The Simplified Guide to a Modern Sales Strategy

 

Every organization needs a comprehensive sales strategy. Defining your sales strategy is the first step to ensuring that you reach your revenue goals. A successful strategy hinges on your ability to develop the right approaches to engage prospects and convert them to customers. A solid sales strategy will empower your entire company to foster meaningful relationships that increase conversion and retention rates.

Outreach Channels

 

Many businesses employ a variety of tactics and channels to reach prospective buyers. Will you contact prospects via digital channels (email, social media, display advertising, etc.)? What about more traditional approaches like face-to-face sales or telemarketing?

 

Competitive Analysis

 

Every successful sales strategy is constructed with awareness to the competition. Understanding the methods your competitors are employing will enable you to improve your own tactics.

Inbound Sales Methodology

 

Inbound sales is a sales methodology whereby an organization engages with prospects through targeted digital channels. Tactics are designed to guide prospects through all stages of the funnel from top-of-funnel awareness through the decision-making process. Common inbound digital marketing tactics include search engine optimization, social media, and content marketing activities.

Outbound Sales Methodology

 

Outbound sales is a sales methodology where sales reps connect with prospects to create relationships, earn trust, and win business. Prospects’ first interaction with a brand is typically when they’re contacted by a sales rep via an outbound sales channel. Sales reps engage with prospects via phone, email, social media and face-to-face interactions to educate them about solutions and/or products.

For years, people have been predicting the end of outbound sales strategies amid the mounting adoption of inbound strategies. But outbound sales strategies are still alive and well. Outbound tactics are still extremely vital to many organizations. In fact, 55% of leads generated come from outbound sales. And inbound? 27%. So why is outbound still more effective? Simply put, businesses cannot expect customers to fall into their lap and convert into paying customers.

There are many external factors that limit a sales department from growing: industry performance, market demand, and consumer preferences to name a few. So what are the internal factors that prevent a sales organization from success?

 

An undefined sales framework

 

Determining how an organization is structured is instrumental to your sales team’s success.  How are accounts disseminated to the team? Unorganized processes and misalignment across teams leads to duplicated efforts, lengthy hand-off times, and damaged relationships between teams.  Building a solid sales framework brings more transparency to salespeople on the processes they must use to help the company meet its goals.

Ineffective onboarding and training

 

Companies with formal employee onboarding programs have significantly greater profits and employee retention, productivity, and satisfaction. Employee trust and performance also improve. Therefore, it’s critical that companies implement a solid employee onboarding program that sets proper expectations from day one. But training shouldn’t stop after the first few months on the job. Sales reps should also receive proper training for continued growth and development.

Lengthy sales cycles

 

Prolonged sales cycles will kill any organization’s bottom line. Luckily there are steps that sales organizations can take to shorten the buying process. The first step is truly understanding target audiences and their pain points, desires, and reservations. The sales cycle can also be optimized by implementing proper sales tools that reduce sales reps’ workloads.

• Specific – Specific goals are clear and accurate. Your goal should answer the five “W” questions: what, why, who, where, when.

 

• Measurable – Measurable goals set concrete criteria to attain your goal. Increasing sales revenue by 15 percent in Q1 is an example of a measurable goal.

 

• Attainable – Avoid setting goals that are impossible to achieve. Instead, set goals that are reasonable and attainable.

 

• Relevant – Does your goal align with your company’s overall mission? If not, you’ll want to find a new goal to set.

 

• Timely – All sales goals should be time-sensitive. Will your objective be completed in the next month, quarter, or year? Setting a due date will make it easier to measure sales performance.

Step 2: Build Buyer Personas

 

Buyer personas (or marketing personas) are fictitious, broad descriptions of your ideal customers. Sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams use buyer personas to attract, engage, and humanize the buying journey for prospects and customers. Additionally, in today’s landscape consumers expect a personalized experience. In fact, more than 50% of consumers expect companies to personalize offers and communications.  This belief is even higher with millennial consumers.

It’s important to build your buyer personas as if they were actual people. This will enable you to create marketing and sales messaging that better fits their needs, wants, and desires. From Manager Maggie to Soccer Mom Sam, deep insight into your buyer persona(s) is a valuable tool that fuels marketing communications and sales outreach activities.

