What Actually Is "Strategic Sales" and How to Craft a Killer Strategic Sales Plan

When people think of sales, they tend to reflect on transactional sales – the type that focuses on a sales outcome that can take place in a matter of minutes or a longer set period. For example: You go to the store, you buy a candy bar. You just took part in a transactional sale. 

But sometimes you need a sales strategy more focused on building a long-term customer relationship. How will the clerk nurture your relationship and convince you to buy more products in the future? The answer is found in a strategic sales plan.

What is strategic sales?

What is strategic sales? Strategic sales involve developing a detailed plan for targeting prospective clients and selling them a product or service. Through strategic sales, companies focus on how their brand can provide a solution for their target customers. How do they do this? Sales teams take steps to understand their potential customers’ needs and develop strategies for their products and services to fulfill those desires.

Because strategic sales is an ongoing process, it requires careful planning. An effective strategic sales plan should include information about every aspect of the sales cycle, from capacity planning to territory design. It should also present plenty of data to justify the presented strategies. 

Why are strategic sales important?

Every sales team will develop a unique strategic sales plan specific to their products, brands and customers. The benefits provided by strategic sales, however, are common to practically any business. These benefits include:

• Strategic sales allow teams to build and develop customer relationships.
• Strategic sales plans help sales teams to better utilize sales analytics and understand the value of various metrics.
• Strategic sales help turn average sales reps into outstanding sales leaders.
• A strategic sales plan helps sales teams identify weak and strong areas in their sales funnels so they can make necessary adjustments.
• Strategic sales plans help sales and marketing teams align their processes to improve outreach efforts.
• A sale strategy helps teams target and nurture more profitable customers.
• A detailed strategic sales plan helps ensure a brand’s sales strategies are optimized and followed by all.

Develop a strategic sales plan

How do you develop an effective strategic sales plan? Your strategic sales plan should include not only your sales funnel and strategies, but also all of the ideas, processes and resources available to help implement sales strategies.

Every company will benefit from a unique strategic sales plan, but most will share a few common elements that can serve as a solid foundation. When creating your own strategic sales plan, be sure to include:

• Mission statement – What are the company’s purpose and values? What is the brand’s primary strategy for doing business?
• Market conditions – In what market is the sales team operating? What are the market challenges? Have any recent events impacted the market? What is the competitive analysis?
• Sales organization – Who makes up the sales organization? Using an organizational chart, identify the team’s key players and possibly individual sales reps.
• Product information – What are the details of the products for sale, and what is their pricing? What about the products gives them value at their set price points?
• Target customer – Who is the target customer that will most likely purchase the product or service being sold? What are their demographics, and what are their motivations?
• Financial data – The strategic sales plan should include a variety of financial data to support the strategies described, including sales, revenues, budgets and even the sales compensation plan.
• Branding and marketing – What sort of branding has the company emphasized, including potential social media presences, advertising and other marketing efforts. What is the company’s marketing strategy?
• Sales process – What does the company’s sales funnel look like? What sales processes have been implemented for teams to follow?
• Goals – What sales goals have been set for the company, each sales team and each sales representative?
• KPIs – How are sales teams currently performing? It’s important to regularly update the strategic sales plan to reflect current data measuring sales teams’ progress and performance.

Not ready to create a strategic sales plan from scratch? Try customizing a template instead! Beautiful.ai offers a slew of convenient presentation templates created by professional designers to take the guesswork out of developing your sales plan. 

Take a look at the sales plan design of our Sales Projection Presentation Template, which includes slides to analyze the health of a company, compare projections to past sales numbers and even inform audiences about company operations. It’s easy to add additional slides to better illustrate your company’s own unique sales strategy, or just customize the Smart Slides with specific data relevant to your business.

It’s effortless to personalize slides using Beautiful.ai. Just enter your content and watch as artificial intelligence adjusts the design of the slides, infographics and other data visualizations.