts) to your satisfied customers so they can spread the word about your business to other prospective customers.

  • Partners: A referral partner is an individual or a business who recommends your products or services to their customers in exchange for a benefit, such as reciprocated referrals or a percentage of your sales revenue. Building a network of referral partners is an excellent way to grow your business and network with other similar businesses.

Referral-based leads often have a higher likelihood of converting into customers because they come with a level of trust established through the connection that referred them.

Tips for developing the best sales strategy

Sales strategies aren’t one-size-fits-all. It’s up to you to come up with the sales strategy that best suits your company’s identity and business model. To develop a strategy that fits your business, you’ll need to determine the following:

Company vision

A clear declaration of your company’s future direction helps you determine what you need to achieve now, this month, this quarter, and so on. Everything that you’re doing now and in the future has to bring you closer to your vision.

Revenue goals

Your revenue goals should be aligned with your company vision. Why do you want to generate $250,000 in sales this quarter and $1 million for the whole year? How does it help you achieve your company’s vision?

Ideal customer profile

Gone are the days when you could identify your customers through demographics, interests, and associations. Create an archetype of your ideal customers, including their background and pain points. This will help your sales team quickly qualify prospects.

Value proposition

Your customers need to understand how your product or service meets their needs, the benefits it provides them, and specifics of how it is different from the competition. A perfect value proposition clearly addresses your prospect’s challenges.

Budget

To implement a sales strategy, you’ll need resources. Your team will need tools and software, as well as sales training and onboarding for new reps. Your company will need to allocate a dedicated budget and invest in your salespeople.

How to build a sales strategy for your business?

Now that you have a sales strategy planned, it’s time to implement it. You can do this in seven steps:

1. Find the right market and persona

One of the easiest ways to generate more sales is to look at what’s already working. Look at your current customers. Who is actually buying your product?

This is critical because there’s often a gap between your target customers and your actual customers. You don’t want to ignore your genuine buyers in favor of a mythical ideal customer. Get to know buyers and create a customer persona that reflects who they really are.

Buyer personas should be precise, not a compilation of facts and figures. Instead, create a story about the persona and give your sales team a glimpse of their lives. Here’s an example of a customer profile for an e-commerce consulting business:

Stephen is a 36-year-old retail store owner who is fairly successful selling healthy homemade chips to local customers. However, he knows he can achieve more sales and grow faster if he can sell his product online. Unfortunately, Stephen has no idea where to begin. He has a website but it’s not making a lot of sales because it is not search engine optimized. He needs an expert to show him the ropes.

As opposed to the usual demographic-based profile that says 30-50 years old, business owner, retail industry, and so on, this profile tells a story your sales team can quickly understand. With a persona that represents actual buying customers, you’re one step closer to generating consistent sales.

2. Analyze risks and opportunities

Next, analyze the situation of your current position. One method is to implement the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis. SWOT provides insight about where you can further expand your business and the risks involved. 

This simple yet extensive analysis can be performed by anyone familiar with your business processes (so you don’t have to break your bank account to engage consultants. Phew!) 

SWOT analyses your business’s current situation and paints a clear picture of your weaknesses while pinpointing the areas of strength. With these two factors, you can build on the opportunities and threats for your business and industry.

3. Align sales and marketing

Once you know your current position in the market, align your sales and marketing functions to work side by side

Although these two functions are often in conflict, the two teams can help each other get better at their work. After all, both sales and marketing have the same business goal—to drive customer acquisition and revenue. 

For example, salespeople can share their learnings from customer interactions with marketers, who can use this valuable information to target new leads. Marketers can provide salespeople with resources that are much needed to engage with prospects, such as case studies and battle cards.

Once you’ve aligned both teams, drive the power of sales and marketing to create a powerful value proposition message that both teams agree on. Then, identify the best platforms to reach your prospects: TV, radio, email, social media, and so on. Use a shared voice to send a consistent message to all your prospects.

4. Define your sales process

A sales process is a structured set of repeatable actions that sales teams follow to convert prospects to paying customers. It covers what a salesperson should do at every stage of a prospect’s buying process. 

It’s not the same as a sales strategy, which outlines the company’s approach to attaining large-scale sales goals. The sales process is a set of activities that salespeople need to follow to close an individual sale.

What happens when you don’t have a sales process?

Your sales team performs many sales activities each day across different accounts and deals. Without a sales process, the only metric that you’d be able to track would be the number of deals closed and their value. There would not be any visibility into the sales pipeline. When the revenue produced by the sales team fluctuated, no one would have a clue why.

Having a defined sales process provides much-needed visibility into your sales pipeline, your sales team’s activities, insights into what worked and the areas that need improvement.

5. Hire the perfect team

Recent research by Harvard Business Review found that 81% of happy sales teams report annual increases in business performance.

