This article is based on a lightly edited transcript of a video conversation. The language has been kept conversational to preserve the speaker’s original tone and flow.
Sales strategy is a documented plan, one that translates your business objectives into a commercial and operational sales approach. That’s the essence of what a sales strategy is. Your sales strategy is like a roadmap for your commercial success.
Sales strategy outlines the vision, the operational guidelines, and the objectives that your sales organisation should follow. Most sales departments don’t have their sales and ops planning mapped out enough.
As a result, they face challenges. The better defined your sales strategy is, the more success you’re likely to have.
Defining your sales growth strategy matters because it helps you minimise risk, becomes your roadmap for growth, helps you plan and refine your sales approach, and ultimately, build a consistent, repeatable sales engine.
Most challenges in sales lead back to the sales planning and strategy—either there’s a gap in how well it’s defined, or inconsistencies in how the different elements connect and work together.
There are seven critical components of a sales strategy. Each one includes multiple elements that help shape your thinking, guide your approach, and support your execution.
There are at least 28 subcomponents within these seven main areas. Different types of organisations, depending on their focus, will need to pick and choose which components are most relevant and important. That’s exactly why going through the process of defining and documenting your sales and marketing plans is so essential.
Another key point: you should never define your B2C or B2B sales strategy in isolation.
It should always be tied back to your broader business objectives. And even more importantly, it needs to align with your marketing goals and your product or solution direction.
If you take the time to factor in all of those elements, your sales planning and strategy become your blueprint for growth and success.
I want to dive into each of those seven components and give you a clear picture of what’s involved and why each one is so important to understand, define, and develop.
1. Sales Vision, Goals, Tactics, and People
Have you ever really thought about these elements? What kind of sales culture do you want to foster? How do you want your team to talk about your company—the brand they represent? These questions are key when it comes to defining the vision, setting goals, and choosing the right tactics for sales and marketing plans.
These elements are all tied to setting a strong vision and building the right infrastructure and logistics to help your team succeed. It’s important to have this documented and easily accessible for your team.
There are four key elements I want you to think about here. First, you need to focus on translating your overarching business strategy into a clear sales vision.
Take Tesla as an example. Everyone knows Elon Musk and the massive brand that Tesla has become.
When they started, their business strategy was centred around attracting investment. So they targeted high-net-worth individuals—people who were passionate about both technology and cars.
That was the big-picture strategy: generate interest and excitement around their innovative, tech-driven car products. But their sales vision and sales strategy were a whole different story.
They wanted to disrupt the automotive market—an industry that hadn’t seen a new, bold manufacturer in a long time. So, from a sales perspective, they took a different approach. They set up showrooms. They made it possible to order a Tesla online—something that had never been done in the industry before.
That disruption came from how they executed their sales strategy. The business strategy was one thing, but the sales vision and execution brought it to life in a way that completely changed the game.
Every organisation has a value proposition. But part of this process is about translating that value proposition into a selling proposition.
How do you want to position your organisation for success? Your value proposition is great from a marketing standpoint, but we also need to think about what the sales-focused elements are.
What messaging are we going to use, when are we going to use it, and which types of customers is it intended for? Because each sales scenario will be different.
The more clearly we define these pieces of the puzzle, the easier it becomes for our teams to execute effectively.
The third element is about team roles and values. We’ve got to clearly define what those roles are. We need to put the infrastructure in place that shapes how we want our teams to sell.
What qualification frameworks might they use? In many cases, how you think through and set this up will directly influence the success you achieve. We need to get granular:
- How will we do outreach?
- How will we retain clients?
- What model are we applying?
- What frameworks are we using consistently, and how will we report back?
These are critical when it comes to setting and defining your sales planning and strategy. The final point here is about your sales tactics and engagement. What’s the plan for outreach? What boundaries and expectations are we setting for the team?
Whether you are a B2C sales manager or a B2B sales leader, it’s your role to set that direction and those expectations. And the key piece that ties all of this together is sales enablement.
Sales enablement aligns these elements. It creates a control mechanism inside your sales organisation that allows you to set, maintain, and manage that sales vision and strategy.
2. Market Analysis and Distribution Channels
The second component is market analysis and your distribution channels. Before we dive into distribution channels, let’s focus on market analysis. It breaks down into four components.
The first is market knowledge. This is all about understanding the market you’re operating in—inside and out.
It’s about identifying your USP, doing the necessary research to understand how you’ll serve your clients, what their expectations are, what the trends in the market look like, and what the current distribution channels are.