 

You may have a simplified view of your target buyers. For instance, your buyers might be IT management professions. However, do you know their pain points or what drives them to find a solution? Building comprehensive buyer personas will help you understand your ideal customers on a deeper level. The number of buyer personas you develop is dependent on your business. Some businesses have one to two, and some have as many as 20.

Here’s a simple process that you can use to create buyer personas:

 

Do audience research

 

Learn about your existing customers: Utilize your customer retention management (CRM) software to reveal generalizations between leads and customers. Demographic details like job title, industry, and company size are all characteristics to look for. Detail what the typical prospect journey looks like and how you can recreate that in the future. Obviously not all customers will be an exact match to these criteria, however this exercise will help eliminate wasted hours chasing prospects who aren’t likely to purchase.

Capture persona information on your website

 

Use website lead forms to capture demographic or firmographic information. For instance, if your personas vary based on industry, ask each lead for information about their industry on your forms.

 

Identify pain points, goals, and challenges

 

What challenges are potential customers attempting to solve? What are their motivations, desires, and reservations? Uncover what customers like about your product and services by conducting surveys in person, over the phone, or via email. You can also interview salespeople and customer service reps to understand the prospects and customers they commonly interact with. What commonalities can they make about your top-performing customers? What about underperforming customers?

 

Establish how your brand can help

 

Once you understand the challenges and aspirations of customers, it’s time to distinguish how your products or services can help them. What benefits do customers get from using your products or services? It’s important to walk a mile in the customers’ shoes to really understand their perspective.

Step 3: Analyze Industry performance

 

Conducting a thorough industry analysis will help you determine how your industry is performing. It will also help you forecast future industry trends. Additionally, you can conduct a S.W.O.T. analysis to determine strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and how you rank up in comparison with the competition. Start by analyzing the demand and supply chain of your industry.

 

Here are a few important questions to answer:

 

• How has the industry performed in the past?
• What is the future viability of the industry?
• What is your current percentage of market share? How can you improve?
• What operational efficiencies do you hold that your competitors do not?
• How can you remain competitive in the industry?

 

Step 4: Define Key-Value Proposition

 

A value proposition should answer why someone would purchase your products or services over your competitors. It should persuade prospects that your products or services will provide more value to them over similar products or services in the market. A great value proposition should:

 

• Be clear and easy to understand
• Define your brand’s visual identity, voice and messaging
• Answer what problems and pain points your product or services solve for
• Detail the benefits of using your company’s product or services over your competitors
• Be consistently displayed across your website and customer touchpoints

 

Step 5: Determine your Competitive Advantages

 

A competitive advantage is a benefit that your products or services provide to consumers that they cannot receive from competing companies. To determine your competitive advantage, identify something opposing companies cannot easily copy. This could be location, price, operational processes, convenience, and more. Start by researching the differences between your goods and services and your competitor’s. What are your comparative strengths? What are your weaknesses? How are your company’s product or services unique?

 

Step 6: Set Metrics and Benchmarks

 

 

Benchmarking is the process of comparing a businesses’ performance metrics with the top performers in their industry. Quality of services, time to purchase, and cost are all typically measured. Simply put, creating benchmarks will help your company establish what metrics you must reach to be successful in your industry. Benchmarks will also enable you to determine what quotas you need to reach to increase your percentage of market share. From there, you can build data-centric goals and objectives.

 

Here are some important metrics to track:

 

• Growth: How well a company builds revenue over a specific time period.
• Sales Target: Overarching business objectives versus actual campaign performance.
• Revenue: The money a business earned from the sale of their products or services.
• Opportunities: A verified prospect who has been qualified by marketing and sales.
• Sales to Date: The total sales over the past year.
• Monthly Sales: The total sales over the past month.
• Product Performance: The sales of a specific product or product line.
• Lead Conversion Rate: The amount of leads that convert to sales opportunities.
• Sell Through Rate: The measurement of sales compared to an entire inventory.
• Average Purchase Value: The average value of each customer purchase.
• Sales by Region: Regional variations in sales and profits.

