Sales strategy to support your growth + 8 tips

A well-defined and well-thought-out sales strategy is essential for success in most markets.

In this post, we will guide you in creating an effective sales strategy that can increase your company’s revenue. We’ll first look at what a sales strategy actually is, and then dive into the key elements and steps involved in the process.

Read on for valuable tips on how to create a strong sales strategy.

• What is a sales strategy?
• Why it’s important to have an effective sales strategy
• What should an effective sales strategy include?
• How toevaluate your sales strategy
• 7 tips for your sales strategy
• Implement HubSpot to optimize your sales strategy

What is a sales strategy?

A sales strategy is a plan or approach used to increase company revenue through effective sales activities. An effective sales strategy can vary from company to company, but as an example, they can involve

• Sales outreach / Canvas sales
• Focus on relationship building to build strong customer relationships with potential customers and partners to create more successful sales opportunities.
• Social selling

The above are three sub-elements of a sales strategy. You can see a sales strategy contains several important components, which can be divided into:

• How do you get new customers?
• How do you handle new customers?
• How do you ensure they stay customers?
• How do you sell more to your customers?

The above are three basic questions that any good sales strategy should be able to answer, because it covers the areas an effective sales strategy should include. Therefore, it is essential to consider lead generation, customer service, upselling and sales process when discussing sales strategy.

To put together an effective sales strategy, it’s crucial to understand your company’s goals and vision. This involves analyzing needs, focusing on action areas and engaging with stakeholders. It also involves defining USPs, which helps communicate the unique benefits through strategic outreach to potential customers.

The prevalence of sales strategies varies. In B2B sales, sales strategies are very complex due to longer customer journeys, whereas a sales strategy is less complex in B2C.

Why it’s important to have an effective sales strategy

An effective sales strategy helps define clear goals and areas of focus for your sales team. This gives them a clear direction to follow, increasing their focus and motivation to achieve results.

By analyzing customer needs and having a clear sales strategy when approaching them, you can also ensure better communication with your ICP(ideal customer profile). The strategy thus contributes to streamlined communication, which leads to increased customer satisfaction and creates loyal customers who are more likely to buy again and/or remain customers for longer.

At the same time, a well-implemented sales strategy contributes directly to your bottom line by setting realistic sales targets and KPIs(Key Performance Indicators). By constantly analyzing the results, your strategy can be continuously adjusted for optimal performance.

An effective sales strategy will be an essential part of your go to market strategy, as sales is the direct channel for more revenue. With an effective sales strategy, you’ll be far along in your growth plan and can then build more parts of your go to market strategy.

What should an effective sales strategy include?

Although a sales strategy is tailored to the individual company, there are certain elements that an effective sales strategy should always include. We’ll go through these below.

How do you reach new customers with your sales strategy?

When creating your sales strategy, it’s essential to know how to reach new customers. You need to consider whether this should be done inbound, outbound or through partnerships.

Once you’ve decided on the above, you can start looking at how to build each new customer strategy. If you want your sales strategy to include elements of outbound, it’s important to educate your sales team on how to approach customers and make them experts in your product.

Read more about lead generation

How does your sales strategy handle new customers?

What do you do as soon as a company comes to you and says they want to become a customer? Who takes it from here, do you have presentations ready and how easy is it to buy for them? This is an element of the sales process that you need to be 100% on top of to avoid appearing unprofessional – it’s also important for you to have a good relationship with your new customer that the process from here is efficient and easy.

You can make this process easy with a CRM system where, for example, you create an inbound funnel that has defined the stages a new customer must go through.

How does your sales strategy ensure customers stay customers

Your sales strategy is not over as soon as customers become customers, because the impact of sales on customer retention is significant. Imagine a sales process where you are listened to, feel prioritized and your needs are met – are you more willing to remain a customer here versus a sales process where you are not prioritized?

Therefore, a good sales strategy is often linked to customer service and ensures that the customer is at the center.

Read more about customer service

Your sales strategy should focus on upselling

One place where you can really grow is through upselling and therefore your sales strategy should have a plan for this. This can be when the customer reaches a certain level of engagement, has used X number of features or has been a customer for a long time. There are different ways you can incorporate upselling into your sales strategy, just make sure it doesn’t compromise the customer relationship.

You can read more about upselling here.

How toevaluate your sales strategy

Clear goals and KPIs are essential for an effective sales strategy. By defining clear goals, you can measure and assess your progress and identify areas that need improvement.

