Discover best practices in selling so you can connect with more customers, scale, and make money. Discover how to determine customer requirements, create a sales cycle and position yourself for success.

Small business has to have a clear sales plan to survive in today’s market. A sales plan is not just about selling – it is a guide to how you will meet your audience, market your product or service, and close the deal. If you follow these sales techniques properly, you will have the ability to sell more, earn better customer reviews, and put your business ahead of the competition.

Learn what sales tactics look like and 10 strategies you can implement to scale, become more effective, and adapt in an instant to a changing marketplace. 

What are sales strategies?

Any sales plan you make to sell stuff, is a sales strategy, but it’s not fixed. It has to be a working roadmap. A sales plan can include who you want to sell to and how. Say for instance you have a product that is perfect for elementary school teachers. In this scenario, you’ve got the target market but your sales process also has to include where to sell to them and what you’re selling. Your sales process will really be all about how you relate to your customer and how you tell them what’s the best thing about your product. 

A secondary aspect of your sales plan is to set KPIs (key performance indicators) like revenue goals, sales quotas, and conversion rates that you can use to monitor your performance in the long run. This allows you to see which elements of your plan get you where you want to go and which can be improved upon.

Sales strategies can also include: 

• Buyer personas
• Competitive analysis
• Organizational structure
• Selling methodologies
• Goals for expansion

When you’re working on your sales plan, you’ll have to look at your customers. It, most importantly, lets you see their pain points and how you can address them or offer a solution. It is like a road map. It should also include your sales numbers, where you’ll be promoting your product, who you’re targeting, the stages in your sales funnel, and any other resources that can help your team close more deals.

Why you should have a sales plan?

Proven sales tactics can help sales people to sell more, stay ahead of their competition, and be happier with their customers. A few additional benefits include:

• Understands customer needs: Sales planning can strategize customers based on where they’re in the sales funnel, so you have more authority to provide your customer with the right needs.
• Forms a routine: Repeating the same strategies repeatedly is when you can start to quantify the effectiveness. The sales strategies are the ones that make your process transparent to you, able to analyze it, and refine it over time while you are doing it again and again which gives you a good concept of your ROI.
• Organizes team capabilities: If you already have a plan of how you will be selling and what sales channels you’re using, then you can apply that sales plan to hiring the teams that you will need for the skills you need.
• Prepare for the future: If you have a plan in place, you can handle your customers’ objections and obstacles naturally. The more prepared you are, the easier they will seem on the day of their occurrence.

What are the snags of a sales plan?

This can work for sales teams, but you’ll want to be ready for some hurdles. Listed below are just some of the things that sales strategies cannot do, and what you can do to break them: 

• Lead-sighting: Lead, basically, means a lead is someone who’s expressed interest in your product or service you’re marketing. If it is a good qualified lead, they will buy something, most of the time, as long as it is relevant for them. If you incorporate some process, for example including the marketing department, into sales plans for lead nurturing, then you can filter out potential customers and spend time on the ones who would actually buy.
• Engaging with the right decision-maker: The decision-maker at the company is who decides whether to purchase your product or service. To maximise your time, you will want to sell to the “yes”-authorized person. 

Inbound vs. outbound sales strategies

Sales Strategies inbound sales, versus Outbound sales refer to the general approach. Inbound sales – the goal of the inbound sale is to get customers naturally so they call a sales rep. Outbound sales: In this kind of sales, the sales person contact customers. 

A website, landing page or free trial is an example of an inbound sales funnel. Advertising brings leads to the website which is a sales funnel that moves leads towards the final sale. The outbound sales strategy is cold calling, emailing, or scheduling sales calls. Your company could do inbound sales or outbound sales only or you could do both. 

Who uses sales strategies?

Sales is applied by every sales person including sales managers, representatives, experts, customer service reps. Selling to customers or other entities : Sales teams devise methods to sell directly to customers or other companies. The sales lead/sales manager usually determines the overall company sales vision. 

10 sales strategy tips

Developing sales tactics for your product or service can be an art, where you have to experiment and see what people are willing to hear. The following recommendations will get you started on building a strong sales funnel. 

1. Clearly define your goals.

You’re better able to track where you’re going, and visualize where you’re headed, if you know what you’re after. Make your sales objectives SMART: specific, measurable, realizable, realistic, and achievable. 

2. Incorporate storytelling.

You can give your customers all the information that says your product is amazing and the research has proven that it will fix their problems but what they’re going to recall is the narrative you used to prove those things. When you are selling something and you have stories to share about your product or service, you will definitely have an intimate relationship with your customers and more impressive results. 

3. Turn to social media.

Social media will keep you in touch with your followers and grow your business. We can also use social media to find and reach out to new customers, and communicate with existing customers. You can display information about your product, drive visitors to your website and even produce leads. Pay-per-click ads on social media also can drive sales.

4. Consider cold calling.

Cold calling can be forgotten by sales teams as an old sales trick. Still, it’s one way to directly connect with an opportunity buyer. Cold calling enables you to contact potential markets that you aren’t already talking to anywhere else. 

5. Focus on benefits to buyers.

When promoting your product or service to prospective clients, communicate what it will make the customer’s life better. How are you getting them to come through the obstacles? If you can prove to customers that you know what they’re suffering from and that you have an answer, they might trust you. 

6. Do something your competitors don’t.

You want to get at what sets your company or product apart from your competition. This quality will be described and shown to prospective clients so you can expand your market. 

7. Offer a free trial.

Offer a free trial or sample of your product to any customer that is interested in experiencing it. Who doesn’t like getting free stuff? Rather, the best thing about a free trial is that you can get your customers near enough to your product to see if it can transform their lives. You can attract customers who want to buy and they will be more likely to convert to paying customers.  

8. Create urgency.

Seal the deal: Be in an urgency with your customers and tell them why they should buy right now. You might say for instance that you’ll save them $1,000 at the end of the week if they start using your product now. Or you can provide them with a short-term offer or test drive that is additional value for making a purchase now. 

9. Embrace customer feedback.

Don’t dismiss your customers if they say something isn’t quite right with the product or price. It allows you to resolve their problem but if you listen to your clients, it’ll allow you to identify the root cause quicker. What’s more, if your customers are comfortable with you paying attention to their issues, they also know you respect them, and that in turn generally means that they are more likely to work with you to resolve the issue.

10. Build and maintain relationships with your customers.

Keep contact with customers after they’ve bought from you to open the possibilities of another sale. You have to work very hard to convert a lead into a customer. And you can stay in touch, checking in from time to time, check on where you’re at, and you don’t have to do it all over again. 

Final Thought

Sales tactics are part of the sales process and work with you to acquire customers. They open avenues to make you better know your customers’ needs and form relationships they will keep coming back to.