Business Development | Sales Tactics and Strategies
When looking to increase your revenues, it’s often recommended to go one way or another: find new leads, or lead old ones to repurchase. There doesn’t seem to be a happy medium that consultants or companies can agree upon. Old leads/customers are often sent to the client managers who maintain satisfaction for their customers, but they don’t remain in the sales teams’ hands to try and increase more sales per customer. Then, there’s the alternative, sales teams are the client managers who try to make more sales, but don’t worry about looking elsewhere for new leads.
There is a happy medium that can work for both ends of the spectrum. Here are a few tips to finding the mix that works best for you and your customers:
- Define your strategies. These are the goals tied to the company’s overall objectives. What is the company aiming to do? Increase sales? Awareness? Sales per customer? Whatever it is, you have to know them before you can move on to step two.
- Define your tactics. How are you going to reach those goals, meet those objectives? Create an action plan based on your strategies. This way, and only this way, will you be able to create meaningful actions that are related to the company’s objectives.
- Think creatively. Many companies still do things without realizing or knowing why, and often continue to do them because they either worked in the past or are simply the way they’ve always done things. When doing steps one and two, take into consideration the things you’re already doing, and be willing and able to say, “maybe this isn’t the right way to gain this strategic goal…” Then you can continue to grow.
- Implement your tactics. This is an important component to being able to see results. Assign responsibilities and put your tactics into place. Also prepare for step 5 by implementing measurement tools, guidelines, and benchmarks.
- Evaluate. Take a look at the results. From the benchmarks you created previously, you should be able to see if your results were successful or not, based on the criteria already established. This is the only way you can improve future efforts to create an even better plan or course of action next time.
Remember that, though this may be useful here in business development planning and creating sales objectives, this method can and should be used for marketing, advertising, PR, and any other business venture. You need to know your goals (strategies) before you begin acting (tactics).
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