A sales strategy is an indispensable element of a well-oiled, successful sales organization. It comprises actions, priorities, goals, decisions, and guidelines to help drive the best sales results. Every company needs to have a sales strategy to connect with the right prospects faster and close more deals to increase revenue.

Many of you may have this question: How do you create a sales strategy that works? If yes, I’m glad you asked. Let’s get to know what it takes to craft a quintessential sales strategy.

Getting Started

The first thing I’d do when building my perfect sales strategy is develop measurable and specific sales goals. Then, I’d tie them to my company goals. For example, you could target 10 closed deals per week per rep to add €50,000 to your company’s total revenue.

Discuss your sales goals with key stakeholders from other departments to avoid confusion, inform what your team is really accountable for, and gather valuable inputs. It also helps you double-check whether your sales goals are aligned with company goals.

Creating a flawless sales strategy requires more than just setting goals. I suggest you follow these five crucial steps to build that perfect sales strategy.

1. Decide who’s your ideal customer

Building an ideal customer profile (ICP) is a great way to start. Without knowing which accounts to target, you can’t expect to have a strong sales strategy. My first approach to creating an ICP is digging through my existing customer base and CRM to know:

• Who my best customers are or who brought in the highest profit
• Which characteristics they share in common
• What their purchase patterns are
• Whether they belong to a specific location or industry
• Whether they have a similar company size or are at a particular growth stage

Besides firmographic data, I’d take a deep dive into my ideal customers’ psychographic, behavioural, and technographic data. Other factors to consider when building an ICP are frequency of product usage, product renewal, customer lifetime value, willingness to refer or advocate for your brand, etc.

2. Build a compelling value proposition

Create a persuasive, uncommon, and effective value proposition to stand out from the competition, communicate value, and position yourself to win more sales. My ideal value proposition wouldn’t just include how valuable my brand is or how my product can solve customers’ problems. Most companies use these factors as a foundation for their value proposition.

Therefore, it makes sense to me to focus on building a buying vision to create a more unique and powerful value proposition. Such a value proposition helps potential customers envision how your product or service can improve their business not only in the short term but also in the long term.

In addition, your value proposition can highlight unmet, undervalued, or unconsidered needs of your target audience and tell how you can meet them. You can also create a sense of urgency and back your claims with insights, stories, and proof points.

3. Develop a clear plan of action

Don’t burden your reps with figuring out all by themselves how to reach their goals. Remember, you have a better chance of achieving your overall sales goals when your reps crush their individual goals.

Create an actionable sales plan with clear objectives and targets and provide guidelines and resources to achieve them. This is one of the most critical steps to building the perfect sales strategy, if you ask me.

• Collaborate with the marketing team to plan demand generation
• Segment your target audience and assign reps to specific segments
• Discuss the channels your team is going to use to connect with prospects
• Share scripts, email and call templates, professional PowerPoint templates, battle cards, and sales playbooks
• Create customized sales sequences and train your reps to use them

You can also invest in sales automation to reduce manual tasks and save time and effort while enabling your reps to achieve more and faster. Secondly, I recommend powering your sales team with accurate, verified B2B contact and company data as part of your sales strategy.

For example, you can combine intent data with B2B data to shorten your sales cycle. This combination lets you know who’s interested in your brand or products similar to yours. Most importantly, it enables you to connect with their decision-makers faster, even before visiting your website or deciding to contact you.

4. Focus on building a resilient sales team

It’s not enough to hire the right salespeople. Ask yourself: Are your reps motivated enough, or do they have the appetite to achieve more? How are your sales managers handling escalations? Do you have a rewards or incentives program? Do your reps have the right tools to do what’s expected from them?

Not to mention, onboarding and training efforts play a significant role in laying the foundation for a strong, high-performing sales team. Statistics show that continuous training helps with 50% higher net sales per employee. Furthermore, integrated sales enablement through tools such as CRM, contract management software, and integrated data analytics platforms results in reduced manual or repetitive work.

Your sales team is the backbone of your sales strategy. From my experience, there’s no perfect sales strategy without a capable sales team. Moreover, what’s the point of building a sales strategy if you don’t have a strong team to execute it? From providing an excellent user onboarding experience to keeping in good touch with customers, your sales teams should be trained for it all.

5. Track sales performance and activities

Measuring sales team and individual rep performance is another important part of creating a robust, ideal sales strategy. If you don’t track the right metrics, how can you know whether your sales efforts yield positive results? I’ve seen sales managers tracking almost every sales activity, from prospecting to deal closing.

If you need help determining which sales metrics to measure, I suggest you start tracking:

• Average time-to-hire and sales ramp-up time
• Percentage of reps following the sales process
• Percentage of time spent on selling activities
• Percentage of opportunities closed/won
• Percentage of qualified leads
• Conversion rate by sales funnel stage
• Percentage of revenue from new and existing customers

Wrapping Up

One of the secrets to building a perfect sales strategy is to make it customer-centric. When it comes to sales, it’s always more about the customer and less about your organization. 71% of customers prefer buying from companies whose values are aligned with their own.

Secondly, weed out unqualified leads and work with high-quality, qualified ones to boost your conversion rate. Aligning your sales and marketing teams is a great way to maintain a healthy pipeline. Besides, you have the five proven tactics explained above to build your dream sales strategy. Now go forth and ace out your competitors with your perfect sales strategy.