5 Types of Sales Strategies That Will Give You the Edge

Without a strategy, you won’t unlock your true sales potential.

It’s not like you’d go build a house without blueprints, and you wouldn’t try and make crème brûlée without a recipe.

The same goes for sales. Even if you have years of experience, the right sales strategy helps you secure more wins with less stress, from sales prospecting to customer retention.

In this article, we’ll cover the five main types of sales strategies, their benefits, and some extra top tips to help make any sales strategy you choose a success.

This guide is comprehensive, so if you’re looking to jump straight into the strategies, skip ahead using the table of contents.

What is a sales strategy?

A sales strategy is a set of processes and tactics a sales organization uses to achieve its goals.

When your sales strategy is aligned and agile, all the members of your team are positioning your company in the same way. A successful sales strategy evolves as your company’s goals shift, the market moves, and new needs arise.

Think of it as a compass for your team that helps everyone work together to efficiently reach the right prospects, convert leads, and add more logos to your book of business.

5 key benefits of an effective sales strategy

1) A sales strategy will define your ICP

Selling without knowing your ideal customer can be like playing heavy metal at a wedding where all the guests are hip hop fans. You need to know your audience, or in this case, your customer.

Your sales strategy will help you to define your ideal customer profile (ICP), or who your sales reps should target when identifying prospects or pursuing inbound leads.

Defining the attributes of your ICP will encourage alignment on your key target audiences – not only between your sales leadership and sales team, but the rest of the organization, too.

When you go after the right customers, you boost your chances of:

• Long-term retention
• High customer satisfaction
• Better company reputation

What’s not to love? You also empower sales reps to gain a deeper understanding of who their prospects are, what challenges they face, and how to offer value, making for a winning sales pitch we’d say.

Anyway, here’s an idea of what your ICP should cover:

First up, the standard demographic information, like:

• Industry
• Company size
• Region of operation

Some sales teams stop there, but we strongly recommend getting more specific. The more granular you get when defining your ICP, the easier it will be to figure out who is truly a good prospect and who isn’t – meaning less time wasted.

Here are some additional criteria you could include:

• Current tech stack
• Monthly/annual revenue
• Volume of sales/shipments (if relevant)
• Challenges/pain points

You’ll also want to get an idea of a prospect’s constraints on budget and timeline. For example, a company might meet all of your criteria, but isn’t ready to make a deal or doesn’t have enough budget for your product or service. Because, ultimately, they don’t fit your ICP.

2) A sales strategy offers actionable guidance

However many types of sales strategies you test out, your sales playbook will provide helpful direction to your reps.

Eh, a sales playbook?

So, a sales playbook translates your sales strategy into actionable steps on how to move prospects through the cycle, plus tips (like talking points), and guidance (like how to give a product demo) on how to build trust.

This is helpful for alignment between the team, but also onboarding.

3) A sales strategy synchronizes your team

A well-put-together sales strategy lends your sales organization a common language with which to articulate and pursue your goals.

Instead of just telling reps to get out there and reach their quotas, a sales strategy offers a framework to ensure each rep retains their style while sticking to the same guiding principles and processes.

Without it, you’ll probably have a lot of reps “going rogue.” Maybe they leave out an essential part of your messaging that would have otherwise motivated a prospect to move forward. Or maybe they try less-effective tactics which can waste your company’s and your prospects’ time, or worse: completely jeopardize a deal.

Use your solid sales strategy as your anchor. ​​

4) A sales strategy drives efficiency

This benefit goes hand-in-hand with standardization. Gone are the days of ad-hoc demands as you make your way through a deal. With a sales strategy, you enable your reps to work more efficiently and focus their time and energy where it will make the biggest impact.

Once you have a clear sense of who your ICP is and a comprehensive sales playbook with standardized processes, reps can focus on doing only what works.

5) A sales strategy improves onboarding

It’s hard to train a new hire to do something you only learned through experience or intuition.

Without a solid sales strategy, onboarding new reps can be a murky and frustrating process for both sides. You lack the means to explain how and why you do the things you do, and the new rep lacks the framework to contextualize new information.

But when your sales strategy is front and center, onboarding new reps is far easier. The strategy – and everything it entails – becomes the thing to master.

What are the 5 main types of sales strategies?

There are five primary types of selling strategies to know:

Let’s take a closer look at each.

1) Value-based selling

While other sales strategies focus on what the product is, value-based selling zooms in on how the product supports an individual prospect’s unique needs.

Every company is different. Even if we have two very similar companies operating in the same industry and in the same region, they may have completely different approaches to their market and the challenges they face. This means different cost structures, different pricing models, different types of value… you get the jist.

In value-based selling, you must do your homework and gain an intimate understanding of your prospect’s market, challenges, and business strategy. Without this knowledge, it’s impossible to hit the right nerve and offer the most relevant value proposition for your prospect to trust.

One of the main benefits of value-based selling is that it appeals to prospects’ desires to quickly understand a product’s value. Getting down to the nitty-gritty of the question “but what is this going to do for me?”. The other is that it creates a sense of personalization, which is – quite frankly – essential to any customer experience.

By setting the tone during the sales cycle, you’ll be able to show your prospects that as long as they’re your customer, they can count on you to get continual value that’s tailored to them.