 

Step 7: Listen to Your Audience

 

Listening to your audience is vital to analyzing your performance and determining areas in your pre- and post-buying experience that can be improved. The first step is ensuring that your customers have a simple way to send feedback. Social media channels, website chat bots, customer service emails, and contact us forms are all great contact methods. Not only will you want to ensure you have several feedback channels enabled, but you’ll also want to regularly seek out feedback from customers.

It can be time-consuming, difficult, and costly to convert prospects into customers. And it’s only getting harder. According to Hubspot, 40% of salespeople think it’s more difficult to get a prospect to respond today than it was in the past. Smart businesses are always on the lookout for new tactics to improve acquisition processes while lowering costs. Customer acquisition strategies and channels fluctuate with time and your business must have flexible processes in place to evolve with consumer demand.

Convincing a potential customer to purchase takes a variety of marketing and sales tactics. Having a defined, written strategy will enable your organization to hit sales benchmarks, reinvest profits in growth and development, and keep business operations afloat.

There are several tactics we recommend considering including in your customer acquisition strategy.

 

Communicate with your ideal buyer

 

After you have defined a target audience or audiences, you can create messaging that specifically targets their pain points, wants, and needs. After all, your marketing and sales efforts won’t attract and engage with the right audience if you’re not creating messaging that ideal buyer cares about. Additionally, you’ll avoid spending advertising and marketing budgets on buyers who are not in the market for your products or services.

 

Determine customer acquisition cost

 

Customer acquisition costs, also known as CAC, are all of the accumulated costs a business incurs while persuading prospects to purchase from them. Everything from advertising, marketing, research and development, and sales costs are all CACs. Customer acquisition costs have risen by more than 50% over the last five years. Therefore, many businesses are determined to develop strategies to lower their acquisition cost.

 

CAC can be calculated by campaign or by a specific time period (month, quarter, year, etc.). Many businesses measure CAC to understand the ROI of specific campaigns. From there they are able to determine the impact of marketing and sales efforts and optimize future campaigns.

Calculate customer acquisition cost by adding the marketing and sales costs connected to a specific campaign or time period and dividing that by the number of customers acquired from that campaign or time period.

 

The basic CAC formula is MC + SC / AC = CAC, where:

 

• MC is marketing costs
• SC is sales costs
• AC is acquired customers
• CAC is customer acquisition cost

 

If a company spent $50K on sales and marketing, and gained 500 new customers, their customer acquisition cost would be $100, for example.

Identify acquisition channels

 

After your ideal target audiences have been defined, conduct research to understand where they consume media and how they prefer to buy. Before you add a new acquisition channel to your marketing and sales mix, also analyze the current channels you use to obtain customers. Combine your past successes with your new insights to determine the best channels to reach, nurture, and engage prospective buyers. Some common acquisition channels are:

 

• Social media channels: According to Hubspot, 28% of businesses are using social media in their marketing and sales efforts. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Snapchat are all social media channels that many businesses are leveraging to reach prospective buyers.
• Influencer marketing channels: Influencers are people with large social followings within a particular industry or vertical. While this channel can be more costly than others, when leveraged correctly, influencers campaigns can be very successful.
• Paid advertising: Paid advertising channels can range from digital ads (Google AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), to TV and radio spots. They can be effective tools to obtain new customers quickly. However, you’ll want to ensure you’re choosing the best channels for your budget by keeping track of ROI and optimizing spend based on performance.
• Cold email or cold calling: Before cold outreach, first ensure that your team is reaching out to potential buyers, and not people who will never purchase. Not only will reaching out to the wrong people waste time and resources, but it could also hurt your business’s reputation.

Collect prospect data

 

A recent Forrester Consulting study uncovered that 64% of marketers want better prospecting data. Prospect data can be collected from a variety of sources including:

 

• Company website
• Online surveys
• Outreach channels (email, phone, social media)
• Returning customer’s purchase history

Solidify the human connection

 

The rise of technology has hindered sales’ abilities to have good old fashioned conversations with prospective customers. People are bombarded with digital advertising on a daily basis. In fact, the average American sees roughly 4,000 to 10,000 ads every day. With the constant digital noise, now more than ever people are yearning for real, human interactions. Create an emotional connection with prospects from the get-go. Build solid relationships by prioritizing face-to-face sales and personalization tactics.

