What Is a Sales Strategy?

Sales Strategy Definition and Types

Sales strategy

An approach to selling that allows the sales force to position the company and its product(s)
to target customers in a meaningful, differentiated way.

Sales strategies can include, but are not limited to: a detailed plan of best practices and
processes set out by management, from how to research and qualify prospects, cold calling,
pitching, and the sales presentation, to closing techniques and account management policy.

There are two primary types of sales strategies: inbound and outbound. In outbound sales, the
legacy system of most sales teams, companies base their sales strategy on seller actions, they
rely on manually entered data to monitor the sales pipeline and coach their salespeople, and
they run sales and marketing independently, creating a disjointed experience for buyers.

In inbound sales, the modern methodology for sales teams, companies base their sales
process on buyer actions, they automatically capture seller and buyer data to monitor the
pipeline and coach salespeople, and they align sales and marketing, creating a seamless
experience for buyers.
Traditionally, buyers suffered through evaluating a product and deciding whether to buy it
with only information provided to them by the seller. Today, all of the information needed to
evaluate a product is available online and buyers are no longer dependent on the seller.

In fact, before a seller even contacts a

buyer, he or she is already 57% of the way
through the sales process.
CEB Global
If todays sales teams dont align themselves with the modern buyers process and fail to add
value beyond the information already available to the buyer, he or she has no reason to
engage with a sales team.

Inbound sales helps buyers at each stage of the buyer process: awareness, consideration, and
decision. Inbound sales teams help the buyer become aware of potential problems or
opportunities, discover strategies to solve the buyers problems, evaluate whether the
salesperson can help the buyer with the problem, and then purchase the solution. They are
helpful and trustworthy, creating partnerships rather than power struggles.

Sales Strategy Plan

The Sales Planning Process

Every sales team should have a sales strategy plan outlining their goals, best practices, and
processes designed to align the team and create consistency. These are the essential
components of a sales plan:

Organizational goals

Each goal should be specific and measurable. For example, to sell 150% of the projected
sales quota in Q2.

Customer profile and product offering

This entails a detailed profile of the target customer including the company size,
psychographics, and the buying process. The product offering should outline the product
benefits and features, with emphasis on those that solve the target customers pain-points.

Hiring, onboarding, and compensation

Developing a list of criteria and attributes for sales managers to screen for when interviewing
candidations is essential to recruiting and retaining top talent. The next step is to develop a
training and onboarding program that will prepare them to start selling effectively and
efficiently, followed by a compensation and rewards plan that will motivate them to continue
performing.
Demand generation

This section should include a detailed plan for how to target potential customers in order to
increase awareness of your offering. For example, using paid social acquisition channels,
creating e-books and hosting webinars, hosting events, etc.

Performance and measurement procedures

Time to track! Once the infrastructure is set up, we must create a procedure for tracking
performance on the individual, team, and company levels. This measurement can take the
form of quarterly KPIs, weekly dashboards, monthly reviews, or some combination of all
three. This section should also highlight the specific metrics that the team should focus on.

Sales activities

This should span everything from the sales presentation to closing techniques.

Prospect qualification: Outline what criteria a prospect meets in order to qualify

them as a high-probability potential customer. This should be based on a prospects
engagement history and demographics.

Sales presentation: This should entail an overall outline of the connect stage for each
salesperson, whether its a discovery call or a final sales pitch. Inbound sales teams
should lead with a tailored message to the buyer from their specific context or point-
of-view rather than a generic elevator pitch.

Objections: What are the biggest challenges to purchase? Sales teams should be
equipped with responses, resources, and educational material to handle any common
objections that a prospect may address.

Closing techniques Keeping a list of proven, go-to closing techniques will help
salespeople routinely win deals. Such techniques can include the now or never close,
If you commit now, I can get you a 20% discount, or the question close, In your
opinion, does what I am offering solve your problem?

Timeline: What is the typical timeline of your sales process from first contact to
close? This section should guide sales teams to better understand the length of each
stage in the sales process.
 Start building your sales strategy today.

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Sales Strategy Examples

From Successful Sales Teams

In this section, weve analyzed three incredibly high-performing sales teams and how they
achieved success due to their unique sales strategies.

Case Study 1
Founded in 2006, HubSpot has since grown to over 15,000 customers and over $100 million
in annual revenue in just nine years. With an IPO in 2014, HubSpot is now valued at over
$1.5 billion.

That said, we want to share a few pages from our own sales strategy playbook.

Hire the right people according to a repeatable

evaluation criteria.
We first started by determining a list of attributes that made a successful sales rep. From
there, we established a repeatable process to evaluate candidates during interviews based on
these weighted criterion:

Work ethic Adaptability to change

 Coachability Prior Success

Intelligence Organizational Skills

Passion Competitiveness

Preparation / HubSpot Knowledge Brevity

Train the sales team by making them wear the

customers shoes.
Again, the first step we took was to define the sales process that we thought would be most
successful. We outlined our unique value proposition, target customer, competition, most
common objections, product features and benefits, and so forth.

Then, we created a hands-on training program that would not only imitate the sales process
for reps before they actually begun selling, but also allow them to experience our target
customers painpoint. So a large part of our training program involves making reps create
their own website and blog, and then drive traffic to it. This exercise allows reps to better
consult potential customers in the future. We also use exams, certification programs, and
presentations to measure each reps performance.

