Sales strategies are one of the most important pillars in any company in order to achieve good economic results and growth.
Sales strategies define the actions that will contribute to the growth of the company so that it can reach the expected profitability.
But this is something quite logical, so in this post we leave aside the definitions and the scheme to carry out one of these sales strategies and we enter fully into those factors that will determine the power to become the leader in your market.
Definition of sales strategies
A good definition of sales strategy would be:
“Sales strategy is that type of strategy whose design is made in order to achieve sales objectives”.
This definition, although very concise, is quite clear and indicates very well the meaning of what sales strategies are.
However, although this short definition indicates very well what sales strategies are, as I am going to tell you, this term goes much further.
Because this type of strategy is much more than a simple planning, in fact, it must involve all the components of the company beyond the sales department to achieve greater effectiveness.
This is logical, since the more involvement there is on the part of everyone, the more effective it will be.
The life of the company depends directly on this strategy and, therefore, also the jobs of all employees.
What to include in the development of sales strategies:
- Sales channels.
- Objectives of each channel.
- Means by which each objective will be achieved.
- Budget allocated to each channel and each sales action.
- Time dedicated to the development of each action.
- Type of actions to be carried out, frequency and order in time.
- Analysis and correction tools.
Definition of sales force strategy
A sales force strategy allows the sales force to position the company and its products to reach customers in a meaningful and differentiated way.
What is the relationship between sales strategy and sales processes?
While sales strategies define how a company will achieve its sales objectives, sales processes indicate a series of actions that achieve more sales.
Key factors for success with sales strategies
For any sales strategy to be successful, we must take into account the 4 key factors that I am going to explain below.
Moreover, if we control these points, our sales strategies will surely be successful:
1.- Analyze, correct and change
Analyze the ROI of each of your actions:
Discard those that provide a worse profitability.
Try to improve those that may be worthwhile, seeing what has failed or what can be improved in the funnel or sales funnel.
2.- Optimize expenses
A penny well spent is a penny closer to your next customer. How to optimize costs? By analyzing, correcting and changing your sales actions.
To find out which actions will bring you the best profitability, you can do the following:
- Benchmarking: copying what the best do will never make you the best, but it will help you get closer to them.
- Trial and error: try new ways to get customers and keep the most profitable ones.
3.- Increase productivity
Even if you correct your actions, keep the best ones and optimize your expenses, you can still optimize your productivity.
There are 2 main ways to do this:
- Technology: the first thing to improve the profitability of a company is to promote the use of better and more advanced tools and machinery. This will help to streamline processes and avoid having to hire more labor, which will be more expensive in the medium and long term.
- Internal marketing: internal marketing is essential in a company if we want to improve the productivity of workers (who are our most important asset).
4.- Determine the objectives
Correctly determining the objectives in your company is a vital part of the sales strategy because this will help to:
- Establish a guide for the execution of actions.
- Stimulate, encourage and make the staff strive to achieve the goals.
- Evaluate the actions taken.
- Justify a company’s actions.
“A person working under pressure is more effective as long as he or she does not exceed an average level of stress.”
What are the main sales strategies? 10 examples
- Write a corporate blog.
- Perform demonstrations.
- Improve the product.
- Give a new use to the product.
- Provide free additional services.
- Give free gifts to your customers.
- Use social networks to attract customers.
- Use testimonials.
- Get referrals.
- Change the price.
These are some examples of sales strategies that work quite well nowadays.
There are many others and not all of them are applicable to all companies, but surely more than one can help you or serve as an idea for a new sales strategy.
For convenience they are ordered from best to worst sales strategies in our opinion.
1.- Write a corporate blog
Assuming that if you have a business you have a website, you should have a corporate blog on that website.
Writing a corporate blog has many benefits and, in the medium term, all companies that have one end up achieving more sales.
Some of the benefits of a corporate blog are:
- Publicize your skills and abilities.
- Increase visits to your website.
- Help improve your brand image.
- Tell testimonials and success stories.
- Collaborate with other companies.
2.- Perform demonstrations
Whenever you can perform demonstrations, because there is no better sales strategy than an effective product.
You should always try to show how good it is to use your product or service to your customers, which will get you one step closer to closing the purchase.
To make your customers get to know you, see how your products or services work and know the benefits of using them, give demonstrations whenever you can.
To do this you should:
- Analyze who your potential customers are to give samples to them and not give away products in vain.
- Perform demonstrations whenever you can to make your product known to as many potential customers as possible.
Some examples of effective product demonstrations are:
- Demos.
- Free samples.
- Temporary trial.
3.- Improve the product
Changing or improving the product is one of the strategies that usually works to get more customers.
This is something that many companies do, especially those with a technological base.
To do this, the most recurrent is to provide the product with:
- New features.
