22 Best Sales Strategies, Plans, & Initiatives for Success [Templates]

Discover sales strategy examples, templates, and plans used by top sales teams worldwide.

Editable-Sales-Plan-Template-Cover

FREE SALES PLAN TEMPLATE

Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent plan.

sales strategies initiatives and templates to plan your quarter

Updated: 10/17/23

Published: 10/17/23

A strong sales strategy plan creates the foundation for a cohesive and successful sales organization.

Sales strategies and initiatives also align salespeople on shared goals and empower them to do their best work — keeping them happy and successful, too.

Free Download: Sales Plan Template

In this guide, we'll dig into some sales strategies and initiatives that can help you generate more leads and close more deals. But first, let’s define what a sales strategy is.

What's a Sales Strategy?

Types of Sales Strategies

Building a Sales Strategy Plan

Inbound vs. Outbound Sales

Sales Initiatives

Sales Strategy Examples

What is a sales strategy?

A sales strategy is a set of decisions, actions, and goals that inform how your sales team positions the organization and its products to close new customers. It acts as a guide for sales reps to follow, with clear goals for sales processes, product positioning, and competitive analysis.

Sales Strategy: Cranney sales process graphic

Image Source

Most strategies involve a detailed plan of best practices and processes set by management.

Why is a sales strategy important?

A clear sales strategy serves as a map for the growth of your business. Your sales strategy is key to future planning, problem-solving, goal-setting, and management.

An effective sales strategy can help you:

  • Give your team direction and focus. Strategic clarity can help your sales reps and managers understand which goals and activities to prioritize. This can lead to improved productivity and outcomes.
  • Ensure consistent messaging. Your sales strategy can help your team deliver a consistent message to prospects, partners, and customers. This can increase both trust and effectiveness.
  • Optimize opportunities. Strong sales strategies will help you target the right prospects and customize your approach. This can help your team make the most of every sales opportunity.
  • Improve resource allocation. Your sales strategy outlines priorities and resources. In turn, this can help your sales team use their time, effort, and resources efficiently. This efficiency can boost your team's ability to focus on high-potential deals.

Let's cover some popular sales strategies — including inbound sales.

Sales Strategies

  • Increase online sales through social media.
  • Become a thought leader.
  • Prioritize inbound sales calls as hot leads.
  • Properly research and qualify prospects.
  • Implement a free trial.
  • Don't shy away from cold calling.
  • Offer a demonstration of the product.
  • Provide a personalized, clear end result.
  • Be willing to adapt your offering.
  • Close deals with confidence.
  • Nurture existing accounts for future selling opportunities.

1. Increase online sales through social media.

Social media is one of the most popular ways that people consume information these days. That’s why nine out of ten retail businesses are active on at least two social platforms. With the data on your side, increasing online sales through social media is attainable with some creative thinking and strategic planning.

Although it may be tempting to jump on the hottest social media trend or go where your competitors are, that probably won’t be your best choice. Time is precious and you’ll want to build your pipeline as efficiently as you can. So, be diligent about figuring out where your target customers are spending their time and meet them where they're most active.

Keep in mind that your tone and voice may need to adjust to the platform so that you can connect with your audience. You’ll want your content to blend in naturally with the platform and not seem out of place.

Featured Guide: 37 Social Selling Tips for LinkedIn

Download the Guide

2. Become a thought leader.

Sharing your advice, tried-and-true best practices, and niche expertise are some of the most long-lasting ways to build your personal brand and lend more credibility to your organization. I’m sure we all can agree that nobody wants to feel like they’re being sold to. Instead, it’s better to help people by offering solutions to their problems.

Thought leaders do exactly this, and it’s even been backed up by Edleman data . In its 2022 Thought Leadership Impact Report , Edelman found that "Thought leadership is one of the most effective tools an organization can use to demonstrate its value to customers during a tough economy – even more so than traditional advertising or product marketing, according to B2B buyers."

According to the study, 61% of decision-makers said thought leadership could be moderately or very effective at demonstrating the value of a company’s products compared to traditional product marketing. Additionally thought leadership becomes even more important during economic downturns with 51% of C-suite executives stating it has more of an impact on purchases.

So what’s the catch?

Not all thought leadership content is created equal. While it can positively affect a company, poor thought leadership can be devastating to a company’s sales goals. A quarter of decision-makers who answered Edleman’s previous survey reported that thought leadership content contributed to their reasons for not doing business with an organization . Ouch!

Before you plan a spree of LinkedIn posts to drive leads, consider who your audience is, what they need to know, and how your organization can help. And, it may not hurt to have a second set of eyes from your marketing, communication, and PR departments review your plan first to make sure everything is on-brand (and trackable!)

market and sales strategy in a business plan

Free Sales Plan Template

Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent sales plan.

  • Target Market
  • Prospecting Strategy

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

3. Prioritize inbound sales calls as hot leads.

There’s the age-old question: "Should I discuss product pricing with a prospect on the first sales call?" The honest answer is: It depends.

You and your sales team know your process front and back and if you’ve seen success with pitching with pricing first, last, or somewhere in between, stick with what’s working for you.

