Crafting a sales strategy is one of the core activities every business will have to undertake. You can delay it until you’ve acquired your first 100 or 1,000 customers, but at some point you’ll need to find sustainable traction in the market.
DEVELOPING A
SALES STRATEGY
Brought to you by Intercom
Crafting a sales strategy is one of the core activities every
business will have to undertake. You can delay it until you've
acquired your first 100 or 1,000 customers, but at some
point you'll need to find sustainable traction in the market.
A well defined sales strategy is your path to meaningful
growth. It's how you'll know who your target customers
are and how you'll sell to them. Get it right and watch your
company's growth trajectory go up and to the right.
Go without one and risk seeing your business flame out.
The challenge for you is deciding which sales motions will
actually drive your strategy forward and leaning into just
those few. It's far too easy to say your initial sales team
will be both SMB and enterprise, inbound and outbound,
hunters and farmers. The reality is that without focus, doing
any of those effectively is nearly impossible. The key is to
experiment and iterate with discipline, so you can zero in
on the sales strategy that's right for your business.
Here, you'll learn from top practitioners in the field about
their winning sales strategies and the lessons they've
learned scaling sales. Taken together, their advice is a
roadmap to identifying and navigating the crucial inputs
to long term sales success.
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
3
Developing a Sales Strategy
Part I
What it takes to attract
your target customer
Des Traynor,
Co-Founder, Intercom
Regardless of whether you're selling a SaaS
service or a physical good, you need to understand
what it takes to attract your target customers and decide
how much revenue you want to earn from them. That
gives you the ability to plot how you'll reach those
customers, which gives you three options:
These axes were created by Joel York to define the three
key sales models for SaaS businesses and are a great way
to help you understand how to move forward. (The
bottom-right quadrant, a complex sales process with
low value customers, isn't a viable busine