Ramping Up Your Sales Strategy
Focusing on creating or refining your sales strategy are all important. A good strategy will make selling easier.
The Selling Mindset
The most important part of being in sales, is the attitude that you bring about the work you are doing. If you don’t believe in what you are doing, neither will your customers.
Why This Model?: You need to have the right mindset to get started.
Sales Are Not An Afterthought
Sales are important. If there are no sales, then a company is not making money in its own right. From the very beginning of any company, sales should be paramount.
Why This Model?: You will only land a sale if you are taking the time to sell.
Company Brand
What is your business all about? Understanding your business’ brand is important as you need to verify that this is aligned with who you are.
Why This Model?: Your corporate brand helps to give you credibility. It is a basic of selling.
Personal Brand
Who are you? Understanding who you are is important to ensure that your personal brand is aligned with your business’. If these are misaligned, it can cause confusion.
Why This Model?: Your personal brand lends credibility to your product or service. People buy from people they trust and like.
Customer Profiling
Who you are doing business with today is a great indicator of who you should focus on selling to. Critically analyzing what is working today, will help you get more.
Why This Model?: You need to know who your customer is to create a solid sales strategy.
Who Should Be Your Customer?
Sometimes who you are selling to is not the right customer for you. Most companies start with the idea that any business is good business, but this is not always true.
Why This Model?: You need to validate that you are selling to the right people to be successful.
Test Your Offering
Before you invest too much of your money into a business idea, how can you find out if a consumer will actually buy? Testing your offering is a low risk way to see if your product/service is market ready.
Why This Model?: Part of ramping up your sales is getting feedback on your product or service.
Unique Selling Proposition
Looking at your brand and your customers, what can you truly offer them that is different from the competition? Knowing exactly what is unique about your offering makes it easier to sell.
Why This Model?: What is the pitch and language to use to explain to your customers that you are different?
Customer Personality Types
The best sales people are able to adjust to their audience. They quickly assess the personality type of their customer, and adjust how they interact with this customer immediately.
Why This Model?: Different customers need to be communicated to differently for them to hear you.
Selling Inside Your Skin
Whoever you are, be comfortable with that. It doesn’t matter what your personality is?take its strengths and minimize its weaknesses.
Why This Model?: Confidence is a key part of selling and you need to be comfortable with yourself to be confidence.
Lead List Generation
If you are going to reach out to customers, you will need to develop a lead list with customer information to assist you in doing this.
Why This Model?: You need a good list of customers to go after to justify your revenue targets.
Lead Research
Knowing more information about your customer can help you with a sale. What information helps? How to find it? How much is too much?
Why This Model?: The more research you do upfront, the better your interaction with customers will be.
Lead List Testing
After generating a list, the only true way to know if it works is to use it. Testing a lead list is a critical step in refining your sales approach.
Why This Model?: Testing a small part of your list will give you more confidence in it, and help you get your selling started.
Integrated Marketing Strategy
An integrated marketing strategy is when you use multiple marketing tools, and delivery the same message to the same audience, to help reinforce the message.
Why This Model?: Marketing is a tool to support your sales strategy.
Reducing Risk
Customers will only buy once they feel 100% comfortable in your solution. This means that they can’t feel that anything is risky. How do you ensure that they’re comfortable?
Why This Model?: There is a lot of risk in buying from you when you start selling as you are not yet established. You need to minimize this.
Most Common Objections
The most important thing about objections? Deal with them early on rather than later. There is no point in belabouring something if the objection is a deal breaker and cannot be cleared up.
Why This Model?: There are always objections no matter how could your offering is. Be prepared.
Competition
You need to know details about your suppliers, but you need to learn everything you can about your competitors. Learn how to do this.
Why This Model?: Know your competitors so that you can explain why you are better!
Whales Vs. Minnows
Every sales person wants to track down a whale of a customer as it is assumed that this is where all of the money is made. However, there are different reasons and different ways to sell to big companies versus small businesses.
Why This Model?: In the beginning you might simply not be ready for the whale. Know why.
Motivation & Persistence
You have been selling now for at least six months. How do you keep momentum up and make sure that you are remaining consistent with your prospects?
Why This Model?: Keep motivated to keep selling. You don’t have a business if you don’t have sales. So you have to keep motivated in the beginning to get some of that traction.
Channel Partners
Why sell when you can get other people to do it for you? “Channel partnering” is the process of setting up other people or businesses to sell on your behalf, enabling you to focus on your core competency.
Why This Model?: Find other businesses to sell on your behalf. As a start up, you might not have your own sales people and partnering with other businesses might allow you to have an expanded number of people selling your offering.
CRM IT Tools
There are a lot of customer pieces to keep track of?how do you do it? You could start with an Excel spreadsheet, but when dealing with multiple locations and people, a centralized Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool is sometimes even more important.
Why This Model?: Keep track and be organized early on.
Upselling
If you have many products available to sell to customers, how do you persuade them to try out something different, maybe a more expensive model or an additional complementary product? This is upselling.
Why This Model?: Start early in being strategic of what upselling makes sense.
