Sales Strategy: The Roadmap for Your Success
In the ever-evolving business landscape, your role as the Founder, Owner, or CEO demands not just vision but a concrete strategy to turn that vision into reality. This is the beginning of a blueprint for you to maximize the potential of an existing team by deploying an optimized sales strategy. Your team is your greatest asset, and a well-crafted sales strategy serves as the roadmap leading them to success. In exploring the key elements that define a winning sales strategy, there must be some foundational pieces set into place. The first 3 major components to address in your sales strategy are:
Industry Positioning | Competition | Value Proposition
It would be easy to add many more items to the list of needs but to develop an actionable roadmap keep the focus tight and limited to these 3 foundational items of the strategy. They represent the most crucial components to cement before adding additional pieces to the strategy. A good strategy is grounded in facts, data, and reality. Leaders run the risk of not executing a strategy because it is either overly comprehensive and unattainable for the current organization, or the leader sees the exercise in crafting the strategy as too difficult/time consuming and the preparation work never gets completed.
In either case, the company and team miss an opportunity to align and scale quickly based on a strategic initiative and they remain in the same market position, with the same results, or worse, year-over-year. You don’t have to live in this paradox. Train the focus to the 3 key areas to start the process and leverage your ability to execute by being disciplined to complete and roll out these 3 strategy components.
Industry Positioning requires an intellectually honest assessment of where you are now. It’s the starting point for the roadmap. What areas do you win or outperform the competition? What geography and verticals do you focus on and what is your market rank in them? Establishing these will tell you more precisely what deals to pursue and which ones to avoid. One of the nuances people often overlook is how well your internal resources are aligned to serve your current and future clients. If your goal is to be #1 and you are currently # 3 in your market, what resources do you need to overtake the number two and the number 1 spot? It may be different resources for each area you need to overtake. Simply, this is often a budget discussion of how many people, capital assets, additional resources do I need to acquire to achieve this goal. Wanting #1 is not as simple as doing all the things to get there.
Competitive Analysis takes a much deeper look at the competition and their comparable solutions. Taking a closer look at the features, benefits, guarantees, warranty, additional offerings, and terms of sale requires lots of detail work. If you are daunted by the work required here, you should be. Although how much better could you and your team perform if you knew these things and were able to develop deal-specific strategies to outmaneuver and outsell your competition?
Value Proposition is not how much value you think your offering has to a client. Instead, the value is simply what measure the customer uses to review your product’s impact on their situation. I firmly believe the value proposition is phrased in terms of the customer’s perceived or measured value. A piece of software does not only save processing time or provide reporting faster. The value proposition is rooted in the benefit it provides the client in terms of how they measure value.
These areas represent the starting point for implementing the type of tools you need to systemize success, measure performance, and drive change then dominance in your market as opposed to reacting to. Success requires preparation and execution on a plan- let’s get to work.