Sales Strategy Guide: 5 Steps to More Efficient Selling

A sales leader will often begin the year with a target of how much revenue to bring in. This will help determine what customers you need to target and how many deals you need to close in the coming year.

Let’s imagine your target is $1 million in revenue. Now you’ll need to determine the right target customer and selling channel in order to meet your goal.

First, determine your target customer based on how you slice and dice the market and what will likely get you to your revenue goal. As we noted above, you can focus on company size, region, industry, or the product you’re selling.

Second, conduct competitor research and learn more about the customer’s operating methods (online and via sources in your network) to determine how your target customer likes to buy. This will determine the sales channel you focus on.

For example, say you’re selling accounting software to enterprise business customers and you see a big opportunity among financial services firms. You know from experience that these buyers like to buy one-on-one from experts who understand the nuances of their regulatory environment. Ding-ding-ding! Train your sellers to speak the language of this specific industry and move forward with direct sales.

At this point, identify the steps your sales team can follow to complete a sale — the sales process — with the type of customer and channel you’ve chosen. Think of it as a roadmap with checkpoints between first customer contact and close, with guidance on how to move from one checkpoint to another.

The stages you choose and the milestones for each one will depend on the customer and channel. Here’s an example of a sales process that might fit our target customer (financial services) and channel (direct sales):

1. Prospect: Find new leads via online sources or your professional network.
2. Qualify: Determine whether your product is a good fit for a prospect by calling bank managers.
3. Research: Learn more about your prospect via online sources and industry research.
4. Pitch: Connect with your prospect again to demonstrate the value of your offering.
5. Overcome objections: Answer questions and allay concerns. Consider showing a demo to demonstrate how your product will help.
6. Close: Negotiate terms and sign the deal.
7. Nurture and continue to sell: Focus on post-sales activities, such customer adoption and success, renewals, and marketing partnerships like events and referrals.

Now that you’ve defined the stages in your sales process, fill your sales pipeline with prospects. Determine how many you need based on likely deal size for the customer types you’re targeting and past conversion rates. Then, use marketing channels and network outreach to connect with them.

In our example, you know you need to hit a $1 million revenue target. If the enterprise tier of your accounting software sells for $10,000 a year, you’ll need to close 100 deals to hit your goal. You know that last year’s conversation rate for enterprise prospects was 30%, which means your team probably needs about 330 prospects in your pipeline.

You also know that many of the decision-makers for big banks attend finance conferences, so you register several of your reps for the major ones in your region to make connections and identify prospects.

Prospects coming in? You’re ready to sell! (Wait, how do I sell? Good question. Read our definitive guide.)

As you roll out the rest of your sales strategy, your team will dive into selling, going from cold leads to warm opportunities to red-hot deals. At the same time, your business and your market will experience disruption and change. So it’s critical to continually monitor the health of your pipeline, and if things aren’t going as expected, or a change throws a wrench into your selling machine, then act to adjust.

Let’s say many of your prospects are suffering from tightened budgets. Instead of pushing your enterprise software, you pivot from fewer, high-value deals to more mid-value deals. How? You start recommending a lower-cost, midrange tier of your accounting software that can be easily upgraded when the time and budget is right.

Building and executing a sales strategy starts with a single source of truth, a CRM, where you can segment your customers and channels and map specific actions to your sales process. Additional tools can be combined with a CRM to boost productivity and efficiency, from reports and dashboards to forecasting tools and revenue management software.

Here are a few of the most important tools to consider:

A CRM gives you a complete view of all your prospects and customers. This visibility is critical for tracking your leads from click to close, monitoring what is and isn’t working, and making smarter decisions about where to invest.

Reports and dashboards provide a real-time picture of your business revenue at a glance. This helps sales leaders continually adjust their sales strategy to stay on target, and dig deeper into detailed reports that can show insights at the level of the individual deal or seller.

Remember the defined sales process you created earlier in your strategy? Bring in pipeline and forecasting technology to help you stay up to speed on your team’s progress. Get a handle on where every deal sits in the pipeline and roll those numbers up to create accurate sales forecasts. Then, make cost-effective decisions about where to focus your resources.

A revenue management tool can help you connect customer touchpoints — like quoting, selling, and billing — that used to be locked away in different systems. When you connect the flow of customer data from one touchpoint to the next, you can make it easier and faster for customers to buy.

Creating a sales strategy is like building a car while driving it. You’re asked to hit your numbers while also building the machinery beneath. When in doubt, come back to the basics. According to Tiffani Bova, Global Growth Evangelist at Salesforce, the basics come down to these questions: Who is your customer? What is your product? And how does your customer like to buy? When you can answer these, you know you're on the right track.