In the current economic climate a lot of small businesses & start-ups are dying, but yours doesn't have to.
Many of my clients approach me feeling discouraged and frustrated, believing that they have exhausted all options to boost their revenue growth.
The market for any product these days is insanely competitive, so you have no choice but to implement effective sales strategies to give you an edge, if you don't your competition will!
What Are Sales Strategies?
Sales strategies are the carefully planned long term approaches used by businesses to effectively acquire, retain, and grow their customer base. These strategies encompass a range of activities, but are always related the goals set out by wider business strategy.
Successful sales strategies aim to maximise revenue, profitability, and customer satisfaction while adapting to changing market conditions and customer preferences.
The Difference Between Sales Strategies & Tactics
In short, sales strategy provides the overarching plan and direction for sales efforts, focusing on long-term objectives and high-level decisions, while sales tactics involve the specific actions and techniques employed on a daily or short-term basis to implement the strategy and achieve immediate sales goals.
The below 7 solutions feature a mixture of both sales strategies and sales tactics, while also aligning with potential business goals you might have.
1. Upgrade Prospecting With An Ideal Customer Profile
2. Increase Inbound Sales By Leveraging Social Selling
3. Maximise Average Deal Values with Upselling & Cross-Selling
4. Unlock Repeat Business With Exceptional Customer Service
5. Warm Up Cold Leads With Email Marketing Campaigns
6. Grow Your Audience With Strategic Partnerships
7. Analyse & Optimise With Simple (Often Free) Dashboards
How To Prioritise Sales Strategies
1. Upgrade Prospecting With An Ideal Customer Profile
To increase revenue, it's important to clearly identify and understand your target audience. By defining your ideal customer profile, you can tailor your sales efforts to meet their needs and preferences.
- Have a close look at the people who have already purchased from you and rank them, think about what makes the best ones different?.
- Call your customers and ask them why they used your company, most people are happy to tell you, pay special attention to what they were trying to solve so you can identify common pain points.
- Conduct market research to assess the viability of new products and/or services, including basic competitor analysis so you know how your offering compares.
Build an ideal customer profile using the above information and what they are trying to solve with your products/services, understand who they are (demographics, etc), where you can reach them (phone, socials, email, etc) and how you can interest more of them (solving their pain).
From here you can develop a better approach to prospecting as well as a customer centric sales process that is much more likely to convert your prospects into new customers.
2. Increase Inbound Sales By Leveraging Social Selling
In an increasingly digital world, social media platforms offer immense opportunities to reach a wider audience and increase revenue.
Developing a strong social media presence by creating engaging content, sharing industry insights, and promoting your products or services should be an easy win, this is your opportunity to display your expertise to the entire world.
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Create a presence where your ideal customers are likely to be, such as; Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, or X(Twitter).
- Develop an audience by interacting with your industry as a whole, not only potential customers, but partners and competitors (play nice-ish).
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Take the opportunity to partner with other companies in your space, by including them in your strategy you can share your audiences with each other, more on this one later!
But have got to play if you want to win, social media is not optional anymore, arguably it hasn't been for a very long time. If you aren’t making yourself available in the places where you’re being looked for, you simply won’t be found.
3. Maximise Average Deal Values With Upselling & Cross-Selling
Increasing revenue doesn't always mean acquiring new customers. Upselling and cross-selling techniques can be highly effective in maximising the value of existing customers.
This starts by listening to your customers during the sales process, and I mean active listening, part of a topic that we will cover in greater detail in a future post.
- Identify the need for complementary products/services in your sales calls and strategically offer them to customers during the buying process.
- By showcasing the pain you can solve and the additional value they can gain, you can increase average order values, boost revenue; and gain happy, fulfilled, repeat customers!
- To get started, always offer at least one additional product/service in every sales cycle, don’t assume that your customers are aware that you solve more than the initial problem they came to you for, this will help form a core habit around a customer centric sales style.
The consequences of not doing this are doubled. Because if a more complete offering is made by a competitor, you might not even win on the core product/service offering.
