Five Essential Elements for Building a Strong Strategy Execution Culture

 

by Terry Sterling

Many of our clients do an excellent job creating their strategic plan only to run into significant challenges on the strategy execution side, often due to cultural challenges. Culture, defined as the shared values, beliefs, norms, and behaviors that define how people within an organization interact with one another, plays a pivotal role in the success of any organizational strategy. An organization with a strong and aligned culture will not only embrace the actionable components of a well-designed strategy, but will enthusiastically implement the measures and initiatives to ensure its success. When a strong organizational culture is present, members of that organization are much more likely to exhibit shared values and desired behaviors that support strategy resulting in a shared sense of purpose and accountability.

So how does an organization establish a strong culture? We have found addressing the following five elements to be essential in building a strong strategy execution culture.

Element 1: Alignment of Values & Strategy

One of the most significant impacts organizational culture has on strategy execution is in the area of alignment of values. If a company’s strategy is compatible with its culture, a powerful coalition is generally found that can propel the performance aspects of an organization forward. Imagine, for example, a strategy focused on innovation and agility in a culture that highly values creativity and experimentation. In this type of environment, employees are much more likely to embrace, contribute to, and execute strategic objectives enthusiastically.

On the flip side, when a disconnect between culture and strategy occurs, execution quickly becomes an uphill battle with less than optimal results. Organizational cultures, for example, rooted deeply in bureaucracy and risk-aversion, will generally foster an environment of resistance and pushback, especially when attempting to implement a strategy that requires rapid-decision making.

Element 2: Leadership

Leadership has a significant impact when it comes to shaping an organization’s culture. Effective and experienced leaders understand culture is not something that can be imposed from the top down. Rather, it is a process that must be nurtured over time, in order to morph into a desired culture where individuals are content, motivated, empowered and committed. These types of desired behaviors must be modeled by the organization’s leaders and actively promoted throughout the organization. If leadership fails to do this, the cultural aspects of an organization will develop on their own and it may be a far cry from what is necessary for an organization to succeed.

When leaders put forth the required effort to align with the culture and its strategy, a sense of purpose and direction permeate an organization and can often lead to the development of a high-performance culture where the successful execution of strategy is much more likely. Employees look to leaders for guidance and inspiration, as well as purpose. When leaders are observed demonstrating the cultural values of the organization, it reinforces the connection between strategy and execution.

Element 3: Employee Engagement and Motivation

Another critical aspect of culture’s impact on strategy execution is its influence on employee engagement and motivation. While leadership greatly influences this area, other factors also weigh in. It is about mutual respect and creating an organizational environment characterized by a sense of belonging and purpose. It is a positive and inclusive culture where employees feel valued, heard, and respected. When these things are present in a culture, employees are much more likely to be fully engaged in their work and committed towards organizational goals.

Not only are engaged employees more productive, but the are the ones generally willing to put forth that extra effort; to go the extra mile to ensure organizational success. They have a positive self-im

Element 4: Adaptability & Change

Today’s fast-paced business environment is constantly causing disruptions and change. Technology, for example, is impacting every organization as Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to evolve at lightning speed. The necessity to be able to adapt and make positive change in light of these disruptions is critical for long-term organizational survival. Organizational culture greatly impacts how well an organization is able to navigate through these changes. Cultures that encourage learning, experimentation, and resilience are much better positioned to handle these types of disruptions and leverage them to their advantage.

Cultures resistant to change, or those that are overly complacent can become a major hurdle to being able to successfully execute organizational strategy. In these types of organizations, we often see employees who are accustomed to a rigid and unchanging environment struggle greatly with new processes or technologies necessary for the organization to achieve. This results in poor execution and hinders the successful implementation and success of an organizational strategy.

Element 5: Risk-Taking and Innovation

In today’s competitive markets, organizations must focus on staying competitive and innovative. In order to do this, its culture must be one that supports risk-taking and innovation. A culture than provides encouragement to its employees to explore new ideas, take calculated risks, and learn from failures can be a powerful driver of strategy execution. Not only are employees engaged, but that are challenged to be creative problem solvers, resulting in a culture where continuous improvement is the norm.

Organizational culture is not a side note in the process of strategy execution; it is a central player capable of making or breaking the successful implementation of strategic initiatives critical to the success of the organization’s strategy. Developing a keen understanding of the cultural impact on strategy is not only crucial, but actionable. Leaders who recognize the interplay between culture and strategy can effectively shape and align both to drive their organization forward towards its desired outcomes.

Summary

It is vital to examine your culture and strategy from a holistic point of view. Regardless of what framework you might have utilized to develop your strategy, it is essential that cultural considerations be considered and embedded. Performance is more than just numbers and metrics. It involves the people who drive the execution of your strategies and how their beliefs and behaviors can either propel or impeded progress.

