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 need to organise your own resources to counter the other team’s moves. And you need to play to your strengths when its your turn with the ball.

Selling is no different.

Of course it isn’t a game. It’s more serious than that. But the philosophy is the same.

Anybody with a responsibility for winning business can develop their own unique sales strategy.

Management and Marketing can’t do it. They don’t understand the particular chemistry of individual customers with particular hot buttons, and the moves the competition will make.

But you sales professionals can. You are on the street. You can feel the vibes. You know which strings to pull and what happens.

Just like sports coaches, you can do the thinking up front. Put your experience to work. Figure the angles and the plays. Write your own playbook of strategies and tactics which work for you.

That’s your sales strategy – your unique sales proposition – your USP.

If you’d appreciate some help? If you’d like a coach? If you’re not quite sure of how to manage your own destiny?

Check out our tutorial The Why’s and How’s of Sales Strategy which explains how figuring the plays out before the game starts wins you more business, at better prices, with less effort.

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 the standard business practice. They’re built on co-operation, as opposed to competition. Every partner in the chain is dependent on all the others. Nobody succeeds unless everybody succeeds. They’re also exclusive clubs. Each member is the very best at its individual role.

Buyers achieve their ultimate goal – the most value at the lowest cost, with the risk managed by somebody else – when they put together consortia of suppliers, each of whom is the best in his business, prepared to collaborate in satisfying the end customer.

Sellers are keen to take any opportunity going, especially in times like these we face in 2012. Markets are short on buyers and long on sellers. Nobody want’s to walk away from business they might win. It’s natural, when a buyer says “I’m looking for” the sales rep responds with “we can do that” regardless of how good they are at doing it. In any sales opportunity most of the competing suppliers will be selling “we can do that”.

Sales people can up their game when they understand buyers. Knowing why their company is the very best at “that” and presenting it credibly, they’ll shine through the fog of competitors claims.

There’s an opportunity here for the sales guy who puts in some extra effort. Understanding all the dimensions of the buyers requirement, and positioning the proposal as “the very best at some part of it”, helps the offer stand out from the crowd.

Competitors will readily understand the maximum value at lowest cost element. The part they’ll be less likely to translate into their own thinking is the “best of breed” concept. The fact they “can” do something isn’t a qualifier for winning the business. The fact they can do it better than anybody else is.

Finding that “something we’re the very best at” isn’t necessarily as difficult as it sounds. Just asking the right questions will usually uncover several hidden influences. Asking those questions in the three agendas will reveal hot buttons the competition might not discover. Selling as the only vendor to understand a particular want, and being the very best at satisfying it, is usually the secret sauce.

So which are those three agendas hiding the hot buttons others won’t discover?

The Business Imperative

There’s something driving the change in the business. What is it – a defence against competitive pressure, or an offensive initiative. What will reduce the risk of failure

The Business Case

There’s always a business case. Return on Investment and or cost justification – no matter how notional – will be part of the final decision. So will cash flow, and risk. Amateurs assume the business case is about cost. Professionals understand the other sides of the coin.

The Personal Agenda

There’s always a personal agenda. It might be the buyer’s. It might be the CEO’s. It might be any number of other influencers’, but there is always a personal agenda.

Sales professionals who’s offer is as good as the others in two dimensions and the very best in the other have a competitive advantage. When they’re as good in the others in two dimensions and the very best in the personal agenda, they’re dealing from a stacked deck.

On the other hand the “we can do that” rep is simply there making up the numbers.

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 necessary to win the sale, and ask forgiveness after.

When it comes to those final few interchanges “whatever it takes” makes sense. The cost of sale has already been spent. Any deal is better than a loss report.

But that’s only one part of what sales people and sales managers do. Most of their time is spent researching, cold calling, networking, discovering, probing, qualifying – finding out where there are deals and checking those are real opportunities.