- New attributes.
- New improvements.
Apart from these changes, we can also modify the product externally to give it a new look and change the customer’s perception. Of course, if we decide to alter something of the product, it is very important that we study it thoroughly beforehand, since any modification can affect both for better and for worse.
Keep in mind that the design your target audience liked yesterday may not like tomorrow if you change it.
For an external change we can modify:
- Design.
- Presentation.
- Packaging.
- Colors.
- Label.
- Shape.
4.- Give the product a new use
Another option is to give the product a new use without changing anything apparent.
In this way, we will easily increase our target.
To do this, we need to promote this new use by means of:
- Endorsement: celebrities taking care of using the product in this new way will make others do it too.
- Advertising: advertising together with the previous uses this new use so that users adopt it.
- Influencers: speaking on blogs and vlogs to promote these new uses.
- Point-of-sale display: to be conveyed to customers at the point of sale.
Examples of products with new uses:
Converse All Star: A good example is the Converse All Star. These sneakers were intended for sports use and became casual wear, also selling to a different type of public that did not use them for basketball.
Computers: Apple encouraged the purchase of computers as products to be used at home. By doing so, they were able to increase their sales without having to change anything about the product.
5.- Offer free additional services
An alternative sales strategy to raising the price is to offer free additional services.
This makes the product more interesting compared to the competition, increasing the probability of purchase.
Some options of free additional services that do not suppose a great added cost for the company, but they do manage to differentiate you from the competition are:
- Home delivery.
- Free installation.
- Maintenance service.
- New warranties or return policies.
- Personalized treatment.
For example, if we are an online marketing tool like Semrush, we can differentiate ourselves from the competition by offering more tools integrated into the platform than the rest, without raising the price.
This differentiates Semrush from other SEO tools and, in the long run, leads to more customers.
6.- Give gifts to your customers
One of the sales strategies that works very well is to offer gifts, both to your current and potential customers.
A gift can help you to:
- Break the ice: you can use it to break the ice with potential customers you meet. A gift always helps them pay more attention to you or make them less reluctant to receive a quote from you.
- Reward loyalty: rewarding the loyalty of your best customers with a gift always helps to strengthen your relationship and, perhaps, to get that customer to give you the attention you need to introduce that new product of your company.
Some examples of gifts are pens, key chains, portable cell phone chargers, cell phone cases…
Although, without a doubt, the ideal is to offer products produced by your own company if possible.
7.- Use social networks to attract customers.
They are a very powerful channel if you know where to be and, of course, how to get customers on social networks.
I say this because there are many companies that are in the networks, but do not perform any action to attract them.
If you are a company, do not want to hire a specialist and do not know where to start, we recommend you:
1) Create your Social Media Plan
With your Social Media Plan you will establish objectives, see where your niche is and plan actions to attract customers. If you don’t have one, here you can read how to do it.
2) Buy some social media monitoring tool
Of course, once you have your Social Media Plan done, you cannot create your campaigns without analyzing the results.
This would generate a disparate and meaningless strategy, because we would not be able to know the return and effectiveness of each of the actions we implement.
Therefore, the ideal is to read about the best social media monitoring tools and choose yours before you start.
3) Customer acquisition strategies
There are customer acquisition strategies for each social network.
This will help you get your first customers and start making this channel profitable.
4) Analyze, measure and correct
And remember: all the actions you have outlined in your social media plan, monitored with your tools and the customers you have acquired through social networks, must be analyzed to know how effective each channel is, whether it is profitable or not and what you can improve through A/B testing until you optimize all your actions to the maximum.
8.- Use testimonials
Testimonials have always been a good option for sales strategies. There is nothing better than a satisfied customer to get an undecided customer to buy.
We can include testimonials almost anywhere.
It never hurts for any user to see that your customers are happy with you. This will give them confidence to buy your products.
Examples of places to include testimonials:
- Corporate blog.
- Advertising brochures.
- Home page.
- Pages or catalog of services.
9.- Get referrals
Another of the best sales strategies is to get referrals.
It is always better to have other people talking about our business than ourselves, since the opinion will seem much more sincere and will be reflected in the user’s subconscious, being reflected in the purchase intention.
How to get referrals?
- Build customer loyalty: good customer loyalty is the best way to be recommended. Don’t forget that a happy customer is the best salesperson.
- Offer a further benefit: offering a percentage of the sale, a free product or other benefit for getting customers is a way to encourage customer referrals to our business.
- Give away coupons to our customers: another way to get customers to talk about us is to give them coupons to give to their family and friends.
This will encourage referrals and, if the customer really likes the product, he/she will surely give the tasteful coupons to the people closest to him/her.
10.- Change the price
Here we have two options:
Raise prices: raising prices is often a better strategy than lowering them.