4. Unlock Repeat Business With Exceptional Customer Service
It seems like I’m stating the obvious, but ask yourself honestly, what intentional and repeatable steps do you take to deliver consistently exceptional customer service?
Don’t be fooled into thinking that a focus on customer service is just about reputation or a waste of time, done correctly you’ll build long-term relationships and ultimately increase revenue.
You can ensure that you provide excellent customer service with some fairly basic measures:
- Provide training for your sales team that focuses on: addressing customer needs (active listening), resolving issues promptly (service level agreements), and exceeding expectations (winning hearts and minds).
- Make high levels of customer service standard within a customer centric sales process this makes it easy for your team to look after your customers, and get rewarded for it (closing deals).
- Review, review, review! Make sure you get customer feedback whether the interaction was good, bad or unremarkable.
By providing a memorable experience, you can foster customer loyalty, encourage repeat purchases, and benefit from positive word-of-mouth referrals.
5. Utilise Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing remains one of the most effective lead generation strategies for small businesses. Build an email list of prospects that fit your ideal customer profile(s) and loyal customers. Regularly engage with them through targeted campaigns.
You might gain these prospects through your social strategy, or they might just be people you only just missed out on working with in the past.
- Provide valuable content such as; how-to-guides, blogs, reviews on relevant products, opinions on industry trends, case studies and more.
- Exclusive offers that fit their customer profile, and personalised recommendations to drive conversions and increase revenue.
- Remember to optimise your emails for mobile devices to ensure maximum reach and engagement.
With tools like Apollo.io there has never been a better time to easily create large scale nurturing campaigns with automation, tracking and built in dashboards.
Important: Ensure you obtain proper consent before emailing your prospects to avoid potentially violating the law in your country, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union.
6. Grow Your Audience With Strategic Partnerships
Furthering my point about partnering with other companies in your space, forming strategic partnerships with complementary businesses can significantly boost your reach and revenue.
- Identify non-competing companies that share your target audience and explore opportunities for collaboration. These could simply be companies that supply products you sell, or tools that you implement with your services.
- The best partnerships are ones where working together can provide a solution that is highly sought after but is not currently solved by anyone else, this means both companies may gain a new audience that neither would be able to access separately.
- By cross-promoting each other's products or services, you can tap into a wider customer base, increase brand visibility, and ultimately drive more sales.
So seize the opportunity! If you haven't formed any partnerships yet, now is the perfect time to start seeking them out. The benefits far outweigh any potential drawbacks, and there is so much to gain. Don't hesitate to explore the possibilities and unlock new avenues for growth and success.
7. Analyse & Optimise With Simple (Often Free) Dashboards
To ensure the effectiveness of your sales strategies, it's essential to continuously analyse and optimise your efforts.
You should utilise easy to implement analytics tools such as the ones found built into HubSpot, to measure key performance indicators, including but not limited to the following:
- Conversion rates
- Customer Acquisition Costs to Lifetime Value ratio
- Average deal/contract values
- Sales team activity totals
- Customer service scores (NPS, etc)
Identify areas for improvement, experiment with different approaches, and refine your strategies with data-driven insights.
This ongoing process of optimisation will give you the competitive edge and fuel continuous revenue growth.
How to Prioritise Sales Strategies
So where should you start? Have a close look at your business and think about how well you are doing in each of the above strategies right now, grade them according to the following:
Simply focus on improving the weakest ones first for the biggest payoff, of course there are some dependencies, a lot of this will be hard to do without a Ideal Customer Profile, and you're unlikely to get much traction from partnerships if you haven't built your own individual social following.
When you implement these proven sales strategies & tactics, you will make a measurable and profound impact on your revenue growth.
if you’re not sure how to assess these areas of your sales strategy (or any other) you can book a free meeting with me on my booking page.
Don't miss out when I publish my next article, "Perfecting Prospecting: Effective Techniques & Sales Prospecting Tools" Subscribe now and stay ahead of the game!
