Ready, Set, SALES! Get Ready to Revolutionise Your Business Sales Strategy

Your Business Operating System

Ready, Set, SALES! Get Ready to Revolutionise Your Business Sales Strategy

Every business needs a rock solid sales strategy. Big or small, one person or ten thousand, sales are the lifeblood of your business. Sales give you the resources you need to keep growing, thriving and prospering.

Finding a sales strategy which works for your business can feel challenging. Finding one which doesn’t feel like you’re selling your soul? Almost impossible. There’s so many different options, each with a different process or tool (which you have to pay for).

It doesn’t have to be that way. In this three part series, I’ll outline a straight forward, easy to follow set of steps you can follow which will help you drive great outcomes for your business, while staying undertaking a significant sales step. Even if you’re a company of 1.

Let’s go!

Series Overview

The series is divided into three articles and 15 steps. Each step is specific and concrete, containing real life processes you can work through to level up your sales process. Put them together and you’ll be well on your way to sales success.

1. Ready. Part 1 explores how to get yourself and your sales team (if it exists) ready for your sales push.
2. Set. Part 2 shares how you can set your approach and next steps into a repeatable process, giving you valuable insight into how it’s going.
3. Sales. Part 3 finishes with how to maintain your momentum by looking at your leadership and outcomes.

As always, I hope this content is helpful! It means the absolute world to me when you take time to clap for an episode, subscribe to my stories or use my referral link to sign up for Medium. It lets me know that my stories are helping you ❤️.

Enjoy, and feel free to drop me a DM on twitter, connect on LinkedIn / Github with thoughts and comments 😃

Get Ready, Get Ready, Get Ready

Our first stage is all about the preparation. I’m sure I could quote some kind of pithy phrase about ‘poor preparation’ or some such item, but the truth is that you probably already know this. You’ve seen the impact.

So today, let me share with you some concrete steps about getting you and your business ready for growth, ready for sales and ready to quantify and analyse the effectiveness of your strategy.

Ready For Impact

Getting ready creates three beneficial impacts for your business.

1. Purpose. You and your team will be united in your purpose for yourselves, your team and your business. Even if you’re a team of 1, you’ll find getting ready gives your business a stronger sense of purpose.
2. Message. Common messaging across all area’s of your business is an immediate level up for your sales process. It makes sure that every area of your business is pulling in the same business.
3. Resources. You’ll have a common understanding of the resources you’ve invested in your business.

These three things will make your sales push exponentially more effective.

1. Develop a Clear Strategy

Phase 1 starts with your strategy for this season of your business. That last part (in italics 😉) is critical.

Let me explain.

Imagine you’re a business of 2 people selling a career coaching service. Your business might be constrained by things like:

1. The amount of money available to invest in online marketing
2. The amount of time available to invest in new clients (while also maintaining your existing client base)
3. The process in place to manage growth — i.e. in a team of two, who will answer the phone if you’re both currently in a coaching session

Clearly, this business must take these things into account, or your sales push might just overwhelm it.

In contrast, if you’re a business of 100 people selling a career coaching service, you might have an entirely different set of constraints. You might have to consider things like:

1. Hiring a sales person who understands your values
2. Ensuring you’ve got a website and CRM (more on this later) in place to handle prospect handoffs
3. An effective quality control processes in place to ensure a consistent standard of service for new clients

What company 2 faces is different from company 1.

What your company faces right now is different from what you’ve faced in the past

Your business sales strategy also needs to change. There’s different constraints and inputs to work through. Your goal of increasing sales remains — but the specifics? They’re completely different. Your strategy needs to frame and be framed in your current context.

Here’s a three step process to get to this context:

1. What is your current overall goal?
2. How will what you’re doing in this sales push impact your ability to deliver on your current overall goal?
3. What are measures of success are relevant for this sales push?

You’ll be well on your way to a great strategy as you dive into these questions.

Reminder: Your business changes as it prospers. Create a strategy appropriate for your current state.

2. Explicitly Define Your Target Market

Almost immediately after your strategy (or often as part of the strategy), you need to be defining your target market. Don’t be fooled by how simple this sounds — defining a target market can be a very labour intensive process! However, done right, it’s incredibly rewarding.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Define Location. Think about 2hat location (including digital) you want to focus on. What are the characteristics of this location?
2. Define Your ‘Who’. Who are the people you want to reach at this location? Is it all visitors to a website, or is it only those who are attracted to a certain market segment?
3. Define How. Start to figure out where you need to be present. Ask yourself: “How do we connect with these people at this location? How do we share our story, brand, products and services with them?”

Entering Your Very Own Strategy / Target Market Loop

Done right, you’ll find yourself entering your very own ‘Strategy / Target Market Loop. This is an incredibly beneficial loop for your business where:

1. You’ll come up with a strategy,
2. You’ll research the target market,
3. Then realise your strategy needs to be refined.
4. Then you’ll refine your target market.
5. Then you’ll refine your strategy.

