Your business has a game-changing product. It’s different and effective. You know it’ll stand out from the crowd. 💫
So, the next question is, how do you ensure your outbound sales team can successfully sell everything it offers?
The answer is: Develop a sales strategy that can generate leads, answer questions from prospects, and close more sales.
Below we’ll get into creating an effective sales strategy for the long haul.
A sales strategy is your business’s plan to maximize product or service sales.
This strategy uses principles based on a company’s competitive advantage to gain new customers. As well as growing their current ones.
It doesn’t matter whether your sales team is 5 or 500 employees; having an effective strategy is necessary. Without it, your team will struggle to fill the sales pipeline and close deals quickly.
A sales strategy is a documented plan for outbound sales revenue in the short and long term. It also maps out how you will differentiate your product from competitors.
Your sales team should use it as a guide to set themselves up for success. 🏆
When developing a sales strategy, ensure it aligns with other elements like your target market. For example, details of your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer persona. Not to mention sales motions, go-to-market positioning, and other components.
Your strategy should help your team determine your potential customer’s pain points. And how the product or service will solve them. Remember that you may need to evolve and change your inbound and outbound sales strategy as the business grows!
There’s an age-old debate over which is ‘better’. The truth is both are valuable, but it largely depends on what you’re selling. Some businesses may cope without a big outbound sales function, for example, product-led growth (PLG) software companies.
This doesn’t happen overnight. That’s why it’s so important that your team puts in the time and effort to build one. A defined sales strategy with clear and achievable metrics is crucial for the success of your sales team and the entire organization.
David Bentham, VP of Global Sales Development at Cognism explains more in the clip below. 🎬
Regardless of whether the strategy is through social selling or product-oriented selling. You need a defined approach to drive leads and build customer relationships.
Lead generation strategies allow your team to navigate the future better and assess problems. They should also allow you to manage approaches throughout the company.
The strategy should highlight:
Doing this will ensure that all sales reps are on the same page and understand how to use the strategy.
We know that buying behavior has changed dramatically over the last decade. Shabri Lakhani, Kaspr’s Subject Matter Expert, has over 13 years of sales leadership experience, and she says outbound is 4x harder today than it used to be.
So now, let’s look at some of the effective sales strategies for today’s market.
The days of quantity over quality are over. 🫡
There are many places where prospects look for information now; digital channels mean they don’t have to speak to a rep. Value-based selling is where SDRs aim to add more value to the buying process than any other available channel can.
Core characteristics of value-led selling include:
PACTT and SPIN selling are frameworks reps can use to help implement value-based selling and other sales strategies.
PACTT stands for:
Shabri Lakhani explains why she prefers PACTT over another commonly referenced framework, BANT (budget, authority, need, timing):
“I like PACTT because the ‘P’ stands for pain, whereas the ‘N’ in BANT stands for need, but often, when doing outbound sales, there is no immediate need. The pain element allows sales reps to uncover whether there might be a challenge the prospecting is facing that they are not yet aware of.”
SPIN selling stands for:
This approach also enables reps to lead with value. But one issue we do have with it is that unlike PACTT, it doesn’t actively consider those not in the market to buy right now. So what happens to them?
💡 Learn more about sales methods and types of selling to avoid .
There are so many channels to connect with prospective customers now. And the relationship doesn’t even have to start with your sales scripts. Social selling is such an effective channel for reps. It almost goes hand-in-hand with your marketing strategies - SDRs become mini-marketers!
Tom Boston, Top Social Selling Voice on LinkedIn and Brand Awareness Manager at Salesloft has made a career out of creating a personal brand. He’s the host of a podcast (No Nonsense Sales) and creates lots of sales content for Salesloft too.
But here’s the thing, Tom started out at Salesloft as an SDR. During his time as a rep, he created loads of entertaining sales content to appeal to the ideal customer persona like this. 👇
The result of content like this that resonates with your audience, is that you build up an audience of people who know about your product and the problems it solves.
📹 Get more sales advice and prospecting tips from our FREE streaming service, prospecting on demand.