The more you understand about your market, the easier it becomes to determine the best strategies and tactics to use—whether you’re trying to break in, acquire new customers, or scale your efforts.
This also helps you identify adjacent markets—markets you could potentially move into if your core one becomes saturated or starts to plateau.
The second component is market sizing. This is where you evaluate the size of your market. What is your total addressable market? What portion of that is serviceable for your business? And most importantly, what’s the segment you can realistically go after right away to start winning deals?
A great example here is schools in the UK.
According to the government register, there are around 32,000 schools across the UK. That’s more than any small business—or even many larger businesses—could hope to target in a reasonable timeframe.
So what do you do? You start segmenting.
Out of that 32,000, maybe you decide to focus only on high schools. From there, maybe you narrow it further—perhaps by schools with a certain number of pupils, or by location, or even by the subjects they offer.
By getting that granular, you can shrink that massive number down into something much more targeted and manageable, giving you a clearer strategy for how to reach out, how to communicate, and how to penetrate those accounts effectively.
Market sizing is crucial, but only if you do the research. Understand your total market, your serviceable market, and then carve out a segmented target list you can actively work with.
The third element of your market analysis is competitive context. It’s crucial to understand who your competitors are. You need to know where you win, where you lose, and—most importantly—where your clients see value to make your sales and marketing plans.
Features don’t matter. What matters is what’s important to the client. If you and your competitors are perceived as offering the same thing, how will your client make a decision?
By understanding your competitors in depth, you can distinctly position yourself and speak directly to your clients. That’s the real purpose behind this analysis.
Your competitive landscape is always evolving. This isn’t a one-and-done activity.
I’d strongly recommend reviewing and updating your competitive insights and sales strategy format regularly. Also, empower your team to gather competitive intel as they go. Feed that information back into your sales strategy so it’s always current and actionable.
The fourth and final element in this exercise is a SWOT analysis.
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It’s a classic strategic planning tool and still one of the best brainstorming exercises you can do with your team.
The key is to make sure we highlight our strengths in our communication and messaging.
At the same time, when it comes to weaknesses, we need to put tactics and strategies in place to ask, “How are we going to overcome these?”
Then with opportunities, it’s about figuring out how we’re going to capitalise on them—how we can take full advantage and make them work in our favour. And for threats? We need to ask, “How can we defend our position so those threats don’t evolve into something bigger that impacts us?”
Once you’ve gone through this entire analysis, you’re in a much stronger position to decide which distribution channels to focus on—and more importantly, why you’re focusing on them.
When you’re starting as a small business, it’s tempting to take a scattergun approach—try everything, be everywhere. That might be okay in the very early stages. But as your business grows and becomes more established, that approach just doesn’t cut it anymore.
You’ve got limited resources, and you need to make sure you’re focusing them in the right places. People are often the toughest part of sales, so you’ve got to use their time wisely. If you’ve already completed the market sizing exercise, this process becomes so much easier.
You’ll be able to guide your team confidently: “Based on all of the analysis we’ve done, here are the distribution channels we’re going to prioritise. Here’s where we’re focusing our energy.”
That clarity simplifies everything. Because now, instead of chasing everything, you can focus on what you need to make those selected channels work.
Once you’ve identified the most relevant and effective channels for your products and services, you can start building out cadences for communication, plan your outreach strategies, and set your team up for success.
The key is often to use a multi-channel approach. For example, if you’re doing outreach through email marketing, the language you use there is going to be completely different from the language you’d use in a social media campaign.
And even within social media, it varies by platform.
LinkedIn? That’s a whole different tone and structure compared to Facebook or Instagram.
So this is really about understanding two things:
- Where your clients spend their time—where they’re most active and most engaged.
- Which distribution channels are best suited to the products, services, or solutions your organisation offers?
Once you’ve got that alignment, you can tailor your messaging, tactics, and cadence to match each channel.
3. Ideal Buyer Profile
Your ideal buyer profile is critical because today’s buyers have more choice, more awareness, and way more access to information than ever before. Technology and the internet have broken down geographic barriers—competition can come from anywhere now.
Let’s be clear: buyer personas are not the same as marketing personas.
- Marketing personas are focused on generating awareness and interest—they’re top-of-the-funnel tools. Their job is to cast a wide net and bring in potential leads who might be interested in what you offer.
- Buyer personas, on the other hand, focus on the actual buying process. They’re about understanding the moods, motivations, and decision-making criteria of the stakeholders involved in the sale.
