Create a sales strategy for your business

Getting your sales right is vital to the success of your business. You need to develop a sales strategy to ensure that you are getting everything out of your sales team. This guide will show you how to do that.

• Why you need a sales strategy
• The main elements
• Communicating the strategy
• Monitoring the strategy

Why you need a sales strategy

The strategy gives your business a consistency amongst your sales force and helps with customer retention, increased market share, more accurate forecasting and improved morale. It allows your sales team to know precisely what its aims are, and pushes you to make objectives focused. It gives structure to your future plans and allows you to assess your competition. In creating it, any potential problems are highlighted and your future revenue streams are clearly mapped out. It also allows you to measure performance against targets further down the line.

• Helps with customer retention, market share, forecasting and morale
• Gives clarity to you, the business's plans and the sales team
• Highlights problems and competitors and maps out revenue streams
• Allows you to measure performance against targets

The main elements

The strategy sets out clear sales targets and in which areas - core revenues/secondary revenues - they will come in. It specifies how you intend to sell your product/service, attract repeat customers and meet sales goals. You should set targets at both team and individual levels. It also sets out how you intend to sell and at what price. It analyses the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.

• Set out clear sales targets and how you intend to sell your product/service, at both team and individual levels
• Explain how you intend to sell and pricing
• Analyse competitors

Communicating the strategy

Targets work best when they are quantifiable and measureable - so it's easy to know if they've been achieved or not. You need to communicate the strategy internally and ensure that the whole of your company understands what it is and how it fits in with the rest of the business.

• Make targets quantifiable
• Communicate strategy to the whole business

Monitoring the strategy

Regarding your sales team, you should be prepared to listen to their feedback. You should also inform them how often you will review their sales performances. You can monitor their progress by holding regular performance appraisals. Use key performance indicators too. Software packages are available to help you track sales opportunities from leads to completion.

• Listen to feedback
• Assess performance regularly - try using meetings, KPIs and software packages

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