What they don’t tell you about a good sales strategy is that to succeed, you have to be willing to innovate, whether you’re in consultative selling or making things to sell on Etsy. There’s a lot of formulaic advice out there which encourages you to follow in the footsteps of others and adhere to the status quo, but to succeed you need to have the courage to stand out and find your own voice.
A good sales strategy should offer people something that they want to buy, in a way that makes them feel good about both themselves and your product.
You need to look at the socio-political context you’re working with, identify the values your customers hold dear, and your product’s role in all of this. So let’s delve into the nitty-gritty of how we go about formulating a sales strategy that is future-focused and doesn’t just follow down the tired old paths of the past.
Tap into the Zeitgeist
The zeitgeist is the defining mood or spirit of the present moment. What is the world talking about right now? What are the predominant concerns? What do people value? That is the first thing you need to figure out: what people care about, and why.
If you look at the news, it’s plain to see that people are concerned about things like the cost of living. So think about how your product can appeal to people from that standpoint. What can your product offer to the world to lessen the burden of daily life?
Find Your Voice
Now that you’ve got your finger on the pulse of the world, how do you fit into it? What is your stance? What do you stand for, and what are your values? What sets you apart from the others?
It takes a little confidence, but if you can have the courage to stand out and be an innovator, you can offer the world a fresh perspective that it perhaps sorely needs. Rather than seeing your company and product as trying to keep up with everyone else, or replicating what others are doing, try to move to the beat of your own drum. Authenticity is a rare and attractive quality in sales.
And if you offer something that the world genuinely needs, which we hope would be the case, then try to remember that you’re not trying to sell something – you’re offering the world a good opportunity, something it needs. You can start by writing down a list of values for your company, a compass for your team to remind you of why you do what you do, and how to navigate this terrain.
Identify your Typical Customer
Once you have figured out the landscape and your place within it, it’s time to identify the people within that landscape who would most be interested in your product. Create some profiles of those people. What age are they likely to be? What do their interests include?
By building an idea of your typical customer on paper, you can start to get into the deeper psychology of their motivations and why they might be attracted to your product. What would be a deal breaker? What would be a deal MAKER? By creating detailed profiles that encompass demographics and interests, you can delve into the underlying motivations and triggers that attract them to your product. The inclusion of descriptive research methodologies plays a pivotal role within this process. Through methods like surveys, interviews, and observational studies, it can uncover valuable insights about customer preferences, attitudes, and behaviors.
People are becoming increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of what they buy. To have a strategy that works, you need to take into account your audience’s personal values and concerns.
If you can offer something that appeals to these personal values, you can get a huge leg up on your competitors and become a leader in your field. With the environment example, many companies have started taking this on board and have started providing more ethical solutions to common problems within their sales strategies, like competitors of Zoom that are powered by renewable energy. IKEA has started offering biodegradable mushroom packaging. Amazon is trying to reduce its packaging.
So, to have a good sales strategy in 2024 you need to take into account people’s personal values and concerns to move forward into the future. And people are willing to pay more for their personal values to be adhered to:
Use your Voice
Once you have your voice, it’s time to use it. Get on social media, engage with your followers, make your call recording software known to more people. Getting a marketing plan is essential for a coherent and logical engagement. You should prepare regular posts for social media ahead of time and release them strategically when you think you’ll get the most engagement.
Make sure to have coherent branding and use a style guide within your team. Use your core list of values and make sure that the tone of your texts reflects those values and is coherent across multiple platforms. So if you’re going for a funny but informative vibe, make sure you sound that way on both Instagram and in your email marketing.
You can make use of the plethora of tools that social media has to offer, from analytics to paid ads, to monitor your progress and see how you’re doing, as well as getting up to speed with customer lifecycle marketing to understand your customers’ whole journey with you.
Demonstrate your Product
Videos are dynamic and engaging and can be used to show how your product is used, who your staff members are, and how your product meets and exceeds specific standards – you get the gist! Show off your proposal building software product reviews and reshare content you’ve been tagged in featuring your product (as long as it’s positive). It’s free material you can use!
People’s attention spans are getting ever shorter, so the easier you make it for people to engage with your content, the better. A combination of video with simple text and some uplifting music can go a long way – there’s a reason TikTok has become so popular! Happy colors, simple words, nice music – it’s a winning combo. Especially so when wearing POD merchandise, cosmetic products, jewelry, and other items you showcase in the video.
Compensate and listen to your staff
Whether you’re a one-person show or you have a team around you, make sure that everyone is properly paid and rewarded for their work. A motivated team will be a productive team. Motivation makes the world of difference to your success, as well as the ability and willingness to think outside of the box.
By offering everyone a livable wage and a good work-life balance, alongside flexible working patterns (e.g. hybrid work options), you will create a team around you that is strong and supportive of your vision. You should also offer continual sales training to keep everyone up-to-date on the latest information.
As well as these basic necessities, make sure to listen to your team members. Every time a manager ignores a good idea, like that you should acquire order process software, because it came from someone who’s “inexperienced” or “irrelevant”, they lose not only the cost of having that person there, but all of the value that idea could have brought to their sales strategy.
Ask for feedback
This means feedback from staff and customers. What do your team members think about the plan? What would they change? Remember that you’re paying them for their insights. They don’t have to be salespeople, either, to offer valuable ideas. Some of the best ideas come from people who are outside of the field because they have different perspectives.
And of course, you can get continual feedback from the public and your customers via social media and through product and company reviews. So, customer feedback analysis can provide valuable insights into how satisfied customers are with the plan and what improvements could be made.
Let’s recap
Creating a sales strategy that works requires a couple of major skills: the ability to look and listen to the world around you, and the willingness to respond appropriately. This applies both on a macro level – the world at large – and on the micro level – your team members and core customers.
Ignoring what’s going on in the world around you will only lead to creating redundant products that nobody wants to use anymore – like glitter, super puffy wedding dresses, or energy-intensive washing machines.
The key to a good sales strategy is, quite simply, looking at what people want. It sounds simple, and it is. So, don’t try to market a poor product – create something people actually want instead. Then market the heck out of it.