This process is awesome! Don’t get me wrong. It can be quite frustrating to realise that something you thought was nailed needs to change…but in the process, you’ll discover a TON about your business, your target market and your strategy.

So dive into this process with gusto! Own it!

And be confident that there’ll definitely be a time to execute.

Strategy/Target Market Loop Outcomes

Authentically engaging in the Strategy/Target Loop delivers some incredible results:

1. Efficient expenditure of resources, where every dollar is invested to assisting in the sales push
2. Focus on area’s of the greatest return on investment
3. Rapid feedback when things aren’t delivering as expected

Ultimately, you’ll have a lot more $$$ to reinvest back into your business.

3. Develop a Clear, True and Relevant Message

An explicitly defined target market allows you to naturally flow into your messaging. In fact, you may even find it occurring even as you engage in steps 1 and 2.

Here’s the characteristics you should look for in your messaging:

1. Clarity. Clarity beats everything else. Your message should be very clear to your target group. I’m sure you already know this, but different groups of people respond to the same message differently. If you ask a group of software engineers what languages they know, they’ll give you (generally) a totally different answer than a multilingual arts student! (By the way, if you don’t know what I mean, just try it 😃)
2. Truthfulness. Recently I worked with a company researching eco-friendly accomodation. They made a startling discovery. Across every market segment (cheap, luxury etc), the companies which clearly and truthfully messaged about what to expect at their accomodation, consistently had the best reviews. You could have two budget accomodation providers, with exactly the same kind amenities (or lack of them), and the one which clearly identified things they did and didn’t have would get 5 star Google Reviews. The one which tried to hide it? They would get 4 or less. The take away message here is that truthfulness matters. Truthfulness will get you better results. Truthfulness will sustainably grow your business.
3. Relevance. Being relevant means communicating in way which is relevant to your target group. This impacts all sort of areas like the medium of communication you use, through the way you structure your sentences. Simply put, the more relevant your message is, the more likely it is to be effective.
4. Why This Helps. Whatever you are selling should genuinely and authentically help / improve / advance or assist the person you’re selling it to. It’s not just the standard ‘What’s in it for me’ question, it’s also about the bigger picture. Buying your thing whatever that thing is should have a genuinely positive impact on your prospects life. And guess what…if you can’t answer that question, it might be time to revisit your strategy and target market.

Truthfulness Matters

4. Set Expectations

Here’s the thing. Most humans are hard-wired to enjoy meeting (reasonable, legal and authentic) expectations.

You are no different. Your sales team are no different.

If you want your sales team to think, act and behave in a way which constantly reinforces your message, then it starts with you setting expectations.

If you expect your team to always be willing to help potential customers and clients with their needs even if they don’t land the sale then you need to say it. If you are happy with them working different hours if that serves their prospects needs — then say that too. Even if you’re a team of 1 (and shout out to you if that’s the case!), set expectations for yourself.

At every stage, in every step, make sure that your expectations are clear, consistent and realistic. And if you’re a truly great leader — then work with your team to understand their expectations of you as well!

It’s a theme we’ll return to several times in this series.

Getting Ready is your first and best chance to Set Expectations

Here’s some of the excellent outcomes of effectively setting expectations:

1. Resilience. Your team will be able to effectively navigate the unexpected challenges which always come up. I.e. that prospect/customer which just flashed across your mind.
2. Respect. You’ll be clear about the “Must Do’s”, “Should Do’s”, and “Would love for you to do’s” (and which is which)
3. Real. You’ll establish guard rails around your goals, leading to real outcomes. You’ll also put in place your first guard rails to prevent unreasonable, illegal and inauthentic outcomes which might otherwise occur

5. Discuss Resourcing

Every business experiences resourcing discussions. Sometimes they’re huge, sometimes they’re small. Even if you didn’t plan on having them, there’s an internal talk track which is occurring for you and your team.

For instance, if you get up and joke about ‘Budget Cuts’, without providing clarity about what you meant by that, people will automatically start to think about restricting whatever expense they perceive to be unnecessary. Now this might sound great…but if that ‘whatever they perceive’ turns out to be a critical business function…

Well. You’ll have some issues. And they’ll be really challenging to sort out.

Do you and your business a favour — be open about resourcing

Talk about it extensively. Things like:

1. How much money there is to be spent, and what that looks like
2. What other company resources can and should be used
3. What kind of reporting expectations there are

I’m sure you can think of some more. The point is:

Be open about your resourcing

Get Ready Conclusion

And that concludes phase 1 of our Sales strategy. Stay tuned for the next article in the series — I can’t wait to share it with you.

Remember:

This is Just the Beginning!

Series Episode List

1. Get Ready
2. Get Set
3. SALES