But are you sure you've taken all the components of an effective sales strategy into account when you draw up your annual strategy?
Does it include all the "go to market" components of your product or service offering, i.e. a coherent guideline that aligns objectives, means, allocated resources and the resulting operational organization?
A reminder of the key points that will ensure you have defined an efficient sales strategy and give you every chance of achieving your objectives.
Results targets and monitoring indicators
You've set yourself performance targets (and rightly so!). This means you need to monitor and control their achievement throughout the year, to make sure you reach them. How can you do this?
By defining the associated measurement indicators, and therefore the corresponding KPIs for evaluating them: "Outputs" indicators for the expected results, and "Inputs" indicators for the activities required to achieve them.
Resources
Closely linked to the customer or prospect segments targeted, the resources devoted to winning over and retaining customers are also a key element to be precisely defined: preferred sales channels and expected revenue flow per channel, marketing and communication resources 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 sales team's scope of intervention is a key input. Segmenting your customers and prospects is a must. Are your customers classified according to sales or margin criteria? Is there an assessment of their development potential over the year?
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The level of sales effort required for each of these segments
Efforts are then allocated by determining the coverage and sales pressure on these segments.
In this way, the different types of action to be taken in the sales process (calls, discovery visits, support visits, training visits...), and the allocation of resources and sales time per action to the different segments will be adjusted. Not defining it at strategy level means that each sales rep will decide how to allocate his or her efforts according to his or her own criteria... Are you willing to take that risk?
Optimal sales organization
The formalization of strategy also includes sales organization choices : should teams specialize in different segments, or rather rely on different types of collaborators depending on the stage of the sales process?
Customer visits cost money, and time spent in pre-sales has an impact on sales profitability.
This is why some companies, for example, entrust the detection and qualification of opportunities to sedentary teams, and the discovery of needs through to contractualization to a field salesperson.
If all the points raised have been addressed when you define YOUR sales strategy, you've laid a sound foundation and created the right conditions at the outset to give yourself the best chance of success. The next step is to translate this sales strategy into operational action plans, and to manage these effectively to ensure that objectives are met.
To stay competitive and maximize your chances of converting leads into future customers, it's important to optimize the return on your sales assets. Find out how in this webinar...
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