Besides that, your team should always prioritize those prospects who call into sales first. These hot leads are definitely interested in what you have to sell and want to know enough information about how it’ll benefit them before they make a decision.

By prioritizing talking to these prospects as soon as they call or send an email, you’re putting your best foot forward and showing them that you’re helpful, solutions-oriented, and considerate of their time. If it means closing the deal on the first call , there’s no harm in it so long as the customer has the information they need to make an informed decision.

4. Properly research and qualify prospects.

Even the strongest sales strategy can't compensate for targeting the wrong customers. To ensure your team is selling to the right type of customer, encourage them to research and qualify prospects before attempting to discuss your product. They'll find that more work on the front end can lead to smoother closing conversations later on.

Outline the criteria a prospect should meet to qualify them as a high-probability potential customer. This should be based on a prospect’s engagement history and demographics.

Featured Guide: 101 Sales Qualification Questions

Hubspot Sales qualification questions offer

5. Implement a free trial.

Offering a free trial or freemium version of your product is a highly effective way to convert prospects. HubSpot’s sales strategy report found that free trials were 76% effective followed by a freemium option with 69% effective in turning prospects into paying customers.

sales strategy example: graph showing popularity of free trial offerings

Free trials give potential customers the opportunity to test your product out before committing. You can place restrictions on your free version like limited features or usage caps. Besides offering prospects a risk-free chance to try your product, free trials also help build brand loyalty and expand your customer base. Prospects that have a positive experience using the free version will be more likely to convert to the paid version.

6. Don't shy away from cold calling.

In sales, cold calling is unavoidable. But it doesn't have to be miserable. There are a number of cold-calling techniques that really work, including our bulletproof cold-calling template . Have your sales team practice cold calls with one another before making actual calls; it'll boost their confidence and get them comfortable with the script.

7. Offer a demonstration of the product.

Pitching can be the make-or-break moment in a sales strategy. The sales pitch has to be a powerful, compelling presentation, but it also can't come on too strong lest you scare away the prospect.

Study the elements of a successful sales pitch and prove to prospects how they’ll benefit from making the purchase. Have your team practice amongst themselves, too. Better yet, test your presentations on a few loyal customers and gather their feedback.

8. Provide a personalized, clear end result.

When customers come to your business, they aren’t necessarily looking for a product or service, they’re looking for their desired end result. These customers want to purchase a means to improve their own operation, or simply improve their strategies with the help of your offering.

After you explain your product or service offering, you have to personalize the benefits to each client in a way that’s valuable to them.

If you’re selling customer service software to a small business that has no experience with one, it’s your job to educate them on its use in the setting of a small business, not to manage hundreds of employees in larger ones. By doing so they will have an easier time seeing how they can use it and spend less time debating what they’ll use it for.

By painting a clear picture of the end result, your customer will be able to see the value of the purchase and feel more inclined to accept the offer.

9. Be willing to adapt your offering.

In sales conversations, you should expect to come across clients with unique demands. It’s only natural when working with companies that have different structures and needs.

Instead of saying "you won’t" or "you can’t" — make sure your sales strategy is adaptable to accommodate the customer’s desire.

10. Close deals with confidence.

How you close a sale is just as important as how you start the conversation. Encourage clear, concise, and firm closing techniques to make sure your sales team sets the right expectations and delivers on their promises.

Keeping a list of proven, go-to closing techniques will help salespeople routinely win deals. Such techniques can include the now or never close, "If you commit now, I can get you a 20% discount," or the question close, "In your opinion, does what I am offering to solve your problem?"

Sales strategies offer, sales closing guide

Available for free is our downloadable Sales Closing Guide to improve your closing techniques and to close deals with confidence.

11. Nurture existing accounts for future selling opportunities.

Once a deal is done, there's no need for a sales strategy ... right? Wrong. Account management is an incredibly important part of the sales process, encouraging loyal, happy customers, and leveraging cross-selling and upselling opportunities .

After your sales team sees success with the sales strategy, form a partnership between your sales team and customer service/success teams. Ensuring customers’ continued satisfaction with your product or service will make them more likely to do business with your company again and even advocate for it.

Sales Strategy Types

Who is your sales strategy for.

The most important element when choosing the best type of sales strategy for your business is your customer .

Once you consider your customer needs, it's time to think about your sales team — the professionals who are responsible for closing deals.

Your sales strategy needs to offer a framework that attracts and engages prospects. At the same time, it needs to enable your team to build relationships that help them achieve sales targets.

For these reasons, a sales strategy shouldn't be one-size-fits-all. Every customer and team is different; so, each organization should draw up the type of sales strategy that works best for their needs.

Outbound Sales Strategy

In outbound sales strategies — the legacy system of most sales teams — companies base their sales strategy on the seller, not the customer.

Outbound sales processes often include cold calling, purchasing email lists, and other cold prospecting techniques. And daily success is often based on the quantity of connections, not the quality.

