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Did you know that 82% of B2B buyers feel that sales reps are unprepared for their first meeting? As shocking as this statistic might sound, it also explains why so many sales teams fail to hit their goals when it comes to closing deals.
Buyers these days come armed with extensive research and a ton of information at their fingertips. As a result, success in B2B sales today relies less on the number of calls you make and more on how well you can address the customer pain points.
And this is exactly why having a sales strategy is important to building a predictable revenue pipeline. A solid sales strategy helps you align your revenue teams on the same goals, focus on the right prospects, and scale your sales processes. If you don't have a well-defined sales strategy, you’re likely wasting your time and efforts and probably missing out on lucrative deals.
In this post, we’ll walk you through how to create a strong sales strategy that you can use to overcome these challenges. Here’s everything we’ll cover in this blog:
- What is a Sales Strategy?
- Why Is a Sales Strategy Important?
- Steps to Build a Sales Strategy
- 5 Ways to Make the Most of Sales Strategy
- Elevate Your Sales with MeetRecord
What Is a Sales Strategy?
Take HubSpot, for example. Their inbound sales and marketing strategy focuses on creating valuable lead magnet content pieces that attract prospects and nurture them through the sales funnel. This strategy helps HubSpot automate their prospecting process, create high-intent sales and marketing assets, and build a predictable revenue pipeline.
On the other hand, Oracle uses a high-touch, enterprise-focused B2B sales strategy instead of relying on an inbound content marketing strategy. This strategy helps them control who they want as customers and secure high-value deals.
The point is—a sales strategy is like a guardrail that you build to attract the right prospects and utilize your resources effectively.
Why Is a Sales Strategy Important?
A sales strategy gives your revenue teams a clear direction to make sure that they engage with the right prospects. Without a sales strategy in place, your revenue teams will end up shooting in the dark and risk losing out on lucrative business deals.
Try to succeed in B2B sales without a thought-out strategy can feel like everyone is wasting their energies pulling in the opposite direction.
Patrick Lencioni articulates the importance of strategic alignment beautifully in his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team:
“If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”
Going back to HubSpot’s example, their inbound strategy is a great way to simplify prospecting through content that nurtures leads. And Oracle’s high-touch approach gives the company control over who they want to do business with.
Both sales strategy examples highlight how having a plan—no matter if it’s inbound, outbound, or something entirely different—is crucial for businesses to stay focused and drive revenue.
6 Steps to Build a Sales Strategy That Works
The first step to creating a sustainable sales strategy is to have a clarity in your sales approach. In this section, we’ll walk you through six crucial steps to build a sales strategy that actually works.
1. Identify Your Target Market
To say that "understanding your target audience is important" is like saying "knowing the rules is important for winning."
Just as you wouldn't enter a game without understanding its rules, you shouldn't craft a sales strategy without a clear understanding of your ideal customer profile (ICP). Understanding your ICP is often the first step to building a good sales strategy.
Here’s how Slack—the company that Salesforce acquired for $28 billion—does it. The company focuses on medium to large enterprises seeking efficient team collaboration tools.
By identifying its target market, Slack tailors its features and messaging to meet the specific needs of medium and large businesses looking to improve communication.
So how can you identify your target market? Here are a few tips:
- Study your customer demography
- Use market research
- Monitor your social media following
- Record and analyze sales conversations
Once you have enough data, aggregate it into information that can help you pinpoint your audience’s demographics, behaviors, and pain points.
2. Set Achievable Sales Goals
Just like the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, the foundation of a good sales strategy is often built on clear, achievable goals.
One of the best approaches to help you do this is to follow the SMART framework—short for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely goals. SMART goals can help your teams spell out the exact expectations, track their progresses and milestones, set realistic timelines, and stay focused in their efforts. It also helps them avoid any frustrations and conflicts.
For example, let’s say a leading B2B SaaS business sets its quarterly targets to increase sales by 15%. If you apply the SMART framework to define why you came up with this number, it becomes a clear goal you can achieve in the set timeline. If you can’t map it to the SMART formula, it just becomes an arbitrary number.
Always break larger goals into smaller, manageable milestones so that you can track your progress and adjust your sail along the way. Applying the SMART framework can also help you readjust your goals based on your team’s performance and outcomes.
Over time, the SMART goal-setting technique can help you develop repeatable processes so that you can build a sustainable sales pipeline.
3. Refine Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
The most successful brands have USPs so clear that their customers can recall them in their sleep.
For example, here are the USPs of some of the B2B brands that we all are familiar with:
If your sales reps aren't clear on your brand or product’s USP, start there. If necessary, document the USP or make it an integral part of your sales training and onboarding process.
Without a solid understanding of the USP, your sales team can't clearly communicate your product's value in outreach and demos. Give them the clarity of your product’s USP to sharpen their sales pitch and ensure consistent messaging across all sales interactions.
4. Select the Appropriate Sales Channels
Sales channels are the ways through which you distribute your products or services to customers.
For example, Adobe leverages both direct sales and channel partnerships with resellers to reach diverse customer segments all across the globe.
If you are a B2B SaaS brand, you might want to consider the following acquisition channels to get new customers:
When you identify the right sales channels that fits your needs, you can cut marketing costs, improve your profits, and also offer your customers a seamless buying experience.
