Building your own dynamic sales strategy isn’t rocket science. It’s a byproduct of sustainable systems, processes, and habits.
The best sales strategies aren’t complex. However, mastering it can be a challenge. With the right tools and team, you’ll be on your way to seeing consistent and dependable sales.
Although strategies and systems look good on paper, implementation takes time, effort, and commitment. If you’re up for the task, we’ll be showing:
- Sales strategy 101
- The importance of having a dynamic sales strategy
- Types of sales strategies we commonly encounter
- A step-by-step guide to building your sales strategy
What is a Sales Strategy?
A sales strategy combines ideas, analysis, and execution.
What are you trying to sell?
What do the analytics say about the product/service?
How do we execute the sale?
Answering these questions helps you identify your goals, target audience, channels you should go for, and the sales process to tie it all in.
Once you find a system that works, don’t make the mistake of being stagnant. Remember, the market changes. Your team needs to adapt and build around a dynamic strategy.
The Importance of a Dynamic Sales Strategy
No matter the industry, technology continues to change. The needs of your audience change. So should you. Strategies should be able to adapt to the times.
Working with this type of system in place gives your sales team the following advantages:
Smoother Sales Pipelines
Everything’s smooth like butter when your sales team is on the same page. With the right strategy, they can easily handle objections, cold email prospecting, and going for the close.
You can provide value to your leads at any stage of the pipeline, identify quality leads, and focus on those worth pursuing. The smoother the pipeline, the more productive your team can be.
More Productive and Optimized Sales Team
A dynamic sales strategy accounts for all the data from your previous campaigns and optimizes it to make the process more productive.
Each salesperson on your team can follow a playbook that helps them transform into high-performing sellers with room to grow. Your floor is set, and your ceiling continues to grow.
Min-Maxing Your Sales Process
Min-maxing optimizes the most desirable attributes and minimizes the less desirable ones. Maximize focus on qualified leads and minimize efforts on leads that don’t fit your criteria.
For your sales team, min-maxing relies on the quality of your data and how its distributed. You want your data centralized and have the same KPIs tracked. Think about the macro and micro.
Is your team performing as expected? If not, are there any issues with their sales emails?
A dynamic strategy allows you to track data in real time and make necessary adjustments. You get to make accurate forecasts and create standards for your team.
But, each strategy type can have its standards. Here’s a look at the most common ones:
Types of Sales Strategies
Most sales strategies are based on customer type and channel type. You need to focus on both to build a solid sales strategy.
Customer Types
Customer types are the segments of customers you’re going for—company size, region, product, or industry. Learning these segments optimizes lead qualification and streamlines the sales process.
Here’s a quick look at each segment:
- Company Size: Are you going for SMBs or Enterprise? Will you be going for both? If you have a big enough team, you definitely could. One can go for smaller, safer, low-value deals. Meanwhile, others can focus on fewer high-value enterprise sales leads.
- Region: If you’re selling globally, geography plays a huge factor in sales. There are several cultural nuances to account for, different languages, and issues.
- Product: Are you selling different products or services? If yes, categorize these products and have unique sales strategies for each. Consider the price, target market, or use cases for each.
- Industry: Are you selling in a specific industry? Sales best practices differ for healthcare, finance, SaaS, and B2B. Honing your strategy for one industry allows your team to focus efforts on addressing unique pain points or needs.
Channel Types
Once you’ve identified your customer segments, it’s time for you to choose which communication channel is best for each. The three most popular channels are direct, partner sales, and self-service.
- Direct Channel: This is the classic one-on-one sales channel. It builds long-term relationships but usually has longer sales cycles. Email marketing is one of the best communication methods for direct channels since it can be automated and personalized.
- Partner Sales: Working with resellers, distributors, or vendors allows you to earn consistent revenue without needing extra overhead costs.
- Self-service Sales: This channel utilizes the convenience of automation to complete a sale. Think of eCommerce stores, sites with self-checkout options, chatbots, or subscriptions.
Building Your Own Sales Strategy
Creating a sales strategy lets you identify what works and doesn’t work for your business. Here are the foundations that could help you build your system:
Define your Goals
Goal setting is the first thing you should do. It sets how you approach your entire sales process. If you need help with goal-setting, try the SMART goal-setting method. Create specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely goals.
Identify Target Audience and Sales Channel
Use data and analytics to identify the right target customers and the sales channels to reach them. Base your target audience on the right segments.
For example, if you’re in the SaaS industry, your target market could be people used to getting a sales pitch. Basic cold sales emails won’t do.
You need to speak their language, provide value beyond the obvious, and identify the key decision-makers in an organization.
Create a Streamlined Sales Process
A sales process helps you nudge your target audience further down the lead funnel. Here’s an example of a streamlined sales process at play:
- Lead Generation: Using social media, website contact forms, gated content, cold email, and other outreach campaigns to get an email list.
- Validate and Qualify: Once you have a list of contact info from leads, validate them to ensure they’re real. After validation, qualify the leads if they’re worth pursuing. You can use strategies like lead scoring or BANT to qualify leads.
- Research: When a lead is qualified, do in-depth research about them and their organization to personalize your communications. Don’t just focus on common pain points. Try to figure out internal issues or urgencies within your lead’s organization.
- Outreach: Personalizing your outreach efforts makes leads more likely to convert. Always remember to add value in every step of the sales journey. Try using low-effort CTAs to encourage further communication.
- Prepare for Objections: You should prepare to handle objections in sales. Do your best to understand the ins and outs of your products and how they can ease the concerns of your leads. Consider showing a demo or free trial of your service.
- Closing the Deal: Once everything is in order, all that’s left is negotiating the deal. Most services have fixed subscriptions. Meanwhile, enterprise sales might require you to create specific contracts as you’re likely offering custom solutions.
- Nurture: After the sale, nurture your new-found customer. You should remain top of mind. Offer customer support, and send valuable information on how to optimize workflow with your products or services. Keep adding value even after the sale.
Build Your Sales Pipeline
With your goal, target audience, channel, and sales process ready, it’s time to fill up your sales pipeline with qualified leads.
For example, your goal is to improve sales revenue by 30% in the next quarter. In the previous quarter, you closed 100 deals. That means you’d need 130 deals in the next.
With a conversion rate of 15% in the last quarter, your projections tell you that you’d need at least 867 high-quality leads in your pipeline.
Implement and Optimize Your Strategy
The final thing you’d need to do is to execute your strategy. Follow your sales playbook and track the key performance indicators (KPIs) that make sense for your business.
If you’re conducting cold sales emails, you need an email marketing tool to help you automate, track, and compare your progress with other campaigns.
Pair your tools with a CRM that allows you to track customer behavior. Find out the links leads are clicking on your site, the eBooks they’ve downloaded, and the blogs they’re reading.
Make sure every decision you make is data-driven to improve your chances of success.
Key Takeaways
A dynamic sales strategy is essential for the success of any business regardless of industry. To make sure you make the most out of your campaigns, follow these best practices:
- Define your goals. It will be the basis of your entire strategy.
- Identify your target audience and sales channels.
- Go for high-quality and qualified leads.
- Create a streamlined sales process for your leads.
- Track your progress and improve your strategy based on data.
In every sales strategy, email marketing can help you find, convert, and nurture the right leads for your business. And, when it comes to email, Instantly has you covered! Try it out for free today!
