Do You Have A Sales Strategy?

Every business needs a sales strategy.
A sales strategy is your detailed plan of whom to sell to, how to get them and how to ensure they keep buying. It centers around customer acquisition, customer retention and revenue growth.

All businesses have sales people, even if it's just one person (the founder), but not all businesses have a sales plan. Most businesses are yet to realize the need for having on paper a detailed plan of how they will acquire customers, retain them and grow revenue. A lot of businesses have salesmen who are simply saddled with the task of meeting a sales target. No in-house thought out strategy for the long term. The sales team ends up engaging in short term unfocused strategies that damage the company's long term profitability and brand.

So, do you have a sales strategy?

If you don't have one, then it's time you made one. And we will help you with the process. 

image: expertiseinresults.com

Identify Your Market
A Sales strategy is built entirely on your deep accurate knowledge of your targeted market. You have to know:

1. The size of your targeted market. How many potential customers are there, how much they can afford to spend on your product and who are your competitors.
2. The selling points of your competition. How they convince the people in your targeted market to buy their products.
3. The dissatisfaction or pain points of your targeted market. What your competition is not doing right.
4. The spread of your targeted market. Do they all reside in one geographic region or are they spread across multiple geographic regions. What is it that uniquely binds them.

Craft Your Sales Goal

Now that you know your market and the competition you are up against, you should set yourself a reasonable sales goal. Make it detailed and not just something as vague as "N100 million in 1 year". Break it down to N200,000 a week by selling 10,000 units of your N20 product every week. 

A sales goal must be broken down to daily sales if your type of business allows it. You should be able to tie it to a specific number of sales, at least, per month.

Have a Plan For Reaching The Goal

Now that you have a sales goal, you need to make an elaborate plan that will help you reach the goal. This is where you'll need your CRM data (we talked about CRM last week). You need the details of how many customers you have to pitch to make one sale, and how long it takes you to make that one sale. If you to talk to 10 people to make 1 sale and 1 week to finalize that sale, then you will know that you'll need to talk to 1000 people to make 100 sales. And if you can only talk to 100 people in a week, you should know that it will take you 10 weeks to talk to 1000 people. So it will take you about 10 weeks to make 100 sales. 

Doing this sort of analysis will help you figure out if you need to expand your sales team or review your sales goal.

Implement and Track Your Success 

This is the last stage of building a sales strategy. You have made your sales goal, what is left is to implement the plan and track your success.

Have daily and weekly trackers that show you how you are faring. Include your goal as a benchmark in your CRM software. Have a dashboard that shows you a visual of sales activities against your goals. And keep reviewing the sales strategy. Always be ahead in your chosen market, update your sales goal, keep fine tuning your sales plan and find cheaper effective ways to implement your plans. You should aim to constantly reduce your cost of acquiring a new customer.

If you need further help, especially with building effective and professional trackers and dashboards, you can always contact us.

To your success!