What Is a Sales Strategy? Your One-Stop Guide to Sales Success

The key to building a successful sales organization? A well thought out and developed sales strategy.

Serving as a ‘single source of truth’, your sales strategy is the foundation that guides all of your sales processes and tactics. It’s what gives you and your team the power to achieve your goals in the most efficient way possible, and helps measure your success too.

So, let’s take a look into the ins and outs of what a sales strategy is, as well as everything you need to know about building one yourself (including how sales intelligence tools can really help you out).

What is a sales strategy?

A sales strategy is defined as the processes and actions that sales teams adhere to so they can achieve their goals, (which are probably related to and ).

With a sales strategy, you can easily inform your sales team on how to position your company’s offering, reach the right prospects, convert leads, and ultimately win over new business.

But remember, it isn’t a one-and-done document that sales leaders just write, print out, and stick on the wall. Instead, it adapts with shifting market trends, company goals, and the changing needs of the organization’s talent.

Who is your sales strategy for?

There are a few different types of sales strategies, but whichever one you go for, it should serve as the compass that guides the whole Go To Market (GTM) team to success.

So, the answer to that question above = your GTM team. That includes:

• Sales development representatives (SDRs)
• Account executives (AEs)
• Sales managers
• Other sales roles

Without an effective sales strategy, SDRs, AEs, and everyone else in the sales organization can quickly get lost – and that’s no good for motivation or hitting sales quotas, is it?

Sure, it’s possible to close deals without a sales strategy. But your work would be a lot easier, organized, and successful with one.

Just look at the following insights from a Forrester survey:

These sobering stats paint a vivid picture: too often, sales reps are unprepared to meet with prospects. They might not know what the prospect needs, or how exactly they can provide the solutions. And this, my friends, leads to lost deals.

A well-developed sales strategy can prevent wasted opportunities, and provides the necessary structure, sales tactics, and tools to build success.

What you need for an effective sales strategy

Okay, so we all agree having an effective sales strategy is crucial. But what do you need in order to build one?

Just like when you’re constructing a building, you need a solid foundation if you want it to be strong, mighty and successful.

There’s no point in building a stellar sales strategy on shaky ground.

Here are the three must-haves you need in place first, if you want your strategy to flourish:

1) Driven leaders

Sales executives, with the input of sales managers, are responsible for developing impact-driven sales strategies. So, your strategy’s outcome will depend largely on the experience, vision, and management approach of these leaders.

According to the Harvard Business Review, the following traits make for the most successful leaders in sales, helping take your strategy to the next level:

• A focus on targets: The best sales leaders stay focused on targets and deadlines, and naturally encourage their teams to adopt the same mentality. They are self-disciplined and maintain a sense of urgency in their teams that gets the job DONE.
• Commanding: They establish firm leadership of their team and hold each individual to a high level of accountability.
• Make good hiring choices: They focus on hiring salespeople who can build strong relationships, are persuasive, and have the right experience.
• Strong coaches: They understand there are many different selling styles, and adapt their coaching strategy to benefit each individual.

2) Qualified sales team

Experience is only one aspect of what makes salespeople qualified to sell. Here are some of the most important traits for high-performing SDRs and AEs.

• See the big picture: In addition to focusing on targets and quotas, high-performing reps understand how they’re contributing to the company’s success.
• Self-driven: Great reps feel a strong internal drive to work hard and excel.
• Capable and compliant: Not only do great reps learn the ropes at your company fast, they also stick to the rulebook. They are team players and hold to proven processes.
• Adaptable: Successful reps are always keen to learn more and open to trying new tactics.
• Personable: They easily build and nurture relationships with prospects.

3) Value-driven sales stack

These days, there are almost as many sales tools as there are companies.

When choosing which tools are best for your sales organization, remember: solutions that enable greater efficiency, speed, and organization will offer the most value and enable you to carry out your sales strategy.

Here are a few examples of the categories of technology your sales organization should have:

• List building
• Contact data
• Prospect qualification
• Meeting facilitation/analysis (e.g. calendar scheduling, conversation intelligence)
• Sales engagement

Find more information on each of the categories in our best prospecting tools post.

How to build a sales strategy in 6 steps

Once you have the right talent and technology, you’re ready to start building out an actionable sales strategy that works to generate your sales pipeline.

You’ll want to spend some time researching sales strategy examples and browsing sales strategy templates – they can inspire your own plans and processes. But there is no substitute for a bespoke strategy tailored to your specific requirements and situation.

Here are the six main steps you’ll need to take to create a successful one of your own.

