Strategy planning begins with determining the current position of your business

EVOLVING STRATEGIES

This week’s opportunity to evolve your strategy

Digital sales strategy of determining your current business position

Quick read:

• Before planning can begin, research needs to be conducted, data collected and an analysis of the gaps in your business.

• If you're not understanding your business challenges, and planning your strategy around resolving these then you're losing customers to competitors or creating a bad customer experience.

• Use data and analytics to make decisions, conduct a SWOT analysis to identify business challenges and focus on the customer to develop your resolutions.

The digital sales strategy of determining your current position before planning:

Nowadays buyers are self-educating, reading reviews and doing their research before making the decision to buy a product. This is where your business needs to understand the customer, and be there during the research phase of the buying journey. Sales people are the end of that journey and in most cases the customer has already made their decision as to who they are going to buy from.

You shouldn't begin strategy planning without first understanding the challenges your business faces. With innovation constantly happening, data driven decisions is a must. This begins with customer and market research, and conducting a SWOT analysis. This approach allows you to identify both the current and future trends in order for your business to bring in sales. For a digital sales strategy to be successful, it should have a focus on short term gains but also long term.

Once research and analysis is completed your strategy planning can begin, because you're able to use factual information to determine the needs of your business. Whether this is a change in products, processes, people, culture etc. Whatever the gaps in your business may be, these can be identified and brainstorming can begin to create solutions. This allows you to continue providing value to your customers, and happy customers will continue to buy your products.

How it impacts your business:

If the customer has already made their decision to buy their product from your competitor, how do you get them to change their mind? This is the hard part, at this stage there's a low chance you'll be able to change your customer's mind. So instead you need to be proactive and get in front of your customer before they make their decision. This will make it easier to show the value of your products, when your customer is still making their decision. So how do you do this?

Take the time to use data and analytics to build an understanding of your customers, identify insights that'll help you build out your strategy. There are many interesting observations you can make that'll allow you to do the following:

• Build the right content and share the valuable information with your audience. Allowing you to build a relationship and showcase the benefits your customers receive.

• Identify the right places to be in which your audience is and get that content in front of them, build the awareness before they need to buy.

• Build across both digital and non-digital channels. Doing this allows for clearer information, and consistency for your audience.

Remember, every business has room for improvement, because if it didn't you'd have all the customers. Am I right?

Have your marketing and digital team work together to build the right messaging, keep it consistent and clear what the value propositions are. To create a successful digital sales strategy understand the business challenges that are affecting sales and address them with the right solutions. Keep in mind the importance of testing resolutions before implementing. This will provide further data and confirmation that your solutions should be part of your strategy.

How to apply this:

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

1. Use data and analytics to make decisions

2. Complete a SWOT analysis

3. Focus on the customer

Use data and analytics to make decisions

Data and analytics will help you understand buyer behaviour, and when you understand this you can create your strategy around how to align with it and drive sales. Understand what is getting your customers to buy and what isn't. Remove anything that is causing challenges to your buying journey, and double down on what's driving sales.

Testing and learning is a good opportunity to deep dive into your list of what's working and what isn't. This allows you to collect more information, and secure the insights you have with past data to ensure you're on track to increasing sales.

Complete a SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis will allow you to understand the gaps in your business, what threats there may be and weaknesses that need to be addressed. By identifying and resolving these, you're reducing the chances of a bad customer experience or a competitor coming in and taking away business.

SWOT let's you identify what's missing, what's being done right. Focus on clarifying to your audience the value propositions of your business. Are you doing this? Providing a great user experience on your site and creating easy to use products. Look at it from the point of view of the customer, run a focus group or A/B testing to make sure this is being done.

Focus on the customer

Since buyers are self-educating if your message isn't clear, and your customers aren't understanding your value propositions; how can you expect them to buy? They don't understand the value or what your offer is. Make sure the messaging is clear and the best way to do that is to keep it simple.

Every business is after your customer, so they will feel overwhelmed. They don't want to spend hours trying to figure out what your message is. Focus on keeping it simple and clear. Your best approach to get your customers to buy. Focus on the customer, and create around them.

Thanks for reading! Share with friends.

If you found this information valuable, please consider sharing this newsletter with others that would benefit.

Receive one tip each week on how to evolve your digital sale strategy.

How I can help you:

• Become a member and let’s work together to unlock digital sales and growth opportunities.

• Buy resources to define sales goals, and develop strategies to grow your business at your pace.