Keeping this in mind, you need to hire the right people who fit with your team and the company’s culture to drive your sales revenue. Create a list of your ideal salesperson’s qualities and use it during the interview process to identify the best candidates for the role.

Don’t forget your existing team, however. Sales is a high-stress job, so offer initiatives such as downtimes or happy hours for the salespeople on your team to blow off some steam. A positive sales culture both encourages people to join your organization but also helps you retain your best salespeople.

Once you have your A-team, it is imperative that you coach them on the necessary skills such as cold-calling prospects, handling objections, and negotiations. You also need to provide them with sales enablement or the resources required to close deals, such as case study documents, battle cards, and sales email templates.

6. Have an action plan

As everything falls into place, come up with a workflow that breaks down all the tasks involved in bringing you closer to your goals. Assign the tasks to team members with the right skills and experience. Put together a timeline for the completion of these tasks. Your timeline should be in sync with your revenue goals.

7. Invest in tools and software

With all hands on deck to implement your sales strategy, you need an application that can help capture, track, and nurture prospective customers or leads. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software empowers you to do all those and more.

With a CRM platform, you’ll be able to automatically capture and record lead information. Instead of manually entering data, the best CRMs in the market capture lead information and record them on your database.

A sales CRM also allows you to nurture leads in your sales funnel through various sales campaigns. Through this process, you can educate or provide value by sending relevant content or promotional offers. For example, you can create an automated campaign that sends blog posts or invitations to free webinars based on predefined intervals. This helps demonstrate your expertise minimize resistance, and encourage the customer to purchase your product or service.

Best practices to have a winning sales strategy

1. Perfect your sales pitch

Whether you want to sell a new product/service, promote an existing one, or gain more traction as a startup, a sales pitch is crucial. Behind every winning sales pitch is a story that speaks to the challenges that prospects face. 

Consider this pitch: 

Hi Jane,

I am Rebecca from ABC Pvt Ltd. Our innovative product stores all your business data in one place and generates reports within seconds. Interested? Let’s have a 10-minute chat to discuss more.

Regards,

Rebecca

Rebecca never heard back from Jane. Several things went wrong with her pitch:

  • It talks very little about the product

  • The message was not intriguing or compelling

  • Most importantly, the pitch did not explain what challenges the product solves

Let’s improve Rebecca’s pitch by reframing her messaging and making it more specific:                 

Hi Jane,

As an accounts manager for ABC Pvt Ltd., I usually interact with hundreds of marketers every month. 

I realized that most of them spend almost an hour of their day putting together reports, which are unfortunately never glanced at. It’s always a tedious and time-consuming task that’s never a priority for the average marketer.  

At ABC Pvt Ltd we recognized this problem and created an innovative tool called CDE. This tool stores all your marketing and business data to generate custom reports in 30 seconds. 

Sound good? Let’s have a quick chat to discuss further.

Regards,

Rebecca

This new pitch explains:

  • Why Rebecca is reaching out

  • The problem she can help solve

  • The product she’s selling

  • What challenge you can solve

A winning sales pitch encourages your prospect to take the opportunity you’re offering. It connects with them on an emotional level and contains proof that you know what you're doing to solve their pain points.

2. Reach out to inbound leads in 24 hours

With inbound sales, the prospect is actively looking for a solution. As buyers these days are highly informed, they are likely to try out different solutions at the same time. To make it even more challenging, 35-50% of sales go to the first vendor who responds to a prospect!

This means that to close a deal, you should contact the customer before the competition does. By being the first, you get to acknowledge their challenges, answer their questions, and, more importantly, establish a trusting relationship with them.

3. Follow up consistently

Your prospects receive many emails in a day. Sometimes, your prospecting emails might be buried in their inbox, or they might be too busy to respond to you. You will never know unless you follow up with them. 

Most salespeople do not have a consistent follow-up plan. Prospects need to hear from you, on average, seven times before they pay attention to you. However, some salespeople follow up once or twice, and they move on when they don’t get a response. This inconsistency slows down your sales process, resulting in opportunities slipping through the cracks.

The key to getting a response is to follow up regularly with your prospects. Setting a follow-up sales cadence will more likely net you a response from your prospects.

 4. Ask customers for feedback

Your customers are a wealth of information, data, and feedback related to your product. They use it daily and depend on it to make their lives easier. They understand better than anyone how excellent your product/service is, as well as what it lacks.

While it is tempting to weed out negative comments, it’s important to see them as a learning opportunity. Take negative comments as constructive criticism and work on improving those areas. 

5. Upsell and cross-sell

When your customers truly enjoy doing business with you, they will be open to more products and services. In fact, 80% of your future profits could come from just 20% of your existing customers, so keep them in the loop about your latest products and offers and nurture them even after you’ve closed a deal.

6. Ask for referrals

This is because 92% of consumers trust referrals that come from people they know and respect. And getting one from higher-level executives adds more value when you approach a prospect.