The importance of harmony and alignment in achieving goals cannot be overstated. Just as a well-orchestrated song requires every instrument to be in tune and in perfect timing, so too does a successful strategy require every element, including its culture to also be in harmony and in synch. It is in this end that the harmonious blend of strategy, culture, and the passion by its people in these cultures are able to achieve that pinnacle of success, or in this example, the ability to create the sweetest melodies of success in today’s business environment.

Do you need help with your culture? Are you interested in learning more about how to be successful in strategy execution? Consider attending our strategy execution course. For more information: https://strategymanage.com/practical-strategy-execution-certification/

https://balancedscorecard.org/

Ten Golden Rules for Leading a Good Life

 

Michael Soupios and Panos Mourdoukoutas wrote a book entitled The Ten Golden Rules on Living a Good Life where they extracted “ancient wisdom from the Greek philosophers on living the good life” and mapped it into modern times. Here is a summary of what they wrote, extracted from a Forbes article written by Dr. Mourdoukoutas:

1. Examine life, engage life with a vengeance; always search for new pleasures and new destinies to reach with your mind.
2. Worry only about the things that are in your control, the things that can be influenced and changed by your actions, not about the things that are beyond your capacity to direct or alter. 
3. Treasure Friendship, the reciprocal attachment that fills the need for affiliation. Friendship cannot be acquired in the market place, but must be nurtured and treasured in relations imbued with trust and amity.
4. Experience True Pleasure. Avoid shallow and transient pleasures. Keep your life simple. Seek calming pleasures that contribute to peace of mind. True pleasure is disciplined and restrained. 
5. Master Yourself. Resist any external force that might delimit thought and action; stop deceiving yourself, believing only what is personally useful and convenient; complete liberty necessitates a struggle within, a battle to subdue negative psychological and spiritual forces that preclude a healthy existence; self-mastery requires ruthless candor. 
6. Avoid Excess. Live life in harmony and balance. Avoid excesses. Even good things, pursued or attained without moderation, can become a source of misery and suffering. 
7. Be a Responsible Human Being. Approach yourself with honesty and thoroughness; maintain a kind of spiritual hygiene; stop the blame-shifting for your errors and shortcomings. 
8. Don’t Be a Prosperous Fool. Prosperity by itself is not a cure-all against an ill-led life and may be a source of dangerous foolishness. Money is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the good life, for happiness and wisdom. 
9. Don’t Do Evil to Others. Evildoing is a dangerous habit, a kind of reflex too quickly resorted to and too easily justified that has a lasting and damaging effect upon the quest for the good life. Harming others claims two victims—the receiver of the harm, and the victimizer, the one who does harm.
10. Kindness towards others tends to be rewarded. Kindness to others is a good habit that supports and reinforces the quest for the good life. Helping others bestows a sense of satisfaction that has two beneficiaries—the beneficiary, the receiver of the help, and the benefactor, the one who provides the help.

Dr. Mourdoukoutas also wrote a book entitled the Six Rules of Success, which are summarized below from an article in Forbes: 

1. Get your Priorities Right
2. Use Resources Wisely
3. Stay Focused
4. Develop the Right Relations
5. Don’t be Greedy
6. Don’t be Complacent

https://sliwainsights.com/

Go Beyond Innovation - How To Develop Successful New Products

 

Jess Coles

10 Steps To Create Successful Products

The 10 Steps we cover with practical tips of HOW to put into practice are:

1. Identify your initial target customer
2. Understand the potential market
3. Undertake a competitor analysis of your target segment
4. Find your customer’s problems
5. Build your product positioning strategy
6. Set your target sales price
7. Set your target production cost
8. Test, test, test
9. Tweak, re-design or pivot – action your learnings
10. Iterate, again and again

https://emersonnash.com/

https://www.b2binternational.com/webinars/how-to-develop-successful-new-products/

5 Top Tips That Will Make the Running of Your Market Research Program a Success

 

by Marc Brokenbrow

Most market research programmes involve many different stages, from understanding the initial business need or problem at the start, designing the project in terms of scope and methodology, undertaking desk research and quantitative and qualitative fieldwork, to the analysis and reporting stage at the end. Each of these steps require a substantial amount of labour and specialist skills to carry out.

For this reason, ensuring a smooth and successful market research project isn’t easy, and the best results always come from well-organised and well-executed programmes run by specialist market research agencies.

With over 3,500 studies under our belts and over 180,000 interviews carried out each year, here are our top 5 tips that will make the running of your next market research program a success.

