Sales strategy: boost your business

Are you a tactician who wants to know all the tips you need to implement a successful sales strategy ? Then stay with us, because the fun starts now.

It’s important to bear in mind a number of different strategy concepts. We’ll explain everything there is to know about online sales strategies 😁.

What is a sales strategy?

A sales strategy is a plan thought out from A to Z by a company with the aim of promoting and selling its products or services.

A bit like devising a plan to oust the final boss of a dungeon, you know? 😅

This strategy helps achieve certain business objectives, such as :

• 1️⃣ Increasing sales.
• 2️⃣ tapping into new markets.
• 3️⃣ Building customer loyalty.

To achieve this, a thorough market analysis is required, including a study of the competition and market segmentation with different target groups.

But that’s not all, the sales strategy includes many aspects, including, training and development of sales teams, the use of customer relationship management(CRM) tools, or continuous monitoring to adjust results accordingly. 👀

Don’t worry, we’ll look at each of these aspects right away. ⬇️

10 steps to developing a good sales strategy

As you’ll see, following these steps will help you understand your market, target 🎯 your customers and implement certain actions to achieve your goals. 💪🏼

1) Define your objectives

The first step, and not the least, is to identify your objectives. 🔎

This is very important, because depending on the objectives you choose, you’ll be heading in a certain direction.

These objectives must be SMART, which means:

• Specific.
• Measurable.
• Attainable.
• Realistic
• Time-defined.

If you’re short of inspiration, here are a few types of objectives you can include in a sales strategy. 👇🏼

2) Identify targets

This step involves determining which market segments and customer types are most likely to buy your products or services.

To do this, it’s important to analyze your market in order to understand the needs, behaviors and expectations of potential customers.

For example:

• Market trends.
• Consumer preferences.
• Demographic data.

By doing this, you’ll get an overview of the type of customers that will get your strategy off the ground. 🚀

To go into a little more detail, you’ll segment the market with groups based on certain criteria, such as:

• 🟣 Age.
• 🔵 Gender.
• 🟣 Geographical location.
• 🔵 Income.
• 🟣 Purchasing behavior.

A word of advice: each segment must be large enough to ensure a targeted, personalized approach.

As you can see, if you clearly identify your targets 🎯, you’ll be able to develop marketing messages and sales offers tailored to you and your business.

3) Create a buyer persona

Knowing your persona, i.e. your target, means being able to sell your product or service better 💰 later on. So let’s start at the beginning. We’ll summarize the information you need to create a great persona. ⚡️

To do this, you’ll need to know: 👇🏼

• First and last name.
• age.
• Location.
• Level of education.
• Salary.
• Marital status 💍.
• Her need(s).
• Her points of pain or frustration.

Of course, it’s up to you to add elements that will complete your persona. The more complete your persona, the more you’ll be able to provide solutions to their problem, and therefore sell. 👀

4) Analyze the market

When you’re asked to analyze the market, it’s not necessarily a question of whether it’s saturated or not (go for it even if it seems complicated). In fact, the most important thing is to analyze your competitors. What are they doing to successfully sell their product or solution? When you go prospecting, it’s also about using competitive techniques that work, but also about not repeating the mistakes you can see 👀. That’s why we do market analysis: to understand and better respond to your customers.

Okay, but how do you do it? 🤔

I give you my little top 5 things to do if you want to analyze your market:

• 1️⃣ Study the competition: identify your main competitors and assess their strengths and weaknesses, sales strategies, prices and distribution channels.
• 2️⃣ Analyze market trends: changes in consumer preferences, technological innovations, regulatory developments.
• 3️⃣ Market segmentation: divide according to criteria such as demographics, geography, buying behavior and customer needs.
• 4️⃣ Customer needs analysis: use surveys, interviews, focus groups.
• 5️⃣ Assessment of opportunities and threats: new competitors or economic changes.

You can also sell your products or services in several regions or markets. It’s very important to understand 🧠 your customers’ habits so that you can best meet their needs.

Thanks to these analyses, you can find out whether your product is more in demand in one region or another. You’ll then have the opportunity to optimize it according to the feedback you receive.

5) Organize a sales team

What would a company be without a well-structured and motivated sales team? Not much. 😅

To start with, it’s important that you define the roles and responsibilities of each member of the sales team. Let me explain: ⬇️

• Sales manager: oversees and coordinates the team’s activities.
• Sales managers: manage relationships with key customers 🔑 and develop new opportunities.
• Sales representatives: carry out day-to-day sales activities and achieve individual sales targets.
• Sales support: offer administrative and technical assistance to the sales team.

Building a great team isn’t enough – you need to motivate them to sell your product.

Here are our tips: 👇🏼

• Ongoing training: organize regular sessions to improve skills and update product knowledge.
• Clear objectives: set SMART objectives for each member of your team.
• Motivation and recognition: set up reward and recognition systems to celebrate certain victories, such as bonuses or commissions.

6) Adjust the sales offer

To adjust a commercial offer, start by collecting and analyzing customer feedback using surveys, interviews and online comments to look for areas for improvement. 🔎

Next, don’t hesitate to regularly study your competitors’ offerings to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

You can, for example, modify your product or service by :

• Adding new features.
• Improving quality.
• Adjusting prices.
• Creating more intriguing packages.