With a price increase you can offer complementary products or services to differentiate yourself from the rest and get a higher profit with less effort.
This price increase is compatible with the maintenance of the current offer, thus expanding customer segments by offering a more exclusive proposal without having to give up current customers.
Lowering prices: a strategy of lowering prices can serve to:
⇉ Acquire new customers quickly by taking them away from the competition, attracted by the price or new customers who are users and who had not tried the product before because of its high price.
⇉ Remove products from stock with discounts and strategic promotions to get rid of those products stored in excess (very typical especially in companies selling seasonal products).
⇉ Destroy your competition carefully so as not to commit “unfair” competition. The idea is to keep prices low for a long time in order to drive the smaller ones out of the market and, once they are out, to raise them again.
Sales strategies with low prices are not highly recommended because they can jeopardize the company’s profitability, and in some cases, the quality of our products may be affected, causing changes in the buying habits of buyers.
Strategies to sell more
Now that we have seen the best sales strategies, to finish the post, let’s see some tips that will also help us to sell more and that are applicable to any of the sales strategies mentioned above.
1.- Be effective
Effectiveness is the ratio of the number of sales to the number of attempts to sell the product. This ratio determines how well we are at selling our product, whether it is to cold callers or to people who enter a web page.
Tips to improve sales effectiveness:
- Research the person you are going to call or visit beforehand.
- Prepare well the sales arguments.
- Take care of the forms and design in emails or web page.
- Personalize your commercial actions.
- Carry out your actions limiting yourself to your target audience.
- Know the reasons why they have contacted you.
2.- Control your leads and the sales funnel
Something that many people do not take into account and that, if you have not yet put into practice, will surely increase your sales, is to have complete control over your leads and their transit through the sales funnel.
A complete control of the sales funnel allows us to know in which phases of the funnel we are failing and how we can improve, so we can apply corrections by analyzing our sales actions and achieve a better conversion ratio (increase effectiveness).
For this, of course we need to control our leads and make a complete follow-up and analysis of them during the whole sales cycle.
3.- Know what your competition is doing
Knowing what actions your competition is carrying out will help you to assess whether you should also implement such actions or if they do not work with your type of business.
To do this, you should carry out an exhaustive analysis of:
- What products or services it offers: this will allow us to know what it offers that is different from what we offer, in case it could be interesting to incorporate it to our product portfolio.
- How it offers its products: to assess whether what influences your competition to sell more is the way it does it, you should know the way it delivers it, the shipping times, the product packaging, etc.
- Sales strategies: sales strategies are a very important part of the effectiveness of our commercial actions.
Find out what sales strategies your competitors follow in case this is the reason why they are selling more.
4.- Work on your intelligent questions
Working on intelligent questions will help the salesperson to know the customer’s needs in order to direct the conversation correctly and offer the customer exactly what he/she needs.
Some of the questions we need to ask to know the customer’s intentions are:
What do you need: knowing what you need is the first thing we should ask. This will let us know if we can meet their needs and, if we can, it will put us in the range of products or services that meet their needs and then we can offer them the one we think best fits their needs.
Why he needs it: this may seem silly, but knowing the reasons that move him to make the purchase will help us to be more empathetic, making him feel identified and bringing him one step closer to the purchase of the product. An example can be the purchase of a vehicle.
There are people who buy them to move around and there are others who do it for prestige.
What is your budget: if we do not know the budget, we should at least guess it.
Never try to sell a Mercedes to a person who comes looking for a Hyundai.
When you need it: delivery time is often a determining factor in the purchase.
Maybe the customer wants the service too fast and we can’t satisfy his request, or maybe we can but it increases the final price.
How he needs it: in many cases, the form is a key factor.
We must know if he needs the product in a certain way, in case we can offer the possibility to change this variable.
An example might be a training course, how do you need it, intensive or regular?
5.- The first thing is to listen
It may seem obvious, but when you stop to listen carefully to a client you can read many things between the lines if you are really attentive to the conversation.
Pay attention to their body language and let them tell you what they need, don’t make a quick proposal.
Wait for him to tell you what he needs and, once you have listened carefully and know what he wants, ask your questions intelligently.
6.- Complementary products
Selling complementary products is the ideal way to increase your turnover without having to look for new customers.
Although it is true that, according to Ansoff’s growth matrix, the ideal is to look for new markets first and then new products, the sale of complementary products in certain cases is much better than going out to other markets to sell your product.
For example, if the complementary product is not very complex and goes well with your main product, it never hurts to try to sell it to your current customers.
An example is the sale of shoe sprays sold at Foot Locker (which are not their business at all, but they sell very well) or when you buy a TV and they try to sell you a video (which has always worked great).
So much for my article, but before I finish I would like you to tell me:
What sales strategy or strategies work best for your business?