1. Kick off meetings are an excellent way to start any research project. These meetings are crucial in getting all senior stakeholders fully briefed, on board and engaged with the research program. The meeting should be used not only to build engagement but also to fully explore project objectives, scope, methodology, deliverables and the all-important timings. Preference should be for a face-to-face kick off meeting, but time and budget pressures can often make the telephone or a conferencing solution a more viable option.

   Kick off meetings work best when there is a clear agenda, you also need to make sure you have enough time to discuss everything that needs to be covered. Try to make the meeting more interactive for those invited, get attendees to do some pre-work beforehand or run some workshop-style exercises to stimulate your stakeholders.

2. Have a dedicated point of contact who will take overall ownership for the research. Within the team responsible for looking after the research program, assign a project lead to make sure things stay on track. Give the project lead overall responsibility for making the project a success, empower this person to make decisions and delegate when appropriate.

   Building a team around the dedicated point of contact, who can assist with the day-to-day management of the project, will help in avoiding delays when they are unavailable. However, make sure the day-to-day team is small, maybe 2-3 people. Getting too many people involved can ultimately result in inefficiencies and slow progress with too much input at each stage.

1. Create a project schedule – your research is only as good as your plan. Create a detailed Gantt chart and outline all the individual stages of the project, remember to highlight your critical path and note down what needs to be done, by who and by when. Project schedules are very useful in managing expectations and timings, they also help in reminding people to complete tasks on time. If timings allow, add a week of lag time at each major stage of the project, those being set-up, fieldwork and analysis.

2. Communicate frequently – a weekly call is an excellent way to keep the research on track. Communication is key to the success of any project, calls should be used to reassure and inform clients of the current progress and set expectations for the weeks ahead. There should be no surprises at the end of a project so any potential issues should be highlighted during these calls, whether it be a change of approach or a delay that will impact the overall timings.

3. Finally, prepare for the unexpected and be open to change – projects rarely run completely to plan so those with flexibility often have the best chance in meeting all the research objectives.

https://cutt.ly/4wqCsWbV

9 Beliefs of Remarkably Successful People

 

Jeff Haden wrote a column for Inc. Magazine on this topic.  It is well worth a read here:  link.  As  a teaser to get you to read the article here are the 9 Beliefs.

1. Time doesn’t fill me.  I fill time.
2. The People Around Me are the People I chose.
3. I have never paid my dues.
4. Experience is irrelevant.  Accomplishments are everything.
5. Failure is something I accomplish; it just doesn’t happen to me.
6. Volunteers always win.
7. As long as I’m paid well, it’s all good.
8. People who pay me always have the right to tell me what to do.
9. The extra mile is a vast, unpopulated wasteland.

https://cutt.ly/D8mDLGJ

10 things you need to become successful

 

1. Vision 2. Consistency 3. Adaptive environment 4. Independent thinking 5. Learning from mistakes 6. Goal-setting 7. Hard work and persistence 8. Mentorship seeking 9. Networking 10. Risk-taking

How to Create a Balanced Scorecard: Nine Steps to Success™

 

BSI’s award-winning framework for strategic planning and management, Nine Steps to Success™, is a disciplined, practical, and tested approach to developing a strategic planning and management system based on the balanced scorecard. It gives organizations a way to ‘connect the dots’ between the various components of strategic planning, budgeting, operations and management; meaning there will be a visible connection between day-to-day operations, the measurements being used to track success, the strategic objectives the organization is trying to accomplish, and the mission, vision and strategy of the organization.

This approach is more about engaging hearts and minds to transform an organization to higher performance than it is about just measuring performance. Ultimately, managers and executives can use the BSI-developed scorecard system to help define strategy, rally the organization around that strategy and achieve what the organization wants to achieve.

The Nine Steps to Success™ Program Plan

Below details each step of the Nine Steps to Success™ framework.

Program Launch

The program is launched by project champion(s) and key stakeholders (working on their own or with BSI consultants). Existing strategic material and results are examined, a strategic gap analysis is completed, key stakeholders are interviewed, and other assessment activities are completed to customize workshops to incorporate work done to date.

Step 1: Assessment

It is critical that before an organization maps out its future there is some consensus around where things currently stand. During the Assessment step, an analysis of the current internal and external environments is completed. As part of this step, organization develops or re-validates high-level strategic elements (e.g., mission, vision, values, market assessments, enablers & challenges, primary and secondary customer / stakeholder needs analysis and others) needed for context in strategy formulation.

Step 2: Strategy

Building on the assessment, organizations formulate/clarify strategy in the Strategy step. The development of the strategy includes developing or clarifying your customer value proposition, visualizing strategy using a Strategy Profile and decomposing the high-level strategic direction into three to four Strategic Themes (or goals). Strategic Themes are those focus areas in which the organization must excel in order to fulfill its mission and achieve its vision, given the enablers it can leverage, the challenges it must overcome, and the customer value proposition it must deliver upon.