Step 1: Align on organizational goals

It’s so important to remember the processes within your sales organization need to work as part of the wider organization.

That means sales goals must reflect the company’s overall goals and objectives, and the sales strategy needs to promote the overall business strategy.

To make this happen, sales leaders should meet regularly with company executives and other stakeholders to make sure they’re up-to-date on any company changes, market trends, and shifting business needs.

From there, translate business goals into sales goals. This could look like:

• Increasing targets and quotas
• Repositioning the company’s offering in sales pitches
• Shifting from one customer persona to another

Step 2: Define your ICP

Your ideal customer profile (ICP) is who your company wants to sell its products or services to – and who your product or service works best for.

When developing your ICP, we recommend asking for input from your company executives, marketing team, R&D, and customer success specialists. All of these perspectives will help inform who exactly your sales team should target and why.

When it comes to defining your ICP, there are a few things to consider:

• Demographic information: What industry, company size, and region of operation is your ICP?
• Constraints and potential objections: What could get in the way of your deal (eg. budget)?

Current challenges and pain points: What are the main challenges that the prospect or industry needs solving? How will your product help companies overcome those challenges and provide value to your prospect?

Step 3: Train up your sales team

Even experienced salespeople need training along the way – if they want to fulfill their potential and succeed, that is. (And we think they probably do).

Having selling skills is one thing. Understanding your product, its value proposition, your total addressable market, its challenges, and what your ICP is seeking is something else entirely.

A sales playbook can help with that. As a manual of processes and best practices, it can guide your sales reps through various scenarios and stages of the sales process – whether they’re being onboarded or just need to refresh their memories..

This includes prospecting, qualifying leads, delivering a successful sales pitch, and preparing to respond to common questions or objections, as well as persuasion techniques and how to negotiate.

Here are just a few of the components in a comprehensive sales playbook:

• Onboarding and sales enablement resources
• Detailed information on buyer personas
• Rules of engagement
• Processes and expectations for records keeping and data integrity
• Pricing
• Product demo flows
• Messaging
• Responses to questions and objections

Step 4: Collaborate with marketing

When sales and marketing departments operate in silos, it makes it pretty difficult to execute the sales strategy..

That’s because sales depends on marketing to run inbound marketing, which is aimed at attracting leads who could become paying customers.

To do this, marketing must create brand awareness, attract leads, and spark user engagement so you can add them to the sales funnel and eventually convert them.

When sales and marketing work together, the outcomes of these efforts become a lot more effective than marketing just handing over leads to SDRs. All of your inbound marketing activities — like your email marketing, retargeting and PPC campaigns, organic social media, thought leadership, blogs, ebooks, webinars, and more — will be consistent and aligned with your sales strategy.

This helps make sure all marketing qualified leads reach your sales team in good shape. These leads will understand your value proposition and relevance before they even begin speaking with SDRs.

Step 5: Execute outbound marketing

Outbound marketing represents the tactics and processes sales teams use to identify prospects, pitch them the product or service, offer value, and try to generate new sales pipeline.

It’s a critical component of the sales strategy, as it’s one of the main ways your sales reps convert prospects into new customers.

Outbound marketing is made up of the following three aspects:

1. Sales prospecting

Sales prospecting is the process of identifying potential new customers or buyers who fit your ICP.

After finding them and adding them to your CRM, your objective is to nurture them until they are ready to close the deal and become paying customers.

Effective sales prospecting makes the rest of the work easier and more efficient. With better prospecting, you can dramatically increase your likelihood of meeting your quotas and achieving your goals.

For example, beyond the standard demographic criteria, you might want to focus on prospects that:

• Regularly exceed a specific volume of web traffic
• Already work with competing, or complimentary, vendors
• Operate in a specific region or country
• Are investing in new technologies or marketing channels

Identifying potential customers who fit these types of criteria will likely require some form of sales intelligence tool.

Similarweb Sales Intelligence provides visibility into the above factors (and many more) for over 100 million websites, allowing you to find your ideal prospects with much more accuracy and speed than traditional research methods allow.

2. Lead qualification

Lead qualification is the next step that sales teams take, determining whether a prospect is truly the right fit to become a long-term customer.

It’s an essential part of the sales cycle and enables your sales reps to focus their time and resources on relevant prospects while weeding out irrelevant ones.

If you’re qualifying leads, you need to be:

• Performing lead enrichment to supplement the existing information if you don’t have enough data
• Scoring leads to establish urgency
• Speaking to them on the phone to learn more about their role and intent
• Determining whether they have the authority, business need, willingness, and budget to buy your product or services

3. Consultative selling

Consultative selling is when you – as a sales rep – act as a trusted source of valuable information and actionable insights that your prospects can use to improve their business outcomes. An adviser… or business growth guru, if you will.