5. Create a Sales Procedure
A sales procedure is a structured series of steps that a sales team follows to convert prospects into customers.
Unlike a sales channel—which deals with the external means of reaching customers—a sales procedure focuses on setting up internal steps and workflows for selling. It’s important because it helps you clearly define the steps and activities that your sales team need to follow from the start to finish.
Take Zoom, for example. The company’s sales procedure involves stages like initial contact (either inbound or outbound), running product demos, and handling contract negotiations.
Here’s how you can create a sales procedure for your business:
- Define key activities, such as lead qualification and follow-up calls.
- Establish metrics to measure progress.
- Train your team to stick to the process.
- Review and refine the procedure to adapt to changes.
6. Measure and Analyze Your Results
Tracking performance is key to refining your sales strategy. Use KPIs like revenue, conversion rates, and deal size to measure success.
For instance, LinkedIn Sales Navigator relies on in-depth analytics to fine-tune sales tactics and boost outcomes.
In business—if you are not tracking something, you are likely not improving it.
Regularly monitoring data and performance can help you figure out inefficiencies in your processes, double down on strong areas, and continuously optimize your sales strategy for better results.
Reviewing is a data-driven approach to ensure your team can identify trends, adjust their sales approach, and is on course to meet the desired goals.
5 Ways to Make the Most of Sales Strategy
Knowing how to build a sales strategy is just the starting point—true success comes from putting in the work to execute it. A well-planned strategy is meaningless without action.
Here are five actionable ways you, as a sales leader, can implement a sales strategy to consistently deliver desired results:
1. Analyze Customer Interactions
If you are not regularly analyzing customer interactions, you're missing out on valuable insights that can fine-tune your sales approach.
Revenue leaders in brands such as Hive regularly review customer conversations to gain a deep understanding of their customers’ challenges and refine their sales tactics accordingly.
The result? They have improved cross-functional team collaboration and sped up their implementation time by an impressive 41%.
When you make it a habit to glean insights that are hidden in everyday customer interactions, you will start getting a high-level as well as granular understanding of your target audiences.
It's a practical step that will help you improve your sales approach and get better outcomes.
2. Refine Target Profiles with Data
Identifying your target buyers is a great start to building a sales strategy, but you need to take it further by refining your buyer profiles. Dive deep into customer behavior and preferences to segment your audience more precisely.
For example, you can use data to figure out that mid-market companies have the most pressing needs for your product. Or, you might conclude that they prefer booking a demo as an option more than a self-service free trial experience.
And you can use these insights to come up with hyper-focused account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns to close high-ticket deals in a short time.
When you are building a sales strategy, it’s important to understand which ICPs gravitate toward your solution the most so that you can identify adjacent use cases and potential new markets for your products or services.
3. Train Teams to Leverage Prospect Feedback
The secret to success in sales is to be agile and responsive to customer needs.
Train your revenue teams, including marketing and customer success, to leverage real-time feedback from recorded calls.
Here’s an example from Omneky, a San Francisco-based startup that uses AI to generate social media ads. The company records all customer calls and uses it to automate the coaching process for their new sales recruits.
And the results are impressive—Omneky has improved the sales reps’ ramp-up by 2x.
New or old, encourage your reps to analyze feedback for patterns and adjust their sales approach accordingly. This might involve tweaking their cold email pitches, documenting a list of arguments to counter most common sales objections, or pulling in a product champion for high-stake sales discussions.
Training your reps to integrate prospect feedback into their daily routines can help them improve their sales performance and lead to more fulfilling outcomes.
4. Fine-Tune Pitches Using Analytics
One of Alex Harmozi’s SaaS businesses, GymLaunch, uses MeetRecord to enforce its revenue teams to stick to process standards and keep up with timelines. The teams drew insights from over 85,000 customer calls to develop a sales pitch that helped them shorten the sales cycle by up to 31%.
This is an example that underscores the value of regularly using conversation analytics to spot trends and best practices—so that you can fine-tune an irresistible sales pitch that works every time.
Monitoring the conversation analytics to refine your pitch is like running an A/B test experiment. You are testing between pitches that resonate best with prospects. Making regular adjustments based on these insights helsp your sales team stay sharp and improve sales conversions.
5. Regularly Monitor and Adjust Metrics
This process, a repeat of what we covered earlier, involves tracking metrics like conversion rates and deal size to pinpoint areas for improvement.
Regularly monitoring and adjusting key metrics is the iterative process to keep improving your sales strategy based on market conditions, competitive landscape, or funding divestments.
Continuous review helps you stay aligned with your goals and adapt to market shifts, ensuring your strategy remains effective and responsive.
Ready to Build a Sales Strategy That Lasts?
A well-planned sales strategy gives you a competitive edge and a roadmap for success. You just have to keep at it and make adjustments when needed.
It all begins when you start to understand your target market, set clear goals, and leverage data-driven insights. But remember, a strategy is only as good as its execution. To make the most of a sales strategy, you must own the implementation and see it to fruition.
Stay flexible, monitor your progress, and be ready to tweak your approach as needed. With the right mindset and execution, your sales strategy will help you build a predictable revenue pipeline and grow alongside your business.
Ready to build a sales strategy that works for you? Book a demo today with MeetRecord to take your sales performance to the next level.
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