For those parts of the job, a well constructed sales strategy makes a big difference. Research is better targeted, cold calls are more productive, sales resources are more cost effective, and sales performance is more predictable.

So what is a sales strategy and how can you decide which is the most likely to work for you?

Before you call in the consultants you might find some of the articles in our blogs helpful. At least they’ll give you a basic understanding and foundations for building your own strategy, to fit your business, in your market.

Here are links to a small selection.

The Difference Between Strategy and Tactics
Sales strategy isn’t something business owners and sales managers put at the top of the priority list. Perhaps because they don’t understand the difference between that strategy and sales tactics, or the importance of either in effective sales operations. Or how to develop an effective strategy. So how is a sales strategy different from sales tactics?

The Role of Your Value Proposition
What role does value proposition play in a sales strategy? Or maybe what is a sales strategy, and what is a value proposition, and why should anybody care? The answer to those questions depends on how much you enjoy kissing frogs.
You’ll remember the Brothers Grimm fairy tale where the princess kissed the frog, and the frog turned into a handsome prince who married her. The happy couple lived together in marital bliss for the rest of their lives.

The Role of Sales Process
Process is an essential element of sales strategy. In fact process is an essential element of any strategy. Do you have one in yours?
Most think of strategy in terms of what they want to do. They might even think of this in terms of value proposition – what they’re going to do for the customer. But, do they think about the how?

What is Your Sales Strategy, How Well Does It Work?
Sales strategy is the fundamental element of any business plan. Most advice on business planning misses it out, focusing on revenue, costs and cash instead. Presumably because the people giving that advice know nothing about selling and wouldn’t recognise a sales strategy if it bit them in the behind. But knowing how we’re going to turn prospects into satisfied customers is more important than anything else. Without that concept built into our operating model the business plan isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

10 Challenges – A Checklist For Your Strategy
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 at least highlights any risks. A checklist will help you make sure every angle is covered.

A New Role for Sales People – Customer Experience
Maybe 2012 is all about transitioning the role of revenue generation from sales people to web pages. Maybe the new sales tasks are all about Keywords, Content and Adwords auctions. Who needs the additional costs of sales operations when the customer simply wants the lowest price, and the reps and the managers, add no value.

Sales and Sales Management Tutorials
Want to know all about Sales Management? – Well you’re in the right place for real insight with individual tutorials costing less than cup of coffee and which you can read in the time it takes to drink your chosen brew. And if you want some software designed to help you implement our Sales Probability Process Management method you can get that here too.

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 sales people to web pages. Maybe the new sales tasks are all about Keywords, Content and Adwords auctions. Who needs the additional costs of sales operations when the customer simply wants the lowest price, and the reps and the managers, add no value.

This isn’t a pretty picture for sales people, is it. We seem past our sell by date, redundant in our own time, like so many other professionals replaced by computers.

It’s time for sales people to sell to their own bosses, setting a new role for themselves, and equipping their companies with a new competitive advantage – customer experience.

As much as the bean counters try to commoditise products and services, they fail. Their mistake is believing buyers are only interested in price. But customers only ever buy on price when they don’t care what they’re buying.

In the vast majority of cases customer experience is as significant in the buying decision as price, if not more so. Buying on the Internet is a very sterile experience. There’s no enjoyment, and not much security. There’s very little advice, and a lot of risk. When businesses sacrifice customer experience in pursuit of lower costs they lose control of their markets. The reverse is true. When businesses invest in customer experience they increase control and as result achieve more sales, at higher prices and margins.

The new role for sales in 2012, when so much of the traditional tasks have been automated, needs to be customer experience. Sales people help customers feel good about buying decisions, and that’s what will make the difference between winners and losers in 2012 and beyond.

If your CEO doesn’t agree take her to your nearest Apple store, and ask her to tell you why Apple is the most successful technology company in the world, ever.

Related articles

• Customer Experience Whitepaper Identifies Three Key Strategies to Building and Creating Extraordinary Customer Experiences (prweb.com)

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 what you see as a sales problem.