Existing customers are a great source of referrals. So, make sure that your salespeople get referrals from customers every time they close deals.

Optimize your sales strategy using a CRM

1. Qualify the right leads

To qualify the right leads, a CRM scores them by assigning a particular value to each lead based on the likeliness of making a sale. The higher the score, the higher the chances of closing the deal. This enables your sales team to prioritize the readiest buyers.

Freshsales allows you to score leads using a combination of factors that assess the quality of fit and the level of interest.

In other words, leads that match your customer profile and engage with your company are given high scores and labelled as hot leads. For example, the score increases when a lead opens emails, views a web page, clicks on links to your site, or chats with your salesperson or customer support team.

2. Never miss a follow-up

These elements are usually found in a sales strategy template that you can get online. By the end, your sales team and you can generate clear priorities, strong guidelines, and measurable outcomes that everyone understands.With your sales documents organized, you can launch sales campaigns with ease. Using CRM software, you can design a workflow that lets you execute certain steps based on predetermined conditions.

For example, you can create a series of emails to send to a prospect according to a predefined timeline. Then, you can create steps such as email reminders or call reminders at an interval of three days, so you will never miss a follow-up with a prospect. You can program these instructions ahead of time in your CRM.

With a CRM like Freshsales, you can create workflows instantly by choosing from a pre-set list of workflow templates for your daily tasks like follow-up calls or reminder emails. 

3. Motivate your team and crush sales goals

It is in human nature to set goals and sprint towards them. The same applies for sales as well. Without a clear goal, sales teams will likely lose momentum and motivation.

A CRM is the single source of truth regarding all your prospects and sales activities, and allows you to set goals for individuals and sales teams.

You can set a deals goal, revenue goal, or both, and watch your sales team grow your business like never before.

4. Track quality insights

Tracking the performance of your sales strategy is no easy feat, especially if you're trying to do it manually. It takes up time that could have been spent nurturing a lead or closing a deal. You can easily automate this part of your operations with the help of a CRM.

The most effective CRMs generate multiple customized visual reports that help you evaluate your team’s performance and progress. With a wealth of data at your fingertips, you can identify problem areas and make adjustments in your sales strategy.

You can create custom reports on key sales metrics such as conversion rate, email open rate, and time to contact a lead. The CRM also generates sales cycle and velocity reports. This feature enables key decision makers such as business owners, sales leaders and sales managers to determine the sales stage where you struggle the most so you can come up with an informed action plan.

With the help of a CRM system, you can put your efforts and resources into leads who are very likely to buy from your business. Get lead information from web forms, emails, and chat sans the manual work. The enrichment feature in Freshsales automatically records the lead’s profile with information such as company details, job titles, and social media pages.

5. Organize sales documents

Your sales scripts, email messages, and objection management templates should be easily accessible to your sales team; even better if these documents are stored in one place and can be retrieved on mobile devices.

The best CRMs in the market offer these features. They enable you to create, save, and access sales templates using desktop and mobile devices so your reps can access important documents on the go.

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Your sales strategy should be updated regularly

A sales strategy is a living document. It’s vital that you regularly assess and optimize it to ensure it’s delivering the expected return on your investment.

Look at the various areas of your sales strategy and identify which sales tactics and channels help you close more business. For example, for small business owner Stephen, perhaps free webinar invitations get more business than free blog posts. A possible alternative strategy would be to use Facebook ads for marketing the webinars.

Formulate new approaches to replace the ones that perform poorly. This way, you are able to get the most out of your sales strategy and generate more revenue.

FAQ

What is a sales strategy?

A sales strategy is a detailed plan that outlines the approach, tactics, and activities a sales team must take to achieve their sales goals and objectives. A good sales strategy is a comprehensive roadmap that guides the sales reps through specific steps to help them repeatedly close deals and meet revenue targets.

What are the key components of an effective sales strategy?

A strong sales strategy includes several components that keep your sale team focused, organized, and aligned with your organization’s overall business objectives: 

  • Clear objectives and goals

  • Ideal customer profile

  • Value proposition

  • Sales tactics

  • Budget 

  • Sales enablement tools

How can technology support the implementation of a sales strategy?

Technology plays a critical role in supporting the implementation of a sales strategy by providing tools, systems, and data-driven insights that enable sales teams to operate more efficiently, make informed decisions, and achieve their goals.

Examples of sales technology include Customer Relationship  Management (CRM) software, sales automation tools, chatbots, and sales analytics tools.

How will a CRM help with the implementation of sales strategy?

With a CRM platform, you’ll be able to automatically capture and record lead information. Instead of manually entering data, the best CRMs in the market capture lead information and record them on your database.

A sales CRM also allows you to nurture leads in your sales funnel through various sales campaigns. Through this process, you can educate or provide value by sending relevant content or promotional offers.

Implement an efficient sales strategy with a CRM

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