 

Increase prospect engagement rates

 

Nothing can be more frustrating to a marketing or sales professional than lead streams going cold. Just because a channel used to work, doesn’t mean it always will. Use your CRM data to regularly analyze performance by channel. From there, optimize and invest more resources into the channels that keep prospects the most engaged.

 

Invest in a sales outsourcing partner

 

Outsourcing your sales function to a trusted third-party sales team can boost customer acquisition efforts, drive growth, and increase scale. An outsourced partner allows you to increase or decrease your sales investment based on generated campaign performance. The right partner will also:

 

• Understand your ideal customer
• Adhere to your specific brand guidelines
• Clearly communicate your value propositions, product details, pricing structure and more
• Track the KPIs of previous efforts and optimize based on results generated
• Use industry trends to build campaigns

Focus on Customer Retention

 

Do you know that a 5% increase in customer retention rates can boost profits by 25-95%? It’s also more cost-effective to keep a current customer than it is to gain a new one. Here are a few strategies that have been proven to keep customer satisfaction high, and churn rates low:

 

• Customer onboarding and training programs
• Personalization efforts
• Customer feedback tools
• Robust customer service teams
• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Using feedback to adjust processes

Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

 

CLV is the total value a customer brings to the business over a specific period of time. Acquisition costs should never exceed the customer’s lifetime value.  For example, if the average CLV of a sporting goods shop is $200 but it costs more than $300 in advertising, marketing, and sales costs to bring on a new customer, the shop will lose money. Remember, it is typically more cost-effective to keep a current customer than it is to acquire a new one. Increasing the value of existing customers is an excellent growth strategy.

Step 1: Create Team Member Personas

 

Recruiting the right sales candidates is a complex process and hiring the wrong person can hinder sales growth, damage your reputation, and hurt profit margins. Building team member personas will enable you to determine if a candidate is the right candidate for the job. Start by interviewing internal stakeholders and team members to see what skills and educational qualifications are necessary for a particular role.

When searching for the right sales reps to join your team, you’ll generally want to look for candidates who have these traits:

 

1. Empathy
2. Impeccable Communication Skills
3. Self-awareness
4. Assertiveness

Step 2: Nail the Recruitment  Process

 

Generating demand for open positions can be challenging and costly. In fact, according to Forbes Magazine, on average companies spend over $3,300 per hire. In addition, many hiring managers are tasked with the responsibility to bring on new employees that can immediately prove their value.

 

Collaborating with HR to establish a rigorous vetting process will help your team narrow down candidate pools to salespeople who match your specific criteria. Since salespeople often work with team members in marketing, customer success, and finance, very qualified candidate should have multiple interviews with team members from across the organization. Lastly always define clear expectations for the role and make sure candidates are aware of them before extending a job offer.

Step 3: Determine the Right Compensation

 

A vital aspect of any sales plan is determining a compensation and commission structure for salespeople. Sales commission is typically variable based on sales performance while compensation is fixed. The right compensation and commission package will attract top talent and incentivize sales reps to reach or exceed their performance targets.

Step 4: Develop Onboarding, Training, and Mentorship Programs

 

Investing in onboarding, training, and mentorship programs will build employee trust while improving team performance. Sales reps want to work for companies that are invested in their career growth and development. Implement strong onboarding, training, and mentorship programs to increase team-wide transparency, improve skill sets, and promote employee’s career development.

 

Onboarding programs: Training Industry Magazine projected that it takes more than a year for newly hired salesperson to match the “same performance level as tenured sales reps.” Employee onboarding programs lay the foundation for an employee’s success with a company. It will also help new employees get ramped up faster.

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Training programs: Training should be an ongoing process throughout the lifetime of an employee. Coaching and training programs are extremely vital to ensuring team members have the right skills sets and tools for success. In fact, according to CSO Insights, sales professionals who undergo training programs have 10% higher close rates. Coaching programs come in a variety of shapes in sizes but are ultimately designed to help sales representatives to hit their KPIs and increase company-wide conversion rates. They also help every team member stay up to date with sales strategy and process.

