Remington Begg
A sound sales strategy is key to success and growth for your small business. While your strategies may change over time based on what happens with your brand, taking the time to thoroughly examine where your business is now and where it is headed gives you the information to make course changes intelligently, not emotionally. A proper strategy creates context for operating decisions and provides direction for decision-making. Without a strategy in place it’s nearly impossible to set realistic goals and know if you’ve actually hit them. For this reason, the first step in achieving your goals is start at the beginning and ensuring you have a strategy:
Create a Sales Strategy
A plan is necessary to guide decision-making, allocate resources, and define direction. Because of that, formulating a strategy is well worth the time it will take to develop it. This strategic alignment is critical to hitting your sales goals. Your strategy should do all of the following:
- Leverage experience and skills of your employees
- Position Marketing and Sales together
- Prioritize initiatives
- Set a clear path to a productivity
- Decrease wasted time and money
- Increased sales and profits
- Enhanced the value of your business
Sales and Marketing Alignment
While creating a sales strategy, ensure that this aligns with the marketing goals as well. This combination is known as Smarketing in the inbound marketing world, and it’s a great way to conduct your Lead Scoring and increase conversions. Create a stable and lasting partnership between the two teams with a strategic approach that treats them as a single, revenue-generating organization, not adversaries. This way, everyone either achieves or misses goals together and eliminates interoffice competition.
Conduct Quarterly Strategy Reviews
Schedule weekly alignment calls between the Marketing and Sales, or Smarketing Team. In these meetings, discuss recent success, product information, and any changes or updates to strategies. Review your current strategies and keep an eye out for where there may be misstep. Open communication is the key to any good relationship and the business relationships at work are no different.
The Sales Team needs quality Leads from Marketing to be successful. And the Marketing Team needs feedback on those Leads to improve quality going forward, as well as the funds that Sales provide to create new campaigns to gather new Leads. The two strategies are perpetually connected, and should be treated as such. If you’re ready to learn more in-depth about how to implement a Smarketing Team at your company, download our free eBook Lead Scoring: The Smarketer’s Guide now.
