You’ve probably heard the expression “sales is an art and a science”. But have you ever stopped to consider what that actually means?

My interpretation is pretty simple.

The ability to sell one of something is an “art” and the ability to sell a lot of something is a “science”.

Both the “art” and the “science” part require their own skills, but more importantly they require discipline and persistence. Most sales failure results from a lack of these two things more than any shortcoming of skill.

I put together a list 7 tangible actions you can take to ensure that your sales strategy is more than just a discussion taking place in your own mind or sporadic bursts of prospective customer outreach.

Company Goals → Sales Objectives → Sales Activities

Frameworks are a very useful mental tool for me to ensure that my thoughts about a business problem are structured.

When it comes to defining and implementing a sales strategy, I find that the “Goals, Objectives, Activities” framework to be very useful and easy to follow.

The process starts at the overall company level by defining your corporate goal for the next quarter (or six months or year). It can be a revenue target, a profit target, a customer count- this question is really up to you.

Once you have a clearly defined goal, that will give you guidance into what sales objectives are most important for achieving the goal.

Sales objectives include questions like which of your products to focus on, what quantity you need to sell and at what prices you need to sell them. From here, you can work backwards and determine what sales activities will enable you to meet these objectives and by extension your overall goal.

In order to define specific daily sales activities, you will want to consider which sales channels to focus on (ie phone, email, LinkedIn, etc), how many touches per day you will require from each seller and other day to day tactical questions.

Breaking your overall sales strategy down into specific sales activities and requirements is a very effective vehicle for staying disciplined and analyzing sales performance in a data-driven way.

CRMs can be very helpful, if not indispensable tools, for managing this process.

Data-Driven Feedback: Scrum & Design Thinking for Sales

When talking about “Scrum” or “Design Thinking”, many people in the technology world automatically assume you are referring to methods for product development.

The truth is these ideas can be applied to any discipline and provide a very useful roadmap for continuous improvement and iterative discovery.

Here are three great practices from the Scrum/Design Thinking playbook that will benefit your sales execution:

Daily Stand-Ups & Retrospective Meetings

Your sales representatives have the most insight into how customers are responding to your product, pricing & pitch.

So by extension, the more frequently you talk to your reps, the closer you will become to your customers. It is very common for management teams to become detached from their own customers.

The practice of daily standup meetings and weekly or bi-weekly retrospective meetings will reduce the likelihood of this problem and ensure your customer feedback is being rapidly factored into your sales, marketing and product strategy.

Quantify Sales Activity Outcomes

Imagine building a product without access to data from tools like Google Analytics, MixPanel or other analytics software that gives you insights into how exactly people are using it. The absence of this data-driven feedback loop would make it much more difficult to improve the product quickly.

The same goes for analyzing your sales activities and how effective they are at achieving your sales objectives.

Whether you are using a CRM or google sheets, make sure you have some vehicle to keep track of sales activity outcomes (rejected, email reply, demo scheduled, closed, etc).

Another best practice is to require sellers to add qualitative notes that answer the question of “why” an outcome occurred. This will help you improve both the tactics and messaging of your sales activities much more quickly.

Interview Your Customers

Make a habit of talking to your prospects and customers regularly outside the context of selling to them.

The better you can understand their specific pain and WHY they buy certain products and not others, the more effectively you can explain why your product is valuable to them.

I am sure they will share insights with you that you had never thought of before.

Pay Commission and Give Bonuses

Sales is very hard. Most salespeople don’t choose the career out of altruism. They want money.

Don’t try to convince yourself that they should “be motivated enough by the mission” or to “be a team player”. Sure those things help, but no person wants to face daily rejection and be treated like shit for “the mission” aka to line someone else’s pockets.

Don’t be naive.

I understand the importance of incentivized compensation might not be as apparent to people who have never done sales before. But asking someone to sell something and then just giving them a pat on the back when they succeed is a perfect recipe for resentment and probably even hatred.

SDR Economics: Internal vs Outsourced

It’s no secret that many of the most successful B2B software and services companies have relied heavily on the use of outbound sales development representatives to grow rapidly and acquire a lot of new customers.

So yes, the bare-knuckle tactics of cold calling and consistent outreach (if targeted properly) still work.

The question you should ask yourself is whether it makes sense to hire internal SDRs or use an outsourced service. This will likely be a function of the economics of your product (how much it costs, how long it takes to sell, upsell strategy).

In short, if the economics of your product don’t make sense for full-time SDR hires, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t employ these tactics.

Over the past few years, there have been major improvements in the quality and availability of third party SDR and “inside sales” companies for startups; so if you still have a mental picture of a massive call center with non-native English speakers hammering the phones, you may want to reconsider that perception and be open minded.

Depending on the industry you are in, you can find guidance and best practices on compensation vs revenue ratios and compensation structure for your sales reps.

Price is a Math Problem for Your Customers. Solve It For Them.

Prices impact purchase decisions. That is obvious.

You can do yourself a big favor by understanding the financial drivers of your customer’s business and do the math for them.

For example, let’s say your product helps your customers get more leads and it costs $10,000 a year for them to license from you.

If you know that each new customer for their business is worth $12,000 year, you might want to tell them “one additional customer for you will cover the cost of buying our product and on average using our product leads to 10 new customers per year”.

Don’t rely on them to do this math themselves. This goes back to the idea of truly understanding your customer and knowing how their business works. These things may seem obvious, but they are not. Using concrete examples and being specific is very important.

Synchronize Sales & Marketing

This article talks a lot about methods and practices for being systematic about your approach to sales.

In order to maximize the output of your sales efforts, it’s important that you apply the same discipline to your marketing strategy. Be sure that your marketing efforts are aligned with your sales objectives and sales activities.

Communication failures between sales and marketing teams can lead to a breakdown of messaging consistency and subsequently results.

Don’t let that happen! It would be as if the ground troops from an army went to one destination and the air support somewhere else.

“Sales Engineering” and Demos

Don’t assume that your salespeople (or you) can give a good demo because you have a strong understanding of your product.

Delivering a great product demonstration is a skill that takes work. You should make a point of frequently practicing this internally.

After all the work that is required to get a demo scheduled, it would be a shame to blow the sale by rambling on endlessly or emphasizing the wrong customer benefits.

There is never any guarantee that your sales strategy will succeed, but if you don’t approach it with discipline I’d be willing to guarantee that it won’t.

In case you have questions after reading the post just message me on LinkedIn directly.