Finally, don’t hesitate to tell your community about these changes via marketing campaigns, newsletters and, above all, social networks. 😇

7) Use the different channels to your advantage

When you decide to implement your marketing strategy, you’ll also think about all the channels you can use to spread your message 📩. Think about unifying them so that people can understand you. Setting up a strategy requires you to use different channels so that you can reach as many people as possible. The tools you have at your disposal are :

• LinkedIn (of course).
• Facebook.
• Twitter.
• Instagram.

Thanks to these different media, you have the opportunity to reach customers 💰 on different platforms, and more chances for them to recognize you because they’ve already seen you elsewhere. Two birds, one stone.

8) Generate leads

Do you want to generate leads? Without them, your sales won’t take off. 🚀

To do this, here are a few strategies you can already put in place:

• Search engine optimization (SEO).
• Online advertising (Google Ads, Facebook Ads).
• Content marketing.

You can (and should) combine all 3 strategies to reach more people. 💪🏼

For example, you’ll use social networks to attract and engage potential prospects by regularly sharing relevant content and interacting with your audience. 😇

Our little secret, offer free trials, product demonstrations or even free consultations to encourage your prospects to give their contact information. 😇

9) Qualify leads

Here’s one of the most important steps, I’d say. It involves evaluating prospects to identify 🔎 which ones have the highest conversion potential.

To do this, you first need to have certain information about each lead, such as:

• Company.
• Company size.
• The prospect’s role within the company.

All this data will help you segment leads according to their relevance to your product or service.

Next, we advise you to use customer relationship management(CRM) tools, to track lead engagement (such as opening emails and visiting pages on your website).

10) Adjust your strategy

And yes, the last two steps don’t go without each other ❌. To adjust your strategy, you absolutely must know the results of your analyses. This will enable you to know if the market is changing, if your customers’ behaviors are changing too (which may lead to a product change or improvement, a change in communication…). It will also tell you whether the channel you’ve used is relevant to your target. When you notice that a campaign is not bearing fruit, you can rectify the situation or simply suspend the campaign.

When you analyze, you then have the power to take action that can only boost your strategy.

Sales skills

When you’re a marketer, salesperson or entrepreneur, if you want to sell a product, you also need to have a few essential skills.

If you want to be the master of these skills, we suggest you check out this 👉 article.

Okay, so what are these different skills?

• Confidence. Yes, if you don’t inspire confidence in your target, there’s little chance they’ll buy from you. That’s why you set up your LinkedIn profile when you sell on LinkedIn.
• Like ability is hard to measure. You’ll never know whether someone likes you or not. On the other hand, you can ensure that you do by avoiding talking about yourself too much, smiling 😁, being sincere and showing empathy.
• Adaptability: You’ll also need to know how to turn a no into a yes (in some cases it will work, in others it won’t).
• Observation and listening skills. If you don’t have this, how are you going to meet your customers’ needs?
• Problem-solving. If your prospect has a pain point, you’ll be able to address it and offer exactly what they want.

These are the 5 we wanted to introduce to you today. Of course, there are others that can only benefit your marketing business.

Article conclusion: Sales strategies

As you can see, your sales techniques will vary depending on your objectives. You can sell 💲 on LinkedIn, or you can sell exclusively from your website and use Google Ads to your advantage. You can also combine all the channels available to you and gradually eliminate those that perform least well. Keep only the best levers and carry out A/B tests.

Frequently asked questions

It’s nearly the end of this article on sales strategies, so we’re going to try and show you some concepts that might help you set up your various sales strategies. 👀

What are the 3 main marketing strategies?

There are a few smaller strategies in marketing. For example, you have the strategy of cost domination, differentiation and focus.

1) Cost domination strategy

Nothing to do with fantasies we shouldn’t talk about. What’s important here is that the company ensures low costs for maximum quality. It’s a strategy of being extremely competitive. You’re going to cut costs like fixed costs and variable costs. This strategy doesn’t just focus on cost reduction, it focuses on cost and volume.

2) Differentiation strategy

Here, you’ll focus solely on the product. Advertising is where you’ll make the difference. This strategy is particularly effective with small businesses, as it has the advantage of extending to other user segments . The differentiation strategy will require a great deal of competitor analysis, since you’ll need to find the element that makes your product better than the competition’s.

3) Focus strategy

With this strategy, you focus solely on a specific market, avoiding confrontation with your competitors. It’s essential to know your strengths ✅ and weaknesses ❌.

Don’t hesitate to use the SWOT matrix to perfect this strategy. You’re going to rely solely on a market segment which, for the record, is going to be highly targeted but unfortunately small. Defining a strategic plan based on what will differentiate you from the competition is going to be essential.

What are the 3 pricing strategies?

There are 3 pricing strategies:

• Cost-based pricing strategy: determines the selling price by adding a profit margin to the cost of producing the product or service.
• Competitive pricing strategy: prices are set according to competitors’ prices for similar products or services.
• Perceived-value pricing strategy: prices are set according to the value the product or service brings to the customer.

And we’re at the end of this article, you know all about sales strategy, don’t forget to test 🧪.