But are you sure you've considered all the components of an effective sales strategy when establishing your annual strategy?
Does it include all the components of the "go to market" strategy for your product or service offering, meaning a coherent guideline that aligns: objectives, resources, allocated resources, and the resulting operational organization?
A reminder of the key points that ensure you have defined an efficient sales strategy and that give you every chance of achieving your objectives.
Results objectives and their monitoring indicators
Have you set performance goals (and you've done well!)? This implies monitoring and managing their achievement throughout the year to ensure you reach them. How?
By defining the associated measurement indicators, and therefore the corresponding KPIs to evaluate them: "Outputs" indicators on the expected results and "Inputs" indicators on the activities expected to achieve them.
The resources
Closely linked to the targeted customer or prospect segments, the resources dedicated to acquisition and retention are also a key element to define precisely: preferred sales channels and revenue streams expected per channel, marketing and communication resources deployed, lead flow expected to reach the level of commercial activity defined with regard to the final objectives.
Priority targets, based on potential criteria
The scope of intervention of the sales teams is a key input for reflection. Segmenting customers and prospects is a necessity. Are your customers classified according to criteria such as turnover level or margin generated? Is there an assessment of their development potential over the year?
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The level of commercial effort to be applied to each of these segments
Effort allocation then involves determining the coverage and sales pressure on these segments.
Therefore, the various types of actions to be carried out in the sales process (calls, discovery meetings, presentations, training, etc.) and the allocation of resources and sales time per action across different segments will be adjusted. Failure to define this at the strategy level means that each salesperson will decide how to allocate their efforts according to their own criteria. Are you willing to take that risk?
The optimal sales organization
Formalizing the strategy also involves making choices about sales organization: should teams be specialized in different segments, or should we rely on different types of employees depending on the stage of the sales process?
Client visits have a cost, and the time spent on pre-sales impacts commercial profitability.
This is why some companies might, for example, entrust lead detection and opportunity qualification to inside sales teams, while assigning the needs discovery phases through to contractualization to field sales representatives.
If all the points raised have been addressed when you defined YOUR sales strategy, you have laid a solid foundation and created the right conditions from the start to give yourself the best chance of success. The next step is to break down this sales strategy into operational action plans and effectively manage them to ensure that the objectives are achieved.
To stay competitive and maximize your chances of converting leads into future customers, it is important to optimize the performance of your commercial assets. Find out how by watching this webinar…
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