Additionally, organizations are viewed, internally and externally, though lenses, or Perspectives which frame the organization as a system of defined elements and capabilities that work together. One of the signature components of the original Balanced Scorecard, the names of the four perspectives will vary slightly (depending on the type of organization) from the original design: Financial, Customer/Stakeholder, Internal Process and Organizational Capacity (or Learning and Growth). The perspectives work together in a series of cause and effect (or drivers and results), creating value from the internal to the external. When combined, the Strategic Themes and Perspectives frame and define an integrated strategy.

Step 3: Strategic Objectives

In the Strategic Objectives step, the building blocks of strategy are developed. Strategic Objectives are the linchpins of a successful strategic planning and management system and are the key to implementing strategy. Objectives are qualitative, continuous improvement actions (outcomes) critical to strategy success. Objectives are developed on the strategic theme level first and then merged together to form organization-level Objectives.

Step 4: Strategy Mapping

In the Strategy Mapping step, cause-and-effect links are developed between the Strategic Objectives, creating a “value chain” of how customers and stakeholders are satisfied by the organization’s products and services. Strategy Maps are developed for each theme to ensure a complete strategy to achieve each strategic result and then those are merged into a final organizational Strategy Map. A Strategy Map is a graphic that shows the cause-and-effect relationships of objectives across the four perspectives, telling the story of how the organization will achieve the results desired.

Step 5: Performance Measures

Performance Measures (KPIs) are critical to tracking progress of an organization’s strategy. The image below shows the inter-connectivity relationships among different types of performance measures. Operational measures focus on the use of resources, processes and production (output). These measures “drive” the outcomes a business desires, with some outcomes being more intermediate than other, more final, outcomes. Our process gets at these relationships, so you can identify the most meaningful outcome measures to determine if your actions are leading to the strategic results you desire.

Performance measures are developed for each of the objectives on the strategy map. The emphasis in this step is on helping you develop the critical leading and lagging measures needed to manage strategy execution.

Step 6: Strategic Initiatives

In the Strategic Initiatives step, the projects that are critical to success of the strategy, are developed, prioritized, and implemented. Initiatives help close performance gaps in performance to hit targets. It is important to focus the organization on the execution of the most prioritized strategic projects versus creating a long list of potential actions and projects. Without this disciplined focus, organizations struggle to execute their strategy.

Scorecard Rollout: Integrating Steps 1 through 6

Once Step 6 is complete, the organization-level scorecard system is ready to be rolled out to employees. The goal of this part of the process is to create more internal fans and build a coalition of employees to start thinking more strategically and using the system to better inform decision making. The Balanced Scorecard Graphic, shown below, is a key deliverable and brings all the strategic elements of strategy formulation and planning together in one simple to understand graphic that becomes the heart of the process of communicating the organization’s strategy to all employees. It’s a one-page document that tells the value creation story by summarizing the organization’s strategy in a simple, easy-to-use format.

Step 7: Performance Analysis

In the Performance Analysis step, data is transformed into evidence-based knowledge and understanding. Effective analysis helps people make better decisions that will drive improved strategic outcomes. This step focuses on measuring and evaluating performance to identify what works well and what doesn’t, taking corrective action and becoming a high-performance organization.

Step 8: Alignment

In the Alignment step, strategy is transformed from something only executives worry about to something everyone supports by cascading high-level enterprise strategy to first business and support units and then to individual employees. The Alignment step produces scorecards for business and support units, and individual scorecards for each employee or team.

Cascading communicates how organization level strategy (Tier 1) is supported by department/unit strategy (Tier 2), and then ultimately how employees or teams (Tier 3) contributes to the strategy with specific actions, projects and tasks.

Step 9: Evaluation

Evaluation is an opportunity to review and refresh. During this step, leaders and mangers evaluate how well the organization has accomplished desired results and how well the strategic management system improves communications, alignment and performance. It ensures that the strategic planning and management system is dynamic and incorporates continuous improvement into day-to-day operations and management.

https://cutt.ly/Q3z1Od1

Chain of Success™

 After 25 years in leadership roles with organizations such as Southwest Airlines, JetBlue Airways, DoubleTree Hotels, and Juniper Networks, Ann Rhoades is a leading expert on building values-based organizations. Rhoades has proven that when implemented correctly, this kind of corporate culture not only creates a great work environment for employees but also increases all other performance measures.

During a TEDx talk on organizational cultures she explains how leadership drives culture, which drives performance:

Chain of Success™

I do admire her passion and acknowledge her experience, but I find it hard to believe that culture drives performance, despite the research by Kotter & Heskett*. Because we know from scientific research in Malaysia that culture drives employee commitment, which in turn drives performance. And from research by Gallup, that engagement drives performance.

