Smooth selling forever sounds pretty great, right? You wouldn’t set sail on a boat without consulting a map and know where you want to go! Don’t jump into the sales world without having a strategy. Craig Lowder, interviewed by John Golden, discusses how you can have smooth selling forever with an excellent sales strategy.
In this expert sales interview learn about:
- Eight critical components of a sales strategy
- The importance of revisiting your strategy
- Using customer feedback to improve your sales strategy
- Sales Strategy Defined
Sales strategy is part of an overall business plan that also includes systems and people. The sales strategy is part of how any organization sells their products and services to increase their profits. Lowder breaks sales strategies into eight great components of a sales strategy:
- Target markets and customer segments
- Buying influence and personalities
- Your channel sales strategy
- Ensuring that you have a customer journey buying or selling process or processes in place
- Making sure that you have a sales messages or value proposition that resonates with your target audience
- Having performance metrics to measure the activity and results that you’re expecting to receive from your sales team
- 5×5 gross strategies, which include: “how do you generate leads?” “what do you do to convert leads?” “how do you increase transactions” “how to increase transaction size?” and “what you do to increase your overall profit margins.”
- Using sales compensation to use help drive the direction of your strategy within your sales team.
Sales Strategy Check In’s
“What I find in most business is that they’re highly transactional and highly tactical, but they haven’t thought about anything other than, ‘I need to grow my revenue,’” said Lowder. Companies know their end game and where they want to get, but don’t decide who is going to do it, or how to go about doing it. This lack of planning, or planning as more of an afterthought, leads to these important decisions being made on the fly. “You can’t build predictable and sustainable results if you do things on the fly,” said Lowder. He recommends generating more revenue and achieving your end goals by creating a sales strategy, and continuing to revisit it, ensuring that it’s working for you and helping you accomplish the things you set out to do. However, you have to constantly check back in to make sure it’s getting the results that you want to achieve, otherwise developing a plan is pointless. He recommends “checking in” by writing the strategy down and distributing it to the sales team, and reinforcing the strategy by reviewing it in quarterly reviews, monthly meetings, one-on-one’s with the sales team, etc.
Customer Feedback
You can get a vast amount of information from reviewing customer opinion. If you don’t feel like your sales strategy is working effectively, and are looking for a source of information to know how to improve the strategy, talk to your customers! The challenge is that most people don’t think about asking their customers. When businesses are very transactional, they often become hyper-focused on closing sales but do not consider the buyer’s journey. However, if you permit customers to be candid with you, and to be more effective what should they change, they will give you a wealth of knowledge that will help you improve the sales strategy.
About Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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