Reasons to Have a Sales Strategy

by Miguel Angel Tolsa Miguel Angel Tolsa | Feb 21, 2019 11:53:23 AM

 

sales strategy

I've been in contact with directors and managers of commercial teams for more than 15 years. I've even been a "guest" seller involved in international and national commercial teams in order to understand what their operation was like.

La antigua estrategia de ventas

traditional marketing strategies

The most fortunate commercial managers were able to boast about selling a lot, about knowing how much they'd improved compared to the previous year but, didn't really know for sure how they'd achieved it or if something had changed along the way in order to achieve it. I even came across great accomplishments, described by the superiors or owners of the company like this: "he is such a good Manager, that once we weren't selling as much as expected, he put himself at the phone".

To my question of what was his plan to exceed their previous year's sales, he gave me an answer that left me speechless: "whip our team even harder" ...

Did they have a plan? No, it was all summed up to continue putting pressure on the team. The usual "sell, sell, sell, call, call, call!" In order to achieve this "strategy", they had a strict control over how many calls or appointments had each team member done and then, crossed the information with the number of sales that they had during that month. End of story.

This poor poor vision of people, teams and sales, looses every year, increasingly faster, efficiency and value.

The client has changed his buying methods

This is obvious and perhaps due to its obviousness, it escapes our reflection. Just think about the way we used ti buy 10 years ago and how we buy today: we search in Google for information about products and services; their specifications, user comments on them ... we've managed to get much more accurate information about our purchases or acquisitions.

increase sales

With this change, salespeople have ceased to have all the power in a sale. What will happen to them? Well, those Directors and Managers who work on the development of their salespeople in order to change their approach from "selling by pressure" (rivals point fo view: winner vs. loser) to an intelligent "win-win" approach, supported by automation, Bigdata and artificial intelligence, will be able to plan every year a healthy growth on sales.

Otherwise, whole sales teams -and thus, whole companies- run the risk of staying behind, of loosing their focus and become just takers-of-orders, a job which will also be -in a not very-distant future- left behind, due to the use of apps or smart and predictive websites. 

Therefore, Commercial Directors and Managers, in this digital world, require digital media to provide them with the necessary information to both:

  • Make better decisions
  • Better plan where to direct the efforts of their teams

Both actions will in turn benefit the entire company or institution.

Sales Strategy

A complete sales strategy must take into account or make a big part of their strategy, a digital strategy. In other words, it should consider start selling the way people are buying today.

In order to do so, you should be able to answer the following:

  • What's you sales projection for this year compared to last year's? (by month, trimester and semester)
  • Do you have a whole plan that includes specific processes and procedures as a part of a methodology in order to achieve specific goals? Are these goals measurable, clear and scalable?

If you can't give an answer to this questions, it will be very hard for you to achieve your goal, to understand where the opportunities are and what you need to do in order to achieve it.

Free Inbound Marketing Ebook

 

Subscribe Now

Additional Reading