Set realistic but challenging goals:

• Define clear and specific sales goals that can be achieved within a specific timeframe.
• Be ambitious, but take into account your company’s resources and market potential.

Define Key Performance Indicators that can be quantified:

• Identify the most relevant KPIs to measure sales performance and success.
• Choose KPIs that are objective and easy to report.

Create an action plan with milestones along the way:

• Break down the sales strategy into concrete steps or milestones to ensure progress.
• Assign responsibilities to key employees and set deadlines for each milestone.

Radiant executes on the above and helps define through Sales as a Service.

8 tips for your sales strategy

Below we list 7 of the tips we give for most sales strategies, it’s important to remember that few sales strategies are the same. Therefore, you need to remember to customize what you see as important to you.

Focus on the customer and their needs

Keep the customer in focus throughout the sales strategy, from pitch preparation, sales process, sales funnel, etc. The customer is at the heart of any sales strategy and must therefore be at the center of the strategy. It is therefore also important for your sales strategy that you know 100% who your customer is, what their needs are and what they want from you.

Think long term and build relationships

As we’ve discussed in this article, the importance of sales doesn’t stop when a customer becomes a customer – thinking long-term and building strong customer relationships is key in sales strategy. It doesn’t matter if the most important thing for you is to get the sale, it’s just as important that the customer remains a customer for a long time. As a sales leader, you can influence this in several ways, including introducing bonus models that reward salespeople who ensure long customer relationships, focus on the customer and ensure an efficient sales process.

Read more about customer relations

Make a good sales pitch

A good sales pitch can ensure customer centricity, consistency and professionalism in the way you communicate with the customer. It will also help your sales team get started and you can share experiences on how to pitch best. A sales pitch and knowledge sharing are therefore very central to a sales strategy.

Download our sales pitch template.

Train your sales team

Invest in your employees’ success by offering them ongoing training and development opportunities. Give them the tools they need to improve their sales skills and motivation, which will boost their performance and increase your company’s sales results.

Read more about sales coaching

Selection of sales channels

Effective sales channels play a crucial role in an effective sales strategy. It’s all about choosing the right channels where your target audience is located to best reach them with your message and increase the chances of conversion.

Read more about sales channels

Optimize your lead generation

Focus on effective methods to generate qualified leads. Use targeted marketing strategies, such as content marketing and social media advertising, to reach potential customers at the right point in the buying process. By optimizing your lead generation, you can increase the number of good opportunities for your sales team.

Improve customer service

Go the extra mile to deliver excellent customer service experiences throughout the entire buying and post-purchase process. Be responsive to customer needs, provide fast support and ensure seamless communication between your company and your clients. By constantly striving for better service, you’ll gain greater loyalty from existing customers and positive recommendations from them to potential new customers.

Create an omni-channel experience

By integrating multiple channels in your approach to potential customers, you can ensure you stay top-of-mind, reach your target audience with multiple messages and create greater brand recognition. Overall, this leads to a higher conversion rate.

Read more about omni-channel

Implement HubSpot to optimize your sales strategy

Implementing a HubSpot can really benefit your sales strategy because you will get control of data, a streamlined process and ensure customers are not left behind in the sales process.

HubSpot CRM introduction and features

HubSpot CRM is a tool that can revolutionize your company’s sales process. With HubSpot, you get an easy-to-use platform that allows you to organize and manage all your sales activities in one place. You can easily track leads, manage contacts and create custom pipelines.

HubSpot has many benefits, including flexible pricing, tailored modules for marketing, sales, service, CMS and operations.

Benefits of implementing HubSpot CRM

Implementing HubSpot CRM in your business can have many benefits. It will increase the efficiency of your sales process by automating repetitive tasks and providing in-depth insights into your team’s performance. Furthermore, it will also help create better collaboration between departments by centralizing data.

Implement HubSpot with Radiant

Radiant has developed sales strategies for more than 100 companies using HubSpot. This is done through HubSpot as a Service and Sales as a Service.

Read how Radiant helped Hemonto implement HubSpot, migrate from Microsoft Dynamics, create a clear sales strategy with everything from pipeline management to intelligent segmentation and represented Hemonto through Sales as a Service to book qualified meetings and win deals.
With HubSpot as a Service, we optimize your HubSpot so that you tie your investments in sales, marketing, service and CMS together in HubSpot, creating synergies and a higher ROI.