Most businesses these days have difficulty forecasting which deals will be won by the sales team, leading to problems forecasting revenue, and cash flow.  Uncertainty about income and cash turns into doubt, and doubt stops them investing – in people, product and growth.  Doubt about sales performance, revenue and cash gives everybody reason to hold back.  Not surprisingly, most people will describe such a situation as a sales problem.  But they’re wrong.

The inability to predict success in sales campaigns is a challenge, but the fault lies in one, or more, elements of sales strategy  - either the value proposition, the process, or the systems.

A value proposition  aligning your ability to add value with the needs of a defined market sets the sales rep up with the right messages for the right people.  On the other hand an aspiration to sell what you could do, as opposed to what only you can do, doesn’t.  Targeting sales people in places the competition is stronger can only end in tears.

A process aligning prospects needs with the vendors capability provides both with the opportunity to achieve their goals.  On the other hand demanding your process overrides the way customers want to work creates a confrontation neither party needs.  Insisting the customer does things the vendors way works for some major businesses, but not many, and not for long.

Systems collecting the right information, and putting it where the troops need to find it, equip sales and customer service teams to get their job right, first time, every time.  Unfortunately those systems usually get defined by the IT people who primarily answer to the accountants.  The people who most need information finish up collecting meaningless data whilst what they need to help customers buy isn’t available.

If sales operations isn’t delivering the goods for you don’t blame the guys doing the selling. Look in the mirror and make sure your strategy is working.

• Make sure your value proposition fits with what customers are buying.
• Get your process helping, not hindering, the alignment of a buy/sell collaboration.
• Stop your systems delivering to the accountants at the cost of the sales team’s efficiency.

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 at least highlights any risks. A checklist will help you make sure every angle is covered.

In this blog you’ll find articles describing the importance of your sales strategy, and even a template you might use to develop yours. In our sister site Successful Sales Management we’ve published more articles relating to the same topic. These explain some less obvious aspects your strategy might include. Here, we put them forward as 10 thoughts for your checklist.

What’s the difference between sales strategy and sales tactics discusses how strategy addresses market wide factors, and tactics address ways in which the strategy is deployed in individual sales plans.

In Is your strategy easy to buy we describe ‘easy to buy’ in three dimensions – your internal teams need to believe in it, your prospects need to understand how it benefits them, and the buying process needs to be frictionless, with no barriers to give the customer cause for delay.

Organise your sales funnel into Targets, Suspects and Prospects explains how categorising names in the sales funnel helps with sales forecasting, and prioritising schedules when there are conflicts.

Everybody needs a sales coach highlights the importance of having somebody in the prospect business coach you in how to win the deal.

The role of value proposition in the sales strategy discusses what that proposition should be, how to describe it, and how to use it in your sales process.

The role of process in your sales strategy quotes a real life case study of how an insurance broker plans his sale in a number of steps, then executes the plan in the same way, every time.

Are you selling to the personal agenda positions the various decision and selection criteria involved in any buying process. The personal agenda doesn’t necessarily surface early in conversations, but will have an influence once the short list is selected. Uncover the personal agenda to recruit your coach.

The role of questions in your sales process responds to recent articles suggesting the point of asking questions is in creating conversations. We agree, but there’s more to it than that and explain what.

Avoiding Death Valley warns of the dangers of playing all your cards too early. Always keep a reason to go back to the prospect until the decision is made.

Buying Permission to Sell suggests there’s a step which comes before all the questions – some kind of opening statement which tells prospects they’re talking to the right people and buys their permission to sell.

If these thoughts get you questioning the status quo, watch this space.   We’ll soon be publishing a new tutorial on the subject of sales strategy – why you need one and how to get one.

In the meantime check out our library of Selling and Sales Management coaching tutorials.

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 are you that’s the price you’ll get? How do you know the close date won’t slip out of the quarter?”

