Sales Strategy and How To Build One

Sales strategy includes all aspects of products, customers, value proposition, sales process and tools. It’s about who will buy what, why they’ll buy, and how they’ll buy. These articles focus on understanding the principles of sales strategy and how to implement them. You might also be interested in:

Successful Sales Management

Check out our Sales Management tutorials for coaching in strategy, tactics, processes, systems and tools; all explained in short courses to help you improve the performance of your sales operations.

Your Sales Playbook

Sales Strategies and Tactics

Your sales strategy is simply a playbook – what the sports coaches call the predetermined moves you’ll make in particular circumstances set by the opposition. For a sports playbook you need to understand and stay within the rules of the game. You need to research the opposition’s past performances, seeing how they exploit weaknesses. You [...]

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What Sales People Can Learn From Supply Chains

Sales Strategies and Tactics

Professional buyers can teach sales people a lot about selling. In fact sales people can learn a lot about selling, when they’re buying for themselves. But there’s one aspect of buying sales people will not learn on their own – the supply chains professional buyers build. Supply chains are interesting, because they seem to contradict [...]

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Who Needs a Sales Strategy

Sales Strategies and Tactics

Why do you need a sales strategy? Surely success in sales and sales management is all about tactics – individual responses to unique customer needs. No two customers, no two opportunities, and no two sales deals are the same. The only strategy any sales manager can make work is “whatever it takes”. Do whatever is [...]

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A Role for Sales People in 2012 – Customer Experience

Sales Strategies and Tactics

Is there a role for sales and sales management in 2012 and beyond? The traditional sales tasks in prospecting, pitching and closing seem to be redundant now the Internet has enabled customers to do their own research, and marketing to do the pitching. Maybe 2012 is all about transitioning the role of revenue generation from [...]

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How to Define Your Sales Problem

Sales Strategies and Tactics

Do you think you have a sales problem?   If so you’re in good company.  And you’re also wrong.  You don’t have a sales problem.  You have a strategy problem.  The assumptions you made about market, and customers, and your operations don’t fit with reality. Rework the strategy, based on fact rather than assumptions, to solve [...]

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10 Challenges for Your Sales Strategy

Sales Strategies and Tactics

Do you have a sales strategy checklist – a number of questions, or challenges, your strategy needs to address? Writing a strategy for selling, whether for a market, a team, or even an individual deal, can be tricky. There’s a danger of building incorrect assumptions into the thinking. Testing every assumption avoids that danger, or [...]

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So Just How Confident Are You

Sales Strategies and Tactics

Sales Forecasts based on confidence aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. A subjective, single dimension assessment by sales reps not grounded in fact can only ever be a guess. Consider this example conversation between sales representative and sales manager while reviewing the sales forecast. “How confident are you we’ll win that sale? How sure [...]

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Content Consumers The Silent Market

Sales Strategies and Tactics

Image via CrunchBase Our efforts at developing a social media sales strategy are progressing at snails pace but we have decided on the role of content and the tools we’ll use. First off we put a lot of effort into deciding whether we needed to be involved at all. The conclusion was we couldn’t afford [...]

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Our Sales Strategy for Social Media – So Far

Sales Strategies and Tactics

Our business needs a sales strategy for social media. We decided yesterday. Now the hard work of defining what that strategy should be. Which media should we use for what content, and or engagement, and how often. Should we publish, or monitor and converse? Should we be proactive or reactive? How much time should we [...]

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