Every salesperson was nervous about starting when it comes to sales strategy. When asked for advice, experienced sales executives would suggest to following guidelines and templates. It made things easier for everyone.
Growing and moving further in a sales career, your brain starts finding
new ideas. When experience A lot of salespeople found themselves improving and extending well-known techniques. While some might come up with completely original ideas.
The more sales call you go on, the more Ideas start stacking in your mind. But how certain are we that these ideas will work out?
Sales Strategy Inspiration from Gaming
The trick here is to get to know your prospects well enough. Puppey is a Dota 2 player who said interesting when asked how he strategies against his opponent.
"Once you've practised and analysed your opponent well enough, your instinct becomes your strategy."
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Though said in the context of online gaming, it suits well for other lines of life. Human Instinct has always been our secret weapon. As an experienced salesperson, you can use the same principle when strategising. Be emotionally close to your target audience. When a situation presents itself you can determine your audience's feeling. From there you can reverse engineer and design the perfect strategy.
Sales Strategy Map
Here's a quick map. This is how our minds work.
An event triggers a thought, which invokes feelings. An event could be a visual queue to imagine oneself enjoying the benefits of a product or service, for example.
Reverse engineering this is where salespeople find gold. You have to get your prospects in a position where they feel the benefit of your offer. From that, you go backwards and find the thoughts which would invoke such a feeling. And finally, design an event which would trigger the said thought.
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Sales Strategy Framework
These all sounds easy in theory but would take years of experience to gather such instinct. This can be solved by employing many experienced executives combining their collective experience. While having an instinct is important, strategies also need a framework and pillars. For an effective sales strategy, consider these four pillars
- Specialisation
- Differentiation
- Segmentation
- Concentration
READ THIS FOR KEY ACCOUNTS:
Strategy to win Key accounts with Account-Based Marketing
Specialisation
When a product or service does one thing, customer trust it more. In his book "Alchemy", Behavioral Science expert Rory Sutherland narrated an interesting incident.
When an appliance company came up with ideas to launch a TV and a DVD player in one device for one price, they expected people to bonkers on it. But Instead, it was one of the worst product in terms of sales. When a product or service does too many things, people assume it is half-assing on both fronts. When in reality, it was a perfectly good TV and a DVD player.
A customer wants to be served by a specialist. People who specialise in one specific thing. When you are on a sales call or a meeting be very specific about the type of customer you serve. From here your job becomes to identify if the prospect fits in the criterion.
Differentiation
From the moment you get in the life of your prospect, it is natural to assume they are drawing comparisons. In their minds, they will try to fit you with something they are familiar with. If you are similar to everyone out there, you will be rejected. But here the crazy thing, if you are very unique, you will also be rejected.
The number of people who adopt The best way to win the majority of prospects in your niche is to be similar with a few standing out feature. Consider the Curve of technology adoption as an example.
Segmentation
There will be a few features in which you outperform your competition. Highlight that. Make that your flagship feature.
Concentration
When you highlight your best feature, there will be a segment within your target audience who will benefit the most. In your strategy keep them in the centre. Design the majority of your effort to please and get the attention of these people. These are the prospects who will bring more value to you while enjoying the best of what you offer.
Set clear priorities and concentrate single-mindedly on prospects who represent only the very best potential as a customer.
Wrapping Up
Designing a sales strategy requests study of human behaviours along with product knowledge. The four pillars of creating a framework and designing your sales strategy includes: specialisation, differentiation, segmentation and concentration.
