Sales Effectiveness 101: 5 Steps to a Successful Sales Strategy

sales effectiveness, focalpoint coachingIn order to remain viable, a business must be able to create and maintain customers in a cost-effective way. After all, it is your customers’ dollars that keep the doors open and the lights on. Your company’s sales effectiveness relies on experienced leadership, a well-trained sales team, and a successful sales strategy.

The goal of a sales strategy is to build your customer base and transition prospects into paying customers. Whether you’re launching a new product line or assessing your current sales effectiveness, a detailed strategy provides the roadmap for effectively getting your product or service in front of those who will benefit most from your offerings. Developing that strategy takes some effort, but these steps are designed to help guide the way towards greater sales success.

Step 1: Build Your Foundation

A successful sales strategy is built upon a foundation of knowledge. Use past performance to set a baseline, identify trends, and evaluate opportunities with underperforming services or products. Identify your target audience and conduct research about their preferences and the challenges they’re currently facing. Research your competition to learn from what’s worked, what hasn’t, and which opportunities have been overlooked. Then, use this information to set challenging but realistic sales objectives for each service or product.

Step 2: Design Value-Add Messaging

Prospects are inundated with sales messages, but messaging that’s designed from the consumer perspective will increase your sales effectiveness. Instead of telling prospects how great your services or products are, your sales team should be armed with information that provides solutions to the problems prospects currently experience.

Step 3: Create a Sales Funnel with Tiered Actions

Depending on the type of service or product you offer, the sales cycle may be long or more immediate. Regardless, even interested prospects may not be ready to buy the first (or second and third) time you approach them. By creating a sales funnel with tiered actions, you can continue to engage prospects until they’re ready to buy –without appearing pushy. This may include demos, free trials, or samples for them to try. Be prepared with a “next step” for your prospects, even if that next step isn’t a closed deal.

Step 4: Approach Target Prospects Authentically

Your sales effectiveness will increase substantially if your sale team is strategic in how they approach your target prospects. As a part of your sales strategy, research how your prospects best receive their information and pull insights from your most successful salespeople. For example, approaching prospects within LinkedIn groups may be more powerful than direct emails. Whenever possible, encourage salespeople to personalize their communications, so prospects don’t feel like a name on a list.

Step 5: Train Your Team

Selling today has never been more competitive. As many as 70% of companies do not do any sales training, and the other 30% control the marketplace. By training and retaining the most highly skilled salespeople, your company can surpass your goals and reach new heights. At FocalPoint Canada, we use a wide range of tools and methodologies to tailor programs for our clients’ unique sales effectiveness needs.

Are You Ready to Transform Your Team’s Sales Effectiveness?

At FocalPoint Canada, we guide our clients in overcoming challenges and leveraging opportunities with proven processes and methodologies that have been used by thousands of successful businesses over the past two decades. Our FocalPoint business coaches use their expertise to teach our time-tested methods through individual coaching, group sessions, or trainings and workshops.

It all starts with a conversation. Call us at 866-761-1616 or email infocanada@focalpointcoaching.com

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