So I took the liberty to rewrite the sequence that was shown in the video above to create, what I call, the Chain of Success™:

Indeed, leaders drive corporate values. This then drives corporate behavior, while we know managerial behavior drives the firm’s culture. However, contrary to Ann Rhoades, research has shown that culture drives commitment: without commitment to the firm’s goals employee performance will be determined by – and therefore limited to – individual values and behavior. Their commitment to the firm’s goals, drive employee engagement, which as described by Gallup, leads to a significantly higher performance, which then leads to long-term success.

(*) Research by Kotter & Heskett focused on how adaptive cultures performed, relative to non-adaptive cultures.

https://cutt.ly/x9H3Gs1

22 Best Sales Strategies, Plans, & Initiatives for Success

 

Written by: Allie Decker

Купуємо меблі та техніку б/у великими об‘ємами.

Шафи, стільці, крісла, стелажі металеві, сейфи, ноутбуки, монітори, системні блоки, духовки, столи з нержавійки, барні стільці, інше.

 Discover sales strategy examples, templates, and plans used by top sales teams worldwide.

"A strong sales strategy plan creates the foundation for a cohesive and successful sales organization.Sales strategies and initiatives also align salespeople on shared goals and empower them to do their best work — keeping them happy and successful, too." 

What is a sales strategy?

A sales strategy is a set of decisions, actions, and goals that inform how your sales team positions the organization and its products to close new customers. It acts as a guide for sales reps to follow, with clear objectives regarding sales processes, product positioning, and competitive analysis.

Most strategies involve a detailed plan of best practices and processes set by management.

The most important component of choosing and implementing your sales strategy is your customer. For this reason, a sales strategy shouldn't be one-size-fits-all. Every customer is different; therefore, different organizations should draw up and implement different strategies.

Let's cover some popular sales strategies — including inbound sales.

Sales Strategies

1. Increase online sales through social media.
2. Become a thought leader.
3. Prioritize inbound sales calls as hot leads.
4. Properly research and qualify prospects.
5. Implement a free trial.
6. Don't shy from cold calling.
7. Offer a demonstration of the product.
8. Provide a personalized, clear end result.
9. Be willing to adapt your offering.
10. Close deals with confidence.
11. Nurture existing accounts for future selling opportunities.

1. Increase online sales through social media.

Social media is one of the most popular ways that people consume information these days. That’s why nine out of ten retail businesses are active on at least two social platforms. With the data on your side, increasing online sales through social media is attainable with some creative thinking and strategic planning.

Although it may be tempting to jump on the hottest social media trend or go where your competitors are, that probably won’t be your best choice. Time is of the essence and you’ll want to build your pipeline as efficiently as you can. So, be diligent about figuring out where your target customers are spending their time and meet them where they are most active.

Keep in mind that your tone and voice may need to adjust to the platform so that you can connect with your audience. You’ll want your content to blend in naturally with the platform and not seem out of place.

2. Become a thought leader.

Sharing your advice, tried-and-true best practices, and niche expertise are some of the most long-lasting ways to build your personal brand and lend more credibility to your organization. I’m sure we all can agree that nobody wants to feel like they’re being sold to. Instead, it’s better to help people by offering solutions to their problems.

Thought leaders do exactly this, and it’s even been backed up by Edleman data. In its 2022 Thought Leadership Impact Report, Edelman found that “Thought leadership is one of the most effective tools an organization can use to demonstrate its value to customers during a tough economy – even more so than traditional advertising or product marketing, according to B2B buyers." According to the study, 61% of decision-makers said thought leadership could be moderately or very effective at demonstrating the value of a company’s products compared to traditional product marketing. Additionally thought leadership becomes even more important during economic downturns with 51% of C-suite executives stating it has more of an impact on purchases.

So what’s the catch?

Not all thought leadership content is created equal. Just as much as it can positively affect a company, poor thought leadership can be devastating to a company’s sales goals. A quarter of decision-makers who answered Edleman’s previous survey reported that thought leadership content contributed to their reasons for not doing business with an organization. Ouch!

Before you plan a spree of LinkedIn posts to drive leads, consider who your audience is, what they need to know, and how your organization can help. And, it may not hurt to have a second set of eyes from your marketing, communication, and PR departments review your plan first to make sure everything is on-brand (and trackable!)

3. Prioritize inbound sales calls as hot leads.

There’s the age-old question: “Should I discuss product pricing with a prospect on the first sales call?” The honest answer is: It depends. You and your sales team know your process front and back and if you’ve seen success with pitching with pricing first, last, or somewhere in between, stick with what’s working for you.

