How do you juggle multiple high-priority tasks across an entire sales lifecycle? A well-balanced strategy. Plan, analyze, market, and drive your sales team with this Sales Strategy deck. Segment your target customers and organize your sales team to maximize returns. And don't forget to use sales control tools to assess performance and improve progress.
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A sales mind map defines the process of how you will find, acquire, and retain then transform customers into repeat sales who refer others. (Slide 2)
Use a SWOT Analysis to determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that could benefit or impede your sales strategy. (Slide 14)
Use a customer survey to conduct post-sales surveys or questionnaires and keep up your customer relationship management. (Slide 26)
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With a strategic action plan that works for your organizational circumstances, you can prospect, qualify, and close more sales across a wide variety of channels.
Develop a solid sales concept with a well-rounded marketing mix. Manage time more efficiently and juggle multiple priorities. Improve a weak sales pipeline and identify your ideal customers, classified by order of greatest opportunity, to maximize your efforts.
A sales strategy begins with a sales mind-map. This is where you define and map out the process behind your sales strategy. To have a healthy funnel of customers, you must find, acquire, then retain them.
To find customers, research the market first. This consists of an evaluation of your product's position in the marketplace and a competitive audit of other prominent players in the current landscape.
To actually acquire customers, begin with the marketing process. Craft a brand message and determine your target audience.
After the marketing kickoff, create your sales plan and budget, and your sales control strategy.
Next comes customer data management and analysis of improvement areas. This analysis is to improve in areas where you lost sales or couldn't gain customers so you can conduct follow-ups to warm up cold leads with new tactics. You can also welcome back recurring customers to repurchase or refer you to new customers. (Slide 2)
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After the marketing kickoff, create your sales plan and budget, and your sales control strategy.
First, create a sales plan. This should cover price management (how will the product be priced?) and quantity management (how much of the product needs to be purchased from suppliers?). You will also need to determine how to distribute company resources to carry out these sales. What's the sales team's budget, how many team members are there, etc.?
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Next, determine how the effectiveness of your strategy will be measured. You can set sales goals, create a reporting process, or assign KPIs as part of sales control.
Sales channels are another indispensable part of your strategy. For instance, will you sell through a single channel or multiple channels? Will this be a pop-up shop or an online store only? Will you have a storefront or will your products be stocked by large retailers?
The organization component signifies how sales-related tasks are distributed across the company. What does the marketing team do? What about the management team? What about HR? Or the current sales team? For managers, who do they oversee?
The process component is about how customers are acquired. Begin with lead acquisition strategies, develop sales team workflow processes, and then establish prospective, current, and recurring customer management protocols — which includes aftercare for after the transaction has been completed. (Slide 3)
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The sales concept development process is useful to create an action plan for your sales and marketing will be conducted. Begin with a market strategy that assesses how much potential your product has, compares them to your competition, and defines your market position and strategy. Break this strategy up and apply it to target customer segments. Then combine your mix of products, communications, and sales strategies to formulate an action plan.
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Let's say your company sells premium quality computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. This product mix creates high potential as they form an ecosystem of products that complement one other.
For your sales concept development, conduct a competitive audit of your market landscape. There are other brands that are older and offer a wider range of personal electronic gadgets than you. But your differentiation lies in a covetable brand image that is accessible for the average consumer. In this case, the target groups may include anyone from college students to middle-aged customers. To reach them, you advertise everywhere from online to billboards. (Slide 4)
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Your Marketing Mix is made of components that need to be considered for a successful campaign. The Six P's of this mix are product, price, promotion, process, place, and people.
In our example, the product is your slate of high-tech devices, from computers to tablets to smartphones. Let's say the smartphone product is your main sales focus right now. Its main feature is the ability to install any third-party apps that can improve a user's lifestyle. You could even argue that even though it is a phone, its app-supported features are so dominant that the ability to make phone calls has been downgraded as side usage. Additionally, the smartphone is beautifully designed and adopts user-friendly interfaces. Plus the branding and packaging are sleek and desirable, which are all advantages to be capitalized on.
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Your price point is on the high end and only offers discounts on older devices when a new model comes out.
Promotions are any advertisements, sponsorships or partnerships used to funnel in awareness and sales. These could be billboard ads, TV spots, social media posts, or sponsored placements. In our example, you could even launch a "mini-store" partnership with a top retailer to set up a premium shopping experience with the sales floor exclusively dedicated to your suite of products. However, since your brand name has become akin to a lifestyle, customer referrals are your bread and butter.
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Process is the structure by which customers learn about, interact with, and ultimately purchase the product. It's essentially how you engineer your customer journey. Let's say there's enough popularity and hype built up around your company that you can hold public keynotes whenever a new model comes out. This becomes the launch point of the customer journey where they learn about the new offers, ask questions, begin to preorder, etc.
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Place is where the product can be purchased. This might be big retailers and distributors, your website, mobile shopping apps, or even your own brick-and-mortar.
