Every starting business with products or services knows that they need to sell what they’ve got to turn it into profit. However, most startups are putting all their focus on product and marketing development, forgetting about sales. This practice is costing them a lot of money.
Unlike marketing and product development, sales focuses on the essential part of your business’ success: making money. A good marketing strategy can make your product or service visible to many consumers. On the other hand, a well-planned sales strategy helps you make a profit.
A good sales strategy can help you:
- Get more customers/clients
- Strengthen/expand your current relationships with customers/clients
- Sell more products/services
Below are the main reasons why sales strategy is vital to your startup business.
It tells you your customer’s needs at each stage
Dealing with a new customer is different from dealing with the current. You need to feed your new customers about the features of your products and services. Meanwhile, the old ones need technical assistance and support.
It would help if you had different approaches to deal with prospects at different levels in the sales journey. Using a good sales strategy will help you produce the best results.
Create a spreadsheet or a flowchart with all the possible levels of your customer’s journey, pointing to the ideal strategies that should be done at each. You can then refer to this information for sales conversations with customers.
It helps in hiring the right people
Hiring people is crucial to every business startup. This is especially true if the new business only has less than three members in its sales team.
A team with a good sales strategy has well-planned goals and methods. You already know what you need in the future, telling you precisely what you want on your sales team. This will then help you hire people with the right experience and skills to achieve your desired goals.
It improves the ROI of your sales team
Creating a strategy will let you contemplate on your business as a whole. Try asking yourself these questions:
- Do I need to focus on my existing customers or getting a new one?
- Am I getting better results through upselling?
- In what parts is the outcome better than the cost?
Doing this will let you see what specific strategies are working and what are not. Get better results by putting your focus on strategies that are working and closing more deals. Many startups have a limited budget. Sales strategy allows you to eliminate unnecessary expenses and use your sales budget wisely.
How to formulate a startup sales strategy
Below are some practical tips on formulating an effective sales strategy for a new business:
- Create a course map of your customer journey before and after-sales and determine your stance at each sales interval.
- Analyze your sales journey. Do your research and study where and how you can minimize the expenses or enhance customer satisfaction.
- Once you have come up with a good sales process, check if it will come with the marketing plan.
- Identify the crucial sales activity that will drastically boost your business.
- Determine your process and method in this sales activity, allocate resources, and build your process to enhance this activity’s effect.
Earning some profits is the most critical part of a business, especially if it is a startup. It does not matter how much you are making. As long as the money is coming in, you’re doing your business right. All you need to do is to strategize your sales effectively, keeping you on the right track.
