Is Your Sales Strategy As Clear As It Should Be?

One study, carried out by LSA Global, found that clarity in a business’s strategic sales measures around 31% of the difference between high performing sales teams and low performing sales teams. Clarity in strategic sales? Allow me to explain.

Many of you would agree that teams perform best when every member is working in unison towards the same goal. This is one of the keys to creating successful teams.

Consider your sales team and your sales objectives. Is everyone on the same page, aiming for the same targets, with the same goals and ambitions?

Unfortunately, for many businesses, this is not the case. In fact, an IBM study found that less than 10% of businesses carry out their strategies effectively, regardless of how well-formulated that strategy is.

Nowadays, too many sales managers and directors believe that using quarterly targets and a strict managerial presence that pushes everybody to work hard during working hours is enough to create a high-performing team.

Now that you’re reading it out like this, does it still seem like a well-oiled sales strategy? Even looking at a sales strategy in this simple way, it’s easy to see why some talented teams are not performing to the best of their ability.

Consider the current conditions of your sales team. Is it performing consistently? Are they peaking in some areas and not in others? How are they dealing with sales factors that are beyond their control? Are they even taking risks that are unnecessary? These are all symptoms of an unclear sales strategy, and it needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

The only way to gain market share and rise above your competition is with a leading sales team that knows exactly what they’re doing at all times. Here’s how you do that.

Be Transparent with Every Team Member

Typically, most businesses have clear sales targets for the month, the quarter, and the year. Maybe your goal is to sell 5,000 brooms this month. You may be looking to gain a certain number of followers and interactions on your social media accounts. Whatever your goals are, they're probably clear and your staff will, hopefully, know these figures.

– explains Elvin McCollom, a Sales Manager and a contributing author at Assignment help.

To help you to refine your sales strategy, here’s a list of tips, advice and information to make sure you can turn your teams around and perform to the best of your abilities.

Too Many Priorities

As a director or CEO, it’s easy to dream really big for your teams and set them lots of goals and aspirations that you want them to achieve. After all, to you, every sales goal and target is a number one priority.

However, too many of these can be counterproductive. Designing a clear sales strategy is all about focusing on certain areas and practicing them. This could be focusing on your customers and their experiences, focusing on your markets, your products, your services, your solutions or even trying to create new sales opportunities.

When you’re setting the targets and goals for your teams, start with one main objective. This could be selling a certain number of products, it could be generating a certain number of leads, or it could be to grow your business by a certain percentage of sales in a certain amount of time.

Remember, this goal can and will evolve over time. However, always set one main priority. From this priority, you can then create several smaller steps that your sales teams can implement regularly and track.

One HubSpot study found that an incredible 72% of researched companies with less than 50 new sales opportunities per month failed to achieve their revenue goals. However, 85% companies with 51 – 100 new opportunities per month did hit their goals.

For example, you may want to expand your business by a 50% increase in sales over the next year. This is your main sales goal that’s placed a the forefront of your strategy. Then, break this down into 2-3 steps, for example, generating 500 more leads a week, releasing 30% more content per week and increasing sales by 5% per week.

Of course, this is just an example and the figures can be adjusted to suit your business model but this goals make your slaes strategy a lot clearer for the employees that need to understand it the most, without them getting overwhelmed by a tonne of statistics.

A Constantly Changing Focus

Of course, as a business expands and a sales strategy progress, the priorities of the strategy itself is going to change. A good sales strategy is a constantly evolving form that is adapting and progressing at all times.

However, this change needs to be regulated and monitored to make sure everything is in place and all procedures and being followed.

Sometimes, it’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing solely on what needs to be completely urgently, rather than what’s most important. Sometimes, you’ll be drawn into trying to chase down and secure a bad customer or revive a bad deal.

Sometimes, you’ll be too focused on the wants and needs of your highest performing rep, rather than focusing on the requirements of the entire team.

These are all drawbacks that will hold your team, and therefore your business, back. Fortunately, there are tools available that can bring your teams back together and focused on the same goals, for example, Prospect, is a great sales strategy management system.

