Rethink Your Sales Strategy | Tory Burch Foundation

Many growing businesses spend a significant amount of time perfecting their marketing strategy, but when it comes to sales, the structure isn’t as strong. That discrepancy is a question of mindset, and it could be costing you lots of missed revenue. “The number-one problem that we have in business is that we avoid the word ‘sales’,” explained sales strategist, fractional CEO  and The Heart Sell author Dora Rankin. She joined our webinar series to break down building a sales strategy into approachable steps. She also shared ways to engage your customers authentically and her winning formula for unlocking revenue.

UNDERSTANDING MARKETING VS. SALES.

A good way to get the most out of your marketing and sales efforts is to understand how they’re different and how they work together. In simple terms, sales is how you find your customers for your business, while marketing is how your people find you. Rankin highlights the biggest differences lies in being proactive versus reactive. “If you’re only doing marketing, you’re only going to wait for the sales to come in,” she explained. She estimated that a business could wait 12 to 18 months for a marketing message to turn into a purchase if they don’t do other sales activities. 

Instead of a growth strategy that focuses on engaging potential customers through marketing tactics like social media posts and email newsletters, Rankin believes founders should create a flywheel in their businesses where they focus on sales activities that they support with marketing efforts that enhance the sales process. The relationship she described, in which sales activities attract the customers you need to use marketing to communicate with, are represented by a flywheel. She introduced the concept of the 80/20 principle, in which she recommended businesses spend 80% of their time on sales efforts, indicated on the outer ring of the flywheel, and 20% of their time on marketing, indicated as the center.

BUILDING YOUR SALES FLYWHEEL.

Start by identifying the three types of buyers for your business:

• Ideal clients: This is someone who would directly purchase your product or service.
• Partners: This is someone doing something completely different than you, but has the same audience. For example, bankers can view accountants as partners, as they have the same audience, but serve their customers differently. 
• Ecosystem: This is the same as partners, but an organization. For example, a tradeshow might be an ecosystem target for a handbag business. 

List these three buckets on the outside ring of your flywheel. Add marketing in the middle Once you know who falls into these three types of buyers, you can then set yourself the task of working through these lists in the course of a week. These three buyers make up the basis for a potential weekly sales plan that focuses on outbound prospecting and sales calls once a potential client has agreed to a meeting. The marketing activities will become evident once you have a sense of your sales activities. For example, you will know what kind of one-pager to develop once you know the kinds of partners you’re engaging.

Schedule time for outbound prospecting, via email or LinkedIn message, for example. Rankin suggests the following approach: 

• Research: This shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. The key is finding out a few things about your customer so you can personalize your message. If you’ve ever wondered why someone hasn’t responded to you, it’s likely that you made it about you, not them. 
• Introduction: Introduce yourself briefly.
• Commonality: Share a commonality between the two of you. This is something you will find during your research 
• Compliment: This should be an authentic compliment!
• Reason: Be clear in your reason for wanting to meet or talk, but do not make this about your pitch. 
• Call to action: Rankin emphasizes this step. A call to action includes a time to meet and a link to your calendar. You should never let anyone figure out their own calendar. 

Rankin recommends spending seven to ten hours a week of outbound prospecting work, including eight to ten sales conversations. “The more authentic you are, in doing any type of outbound, the better,” said Rankin. She teaches that prospecting is not about taking a one-size-fits-all script, but rather it’s about truly identifying who you want to work with and doing your research. Remember that repeatedly testing and talking to your buyers will help you learn and iterate as you go along. You might fail many times before succeeding once. 

Keep records of your outbound efforts with a pipeline management tracker This can simply be a spreadsheet, or a more robust customer relationship management (CRM) tool like Hubspot, Monday.com or Pipedrive.

THE ART OF THE SALES CALL.

When one of your prospecting messages turns into a sales call, it’s time to prepare.It’s important to remember that every conversation should walk your customer down a path to solve a problem they may not know about. 

Start off the meeting with a few comments to build rapport, then share an agenda and proposed outcomes. From there, you can ask what Rankin calls profiling questions to learn about your potential customer. Some good examples would be open-ended questions like “I’d love to know more about your business…” or “What challenges are you facing?” It’s also key to include questions about their urgency like, “Are you ready to invest in solving this problem?” 

After asking these questions, you’ve likely identified their pain point. Now, it’s your turn to briefly introduce yourself and summarize the conversation. Rankin offered this script: “Here are the things we talked about, and based on the things we talked about, here’s how I think I can help you.” Think of this as a very simple sharing of information, not a full pitch. “We don’t tell them the things that we do and that we think that they should work with us, unless we know 100% that we’ve gotten to their pain point and that we really are the right people to work with them or to have our thing sold in their store,” Rankin cautioned. 

SUCCESS IS ROOTED IN BELIEF.

At the end of her presentation, Rankin reiterated her belief that the first step to building a sales strategy is to set ambitious revenue goals for your business, achieved weekly, monthly or yearly. She urged founders to ask themselves, do you really believe in yourself and your business to reach a milestone that’s really big? Starting with this question is important, because without belief, you may actually be stopping yourself from doing the things that are uncomfortable but necessary for major growth. Rankin urges that having unwavering belief in yourself and your business is the first key to success.