Ability - Strategic Sales Development Specialists

SALES STRATEGY DESIGN

Ability designs sales strategies for major organisations and includes business and marketing strategies for smaller conpanies.

Let’s just clarify the terminology used here so you know what we mean when we talk about business, marketing and sales strategy. You can then relate our terms to your own experience.

Business Strategy
Here we mean the strategy that determines the organisation’s objectives for both the company itself and the various divisions within it. So for example it can cover what revenue, earnings, growth, and market share is targeted, over what period of time, and at what cost. It can define the products and services targeted at specific markets. It is also likely to cover the way in which the organisation approaches the market.

Marketing Strategy
In our context, the marketing strategy determines how the business strategy is enacted through product and service design, building pricing models to deliver revenue and profit goals, designing and implementing the marketing communication programme to build awareness and knowledge in the market place to support the sales effort, and so on.

Sales Strategy
This is in essence that part of the marketing plan that focuses on how the sales team should use its skills, and the material produced by marketing, to help achieve the business objectives. So it defines the sales process or model, relates it to varying stages of market life cycles, guides sales teams on how to approach customers, determines how to exploit different sales channels, and more beyond.

The Sales Strategy

“Marketing produces the brochures, gives us a few leads, and the rest is down to us!” This is certainly a bit of an understatement, but that’s how a lot of sales teams see it. However, they are often left with the job of fitting together the company’s standard sales process with the demands of selling different products within markets at varying stages of maturity. With the best will in the world, selling to “market-forging visionaries” demands different sales skills, different compensation models, different review processes, and different “lots of other things”, to selling to the late majority of a mature market.

Our expertise is in helping you match the requirements of the market to the abilities of your sales organisation:

• We can help you rationalise expectations to build effective compensation and motivational programmes

• We can help you define skills, capabilities and internal KPI's to recruit and match the right people to the right jobs. Then we can develop the monitoring and measurement process to establish where there are gaps.

• We can help you fill knowledge, skill and capability gaps by identifying development needs and delivering appropriate training, coaching and work-based programmes

• If you need to build a new sales process to guide sales people and help management review progress, then we can do that for you too