Recipe 6 - Know Your Sales Strategy

Sales is on the same continuum as marketing; marketing positions the sales conversations and answers preliminary common questions for future customers while sales personalizes those answers and the solution offerings to the customer’s use case and environment. 

A well-defined sales strategy helps sales teams focus their efforts on the most promising prospects and opportunities, optimize their sales processes, and drive revenue growth to help achieve sales targets. 

Such sales strategies can clarify sales goals as a roadmap to:

- align sales efforts with overall business objectives, 

- identify ideal customer profiles and target markets,

- streamline and optimize sales processes, including lead generation, qualification, and conversion, and, 

- help sales personnel improve their efficiency and increase their chances of closing deals.

In Recipe 6, you will develop core elements of your sales strategy, everything from sales process, methodology, measuring progress on activities, and performance in terms of actual results. Downloadable assets include:

• Recipe: Sales Process, to outline a sales process that fits your Start-Up, industry, and maturity level, determine your investment in a CRM system, decide on your forecasting process, determine how to follow up on sales targets and performance, and outline a reporting structure to leadership.

• Recipe: Sales Methodology, to select the sales methodology that fits your resources and sales team seniority and skill sets, handle sales objections, and complete a company snapshot for each large opportunity.

• Recipe: Sales Tactics, to select initial primary and secondary sales tactics, identify your best practices, set a time frame for testing, vetting, and adjusting tactics, and determining how to evaluate and adjust based on your preferred outcome(s).

• Recipe: Sales Commission Plans, to decide how to incentivize individual sales representatives as well as teams, then develop the incentive plan.

• Recipe: Sales KPIs and Metrics, to select the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to measure for sales success.

• Template: Sales Process, to document your sales process and assets for each stage of the buying journey, calculate your sales forecast, determine your sales team support structure and sales performance improvement plan, and document your CRM data entry process for sales.

• Template: Sales Methodology, to document your sales methodology, approach to handling objections, and document a company snapshot for significant opportunities.

• Template: Sales Tactics, to document your outbound sales criteria and tactics, sales tactics with channels, sales team strengths, sales team credo, customer sales asset mapping, and prospecting conversion rates.

• Template: Sales Commission Plans, a spreadsheet to document and calculate sales commission plans for individuals, teams, and company.

• Template: Sales KPIs and Metrics, a spreadsheet to document the sales success metrics, resources needed to achieve them, and funnel metrics.

• Template: Sales Budget, to document the sales budget projections over four quarters.

• Template: Sales Forecast, a spreadsheet to help project sales results over twelve months.

• Template: Sales Performance Improvement Plan, to document the needed outcomes and support resources to achieve them to improve personal sales results.

• Template: Sales Strategy One-Pager, for at-a-glance documentation of the sales strategy.

Note: as a subscriber, you will be able to access refinements as well as additional Recipes and Templates as they become available in the future.

This Recipe is part of the SavvyX program bundle: Subscribe or purchase here