After employees are onboarded, we continue tracking their progress throughout the various
stages of our sales process. The primary criteria we look at include: leads created, leads
worked, demos delivered, and leads won. Then we measure these criteria against each other
to create ratios such as leads created to leads won.

We track each stage in the process so if a rep is struggling on any particular metric, we can
dig deeper to understand why thats the case.
Train the sales team by making them wear the
customers shoes.
The sales and marketing teams work closely together in a process we call Smarketing in
order to generate consistent leads each month. In this process, Marketing understands which
qualities a lead needs to meet before its handed over to sales as well as how many of those
qualified leads it must create each month to meet our sales projections. Meanwhile, the sales
team understands how long they should wait before contacting a lead and how many attempts
they should make to contact that lead.

All of these decisions are lead by data and science, not gut.

Case Study 2
Valued at almost $50 billion, Salesforce.com reached $5 billion in revenue faster than any
other SaaS company in history. In fact, the company has seen outstanding year-over-year
revenue growth since its founding in 1999.

Now lets find out why.

Develop a rigorous sales boot camp.

Salespeople are enrolled in a rigorous boot-camp curriculum for their onboarding training,
taking as long as two to three months for enterprise sales reps. As soon as reps arrive, theyre
given a long list of homework assignments which includes completing 20 hours of video
instructions to learn about the software theyll be selling and studying for consistent exams to
test their knowledge of said software. During this process, top-performing trainees are
awarded prestigious badges such as Top Gun and Rising Star.

Throughout their training, salespeople are constantly reminded how important it is to tell
personal stories to potential customers as well as amongst each other. When encountering
prospects objections, theyre armed with an arsenal of customer stories which they can recite
effortlessly.

Establish a system for continuous

improvement.
From customer feedback to employee feedback, Salesforce is obsessed with NPS. They even
survey sales reps after their training to create a system of continuous improvement for their
onboarding program.

To support this system, they also constantly track and measure reps success using metrics
which fall into the following four categories:

Visibility: forecasted sales vs. actual sales, percent of quota attained

Process effectiveness: win rate, percent of reps achieving quota

Productivity: average length of sales lifecycle

Lead management: conversion rate, lead response time, lead volume

Regular opportunity reviews, dubbed Pimp My Deal, are designed to present a minimum of
three action-items to sales reps for how they can approach winning new deals or getting
promotions.
Harness extensive data analytics and go-to
sales enablement.
With a plethora of data collected over the past decade from a slew of industries, companies,
and cities, Salesforce has developed unique sales intelligence that provides highly accurate
information about the probability of leads becoming customers.

Sales collateral is also highly accessible with a central system available to all reps, designed
to provide ready-made customer success stories, on-boarding plans, and other content to
increase productivity.

Case Study 3
Loren Padelford, Chief Sales Scientist at Shopify, shared with us his secret sauce for
increasing sales tenfold in ten years leading them to attain $170 million in sales and over a
$1.5 billion valuation.

Hire great people, not necessarily

great sales people.
Hiring is arguably one of the most essential components of a great sales strategy. Many sales
managers, though, are misled into believing that they must hire sales superstars. The truth of
the matter is that we first must look for great people and then train them well so they become
great salespeople. Padelford looks for six key personality traits when hiring salespeople:

Intellgience

Work Ethic

History of success
 Creativity

Entrepreneurial

Competitive

Treat sales as a science, not an art.

Sales is now a field we can measure down to the second. We can explain success, then,
according to cold, hard data-points rather than mystical qualitative assessments. Every sales
team should be tracking average deal size, average sales cycle length, lead to deal conversion
rate, calls per day per rep, and number of deals in the pipeline.

Each of these metrics, tracked over longer periods of time, will inform us as to the health of
our sales process and pinpoint areas we need to improve upon.

Build a smart, technological foundation.

Before Padelford took over the sales process at Shopify, sales reps would manually log phone
calls and emails into the CRM, consuming five hours of a reps time each week. With a
salesforce of 26, that added up to 130 wasted hours per week.

Realizing this misuse of time and capital, Padelford led Shopify to adopt the free HubSpot
CRM. With the CRM, sales reps are able to receive notifications when prospects open their
emails, click links, and view document attachments. They also have access to over 19 million
prospects using the prospecting tool as well as detailed information such as estimated
revenue, number of employees, suggested email addresses, and so forth.
Maintain a high-quality pipeline by eliminating
unqualified leads.
Shopify uses the 4/5 Threshold to filter out unqualified leads, thereby allowing his
sales reps to focus on selling to leads who have a higher probability of becoming
customers. When evaluating whether a lead is qualified, a rep must have a concrete
answer to four of the following five variables:

Pain: Is the prospect experiencing a prominent business issue or challenge

that requires them to make a change?

Power: Is the prospect directly involved with the decision-making process? If

not, who is?

Money: Does our offering fall within their budget constraints?

Process: What is their buying process?

Timeline: What stage are they in the buyers journey? Will they purchase
within a reasonable time frame?

Want more details on Shopify's growth? Loren Padelford walks us through his team's
sales strategy in the video below.

DEVELOPING YOUR SALES PLAN

The planning and time you put into developing your sales plan is as important as
the final written plan. Work through the 5 steps and youll have a well thought
out, focussed plan to drive sales. Each step is important - from looking at past
sales performance to evaluating your business against the competition to
allocating resources and measuring effectiveness.

1. The past - sales history

2. The present - market analysis

3. The competition - competitor analysis

4. The future - sales and revenue goals

5. The sales plan - positioning and actions