In addition to that, your team should always prioritize those prospects who call into sales first. These hot leads are definitely interested in what you have to sell and want to know enough information about how it’ll benefit them before they make a decision. By prioritizing talking to these prospects as soon as they call or send an email, you’re putting your best foot forward and showing them that you’re helpful, solutions-oriented, and considerate of their time. If it means closing the deal on the first call, there’s no harm in it so long as the customer has the information they need to make an informed decision.

4. Properly research and qualify prospects.

Even the strongest sales strategy can't compensate for targeting the wrong customers. To ensure your team is selling to the right type of customer, encourage them to research and qualify prospects before attempting to discuss your product. They'll find that more work on the front end can lead to smoother closing conversations later on.

Outline the criteria a prospect should meet to qualify them as a high-probability potential customer. This should be based on a prospect’s engagement history and demographics.

5. Implement a free trial.

Offering a free trial or freemium version of your product is a highly effective way to convert prospects. HubSpot’s sales strategy report found that free trials were 76% effective followed by a freemium option with 69% effective in turning prospects into paying customers.

Free trials give potential customers the opportunity to test your product out before committing. You can place restrictions on your free version like limited features or usage caps. In addition to providing prospects a risk-free chance to try your product, free trials also help build brand loyalty and expand your customer base. Prospects that have a positive experience using the free version will be more likely to convert to the paid version.

6. Don't shy from cold calling.

In Sales, cold calling is unavoidable. But it doesn't have to be miserable. There are a number of cold calling techniques that really work, including our bulletproof cold calling template. Have your sales team practice cold calls on one another before making actual calls; it'll boost their confidence and get them comfortable with the script.

7. Offer a demonstration of the product.

Pitching can be the make-or-break moment in a sales strategy. The sales pitch has to be a powerful, compelling presentation, but it also can't come on too strong lest you’ll scare away the prospect.

Study the elements of a successful sales pitch and demonstrate to prospects how they’ll benefit from making the purchase. Have your team practice amongst themselves, too. Better yet, test your presentations on a few loyal customers and gather their feedback.

8. Provide a personalized, clear end result.

When customers come to your business, they aren’t necessarily looking for a product or service, they’re looking for their desired end result. These customers want to purchase a means to improve their own operation, or simply improve their strategies with the help of your offering.

After you explain your product or service offering, you have to personalize the benefits to each client in a way that’s valuable to them. If you’re selling customer service software to a small business that has no experience with one, it’s your job to educate them on its use in the setting of a small business, not to manage hundreds of employees in larger ones. By doing so they will have an easier time seeing how they can use it and spend less time debating what they’ll use it for.

By painting a clear picture of the end result, your customer will be able to see the value of the purchase and feel more inclined to accept the offer.

9. Be willing to adapt your offering.

In sales conversations, you should expect to come across clients with unique demands. It’s only natural when working with companies of different structures and needs.

Instead of saying “you won’t” or “you can’t” — make sure your sales strategy is adaptable to accommodate the customer’s desire.

10. Close deals with confidence.

How you close a sale is just as important as how you start the conversation. Encourage clear, concise, and firm closing techniques to ensure your sales team sets the right expectations and delivers on their promises.

Keeping a list of proven, go-to closing techniques will help salespeople routinely win deals. Such techniques can include the now or never close, “If you commit now, I can get you a 20% discount,” or the question close, “In your opinion, does what I am offering to solve your problem?”

11. Nurture existing accounts for future selling opportunities.

Once a deal is done, there's no need for a sales strategy ... right? Wrong. Account management is an incredibly important part of the sales process, encouraging loyal, happy customers, and leveraging cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

After your sales team sees success with the sales strategy, go the extra mile and form a partnership between your sales team and customer service/success teams. By ensuring customers’ continued satisfaction with your product or service, they will be more inclined to do business with your company again and even advocate for it.

Inbound vs. Outbound Sales Methodology

In addition to upselling and cross-selling, there are two important types of sales methodologies: inbound and outbound.

In outbound sales — the legacy system of most sales teams — companies base their sales strategy on seller actions. They rely on manually-entered data to monitor the sales pipeline and coach their salespeople, and they run sales and marketing independently, creating a disjointed experience for buyers.

In inbound sales — the modern methodology for sales teams — companies base their sales process on buyer actions. They automatically capture seller and buyer data to monitor the pipeline and coach salespeople. And, they align sales and marketing, creating a seamless experience for buyers.

In the past, buyers suffered through evaluating a product and deciding whether to buy it using only the information provided to them by the seller. Today, all of the information needed to evaluate a product is available online and buyers are no longer dependent on the seller.

