You know what your monthly sales revenues ought to be…let me ask you, where did those numbers come from?

Are they more closely related to what you need to generate to cover costs or are they based on realistic market potential?

To what degree have you taken into consideration market conditions, your competitors, their pricing/discount, market trends, cost via specific sales channels, your existing market share?

These are just a few of the crucial factors that should be considered as part of a meaningful sales strategy in order to help you to forecast realistic numbers.

One of the key things that many organisations forget is that a Sales Strategy should:

• Help the sales team to sell, so should include up to date information on the competitors, their offering and their positioning. Without this the sales team are going into the market place blind and unarmed.
• Be easily translated into a balanced scorecard that drives business activities on a day-to-day basis.
• Be understood and used by everyone in the sales team – and if it’s too complicated for the sales team to work with then it’s not a good sales strategy.
• Be Universal. Sales strategies for different sales channels should be balanced to ensure parity and market consistency and to avoid market confusion. All activities in the sales strategy should reinforce the same message – i.e. 3 sales channels interfacing with one market should have the same pricing structure, delivery schedule and marketing collateral.
• Be linked directly to the reward and recognition plan of the sales team.
• Have key milestone targets that can be measured on an ongoing basis and at key points during the sales year.
• Flexible enough to reflect differing market conditions.

If  you picture your Sales Strategy as something to sketch out in order to get the budget sorted for the year, you may be missing a vital aspect of sales planning and providing the sales team with a route map for the year.

Take the guess-work out of your sales teams performance – call Carol on 0779 002 1885 for a confidential chat or email carol@mortonkyle.com

For more information on how we work see http://www.mortonkyle.com

Happy Selling!!