2) Consultative selling

One of the most effective types of selling strategies today is consultative selling, where reps position themselves as a trusted and credible source of information that prospects can use to improve business outcomes.

As the name suggests, consultative selling requires reps to adopt a consulting role, where their communication with a prospect goes beyond the product or service they’re selling, to offer further valuable information to help grow their business.

If a sales rep doesn’t actually have experience or expertise working in the given field, they’re gonna have to get on with some comprehensive research, so they really know what they’re talking about.

Doing this over time proves four things to prospects:

1. You fully understand their challenges and pain points.
2. You’re keeping a close eye on what competitors and leaders are doing.
3. Your prospects can turn to you for information or advice.
4. Buying your product or services will allow prospects to access even greater support.

Consider the following research:

These days, everyone is trying to sell something. By acting as a credible consultant instead of ‘just another salesperson’, you stand out. You form authentic connections with prospects as you show a genuine care for them and their business, beyond winning that deal and getting that commission. That’s pretty hard to turn down, right?

3) SPIN selling

SPIN selling is a type of sales strategy that focuses on forming strong emotional bonds between reps and prospects through engaging dialogue.

On top of asking lots of questions and learning first-hand what the prospect needs, one of the goals of SPIN is to create a high exit hurdle from the sales process.

So, what does SPIN actually stand for and how is it relevant to your sales strategy?

• Situation: Ask questions to get a vivid idea of the prospect’s situation and conditions.
• Problem: Focus on learning about the unique challenges and pain points the prospect faces so you can adapt your value proposition to match (and become un-ignorable).
• Implication: Identify the implications of what these challenges mean to your prospect, then present yourself as an ideal way to resolve them.
• Need-payoff: Quantify the value your product or service would provide to the prospect.

The benefit of SPIN selling is that, with some probing questions, you foster deeper engagement with the prospect, and learn about their challenges in their own words. Hearing their unique perspective is not only enlightening, but can help you with brand messaging and targeting similar companies, too.

4) Solution selling

Solution selling is a sales strategy where the salesperson helps a prospect identify their needs, then recommends the right products and services that will help them get there.

A lot of the time, the sales rep looks for an opportunity to identify a problem that the prospect isn’t even aware they’re facing – not to mention what it’s costing them, how urgently they should attend to it, and what the right solution looks like. Hint: it might just be your product.

Solution selling works best when your solution either:

• Addresses unique/niche problems
• Addresses problems that other competitors don’t account for

If you adopt solution selling as your sales strategy, then you’ve got the important role to understand and react to your prospect’s situation. And what does that make you? A valuable and trustworthy resource – almost indispensable, some would say.

That’s because – after identifying the prospect’s pain point – your all-round solution includes far more than just your product. Think about planning, consultations, recommendations for use, and regular training that can accompany the sales. You know, the complete package, extending beyond just the product itself.

Ultimately, winning a deal doesn’t come down to just the product; it comes from the value that comes with it.

5) Challenger selling

The challenge sales strategy originates from Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon’s book, The Challenger Sale, based on a study of 1,000 sales managers across various industries.

It’s similar to the solution selling strategy, but focuses less on solving problems and more on finding opportunities to open up a new business model approach for the prospect.

In other words, the sales rep attempts to “challenge” the prospect’s business model, highlighting where the offered product or service could create new – or further – value.

By getting the prospect to rethink their preconceived notions of how things should work, you create a gap they need to fill.

To do this, you need to focus your questions to find out exactly how the prospect currently does business, along with the challenges that come with it. Once you’ve got that solid understanding, it’s time to propose an alternative way of doing things that will allow the company to increase its competitiveness or improve how they operate.

What kind of product does this work for? Well, because this method involves the prospect rethinking core aspects of their business model, it works best when the product or service you’re offering has something different and never seen before.

Evaluating your selling strategies

The more you hear about new types of sales strategies and methods, the more you might consider switching to a new one. But the decision of switching should be made based on performance data and quantifiable results – not on a whim.

The only way to understand which sales strategies work for your business (and which don’t) is by monitoring KPIs. Find out the top sales metrics to stay on top of.

Strengthen that strategy with Similarweb Sales Intelligence

Whatever sales strategy you opt for, you’re going to want to grab – and keep – your prospect’s attention and interest. An easy way to do that?

Relevant insights and data that will help them build and grow their business.

Similarweb Sales Intelligence is the home to just that, helping you to sell smarter. Our all-in-one platform has what it takes to help you close that deal, with features including:

• Lead Generator: Use this to search for leads within our database of over 100m companies, so you can create a list of your ideal prospects (and save yourself a lot of time).
• Contacts: Oh, not only do we make your prospecting easy by generating a list of ideal leads, we also give you their contact information to make that bit easy for you too.
• Insights Generator: Here’s one that will take your outreach to the next level, offering up insight on your prospect’s pain points and your areas of opportunity.
• Account Review: You get full insight into each account you’re working on (or wanting to work on), including performance and technologies.
• Sales Signals: This one’s a good one – with Sales Signals, you can spot upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and reduce churn with account alerts.

Book a demo today to find out how Similarweb Sales Intelligence will help you smash your sales quota.