Gartner found that most buyers are already 60% of the way through their research before they even speak to a vendor. That means they’ve likely compared you to competitors, read reviews, maybe even looked at pricing, before you get a chance to make your pitch.
And if you’re in B2B? You know that the B2B sales process is rarely a one-person decision. You’ve got:
- An economic decision-maker (focused on budget and ROI),
- A technical decision-maker (focused on integration and functionality),
- A user (focused on usability),
- And potentially, influencers or stakeholders who need buy-in, too.
It’s your job to understand:
- Who each stakeholder is,
- What they care about,
- When they show up in the process,
- And how to engage each of them.
4. Mapping the Customer Journey
The customer journey is the fourth critical component of your sales strategy. Because if you understand the journey your customer is on—from the moment they start looking into a solution to the point they make a purchase—you can:
- Ask better questions,
- Guide them more effectively,
- And manage the relationship with more confidence.
Here is one of the B2B sales examples: I worked with an IT company that was struggling to convert leads. After digging into the issue, we discovered something crucial—by the time a prospect contacted them, that prospect had already been considering a provider switch for 12 months.
It wasn’t a spontaneous decision. It was the result of a long-term, strategic shift happening within the business. They’d already done extensive internal work:
- Analysed existing legacy systems,
- Identified inefficiencies,
- Evaluated what needed to change,
- And began aligning stakeholders.
This internal process generated a lot of valuable information, which ultimately formed the foundation of their RFP (Request for Proposal) document. That document was then managed and distributed by the procurement team, and from start to finish, this pre-engagement process took 9 to 12 months.
Once the B2B sales planning team understood this journey, they completely changed their approach.
Rather than pitching themselves as just another vendor responding to an RFP, they began positioning themselves as strategic partners who could contribute value earlier in the process. That shift from a transactional to consultative B2B sales strategy made all the difference.
So when we talk about mapping your customer journey, we’re not just referring to a series of steps. We’re talking about uncovering the real story behind the buying process—understanding what’s happening before a prospect reaches out, and aligning your sales approach with that journey.
That insight drives your engagement strategy, messaging, timing and sequence, and even how you position your solution and who you’re speaking to.
That reason is the fuel for your entire sales engine. Understand it, and you’ll be able to: build trust faster, shorten your sales cycle, and increase your chances of closing the right deals with the right clients.
5. Defining Your Sales Process
The fifth component of your sales strategy is defining your sales process.
Once you’ve mapped out your customer journey and identified what drives decision-making, you can build a B2C or B2B sales process that aligns with how your clients buy, not how you want to sell.
Your B2C or B2B sales process should be:
- Structured – with defined stages from first contact to close,
- Repeatable – so your team can follow it consistently,
- And flexible enough to account for differences in journey stages or buyer personas.
Think in terms of:
- What happens at each stage (Discovery, Qualification, Proposal, Negotiation, etc.),
- What milestones need to be met
- What questions to ask at each point
- And how you’ll know when a prospect is ready to move forward.
A well-defined B2C or B2B sales process lets your team work more efficiently, manage opportunities more effectively, and provide a better, more aligned experience to your customers.
How well you define the sales process is going to have a significant impact on the results that you achieve.
There might be six stages in the sales process. There doesn’t have to be six. I have worked with organisations that have a three- or four-step process.
I’ve worked with organisations that have gone up to a six- or seven-stage process. I would generally say that once you get more than seven, it starts becoming a little bit more complicated to manage, and you’re becoming granular.
Complex sales environments demand clarity and structure.
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What the sales process enables you to do is also understand your pipeline management principles as well, because through this, you’re able to forecast better, and manage pipeline health a lot better as well.
Think of your B2C or B2B sales process as another roadmap. It is your guide for the buying journey—either when you engage with a prospect or a prospect engages with you. The role of the sales process is to guide them through that process.
In addition to that, what you need to do here is think about how you’re going to qualify each opportunity. And there are some key elements that you’re going to use to qualify. You’re going to qualify things like your budget, the timing, their motivation, the value they see, the competitors they may have also engaged with, who your champion is, and so on.
There are lots of elements that you might want to qualify. The elements that you qualify are going to be unique to what you’re selling.
The better you define your sales process, the easier it is to understand the criteria that you’re going to follow.
The key, again, is to map it out. If you don’t map it out, it’s haphazard.
And everyone in your team, your organisation, is going to be doing their own thing. So, having a process is important, but putting some guardrails there in terms of what the objectives are is equally important as well.