“Well there are never certainties in sales, but in this case I’m 70% confident on winning the deal. I’m 50% confident on the price and I’m 30% confident we’ll get it this quarter.”

“That doesn’t help me solve my prospect list puzzle. I need a single percentage to put in the forecast. What have you got?

“Well, in that case put me down for 50%!”

This is a scenario any experienced salesman will recognize. Here we have confidence in 3 dimensions, each of which may have an impact on our sales forecast, and the sales forecast drives just about everything in the business.

• The sales rep needs to have answers to these questions – otherwise how will she know if this deal is the best use of her time.
• The sales manager needs to have answers to these questions because she’s about to commit to the CEO on cash this quarter.
• The CEO needs to know the answer to these questions, because she needs to review how well the sales strategy works.

These managers need more than guesses. They need a weighted probability forecast based on a standard sales process with milestones. As each milestone is passed the percentage probability can be incremented. The value derived from applying the weighted probability to the estimated value will be a more accurate representation of likely performance than any guess about confidence.

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 not to be.

Next up it seemed appropriate to choose the social media tools we used. But that was a blind alley. We couldn’t decide on tools, even thought that’s the fun part, until we’d decided what we wanted to do, and we couldn’t do that until we’d decided on who would be interested in what, where, and how. Before we could understand where the sales strategy could come into play we needed to understand our social media contacts.

That’s how we arrived, in a round about sort of way, at our 4 categories:

• Content Consumers
• Network Wallflowers
• Power Networkers
• Content Creators

Content Consumers

Content Consumers is by far the biggest demographic, in two of our businesses at least, so that’s the first challenge.  Everybody uses Search, and increasingly Search leads us to Opinion. Anybody wanting to be found, seen and read by interested parties has to feed the monster – Google Search – with fresh, compelling, entertaining, informing content.

Publishing content is hard work- needing new ideas written for both readers and search engines. Competition is fierce. Plagiarism is rife. Getting heard above the noise isn’t simply a question of volume.

Keeping content fresh is even harder work. Every day there’s a pressure to come up with something new to feed the monster.

Luckily putting that fresh compelling content where people can find it is simple. We use a combination of tools to write articles, make sure they present properly in browsers, are friendly to search engines and spread quickly around the Internet. Within a couple of hours of publishing our stuff is out there on all the main sites.

We use (almost) exclusively self hosted WordPress with the Thesis theme. Out of the box, the combination just flat out works, with no technical support needed. The range of design options and plug in tools can’t be matched.

On all our sites we use the Scribe SEO Optimiser tools. They help us ensure the best combination of key words within SEO best practice for content, and offer internal and external links. This is great discipline, even though its also hard to do.

We also use Zemanta to find relevant links and images. The side benefit is our stuff gets indexed by Zemanta and offered as links to other users. Sometimes we even get relevant, quality, backlinks.

Feedburner publishes our new content to Twitter accounts and RSS readers.

Google Reader with Alerts helps us monitor the Internet for interesting content in news, blogs and Twitter updates.

You Tube hosts our videos and provides embeds for our blogs.

So this part of our social media sales strategy is in place, and works, to an extent at least. The combination of ideas crafted into content – text and video – with great tools brings prospects to our sites. That part works, but for sure we’d like it to work a lot harder.

The problem we’re left with is Content Consumers are silent. They arrive, feed, and leave without a word. How much influence we’ve achieved is hard to know, but at least its a start. We can measure traffic and bounce rate, time on site and numbers of actions.

But we get very little feedback.

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 commit, and how will we know when what we’re doing is working and when it isn’t.

Given what’s going on with social media it’s likely everybody with a need to generate revenues is struggling with the same questions. That’s why we decided to start a conversation on the subject. This is our third post in as many days, building a series which explains how we’re working our way through the challenge.

What do you think? Are you doing the same thing? How are you going about it?

