team scope's musings

Your sales strategy creates your advantage

It’s happened so often that I’ve almost stopped being surprised by it, but I have to admit I’m intrigued by the number of businesses I come across that don’t understand the power of a strong sales strategy. It’s something that typically comes up while we work through a brand or marketing strategy when we brief clients on a new project. The design process we use here at team scope helps us to develop an understanding of each business and its goals – we ask direct questions about sales methods, successes, challenges and profitability. And to this day, we’ve never met a client who didn’t want to make their sales more consistent and profitable – but hardly any of them know how to make it happen strategically.

What is a sales strategy?

A sales strategy is similar to a marketing strategy, and is synchronised with both the brand and marketing strategies. The marketing strategy defines your business’s core message, its target audience, the best channels to reach your audience, the ‘four P’s’, and the frequency with which you should put your message out there. Selling, on the other hand, consists of two main functions: strategy and tactics. Your sales strategy dictates how you plan your sales activities: how you’re going to reach clients, what your competitive difference is and which resources you have available to you. Your sales tactics involve the day-to-day selling: prospecting, sales processes and follow-up.

Although the tactics of selling are obviously very important, the competitive advantages of strategic sales planning are too compelling to ignore. A strategic sales plan will let you:

• Increase your closing ratio, because you know your clients’ ‘hot buttons’
• Improve client loyalty, because you understand and appreciate their needs.
• Shorten your sales cycles with outside recommendations.
• Outsell your competitors by offering the right solutions to your customer’s needs.

The moral of the story is that you need to look at both sides of the sales equation – tactics and strategy. If you make sure your brand, marketing and sales strategy are synergistic, then you develop a system where the sum of the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. And this will give your business a competitive edge that will deliver more consistent and more profitable sales.

What’s your value proposition?

I often ask people what they think their most critical business tools are – and I have to admit to being surprised by how rarely ‘value proposition’ is on the list.

A value proposition is one of the most vital tools a business can have – because it’s all about the people who keep your business alive: your customers. You value proposition defined the key economic and qualitative benefits that your product or service delivers from a customer’s point of view, and should prove – beyond a reasonable doubt – that the product will help the customer to either save money, make money, avoid a cost, or become more efficient.

And here’s something that’s even less well known: in order to optimise customer demand you should create a value proposition for each target market. This will allow you to develop a unique marketing mix for each target market. The marketing mix – aka the ‘Four P’s’ – is a term used to describe the combination of product (or service) attributes, pricing, promotional programs and placement.

Positioning is the method used by brand leaders to create an identity or image for a company, product, service or brand. It determines the ‘space’ a product should be situated in for a given target market and it seeks to gain an insight into the target customer demographic. The perception of value and the need-satisfying characteristics of a product or service will be the basis upon which buyers, decision makers, and influencers involved in the purchase of a product or service make their choice.

A product’s position statement incorporates the value proposition by allowing you to engage in explicit and concise communication with your intended market. Your goal is to shape the customer’s perception about your product or service by describing who you are, what you do, how your product or service will solve their problems, and how you compare with the competition.

Most of the books and articles written about positioning tend to focus only on positioning the company, or possibly the brand – but not the product, service, or even a specific piece of literature. Certainly, positioning your company is important. But most of your customers won’t be intending to buy the entire company, so doesn’t it follow that you should also position the products or services that they will buy?

Businesses that fail to clearly understand their positioning may consequently take a disjointed marketing approach that fails to reach their target market – which is essentially a waste of their marketing efforts and budget. To avoid this pitfall, your positioning strategy must be clearly defined in your marketing plan and should become the fifth ‘P’ in your marketing mix.

Here at team scope we’ve helped many businesses create meaningful value proposition statements – isn’t it time you gave us a call to find out how to give your business more value?