And a useful thing to do is to overlay that buying and selling process. Because the better aligned they are, the easier it is going to be for you to help your prospect and your client through that journey.
And that’s the role that you want your sales team to play—to guide your clients and your prospects through that process.
6. Measures of Success
The sixth component of the sales growth strategy is about defining your measures of success. Numbers are important in sales and marketing plans, but they are not the only factor that determines success.
Sales is a performance game. It requires a combination of skills, techniques, awareness of numbers, and more. Solely focusing on the numbers can lead you to become inefficient and focus on the wrong activities and the wrong behaviors.
The way I describe it is that there’s often far too much emphasis on the output—the result. Yes, we want the numbers, we want to hit the targets. Now, the numbers are important, the results are important—but at what cost, right?
If you want to achieve that success, if you want to hit the numbers, then you’ve got to start reframing it in your mind. Because what you put into your system and your processes is ultimately what’s going to help you get the output that you want.
So, if you put rubbish into your process, the result is that you’re going to get poor quality customers coming out.
If you’re scattergun and decide to take any customer that comes to you, with a strategy that’s just “revenue, revenue, revenue”—then guess what? Yes, you can take them, but it’s going to create other challenges and problems later down the line. And this is the big mindset shift.
I’ve been in sales long enough to know that numbers ultimately drive performance. But—it’s a mindset shift. If you are operating that way today, then you’ve got to start thinking: What do we need to do to attract the type of quality customers that we want on a long-term basis?
Your inputs are super important. To put that into perspective: we’re all aware of the sales activities, objectives, and results we want.
That’s the right-hand side here. You can see the results as the objective of those activities. Now, you’ve got to think about what the performance drivers are. What is in your toolkit, at your disposal, that’s going to help you drive the desired results?
Every single action, every single activity, has a knock-on effect on performance. It’s either going to accelerate it or slow things down. So, the more defined we are, the more structured we are,
The easier we make it for our teams to be a little more tunnel-visioned, so to speak, to set boundaries so they can just focus on the things we want them to. If we keep adding too many variables to that process, we make it harder for our teams to achieve those results.
And why am I saying this? Well, ultimately, this is what you need to focus on at a minimum. These are the most important things: know your sales velocity.
Sales velocity is a calculation: Number of deals × Average order value × Win rate ÷ Sales cycle time. Those four metrics are what drive your sales velocity. And they are the four metrics that, at a minimum, you should be tracking.
You should know them. Every single one of the people on your team should know them as well.
7. Account Management and Customer Success
You have to make sure that you’ve got an account management model in place. Account management is a proactive task that you can do.
If you’ve done all that work to secure that customer, think about the service you’re going to offer to help proactively manage that account. Oftentimes, what happens is that an organisation might have a portfolio of accounts, so they will assign that portfolio to a person to manage.
The responsibility that person has is not only to renew those accounts, but also to start thinking about how they’re going to organically grow those accounts. Where is the opportunity? How often are they going to communicate with those accounts?
How are they going to create those conversation opportunities, understand the objectives and the direction, and how might your organisation be able to help them more?
A key part of this process is: the better you understand the objectives of the client, the better you can align yourself with their needs on an ongoing basis.
Now, I’m not saying that you’re going to have to do this with every single client—because in a portfolio, there will naturally be some clients with growth potential, others in the middle, and some where the engagement is lower. However, the key is to be proactive with this process.
Alongside that, I think a lot of organisations have customer success teams.
They’re experts in your business who can help your clients get the best out of the products, services, or solutions they are purchasing.
It is crucial that the customer success team and the account teams—whether it’s the individuals responsible for managing or owning the account relationship—work hand in hand.
Customer success teams are generally not sales-savvy, and they sometimes tend to share information or participate in conversations without fully understanding the value of what the client is telling them.
For this reason, they must work alongside a salesperson. The salesperson—whether it’s an account manager, account executive, or account director—should proactively engage and interact with the customer success person.
Because the better they can understand the work that the customer success person is doing, the more compelling an argument they might be able to build for an upgrade, upsell, cross-sell, and so on.
What I also tend to find is that client-side individuals are often more open to working with the customer success person, because there’s a certain technical level of detail involved.
They enjoy getting into the details, getting into the weeds, and talking about technical aspects they might not discuss with the account manager. So, it’s good to split the roles—but it’s equally important to ensure that internal feedback mechanisms are in place, so that information flows properly.
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