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Ten things to consider when developing your sales strategy

Guest post by: Sophie Le Brozec

Article Overview: One of the hardest tasks for most small businesses and entrepreneurs is developing a robust and profitable sales strategy. After all, selling requires a certain degree of skill combined with natural ability. Irrespective of the sales ability of the people in question, it is important to have a sales strategy to help guide yourself and the people selling your products or services.

Ten things to consider when developing your sales strategy

From my experience of previous businesses and also from what I employ in my current role at Glasscubes, here are ten things to consider when developing your sales strategy:

Establish who is your target audience

It may seem obvious, but know your audience. Does what you are selling satisfy their needs or solve their problems? What turns them on? What gets their attention? Where do they hang out? Who are their opinion leaders? All of this information will help you build up a profile and should help...

Establish the best way to reach your audience

There is no point in trying to reach an online audience offline or vice versa. Similarly, if you are looking for quick sales of low price products there is not much point trying the hard sell. You need to be where your audience is looking to transact or interact with you and make yourself known.

Make sure that you are thinking about return on investment

Whatever you spend on getting leads or sales, make sure you can track it back to the revenue that comes in. So many businesses fail in this respect, instead assuming that because they increased some activity and there were more sales, the relationship between the two is concrete. In this age, using analytics to track leads/sales online is vital and makes things easier. But you are nothing without a decent reporting or leading tracking system.

Choose the best tools for you

Tools designed to assist your business, such as CRM, should be suited to you and your requirements. Having something flexible and cost effective is important as it is unlikely that you can invest the time and money in customising your own. Similarly if you or your team cannot understand the tools, then they are unlikely to use them.

Fulfil your promises

Are you offering the best fulfilment offering. Making the sale is one thing, but ensuring that you can deliver is something completely different. Once again, you have to understand what your customer is looking for and be a little bit flexible in your delivery. You may lose sales if you declare "We promise to deliver in 21 days" when actually you are just covering your back and could deliver next day if needed.

Communication is vital

Make sure you communicate as much as is necessary with your customers and target audience. Nobody likes being left in the dark but also nobody likes being spammed to death. Make sure they are aware that you are there and receptive and give them the messages that they might like to hear. Once you take an order, make sure you keep the customer informed about the progress of their order ensuring a delivery date is met (whether a service or product).

Establish a customer support strategy

You never know where your next customer is going to come from. Often word of mouth is stronger if you let the customer down with poor customer service. Again, ensure you have the right issue tracking tools available to track any problems so that you can address them quickly and efficiently. A bad experience can very quickly be turned into a good experience and recommendations. However, you certainly cannot afford to ignore. Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook ensure that if there is a problem, the whole world may know about it in moments.

Be punctual

If you have a meeting or a delivery date/time, make sure you are not late. No matter who or where you are, lateness is unforgiveable and sets a really bad example of yourself and your organization.

Ask for references

Never be scared to ask for someone to recommend you. The worst thing they can say is no... the best is that they can give you the names of people who may be interested.

Schedule regular reviews and appraisals

Sometimes it seems like everything is going wrong. Review your strategy as much as possible, even when things are going right. By knowing and understanding what worked and what hasn't worked, you can make sure you are ready for any change in circumstances (or apply to future projects you undertake).

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Article Tags: best tools, fulfil, fulfilment, promises, relationship, return on investment, sales strategy, target audience, time and money



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Need Help Growing? - One resource that I've found to be extremely helpful was calling the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC). I've met a lot of top business owners who have used the BDC for various reasons (i.e. sales/marketing strategy, training, foreign development, etc) and all say it was a massive help. The BDC will usually help you create the strategy using industry specific consultants and then not only help you fund the consultant's work but also the strategy. Their loan terms are little higher than banks but they’re a lot more easy going and understanding than regular banks.
Re: help wanted in u.k. - how can we help you?? do you have a sales and marketing strategy??
Re: Can you make a real living online? - I think you can make a living online, it just depends on how much work you want to put in and how 'on line' the business is. You need to approach an online business the same way you do an offline business - with a good plan and well thought out strategy. There's nothing wrong with a strategy of having 300 niche topic websites all making $20 - $50/ month from advertising as long as they are automated or easily managed. But people who set up one or two small sites, populate them with syndicated content and expect to get rich from ad sales are probably going to be disappointed.
Re: Article Marketing - I totally agree with you.If you work with an online business where getting sales and leads are the key to success then the article marketing is the best strategy where you should focus.
Re: Do Women Play the Stock Market? - Hi Aneshia, [quote="AneshiaYS":1lz5khur]I implement a strategy for risk management[/quote:1lz5khur] I'm glad to read this. I think it's the most important part of investing. "Diversify" and have a clear "exit strategy" - ah yes, but "following it" is the hard part and if you have a strategy to induce your clients to follow the strategy, I should think it would be an excellent service.


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