Effective Sales Strategy: Slow Down Your Sellers to Speed Up Sales
Written by Rob Malec
Though it may seem counterintuitive, forcing your salespeople to slow down can help them speed up their closing cycle. The way to do so is to move your team away from the tactical and towards focusing on sales strategy. Creating and pursuing an effective sales strategy will result in increased sales velocity.
Sales Strategy vs. Sales Tactics
In my experience as a Fractional VP Sales and sales coach, I’ve seen that most sales training is focused on sales tactics and precious little is focused on creating a sales strategy.
Sales tactics refer to things like structuring a sales interaction, responding to buyer rejection, structuring good questions to ask buyers, and how to present solutions effectively.
Sales strategy, on the other hand, refers to how to move a sale forward from point A to point B and then to point C. Sales strategy training helps sellers understand a buyer’s decision-making process and then determine the most efficient and effective way to help buyers navigate toward closing a sale.
When a Sales Strategy is Needed
If your sale is a simple one with a single decision-maker and a low price point, focusing on sales tactics training may be all that’s required. However, any time multiple decision makers are involved, or the ticket price is five figures or beyond, sales strategy creation training is indicated.
Understanding a buyer’s decision-making process is a topic about which many books have been written. All share the common thread of helping sellers understand which buying influencers make which decisions, who influences whom within their organization, and how their decision-making and implementation process plays out.
How a Sales Coach Can Help
There are several good reasons to hire a sales coach, and having someone lead your team through creating a sales strategy is one of them. Early on in my role as a sales coach, I worked with sellers conversationally to unravel this ball of yarn. I found it to be very time-consuming and getting to a good sales strategy was tough.
I’ve since implemented a quick inventory within CRM that sellers are required to fill out for each complex deal before our coaching session. I can read this in just a few minutes prior to each coaching session and then get right down to business with the seller to ensure our time is used effectively. This decreases sales coaching time by 50% and the quality of the sales strategies we create is improved by 100%.
If you don’t currently have a sales strategy creation system like this, I strongly recommend creating one. It has been an absolute game-changer for my clients. If you would like to learn more about it, please feel free to reach out.
