But are you sure that you have considered all the components of an effective marketing strategy when you set up your annual strategy?
Does it include all the components of the "go to market" of your product or service offer, i.e. a coherent guideline that aligns: the objectives, the means, the allocated resources and the resulting operational organisation?
A reminder of the key points that ensure you have defined an efficient commercial strategy and that give you every chance of achieving your objectives.
Results targets and their monitoring indicators
You have set yourself performance targets (and rightly so!). This implies monitoring and steering their achievement throughout the year, to ensure that they are met. How do you do this?
By defining the associated measurement indicators, and therefore the corresponding KPIs to assess them: "Outputs" indicators on the expected results and "Inputs" indicators on the expected activities to achieve them.
The means
Closely linked to the targeted customer or prospect segments, the resources devoted to winning and retaining customers are also a key element to be precisely defined: preferred sales channels and expected revenue flow per channel, marketing and communicationresources deployed, expected lead flow to achieve the level of sales activity defined in relation to the final objectives.
Priority targets, based on potential criteria
The scope of intervention of the sales teams is a key input for reflection. Segmentation of customers and prospects is a necessity. Are your customers classified according to criteria of turnover or margin generated? Is there an evaluation of their development potential over the year?
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The level of commercial effort to be made in each of these segments
The allocation of efforts then consists of determining the coverage and commercial pressure on these segments.
Thus, the different types of actions to be carried out in the sales process (calls, discovery visits, support visits, training visits, etc.), and the allocation of resources and sales time per action to the different segments will be adjusted. Not defining it at the strategy level means that each salesperson will decide for himself how to allocate his efforts according to his own criteria... Do you want to take this risk?
The optimal commercial organisation
The formalisation of the strategy also includes the choice of sales organisation : should teams be specialised in different segments, or should they rely on different types of staff depending on the stage of the sales process?
The customer visit has a cost, and the time spent in pre-sales impacts on commercial profitability.
This is why some companies may, for example, entrust the detection and qualification of opportunities to sedentary teams, and the phases of discovering needs up to contractualisation to a field salesperson.
If all the points raised have been addressed when you define YOUR business strategy, you have laid a sound foundation and created the right conditions at the start to give yourself the best chance of success. The next step is to translate this business strategy into operational action plans and to manage these effectively to ensure that the objectives are achieved.
To stay competitive and maximise your chances of converting leads into customers, it's important to maximise the return on your sales assets. Find out how by watching this webinar...
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