If today’s sales teams don’t align on the modern buyer’s process and fail to add value beyond the information already available to them, then they’ll have no reason to engage with a sales team.

Inbound sales benefits buyers at each stage of the buyer process: awareness, consideration, and decision.

Inbound sales teams help the buyer become aware of potential problems or opportunities, discover strategies to solve problems, evaluate whether the salesperson can help with a problem, and purchasing a solution to their problem. They're helpful and trustworthy, creating partnerships rather than power struggles.

Not sure how to get started with inbound selling? Every sales team should have a sales strategy plan outlining its goals, best practices, and processes designed to align the team and create consistency.

How to Build a Sales Strategy

1. Develop organizational goals.
2. Create a customer profile that is tailored to a specific product offering.
3. Hire, onboard, and compensate sales team members adequately.
4. Create a plan to generate demand.
5. Measure individual and team performance.
6. Track sales activities.

To build a comprehensive sales plan, you’ll find the following activities helpful along the way:

1. Develop organizational goals.

Setting goals is a no-brainer for most sales teams. Otherwise, how else will you know you're executing the right activities to deliver the best results? One key factor to note when developing sales goals is to avoid doing it in a silo. Get input from stakeholders across the organization since every department is held accountable to the company’s bottom line.

Each goal should be specific and measurable, such as “... to sell 150% of the projected sales quota in Q2.” This helps reduce confusion when it’s time to review the goals to see what worked and what didn’t.

2. Create a customer profile that is tailored to a specific product offering.

This entails a detailed profile of the target customer — a buyer persona — including their company size, psychographics, and buying process. The product offering should outline the product benefits and features, with emphasis on those that solve the target customers’ pain points.

3. Hire, onboard, and compensate sales team members adequately.

Developing a list of criteria and attributes for sales managers to screen for when interviewing candidates is essential to recruiting and retaining top talent.

The next step is to develop a training and onboarding program that will prepare them to start selling effectively and efficiently, followed by a compensation and rewards plan that will motivate them to continue performing.

4. Create a plan to generate demand.

This section should include a detailed plan for how to target potential customers in order to increase awareness of your offering, such as using paid social acquisition channels, creating e-books and hosting webinars, hosting events, etc.

5. Measure individual and team performance.

Time to track! Once the infrastructure is set up, create a procedure for tracking performance on the individual, team, and company levels. This measurement can take the form of quarterly KPIs, weekly dashboards, monthly reviews, or some combination of all three. This section should also highlight the specific metrics that the team should focus on.

6. Track sales activities.

Tracking your efforts is imperative if you plan to optimize your processes and practices for growth in the future. Even if you’re just getting started setting benchmarks for the team, write those down and track your progress toward them.

You should track everything from the sales presentation to closing techniques. If you’ll be publishing some thought leadership content or even sourcing leads from social media, ensure that any link you share is trackable with a UTM parameter.

Sales Initiatives

1. Refresh your buyer personas regularly.
2. Actively align sales and marketing.
3. Use a CRM.
4. Listen to your prospects.
5. Invest in sales development and team-building.

Businesses should always be looking for ways to innovate their approach to sales. Here are some creative things sales reps and teams can do on their own to jumpstart their performance, stand out from the competition, and boost team productivity.

1. Refresh your buyer personas regularly.

Buyer personas inform all kinds of activity at your business, including (and most importantly) who your marketing and sales teams pursue as customers. However, as things in the market and at your company shift, your buyer personas can become out-of-date — which can cause your sales team's work to become stagnant and ineffective. Work with your marketing team to refresh your buyer personas to best equip your sales team for prospecting and outreach.

2. Actively align sales and marketing.

Speaking of marketing, create and honor a service-level agreement (SLA) between your sales and marketing teams. This agreement will detail how each team can support each other, contribute to the other's goals, and honor boundaries in a way that still moves prospects toward conversion.

3. Use a CRM.

Successful sales teams and strategies require the right tools. HubSpot all-in-one CRM eliminates manual work and streamlines your sales activity and data. It also keeps your sales team up-to-date about all relevant activity with your prospects — an important transparency factor that helps motivate and align your team.

4. Listen to your prospects.

Just because prospects aren't customers doesn't mean they can't provide valuable feedback. As you move prospects through their sales funnel and (especially) when they drop off, ask for candid feedback about their experience with your team and products. You may learn something that can help convert them or your next prospect.

5. Invest in sales development and team-building.

The very best sales teams not only align with customers but also with their coworkers. Sales is a difficult career and can lead to burnout without proper encouragement and camaraderie. Invest in sales development and team-building activities to keep your sales team feeling satisfied and supported.

Sales Strategy Examples from Successful Sales Teams

In this section, we’ve analyzed two incredibly high-performing sales teams and how they achieved success using their unique sales strategies.