Focus on Relationships within Your Teams

Just like it was when you were at school and then all the way through life, it’s easy for your teams to start focusing on who their best work mate is, who they are going to sit next to at dinner and what they are all going to do at the weekend, rather than focusing on adding value to your company.

This is extremely counterproductive, and it’s important that you watch the floor to spot what’s happening, allowing you to address it.

In some cases, low-performing employees will group themselves with high-performing sales members, allowing them to fly under the radar when it comes to sales figures and statistics. As a director or CEO, it’s vital that you look out for this kind of behaviour.

When you’re looking to improve the relationships between your sales team, communication is everything. Conduct meetings with your sales team on a regular basis and communicate with them about what they need to know and make sure that you leave enough time for people to ask questions if they need to know more information. Nobody knows what the sales department is like more than the people that work their so listen to what they have to say.

Additionally, remember that over 93% of all face-to-face communication is non-verbal and comes from things like body language. Make yourself accessible and inviting to your employees and you’ll get so much more return and cooperation from them.

Every Team Member is Accountable

Hand in hand with the consideration above, even if you’ve invested a lot of time in creating a clear sales strategy, if the strategy is unclear to your sales team, or there’s any uncertainty in what’s to be expected, it’s easy for low-performing sales reps to fly under the radar and hide from their work.

Accountability is key, and it’s essential that you implement a way to monitor and track an employee’s performance, allowing you to address it where you can.

This is a double-edged sword as your high-performing reps will see your system as unfair and inaccurate, especially when they’re grafting away, and the other team members are getting away with doing nothing.

Tools like Headreach and Sales Handy can help you actively track and monitor lead generation within your business as well as the performance with each rep regarding that lead.

Master Your Communications

It’s easy to fall into the trap of not being available to talk with your sales team. From their perspective, as a CEO or director, it can seem daunting and intimidated to come and speak with you if they need to discuss something regarding the strategy.

However, this can lead to problems being overlooked and forgotten about which is more than likely to cause problems down the line.

Mastering your communication skills and making yourself available to your sales teams will solve these problems. You can even use tools like UK Writings and Easy Word Count to practice writing emails that your sales teams will respond to and engage with.

Working as a Team

At the end of the day, you need to remember, and you need to remind your sales employees, that everybody is in your business and is working as a team to achieve these targets. Of course, it’s motivational to compete employee against employee to see who’s the highest performing. In fact, it can be one of the best ways to increase sales and performance.

However, it’s vital that this doesn’t get in the way of productive and collaboration. If your teams aren’t working together, this is going to cause problems and inefficiency. You may believe that this is personal issues with the employees, but statistics show that it’s much more likely to be caused by unclear sales goals and targets.

One survey found that around 39% of employees don’t believe that people in their own company collaborate enough. However, another study found that about 75% of all employees rate ‘team work and collaborate’ as ‘very important, yet only 18% of these employees received communication evaluations at their performance reviews.

This just goes to show that although employees value communication and collaboration in the workplace, it’s simply not being implemented or managed by the people in charge, a concept that you’re going to have address to promote productivity and high performance.

Get your teams working together and alongside each other by giving them clear goals and you’ll be amazing with what your teams, even your low performing reps, can achieve.

You need to reinvent the way you implement your sales strategy, so everybody can be a part of it. If you’re looking for a change, you can use tools like Charlie App to transform the way you sell safely.

Perfecting Your Business Writing Skills

Whether you’re generating and typing up your sales strategy, writing an email or writing up a sales report, it’s vital that you ensure that these documents are 100% accurate. Even a little typo that was missed can completely change a fact or a figure which is almost guaranteed to cause a problem.

This means you need to proofread and edit anything you write to make sure that it’s perfect. You can use editing tools, such as Essay Roo, to guarantee this accuracy, or use a copywriting service such Write my paper, to create the documents on your behalf.

Understanding and refining your sales strategy is the first step you need to take in perfecting your sales department. In three easy steps, you’ll need to create your strategy using believable and realistic figures and expectations. Then, execute your sales strategy and inform every employee on what is expected.

Finally, perfect your strategy as you can by making alterations and listening to your team, ensuring that you’re the best manager you can be and your employees are all on the same page.