If your marketing and sales teams don’t align themselves with the modern buyer’s process and fail to add value beyond the information already available to the buyer, the buyer then has no reason to engage with a marketing neither your sales team.
Inbound sales benefits 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 buyer’s 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.
Power struggles usually lead to price dropping and selling by kilograms rather than dollars.
In fact you must have two funnels, one for your marketing process and one for your sales process.
Building a Sales Strategy Plan to Scale.
It is not about the best salespeople or the best football player, it is about their strategy and talent to succeed, All sales team should have a sales strategy plan outlining its goals, best practices, and processes designed to align the team and create consistency, so that you can scale your business.
Here are the essential components of a Sales Strategy Plan to Scale.
Organizational goals
Organizational goals are strategic objectives that a company’s management establishes to outline expected outcomes and guide employees’ efforts.
Each goal should be specific and measurable, such as “to sell 180% of the projected sales quota in Q2.”
Customer profile and product offering
A customer profile is a description of a business’ customers based on their demographics, backgrounds, hobbies, and interests. … They’ll bolster your marketing efforts by determining the best messaging, offers, products, and services to deliver to attract your ideal client. A Product Offering can be assembled from a reusable. Product Specification (sometimes referred to as a product spec). In practical terms, a Product Offering Represents tangible and intangible goods and services that are made available for a certain price to the market.
Hiring, onboarding, and compensation
Your process for onboarding new sales hires has a major impact on the success of your new reps. Research demonstrates that 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years or more if they have a great onboarding experience.
Developing a list of criteria and attributes for sales managers to screen for when interviewing candidates 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
Demand generation is the focus of targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company’s products and/or services.
Include a detailed plan for how to target potential customers in order to increase awareness of your offering, such as using paid social acquisition channels, creating e-books and hosting webinars, hosting events, google ads, etc.
Performance and measurement procedures
Once the infrastructure is set up, 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, such as:
- 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 prospect’s engagement history and demographics.
- Sales presentation: This should be an overall outline of the connect stage for each salesperson, whether it’s 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. See blue link.
- 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 to solve your problem?”
- Timeline: What is the typical timeline of your sales process from the first contact to close? This section should guide sales teams to better understand the length of each stage in the sales process.
Sales Strategy Plan to Scale.
Conor Neill
About Conor… Conor is a sought-after keynote speaker on leadership. As an entrepreneur, he has founded 4 companies, selling 16 private jets and building the 3rd largest fleet of private jets in Spain. He is a professor of Leadership at IESE Business School, and a visiting professor at University College Dublin. More about Conor: http://cono.rs/