How to define your commercial strategy in 3 steps?

What Is a Sales Strategy?

How Do You Define a Sales Strategy?

Simply put, the definition of a sales strategy is the company's action plan to achieve its commercial objectives. This means every sales objective must be tied to specific sales actions and precise indicators.

But when we've said that, we haven't gotten much further. So let's try to show you what a sales strategy is NOT.

"We're going to achieve 50% revenue growth by setting higher targets for our sales reps and hiring two new team members."

No, that's not a sales strategy. Setting high sales targets isn't a strategy. What's funny is that if it works, you'll keep doing the same thing until disaster strikes, and if it doesn't work, you'll be unable to find any explanation other than "the sales reps are terrible" – which will also lead to disaster.

How Do You Develop a Sales Strategy?

Implementing a commercial development strategy actually involves many elements. The simplest and most obvious is the company's revenue target – or better yet, margin target. This is your "North Star metric" – we're here to drive revenue.

A sales strategy is the concrete action plan, the detailed roadmap of how your sales team plans to reach that objective. So you need to have:

• Sub-objectives

• Means to achieve them

• Performance indicators to evaluate your progress

You need these three elements for every revenue acquisition lever. Generally, to reach a revenue objective, you have 4 major levers:

• New customer acquisition through prospecting

• New customer acquisition through referrals

• "Inbound" new customer acquisition

• Additional sales to existing customers

For each lever, you need sub-objectives, means to achieve them, and indicators to track their progress. The more precise and detailed your actions, the better your chances of performing well. The more precise and relevant your indicators, the fewer surprises you'll have.

Does this seem obvious to you? In good faith, analyze your sales strategy and verify that you find this for each acquisition lever and each objective. Then, if you want to reach expert level, ask one of your sales reps (sorry to whoever gets caught off guard with this question – you just caught a stray bullet) to detail their plan for the next 3 months. You win if what your salesperson tells you is exactly what you had in your strategy.

If they get it wrong, don't make the mistake of thinking they failed. You're the sales director – your mission is to make theirs easy.

Sales Strategy Development Isn't Just About Sales Teams

Yes, despite what the name might suggest, sales strategy involves teams other than the sales team. In 100% of cases, the marketing team is involved since you'll need both marketing and sales resources to reach your objectives. But we can also mention project teams, customer success managers, or the product team.

Revenue is what keeps the entire company alive, and EVERYONE in the company works to increase revenue. Yes, everyone – even the accounting team. I can assure you that an efficient billing process saves the sales team a lot of time, and that's directly tied to revenue.

So your sales strategy isn't determined over dinner with all the sales team all-stars. It's prepared meticulously, refined with the sales team, then fine-tuned with other teams. Moving fast is bad – it has never helped anyone win anything long-term and adds no value.

What Are the Different Steps to Define Your Sales Strategy?

I promised you a 3-step method to define your sales strategy, so here we go. Keep in mind that these three steps must be applied to each acquisition channel.

Step 1: Define Your Objectives

STOP! I see you there, full of enthusiasm, about to jump on your spreadsheet or another control tool and start putting numbers everywhere!

First important points: we often talk about quantitative objectives and qualitative objectives. Quantitative objectives are the easiest to define – they have the merit of simplifying the choice of tracking indicators. However, they're not the best in the sense that they're generally less inspiring and encourage less creativity.

Concrete example:

"Becoming the market leader in graphene flying rabbits" is more inspiring than "achieving 100% revenue growth."

Why?

Because the second option constrains you and narrows your vision. There are several ways to be the leader in your market, some of which are actually better than revenue.

We're not judging the graphene flying rabbits. Stay focused.

Last point: a good objective, SMART or not, needs a time horizon – whether short, medium, or long-term. A year is simplest, but if you want an effective strategy, I recommend quarterly intermediate objectives.

Step 2: Key Indicators

You only improve what you measure! You must define Key Performance Indicators that will allow you to evaluate your progress toward the objective.

There are tons of relevant indicators – it all depends on your objective. Common ones include:

• Revenue

• Number of signed clients

• Average deal size

• Signed margin

• Number of new customers

• Number of client meetings

What you need to understand is that measurement influences effort and resources. If you measure revenue, there's a good chance it will improve, but be careful that this doesn't lead to neglecting... margin.

The sales manager's job is to find the right objective, the right measurement, and anticipate contingencies – meaning the effect of each element of the strategy and sales management on achieving objectives.

An indicator guides actions, so anticipate potential drift.

Step 3: Resources

A resource must be a tool, a precise action plan that brings you closer to the objective. So no, increasing each of your sales reps' targets isn't a "resource." It's a method of distributing the objective load, but it doesn't help anyone and guarantees nothing. At best, it's an excellent way to increase turnover and collect burnouts if used alone.