1. HubSpot

Founded in 2006, HubSpot has since grown to over 56,500 customers in over 100 countries and over $510 million in annual revenue. With an IPO in 2014, HubSpot is now valued at over $23.81 billion.

That said, we want to share a few pages from our own sales strategy playbook.

Hire the right people according to repeatable evaluation criteria.

We first started by determining a list of attributes that made a successful sales rep: Work ethic, coachability, intelligence, passion, preparation and knowledge of HubSpot, adaptability to change, prior success, organizational skills, competitiveness, and brevity.

From there, we established a repeatable process to evaluate candidates during interviews based on these weighted criteria.

Train the sales team by making them wear customers’ shoes.

Again, the first step we took was to define the sales process that we thought would be most successful. We outlined our unique value proposition, target customer, competition, most common objections, product features and benefits, and so forth.

Then we created a hands-on training program that would not only imitate the sales process for reps before they actually began selling but also allow them to experience our target customers’ pain points.

Today, a large part of our training program involves making reps create their own website and blog, and then drive traffic to it. This exercise allows reps to better consult potential customers in the future. We also use exams, certification programs, and presentations to measure each rep’s performance.

After employees are onboarded, we continue tracking their progress throughout the various stages of our sales process. The primary criteria we look at includes: leads created, leads worked, demos delivered, and leads won. Then we measure these criteria against each other to create ratios such as leads created to leads won.

We track each stage in the process so that if a rep is struggling with any particular metric, we can dig deeper to understand why that’s the case.

Align sales and marketing.

The sales and marketing teams work closely together in a process we call “Smarketing” to generate consistent leads each month.

In this process, marketing understands which qualities a sales lead needs to meet before it’s handed over to sales as well as how many of those qualified leads it must create each month to meet our sales projections.

Meanwhile, the sales team understands how long they should wait before contacting a lead and how many attempts they should make to contact that lead. All of these decisions are led by data and science, not by gut.

2. Shopify

Shopify has set a record of its own: reaching $1 billion in revenue faster than any other SaaS company. Today, it’s reached a valuation of over $20 billion.

Loren Padelford, VP at Shopify and General Manager of Shopify Plus, shared his secret sauce for increasing sales tenfold in 15 years.

Hire great people, not necessarily great salespeople.

Hiring is arguably one of the most essential components of a great sales strategy. Many sales managers, though, are misled into believing that they must hire sales superstars. Padelford looks for six key personality traits when hiring salespeople: intelligence, work ethic, history of success, creativity, entrepreneurship, and competitiveness.

The truth of the matter is that sales teams first must look for great people and then train them so they become great salespeople.

Treat sales as a science, not an art.

According to Padelford, we can now measure sales down to the second. We can explain success according to cold, hard data points rather than mystical qualitative assessments. Every sales team should be tracking their average deal size, average sales cycle length, lead-to-deal conversion rate, calls per day per rep, and the number of deals in the pipeline.

Each of these metrics, tracked over longer periods of time, will inform companies as to the health of their sales process and pinpoint areas they need to improve upon.

Build a smart, technological foundation.

Before Padelford took over the sales process at Shopify, sales reps would manually log phone calls and emails into the CRM, consuming five precious hours each week. With a sales force of 26, that added up to 130 wasted hours per week.

Realizing this misuse of time and capital, Padelford led Shopify to adopt the HubSpot CRM. With the CRM, sales reps were able to receive notifications when prospects opened their emails, clicked links, and viewed document attachments.

With the prospecting tool, they also have access to over 19 million prospects as well as detailed information about said prospects like estimated revenue, the number of employees, suggested email addresses, and so forth.

Maintain a high-quality pipeline by eliminating unqualified leads.

Shopify uses the 4/5 Threshold to filter out unqualified leads, thereby allowing its sales reps to focus on selling to leads who have a higher probability of becoming customers.

When evaluating whether a lead is qualified, a rep must have a concrete answer to four of the following five variables:

• Pain: Is the prospective customer experiencing a prominent business issue or challenge that requires them to make a change?
• Power: Is the prospective customer directly involved with the decision-making process? If not, who is?
• Money: Does our offering fall within their budget constraints?
• Process: What's their buying process?
• Timeline: What stage are they in the buyer’s journey? Will they purchase within a reasonable time frame?

Grow Better with Sales Strategies, Initiatives, and Templates

Every company can benefit from crafting a sales strategy plan. The free template below includes everything you’ll need to customize your strategy to your business and sales team. Regardless of what strategy you choose, always implement a buyer-first approach. Learn from these winning sales team examples, too, to grow your sales team and performance.

https://cutt.ly/A0MoTBJ