Sales Strategy

What should a B2B Sales Strategy focus on?

Much of B2B sales strategy should center on becoming hyper-focused on the right accounts and determining the ideal customer profile to target. This does not mean that you eliminate “feeling” out other industries or markets, but those types of tests should be part of your B2B sales strategy, NOT the strategy itself.

Too often I see companies of all shapes and sizes trying to boil the ocean. They pick broad industries with many different buyer profiles to try and target. They sold themselves and probably their investors on this massive “Total Addressable Market (TAM)” and now they need to bring it to fruition. So, they go after EVERYTHING.

 Massive sales strategy mistake

This is a massive mistake and is often the downfall of many sales organizations. What Sales Leadership underestimates is the amount of guidance that they need to provide to their teams.  They think that they can just hire “good” sales reps and they will deliver. What they end up with is a roster of expensive salaries with not a lot to show for it.

 

What should a great B2B Sales Strategy Include?

A B2B Sales Strategy needs to include more than recruiting, team structure and competitive analysis. The basic data work needs to be part of how you approach the market.

Here are my recommendations on how to build a strong B2B Sales Strategy.

B2B Sales Strategy

1. Defined accounts and ideal customer profile

1. • Source and identify accounts to target
     Notice I didn’t say “industries”. Industries might be part of the strategy of identifying accounts, but, at the end of the day, you should be doing the initial data work to identify the specific accounts you want to target.This can be done quickly using a freelancer from Upwork with a combination of a data mining tool like ZoomInfo.
   • Identified accounts should then be assigned out to individual SDRs.
   • Identify the specific ideal customer profile and source an initial set of contacts.
     It will absolutely be your within your SDR’s job description to find more contacts and verify the existing contacts, but start with something so that your SDRs can hit the ground running trying to book meetings
   • Set up lead prioritization in Salesforce or CRM so that leads from the identified accounts are prioritized for any inbound inquiries (LeadSpace is great for Lead to Account matching).
2. Create your Sales Development Onboarding and Training Program
3. Create you Sales Rep Onboarding Training Program
4. Define career paths for both SDRs and sales reps
5. Map compensation structures to the career paths
6. Create a recruiting Ideal Profile for both SDRs and sales reps
7. Set up your Salesforce or CRM to align to your SDR and sales rep training and enablement programs to enforce, measure and track behavior and outcome
8. Create appropriate quoting, legal and contracting process both with physical documents as well as the process in Salesforce or CRM
9. Create clear customer transition plan to your support team
10. Create a strategy similar to items 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 for up sells and expansion opportunities

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