Mentorship Programs: Warren Buffett, Colin Powell, Cal Ripken Jr., and even Oprah have given recognition to their mentors for guiding them on their path to success. In fact, a study by the American Society for Training and Development revealed that 75% of executives acknowledge their mentors for helping them reach their current positions. A mentorship program will help younger team members develop skills and prepare employees for leadership roles within your company.

 

 

Step 5: Analyze Sales Reps Performance

 

 

Analyze individual and team performance by tracking reps activity and performance metrics. Activity metrics can be used by sales managers to identify early pipeline issues, dissect why sales reps didn’t reach their sales goals, and refine touchpoints to increase conversion rates.

 

Among the most common sales metrics worth tracking are:

 

• Calls made
• Emails sent
• Conversations
• Social media interactions
• Meetings scheduled
• Demos or sales presentations completed
• Referral requests
• Proposals sent

At Ascenta we believe that most sales strategies should include face-to-face selling. We’ve mobilized face-to-face sales teams across the country for some of the world’s largest organizations. We’re acutely aware that deploying an in-person approach to selling enables decision-makers to emotionally connect with a brand and understand its brand values. Here are some benefits we’ve learned along the way.

 

 

Put a face to your brand: Face-to-face sales interactions are often the first time a potential customer has contact with your brand, products, and services. Friendly, person to person connection humanizes the brand experience.

 

Identify with people’s values: Shared beliefs authenticate your brand and provide a ground floor for driving human connections. In fact, 64% of people said one of the main reasons they have a relationship with a brand is because of their shared values. Face-to-face selling provides a bridge to communicate your brand’s values directly with prospects and customers.

 

Educate prospects and customers: Face-to-face sales gives you a platform to engage directly with consumers and answer their questions about your products or services. Sales representatives in the field should be armed with a wide breadth of knowledge, not only about your products and services, but also about your industry in its entirety.

 

Demonstrate complicated products or services: Prospects are much more likely to purchase after seeing, testing or tasting a product. Brick and mortar retailers have mastered this by handing out free samples in store. Taking the time to demonstrate your product gives prospects the opportunity to learn how it will work best for them. The key is demonstrating how your product helps solve their pain points, needs, and desires.

 

Eliminate technical difficulties and miscommunication: A dropped call is enough to ruin any sale. Face-to-face selling eliminates these technical difficulties, enabling sales professionals to establish a rapport with prospects. You’ll also be able to use body language indicators to better gauge prospects’ reactions.

 

Face-to-face selling can be challenging. However, the benefits outweigh the investment that goes into training and mobilizing a face-to-face team. Engaging with your customers in an intimate setting is a completely different experience than nurturing customers online. Face-to-face sales allow you to understand prospects and customers in real-time, increase sales and create long-lasting, personal connections.

Hire good people

 

An underperforming employee could negatively impact morale, decrease sales revenue, and cost your business thousands. During the hiring process, search for candidates who are empathetic, kind, and knowledgeable. It’s also a good sign if a potential hire shows interest in career longevity with your company.

 

Data-driven mindset

 

Companies like Facebook, Hello Fresh, and FabFitFun use data to make more informed business decisions. Facebook is well known for using data to drive its product forward. In fact, on any given day, Facebook will run upwards of 10,000 versions of their social media network to measure the user experience.  And while every company might not have the capacity to run thousands of tests per day, Facebook’s main lesson is: Having a data-driven mindset will enable your company to run more impactful marketing campaigns and build products or services customers love.

 

Use storytelling

 

Humans have been telling stories for thousands of years using a variety of media. What started as cave paintings 40,000 years ago has transformed into books, TV shows, podcasts, movies, magazines, and more. Storytelling is an effective sales method your sales teams in the field should be employing to win customers. In fact, humans are even biologically wired to consume information via stories. According to Jennifer Aaker, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor,

Effective storytelling will help you create more memorable prospect and customer experiences.

 

 

Boost your sales strategy with the right partner

 

Ascenta has helped companies, large and small, scale their sales strategies, acquire more customers, and increase customer lifetime values. Contact us today to learn how we can create face-to-face sales programs that build customer relationships and generate more revenue.