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:

1. Target markets and customer segments
2. Buying influence and personalities
3. Your channel sales strategy
4. Ensuring that you have a customer journey buying or selling process or processes in place
5. Making sure that you have a sales messages or value proposition that resonates with your target audience
6. Having performance metrics to measure the activity and results that you’re expecting to receive from your sales team
7. 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.”
8. 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.

In this video based on his book Social Upheaval: How to Win @ Social Selling, John Golden brings us 10 essential rules for social selling. Trust us–without them you’re not going to succeed in this still new and changing selling environment.

Melissa Whitaker joined us at the Power Breakfast in Chicago to talk about how sellers must adapt to the changing buyer landscape.

A dynamic and passionate leader, Melissa has helped hundreds of companies run more effective Sales Departments by increasing sales revenue, gross profit and company morale. Watch and listen to her offer practical advice on how to be successful in today’s environment.

Stories are a fantastic way to illustrate the effectiveness of your services. But beyond that, as Patricia Fripp shows us in this insightful presentation, is that there is actually a great formula to follow which will truly engage your audience and empower your message. Part of this formula is populating your stories with real flesh-and-blood characters that your audience can relate to, and to actually use their words. All of this is wrapped up in an emotional connection.

Is success elegant? Can it be governed by a formula or algorithm?

“Not in my experience!” says Roy Osing: “Achieving anything substantial is an ugly matter. Rarely do things go as originally planned and they certainly can’t be predicted by an equation. The unpredictable rears it’s head and you have to scramble to get back on track. People sometimes don’t cooperate with you or keep their promises to you. It’s messy. Customers are anything but elegant. Achievement is a dirty affair.

The reality is, though, if you are NOT prepared to get dirty, chances are you won’t reach your desired destination.”

So what does “get dirty” look like? This video Infographic shows you!

Sales Experts Advice and Tips

Today the seller-buyer relationship has radically changed. In days of old, the seller mostly talked, the buyer mostly listened. With the advent of the web, buyers are far more informed, and a seller must go the extra mile to fully understand buyer issues. This is done through conversation–through the seller asking the right questions, and really listening to the buyer’s answers.

Nancy Bleeke, Ann Hawkins & Jermaine Edwards joined host John Golden to discuss this important topic.

A big thank you to Nancy Bleeke for providing some value-added resources especially for Sales POP! readers – click here to access: salesproinsider.com/pipeliner

Panel Discussion Guests

Nancy Bleeke

Nancy Bleeke is a Sales Enablement Expert focused on the conversations that drive business growth. She is Founder and President of SalesProInsider and has spent years in the trenches as a sales professional, sales manager, a sales coach, and wrote the gold medal winning book Conversations That Sell which has been declared a “must-read” for sales teams around the world.

Nancy Bleeke, Founder and President of SalesProInsider

Ann Hawkins

Ann Hawkins is the MD of Drive the Network, a support and networking organisation that helps business owners to engage and connect with customers, clients and collaborators. Ann is also a business mentor, author of New Business: Next Steps published by Pearson plc., and creator of the on-line training programme Work Smart, Not Hard.

Ann Hawkins, MD of Drive the Network, author of “New Business: Next Steps”

Jermaine Edwards

Jermaine Edwards is a sort after Key account Growth Author, coach, speaker and strategist. He has spent 10 + years in large account sales and sales management selling millions in services to 17 different industries. Presented to and trained over 1000 sales teams and leaders across 8 countries in key customer growth, value differentiation and retention. Jermaine now helps sales leaders, account managers and B2B businesses around the world acquire key customers, deepen key customer relationships and create repeatable sales for long term growth.

Jermaine Edwards, key customer growth, value differentiation and retention coach

Telephone Combat Aid
#SalesChats: Episode 25

People have started to shy away from the telephone in favor of the more impersonal email and digital media. Edward van der Kleijn discusses telephone combat in this #SalesChat, hosted by John Golden and Martha Neumeister.

van der Kleijn explains:

• •How to handle salespeople’s objections to using the telephone, and where these objections come from
• Addressing the fears many salespeople have surrounding using the phone to make sales calls
• Owning yourself as a salesperson, being deliberately truthful about your role, and handling objections you might encounter to being a salesperson by owning it and sidestepping it
•  Smart responses to common objections you might encounter over the phone, and how to prepare your responses so you’re ready when you inevitably encounter the objections
• How to proactively qualify a prospect and understand if they need or want what you are selling or providing
• Understanding your audience definition, and the importance of always qualifying, even if they are in your ideal target profile
• Attaching a value to yourself as a salesperson, and talking as equals instead of presenting yourself as a subservient
• The importance of the upfront contract, and getting agreement on what is going to happen next
• Using nonverbal communication to stage the process of selling
• The importance of establishing outcomes with the prospect

Our Guest

Edward van der Kleijn

Edward is a high-energy, high-intensity sales and marketing activation specialist using proven methods to generate 7-Figure sales results. Since the dawn of the modern computer age, Edward has been an avid follower and a trainer of office, CRM and marketing apps. He has embraced new technology and loves to keep himself up to date with the latest on sales training, social media marketing, marketing strategy and technology news.

Links › blam.online | twitter.com | linkedin.com

Our Hosts

John Golden

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.

Martha Neumeister

Martha is social media strategist, responsible for all social media platforms of Pipeliner CRM. She is a communication expert with social media affinity, which she has been focusing on throughout her professional career. She has a bachelor´s degree in Entrepreneurship & Management and a master´s degree in Online Marketing which supports her in her career as Social Media Strategist.

About SalesChats

SalesChats is a fast-paced (no more than 30 minutes) multi-media series that provides leading strategies, tactics and thinking for sales professionals worldwide. It can be found on Twitter (#SalesChats), as a live Google+ Hangout, and as a podcast available on iTunes, SoundCloud and right here on SalesPOP! If you think you would make a great guest for #SalesChats, please contact co-host Martha Neumeister.

SalesChats is co-hosted by John Golden, CSO Pipeliner CRM, and Martha Neumeister, Social Media Strategist Pipeliner CRM.

How important is coaching? Coaching truly is performance management–and it is the only way to get peak performance out of salespeople and sales management. Join renowned consultant Alice Heiman as she briefly but powerfully informs us on this subject.  Understand the importance of  sales performance management as part of Sales Management.