Your sales strategy needs to be easy to buy by everybody in your business, and especially to your sales and customer service teams. It needs to be easy to buy, by your customers and prospects and it needs to present the value proposition in a package which is easy for those prospects to buy.
The sales strategy needs to present exactly who will benefit from the proposition, why and how those people will buy from you, and how you'll deliver it to assure the customer maximum benefit at minimum risk.
Here's the detail.
Your Teams
Everybody in the business needs to buy into the proposition, believing in the genuine value it will deliver.There's nothing more destructive to sales operations than a bunch of mavericks selling a different story, just because they don't like it. Every sale exists within a market, and people within that market talk to each other, one way or another. If one sales person pitches cost, another pitches quality and yet another promotes convenience, everybody gets confused. Confused prospects rarely make good business partners.
Except maybe the customer service team can be more destructive. The service rep who tells complaining customers "I wish they'd stop telling customers that" undermines everything you're working to achieve.
Your Customers
Explaining to customers the detail of your sales strategy may not sound a good idea. Why go into that stuff when the prospect only cares about what's in the proposal for her.Customers like to feel comfortable when making that final vendor selection. They have to find ways of justifying to themselves the decision they're about to make.
When your entire business model is focused on delivering value to the customer's specific demographic that comfort comes easily. Explaining to customers how your thinking specifically targets them and their needs makes them feel part of a special group, and more confident in your ability to deliver.
Your Value Proposition
This is the dimension you'd expect. Prospects rarely decide to buy when the contract, or delivery is complicated. That complexity simply gives them more reason to delay the decision. When the value proposition is clear, credible and attractive the only barrier can be the buying process. Simplifying that process makes you an attractive partner, because you are easy to buy from.Sales Strategy
There are many more dimensions to developing an effective sales strategy than the ideas presented in this article but making it easy for everybody to buy into is fundamental. We'll look at the other dimensions in future articles.