Ready to start creating a sales strategy to hit your more revenue targets?
Here’s what you need to do:
Step one is understanding how to attract your target customer 🎯
To do this, you’ll need to pinpoint the best way to reach these customers for the best possible outcome. Which is an increase in revenue.
For example, some leads will respond (and respond well) to outbound sales tactics like cold calls and cold emails. But others have a better chance of interacting with inbound tactics like content marketing about your product or service.
This is the classic inbound vs outbound sales debate. We summarize some of the key points to consider in the infographic below 👇
When you know which direction will better attract customers, your sales team can move towards those efforts and fine-tune them for the utmost success.
This next step boils down to your average contract value. It may be challenging to have outbound sales in the equation if it’s on the lower end, like $1,000 for the year.
But, if your team deals with a complex sale with a long sales cycle. For example, one that lasts longer than 20 or 30 days, with a sales cadence involving two or three calls with more than one person, sales is a must in a self-serve model.
Education and automation only go so far, at some point, your customers will want to talk to a sales rep.
When you build your sales team, it should start with establishing clear and differentiated roles for every sales rep.
Create a list of attributes and responsibilities for sales managers to screen for. This will help them when they interview candidates for specific roles.
Then, once you’ve hired the top talent for these roles, you can train and onboard them to sell efficiently and effectively. As you build a sales strategy, be specific about creating the right roles on your team. Make sure you prioritize the right skills within each role.
For example, what’s defined for inbound sales reps will be different for outbound sales reps.
Inbound sales reps will need skills focusing on top-of-the-funnel trends. Such as aligning with the marketing team and using social media to bring in qualified leads.
Meanwhile, the outbound sales team will focus on mastering the art of cold calling.
Elric Legloire, SDR Manager at Agorapulse recently told us he looks for these characteristics when hiring sales reps:
Elric is building out the team and processes at Agorapulse from scratch so this is an important part of his sales strategy plan!
The next step is all about establishing your ideal customer profile (ICP). Your team needs to create a detailed profile of the customer.
This means looking at:
Use your ICP as a guide for your sales reps. It should help them focus on prospects who will convert and deliver repeat business.
It’s in your team’s best interest to act like an advisor to your prospects. Always offer a free demo of the product or service so prospects can see what is being offered in action.
It’s up to your team to field questions and be ready with helpful answers. Sales reps need to find out more about their prospects, too. Learn exactly how a prospect intends to use your product and tailor the demo to their needs.
Educate your sales team so that your prospects can learn the ins and outs of the product from them. Tell the product's story from the prospect's perspective and their business. And always follow up.
Growth within a business is an exciting time. One day you’re a startup and it can feel as if you blink and become a mature organization.
Growth can look like many different things. But make sure your team stays deliberate as your business moves upmarket and begins to sell to bigger organizations.
This means, not everything has to change as a company scales. The simplicity of your sales strategy can still be effective. After all, it likely is what allowed your business to grow in the first place.
A sales strategy isn’t a “set it and forget it” type of process. Your team will likely come up with new ideas or tactics as they encounter more prospects.
Implementing too many ideas at once can turn your sales team on its head. When your team experiments with the sales strategy, have them start small with one or two ideas at a time.
Experiment with ideas before you unleash a full-scale pivot on your team. Pivoting before an idea is truly tested will only cause disruption.
When developing your sales strategy, it can be tempting to leverage channel partners to help establish growth.
But don’t move too fast. Hold off on using channel partners until you need to accelerate growth, not create it. Especially if your company is just starting out.
But what is a channel partner? They’re a company that partners with you to market or sell your products and services. For example, a reseller, vendor or agent.
If you’re a startup, you need to be smart. It’s best to have a steady stream of customers and monthly revenue before you turn to channel partners.
Once you do, channel partners will help take growth to the next level, but they won’t build it from the ground up.
So when is the best time to bring in channel partners?
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was a successful sales strategy.
But don’t forget. When you invest time and effort to develop a sales strategy, you’re investing in your company as a whole.
Here are our final thoughts on developing a sales strategy: