How to create a successful sales strategy 🔍 Evolving Strategies

EVOLVING STRATEGIES

This week’s opportunity to evolve your strategy

How to identify opportunities for your sales strategy:

Quick read:

• Opportunities can be found with your customers and speaking to them to get their experience with your business and products.

• Spend the time and resources to create a solution, instead of a system to capture the issues.

• Use customer reviews to identify opportunities, create a solution and do an analysis before implementing.

How to identify opportunities for your sales strategy:

Many businesses struggle to understand how to identify new opportunities that can evolve their existing strategies or develop new ones. Especially effective strategies that continues to reach the overall objectives of increasing business revenue. To identify these opportunities it begins with the customer, the best way to make improvements is to identify gaps with the customer experience. This leads to more details of pain points and friction points your customers face as they use your website, try to buy product, use your products etc. To create an effective sales strategy it's essential to know your customers' buying behaviour and understand what's the biggest challenges for them.

If you're not able to make improvements to your business based on your customer's feedback, how can you expect to continue to increase sales? There's no improvements for the customer, and it doesn't make it easier for them to buy. Look at it from the point of view of being a customer yourself. If it's not easy for you to shop around on your website, and buy your products. Would you buy? Look at it from an objective point of view.

It's easy to get invested emotionally to what you create, because of all the hard work that goes into it. But it's also important to remember that you're creating something knowing all the details. Your customer is coming in and not knowing any details, or information. Create based on the idea of one customer that knows nothing about you or your products.

How it impacts your business:

Updating your strategy with new opportunities allows your business to remain competitive and continue to grow. Strategies can become outdated, especially in the digital world. The landscape is constantly changing and what worked 6 months ago, may not work today.

When you identify opportunities you want to make sure you're creating an action plan to address with solutions and implement those opportunities. Make sure to consider and address all aspects of the opportunity. Employee capacity, policies and processes, technology and the product itself to name a few. Leaving something unaddressed could have negative results and be a roadblock to achieving success.

Analyzing data to pull customer insights is always a crucial factor in identifying opportunities. It provides the exact steps that customers take on your site, and detailed information of what's working and what's not. Data driven decisions are important to your strategy, because it provides the facts to back up the claim.

Nothing is an exact science so it's important to monitor the progress after execution. This allows you to gain results on how the strategy is going after it's implemented. Is it achieving the success measures you put in place? What is the growth trajectory look like? Also consider if there's a negative impact to your business and sales.

How to apply this:

What you should takeaway and apply to your digital sales strategy:

1. Use customer reviews and pain points

2. Create the solution and implement it

3. Do an analysis before implementing

Use customer reviews and pain points

Reviews and identifying pain points of customers is a gold mine of information. The customer's experience provides so much insight as to what the issue was, and what can fix it. It usually leads to an even larger problem that needs to be addressed, potential technology barrier or the product itself needs to change.

You get free research and the customer tells you exactly what's not working. Use that information to do your own research and experience it for yourself. If multiple customers are telling you this, it's a pain point that needs to be addressed. You just found yourself a few opportunities to include in your strategy.

Create the solution and implement it

One big challenge is that businesses will create a system to capture all the issues that customers face but never action it. Instead of creating a system, create the solution. Spending the time to create a system to capture all the customer issues doesn't actually resolve the issue. You've already captured that through your customer reviews and feedback platforms.

Instead invest both the time and money to create the solutions. Your customers will be happier and your business will be in a much better position. Otherwise you're dedicating resources to manage the system which takes up unnecessary time.

Do an analysis before implementing

Consider the impact of the strategy before implementing. Strategies sound great when you're first putting it together and you create an emotional attachment to all your hard work. It can be difficult to see it from an objective point of view, so take a step back. Use a SWOT analysis and cost benefit analysis to review the strategy.

Put it to the test and see if it fact is going to bring the results you need it to. Will it resolve the customer issues? Will it be increasing sales for the business in some way? Does it make it easier for customers to buy?

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