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Speaking of Strategy – If you’re talking about sales and marketing for your business, you’re probably also talking about strategy. “We need a marketing strategy. We should develop a strategic plan. We need more strategic thinking.” And while there is there a lot of talk about strategy, there’s not always a lot of understanding.
Goals are frequently confused with strategies and the terms are used synonymously. A goal is what you want to achieve, and the strategy is the action needed to reach the goal.
If you have a goal of increasing sales, the first step in creating sales strategies for your business is to know the goals and/or strategies of your customers. Sit with your sales people, your managers, and anyone else on your team that can support your efforts and ask them what their strategy is for a particular client. Better yet, ask them if they know the client’s strategy? Why? Because if you know the goals and strategy of your client or customer, you can offer products and services that are in alignment with their strategy.
When you have that strategic thinking session for the first time you may be surprised. For example: If you owned a soap company and asked your sales manager for the strategy for a client named The Hotel, you might get the following answer. “The Hotel buys all their shampoo from us now, and my strategy is to get them to buy hand lotion as well.”
This type of response is commonly accepted as a strategy. However, selling hand lotion and increasing sales is a goal. If the goal is to get them to buy lotion, what is the strategy (action needed) to make that happen?
Imagine that conversation to the client, based on the idea that up-selling is a strategic move “….and since you buy all your shampoo from us and have premier pricing with our company, I’d like to offer you a great opportunity by having us also supply you with hand lotion.”
This type of thought process and conversation happens so much that it sounds normal. Now let’s look at how a strategic thinker might approach this situation and go back to our example. The goal of the soap company is to sell lotion to The Hotel. After some team brainstorming and digging deeper into the account, someone else offers another thought. Instead of trying to sell the lotion based on volume pricing, they say “Isn’t The Hotel trying to be eco friendly?” Suddenly the conversation moves from price, to a discussion about recyclable packaging and organic ingredients. Someone else suggests the soap company should share data that tells a value story – specifically how customers that care about eco friendly products in their hotel, spend 25% more per visit.
At this point, the strategy of the soap company begins to come into alignment with the goals and strategy of The Hotel. The conversation with The Hotel can now change to something like this “….and since we last met I’ve been doing some research about travelers that prefer accommodations with eco-friendly and organic bath products. Those customers tend to spend 25% more per visit. Since becoming more green and attracting eco- travelers are goals of yours, I wanted to let you know that our hand lotion is a product that will appeal to those customers….” See how this feels and sounds different from the first example?
Strategy is so important and often misunderstood. It takes time and some practice to get it right. I am committed to my work in sales and marketing, and want others to have the same passion – it’s one of my goals. My strategy? Write about all the cool aspects of this career and inspire others.
This article was written by Christine Miller of Miller Sales Consulting. With extensive experience as a highly strategic sales motivator and sales coach, Christine has excelled at building and structuring sales organizations. More sales advice can be found on her LinkedIn page, as well as Medium. Subscribe to her videos on YouTube.