People are the team that drives the sales process and customer lifecycle. For our example, you may have a great sales team at retail locations and your customer service is top-notch, which drives frequent customer referrals. (Slide 13)
You can use another tool in this deck to determine team roles across your organization's pre-sales vs post-sales strategy with an org chart visualization. (Slide 16)
A target group analysis defines who the target audience is and how best to approach and sell to them. Segment this analysis by four target profiles: behavioral, psychographic, demographic, and geographic.
For our example, let's say you want to segment your target customer by their behavioral profile. You have your brand loyalists and your late-stage adopters. Your brand loyalists pre-order every latest version of every new device, attend your keynote events, and convince five of their friends to as well. Your late-stage adopters are still very loyal, but they are usually a few generations behind, often buy second-hand, and tend to find ways to protect and keep their devices longer. While you don't always win them over with the latest chips, tech, and features, you can sell them more accessories to improve their older devices, like power chords, newer headphones, and new cases that extend battery life.
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You can also segment your target customer by demographic. You have both male and female customers, and they can range anywhere in age from 16 to 60. They typically come from North America, Europe, or the Asian Pacific. Their occupation is often in the tech industry, arts, or knowledge economy with a middle to upper-middle class income.
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To segment by psychographic profile, break down your customers by lifestyle, personality, values and interest. For instance, let's say your target customers follow the lifestyle of an urban professional. Their personality is curious with a love for new innovations and the latest gadgets. They value stability, fluidity and ease of use, and they have an interest in everything from arts and entertainment to tech. However, their unifying interest is to accomplish daily tasks easier.
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You can also sort by geographic region, country, population and climate. This is helpful when you want to assess the interests and behavior of international customers segments. (Slide 15)
Now it's time to plot out the customer life cycle. This process goes through four stages: engage, transact, fulfill, and service. In the engage stage, identify new customers, evaluate their likelihood to buy, then begin the sales process. In the transaction stage, the sales team creates offers that the customer then accepts. In the fulfill stage, the product or service is provided or delivered. And in the service stage, customers receive follow-ups across various channels. (Slide 18)
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To make the sales process easier, it's helpful to break your prospects down into the four main customer behavior types.
The programmed buyers buy as a routine purchase and receive below average service. These are the most low-maintenance customers.
Relationship buyers value the experience when they work with you, and expect you to understand the business your products or service supports like the back of your hand. The higher quality the relationship, the higher level of trust and loyalty they have.
Transaction buyers are competitive shoppers and heavily price-conscious. They want to find the best bargain and are well-versed in the product specs as they consider themselves experts due to all of their research.
Bargain hunters look for discounts and coupons just to receive a good deal even if they didn't need to buy anything to begin with. In your case, these buyers may often buy second-hand or could be swayed by discounts on a previous year's models. (Slide 20-24)
You can use a customer classification matrix to determine the characteristics, value, and opportunities and threats from your various customer types.
For instance, Customer A is your most profitable customer. They bring in high revenue and high-profit margin. Even though their purchase quantity is low, they hold a lot of leverage power so you need to service them.
Customer B, on the other hand, has an average revenue and return, they are still profitable and even have the potential to become a Customer A type over time.
Customer C provides low sales and large purchase quantities, but they don't yield as much profit and require a high processing effort. They represent tiny transactions that are necessary to your business, but don't contribute much value. This is typically where most products or customers live, so your aim should be to automate their transactions as much as possible to reduce overhead and prevent a drain on your overall resources. (Slide 24)
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The customer classification matrix can also be visualized as an ABC analysis. The y-axis represents the percentage of cumulative value that a customer type represents while the x-axis represents the proportion of customers in that segment. (Slide 27)
A portfolio analysis helps compare your sales strategy to your competition. The dark blue checkmarks represent your company, while the lighter, grayed-out checkmarks represent your competition. You can rank each feature from very poor to very good to determine areas where your sales process can improve the most. (Slide 28)
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A sales performance summary can be used for cost calculation. Use this summary to calculate the costs (and time translated into cost) associated with key tasks and activities of a sales rep.
In the case of a multi-channel sales team, each channel could require its own sales performance summary. For instance, your sales floor staff wouldn't take into account online ad spend that results in an online purchase — only the activities they conduct on the sales floor, and vice-versa for the online ads team. However, a thorough sales performance summary of all activities conducted across departments can help management and execs see which tasks and activities have the highest ROI. (Slide 30)
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Finally, the key figures in sales control bar chart compares revenue, number of offers, number of orders, and success rate. This is a tool managers can use to share with key stakeholders to measure the KPIs you determined at the top of your plan to assess if the sales strategy is a success. It's editable and will open into an excel sheet for you to enter the relative data when you right-click on it. (Slide 31)
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For more presentations to improve your sales strategy and process, take a look at our Sales Pitch Deck, Sales Funnel, and Sales Review deck.