Elsewhere we’ve discussed a lot about sales strategies. It’s a pet subject, because we like winning sales and hate losing to somebody else. We also have an aversion to wasting time. So all up our philosophy is do the thinking up front and then change the approach to improve results.

There are examples of social media based sales strategy we can learn something from. Unfortunately they all seem to sell into the social media space – people who already get the idea and want to build their own businesses in the same way. We have three lines of business, none of which is like that.

Our Front Office Box business provides software to help the smaller businesses organise and operate more efficiently. It’s like an address book, a planning tool, and review process rolled into a single simple application. Most small business owner managers don’t spend their time watching the Twitter stream. They’re too busy satisfying customers and winning new ones.

Our Discovering The Highlands business is more typical but still not the same.

Avantrasara is mostly about exploiting intellectual property developed by scientists in research projects funded by the EU under Framework Programme 7 – FP7.

More complex than any sane person would choose, this mixture requires us to have a common approach to small business owners, tourists and scientists. Otherwise we’ll run out of time, and money. None of these are watching the web to spot ways of making money on the Internet. But in different ways they’re all using the same stuff.

Maybe we can subdivide into categories the people we want to connect with, based on their involvement with social media? Perhaps that will help us figure out a publish and engage model which works across the lines of business? That’s our starting point. Understand how people use our common facility and what that says about them. And how we can get their interest.

The categories we’ve chosen are these:

Content consumers

People who use simple Search to find the information they need. Just about everybody has a foot in this category. They don’t talk, just listen.

Network Wallflowers

Joiners and watchers, available to talk but not active.

Power Networkers

Mostly selling something, these people push themselves forward. They’re open for business offers but don’t contribute a lot.

Content Creators

The drivers of the Internet, these people self promote and don’t mind others doing the same.

We’re happy with this part of the strategy definition. The next question in what we do with it – Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Blogs, Forums, Questions and Answers sites?

That’s the next article, when we’ve done the thinking.

A blog gives sales executives an opportunity to stand out from the crowd – a way to explain who and what we are, why we’re special, and why others should do business with us. Have you got a blog as your personal business card, yet?

The sales guys personal blog can be a multi faceted, multi dimensional, multi media, resume with all the usual stuff. It can also include the detail we wouldn’t normally put in a formal document. The type of things that show us as real people. For me, my personal blog is like a 3 dimensional business card, with a difference. It’s my brand, not my employers. And my brand is important, to customers, prospects, potential employers and head hunters.

Do you think one might help others understand where you can add value to their business?

Over the last couple of years I’ve watched people quietly engage with the rest of the world, using social media. The more business focused have joined Linked In, dipping their toes into a web presence. But, from what I’ve seen, none have taken the ultimate step of presenting a blog. They’ll have a profile, but it’ll be a sterile career history, and maybe some complicated marketing speak about capabilities and achievements. There’s not much that’s “real” about a Linked In profile – except the blog it allows links to.

They’re missing a trick here. Getting partly pregnant. Making themselves available, but without sharing anything about themselves. The next step is a blog – multi media presentations of the things they’d put in resumes with the added personal touch.

The world seems full of stories now about people who’s career opportunities were limited by something posted on Facebook, but nobody talks about the other side of the coin. Whilst an un-managed web presence is a risk, a properly constructed internet footprint can be a massive advantage.

For the ambitious sales executive blogging offers the opportunity to manage what others will understand about them – not in the sterile reporting of employment history, but in the rich multi dimensional way we live our lives.

It’s probably a good idea to avoid the usual touchy subjects, like religion, politics, poor employment choices and incompetent customers. And its likely a good idea to include more personal stuff, like families, relationships, values, social contributions, sports and leisure interests.

The personal blog is the only place a sales executive can have total control over her reputation, an its so easy to write these days with technologies like Blogger, and Posterous. And it’s free too!

What do you think? If you don’t have a personal blog, have I persuaded you to give it a try?