Showing that you want to provide value – not just close the deal – is actually one of the best ways to close the deal. It shows that you genuinely care about your prospects and solving their problems.

If you’re taking the consultative selling route, here’s what it requires:

• Gaining a deep understanding of your prospects’ needs, challenges, goals, and current context through data
• Using insights, mined from this data, to point out emerging trends, opportunities, or things to be aware of
• Developing strong connections and establishing yourself as a trusted and reliable advisor, both during and beyond the sales process
• Positioning your own company’s services or products as a valuable solution to the prospect’s needs

A modern sales tool like Similarweb Sales Intelligence can be invaluable in letting you properly understand your prospects’ business, and its current market context.

Sales Intelligence’s Insights Generator, for instance, can automate the (ahem… boring) job of finding “insight nuggets” to drop into sales emails – making the consultative selling approach much more scalable for you.

Step 6. Evaluate performance

The last step for creating a sales strategy is to track its performance – and adapt it, if needed. Using a range of sales metrics and KPIs, you can monitor what’s working and what’s not, on an individual, team or company basis.

Some of the main sales metrics and KPIs to consider, include:

• First response time
• Number of accounts contacted
• Number of accounts engaged
• Average revenue per account
• New logos acquired
• New business win rate
• Churn dollars
• Gross customer churn
• Net expansion revenue
• Revenue sold per rep

Sales strategy examples: 3 top tips from proven winners

Learning about creating a sales strategy is step one, putting it into practice is the next.

Let’s take a look at some sales strategy examples in action, with tips from sales gurus and business experts:

1) About to say “no” to a prospect? Take a pause

If you’re talking to a prospect on the phone and they ask if your product or service could do XYZ for them, responding with a flat-out “No” is likely to kill your deal. Instead, try to be accommodating.

According to bestselling author and sales strategy coach Grant Cardone, successful sales strategies enable reps to cultivate trust by being flexible to requests and challenges that arise.

In a blog post on his website, Grant writes, “You may think, ‘I don’t want to mislead the customer. I’m going to overpromise and be unable to deliver.’ There’s an art to telling a customer, ‘I’d love to make that happen for you,’ instead of, ‘that’s impossible,’ or, ‘I can’t do that.’

“The problem is, as soon as you say no, or that you cannot do something because you are ‘so honest’; you just eliminate any chance of being able to do anything for the customer.

“The next time a customer asks for the impossible, say, ‘I never say ‘no’ until I have to.’”

2) Master your pitch

Your superpower: having the ability to clearly and concisely describe what your company does, along with its value proposition in the context of your prospect’s business.

This is what will capture their attention.

According to Robert Herjavec, an entrepreneur, investor, and co-star of ABC’s Shark Tank, delivering a great pitch is all about demonstrating your expertise.

“You have 90 seconds, if you’re lucky,” Herjavec shared. “If you can’t make your point persuasively in that time, you’ve lost the chance for impact.

“Facts and figures are important, but it’s not the only criteria, you must present in a manner that generates expertise and confidence. If you’re not prepared for it, you may just miss your next big opportunity.”

3) Tell a story

Done right, storytelling is a powerful technique for captivating your prospects, triggering an emotional response, and creating more memorable interactions.

When you use stories in your sales process, you help form deeper connections with prospects which helps you fulfill your sales strategy.

According to Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Jennifer Aaker, “Research shows our brains are not hard-wired to understand logic or retain facts for very long. Our brains are wired to understand and retain stories.

“A story is a journey that moves the listener, and when the listener goes on that journey they feel different. The result is persuasion and sometimes action.”

What’s the right sales strategy for you?

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to sales strategy. When building one for your organization, you must consider your industry, solution, and value proposition, as well as the needs and challenges of your specific ICP.

It may be tempting to seek a fill-in-the-blanks sales strategy template, but the best way to create a winning sales strategy is to build one organically.

Elevate your sales success

By now, you’ll have a strong understanding of how an effective sales strategy serves as the foundation for your department’s success.

Having a comprehensive and clearly defined strategy positions everyone on your team to understand their role, improve their sales performance, and together, help the company achieve its business goals.

FAQs

What is a sales strategy?

A sales strategy is a plan to achieve a sales goal and direct the selling activities of a business.

What are the 4 sales strategies?

The four basic sales strategies salespeople use are script-based selling, needs-satisfaction selling, consultative selling, and strategic-partner selling.