It's your job to find the right levers to help your sales reps reach objectives, and these resources can be of several types:

• Material resources: Software, computer equipment, vehicles... everything depends on what's needed to reach the objective

• Human resources: Recruitment, of course, but also training, for example

• Management resources: How will you coach, help the sales team, or implement effective and supportive commercial coaching, and also incentivize them

Most of the time, "providing resources" seems relatively "obvious." But I'll give you an example of a sales strategy doomed to fail due to lack of resources.

Example of a Failing Strategy

Company X wants to acquire more clients in a particular sector. They've developed a dedicated product that's easy to sell, highly differentiating, and profitable.

The sales manager set an objective for their sales reps to sell €500,000 of this new product – 25% of their target.

At year-end, overall sales objectives were met with €2,000,000 in sales. But only 10% of sales concerned this new product.

What happened?

Usually, the sales reps mainly sell services. These service offerings have very short sales cycles, and it's very simple to identify a need in prospects. The sales reps' compensation includes a variable part – this variable part is a fixed bonus per signed contract.

The product to be sold is more specific and only concerns part of their portfolio. The need is harder to identify, and the sales cycle is 3 to 4 times longer than a service offering. The product is easy to sell when a need is identified and brings much more to the company than most service offerings.

The bonus for signing a sale of this new product is the same as for services.

Here's the recipe for failure.

It's normal that your sales reps don't want to take the risk of selling their prospects something more "difficult" and "longer" to sell if the bonus for this risk is zero.

You didn't provide the resources to succeed in your objective.

What's the Best Sales Strategy: 7 Tips for Success

Tip: Too Many Indicators Kill Indicators

Be very careful not to multiply indicators and dashboards. By trying to do too well, you'll get lost – you can't and shouldn't monitor everything. That's why you need to choose the right indicator, and it's not that simple.

Avoid having more than two indicators for a single objective. Make sure indicators are compatible with each other. For example, you can't increase the average margin rate while having a strategy to increase sales share of a product whose margin rate is below this objective. It seems obvious, but we see this every day.

To help you, we've compiled some of the main indicators to use in your sales strategy [here].

The CRM Controversy

Ah, CRMs – now there's a complicated subject. Yes, you need a CRM, but be careful how it's used. It's an important tool for your sales strategy and your team's efficiency, BUT today it's primarily a surveillance tool that serves everyone except the sales reps.

How do you get sales reps to actually use it? The best way is to start by involving them in choosing the CRM. This is important to avoid giving them the impression that you're imposing a digital "time clock."

Then prioritize CRMs that are decidedly sales-oriented and configure them to simplify their work, not just to monitor them.

Among the CRMs you should consider:

• NoCRM: Very sales-oriented, well-designed for prospecting with integrated sales aid tools like script generators. [Discover it here]

• Pipedrive: A very complete tool that will appeal to sales teams with strong marketing and technological culture

• New CRMs like Olynsoft: Built with the DNA to help sales reps throughout the entire sales process

Don't Have a Simplistic View of Sales Performance

Sales performance is a very broad notion. Without being an ayatollah of complexity, being simplistic won't help you improve your performance and achieve expected results.

You need to address all components of this sales performance and not forget that the sales manager probably has the most levers to improve it. Which means if it's not at the expected level, it's probably their fault.

Come on, you're not a child – you know I'm right.

Think About Sales Enablement in Your Company

Sales enablement is a term that describes all the tools and practices aimed at making your sales reps more efficient.

There are tons of tools and training that can be adapted. Here are some examples:

• Email tools like Lemlist

• Tools like Dropcontact that help find your prospects' contact information and fill them into your CRM automatically

• Tools to succeed in your sales process and run your meetings like Sales Deck.io

The important thing is to understand that sales reps also have dedicated tools that can help them. Think about your revenue!

Management Should Serve Sales Reps

The objective of sales management is to help the team daily. It's useless to do weekly reviews when you have 3-month sales cycles, especially if their only purpose is to hand out stickers.

No random meetings, no point-counting in public lynching mode – this has absolutely NO value and generally demonstrates more an inability to target problem sources than real managerial effectiveness.

Be a coach, not a referee.

Don't Bet Everything on One Gamble

You've identified a pool of potential clients, you're convinced it's your company's future?

Great, but until this actually translates into numbers, these are just hypotheses.

Don't sin through excess enthusiasm by betting everything on a market you know nothing about (buyer persona, competitors, competitive advantage...) or be ready to question this strategy rather than your sales reps' effectiveness in case of failure.

Once again, you'll tell me "obviously," except that in practice, this happens constantly.

Involve the Marketing Team and Share Common Objectives

We can no longer do without effective marketing to be commercially successful – it's an integral part of the company's development levers. And since you need them, and you know they need you, work together!

More than nice words, you need actions, and for there to be actions, you should have common objectives. The target, the revenue objective – it's not just the sales team's, for example, neither is the closing rate.

If the marketing team is only tracked on the number of leads generated, don't be surprised to have situations where they complain about the sales reps' inability to close their leads while the sales reps are ready to come to blows because they receive demo requests from students every 3 minutes.