Outbound sales teams often rely on manually-entered data to monitor the sales pipeline and coach their salespeople. They may also run sales and marketing independently, which can create a disjointed experience for buyers.

Inbound Sales Strategy

In inbound sales strategies — the modern methodology for sales teams — companies base their sales process on buyer actions.

They automatically capture seller and buyer data to monitor the pipeline and coach salespeople. Inbound sales strategies connect to the three stages of the buyer journey — awareness, consideration, and decision. Then, sales reps will map their tactics to the right step in the customer journey.

Many popular types of sales strategies have a customer-centric approach, including:

  • Account-based selling
  • SPIN selling
  • Value-based selling
  • Consultative selling

Learn about these approaches and more in this post about customer-centric selling systems .

Another important point — the inbound methodology aligns sales and marketing, creating a seamless experience for buyers. Check out this post to learn more about inbound sales and how to develop an inbound sales process.

Inbound vs. Outbound Sales Methodology

In the past, buyers suffered through evaluating a product and deciding whether to buy it using only the information offered to them by the seller. Today, all of the information needed to evaluate a product is available online and buyers are no longer dependent on the seller.

If today’s sales teams don’t align with the modern buyer’s process and fail to add value beyond the information already available to them, then they’ll have no reason to engage with a sales team.

As mentioned above, inbound sales benefits buyers at each stage of the buyer process:

  • Consideration

inbound sales methodology sales strategy hubspot

Inbound sales teams help the buyer become aware of potential problems or opportunities and discover strategies to solve problems. Then, they evaluate whether the salesperson can help with a problem, which leads to that buyer purchasing a solution to their problem. Inbound sales reps are helpful and trustworthy, creating partnerships rather than power struggles.

Not sure how to get started with inbound selling? Every sales team should have a sales strategy plan outlining its goals, best practices, and processes designed to align the team and create consistency.

Keep reading to learn how to create a sales strategy plan for your team.

Sales Planning: Building a Sales Strategy Plan

Now that you have the template you need, let's go over how you can build a sales strategy.

How to Build a Sales Strategy

  • Develop organizational goals.
  • Create a customer profile that is tailored to a specific product offering.
  • Hire, onboard, and compensate sales team members adequately.
  • Create a plan to generate demand.
  • Measure individual and team performance.
  • Track sales activities.

To build a comprehensive sales plan, you’ll find the following activities helpful along the way:

1. Develop organizational goals.

Setting goals is a no-brainer for most sales teams. Otherwise, how else will you know you're executing the right activities for the best results? To develop clear organizational goals for your sales strategy:

Involve cross-departmental stakeholders.

When developing sales goals, avoid doing it in a silo. Get input from stakeholders across the organization since every department is held accountable to the company’s bottom line.

Create SMART goals.

SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Setting SMART goals helps your team simplify and track complex or long-term sales goals .

For example, a specific, measurable, and time-bound goal could be to sell 150% of the projected sales quota in Q2. Your internal team will create this goal and can decide whether this goal is relevant and attainable.

SMART goals help reduce confusion when it’s time to review your strategy to see what worked and what didn’t. Attainability is also important, because unrealistic sales goals can impact team motivation.

Connect individual goals to organizational goals.

If you're creating a team-specific strategy, you may also want to set goals for individual team members. Building ownership and accountability into sales goals can help keep your team aligned. It also makes your sales strategy more cohesive.

2. Create a customer profile that is tailored to a specific product offering.

A detailed profile of the target customer — a buyer persona — is essential to an effective sales strategy. There are many ways you can create a useful buyer persona.

Find target markets and segments.

First, look at your industry as a whole. Get to know your ideal customer's company size, psychographics, and buying process. You may want to look at industry trends too.

Conduct market research to understand customer needs and preferences.

Next, do some market research. This template can help you streamline the process and understand which types of research will be best for your business.

You may also want to do some competitor analysis at this stage. Once you know the strengths and weaknesses of competing brands you can more easily find gaps that you can fill for specific customers.

Create a clear value proposition to attract your ideal customer to your product or service.

Your product offering should outline the product benefits. It should also use insights from your customer profile to emphasize features that solve your target customer's pain points.

Your business may already have a clear value proposition, but if not, you can use these free value proposition templates to draft one.

Quick tip : Be sure to schedule time to update and refine your buyer persona to make sure it aligns with current customer trends and expectations.

3. Hire, onboard, and compensate sales team members adequately.

To develop your sales strategy, you must have a powerful sales team in place.

According to HubSpot research, the churn rate for sales teams was about 35% in 2021 and 2022. But the ideal churn rate for most businesses is around 10%, a significant difference.

To create a supportive and successful sales team that can both support and enhance your sales strategy:

Create great processes for hiring new members of your sales team.

To begin this process, create a list of criteria for sales managers to screen for when interviewing candidates. A well-defined job description and competency framework are also useful. These tools can help your team with recruiting and retaining top talent.

Develop sales onboarding, training, and development programs.

Your training and onboarding program should prepare your sales team to sell effectively and efficiently. It should also help sales reps build advanced skills and industry knowledge.

But what if you don't have the resources to develop comprehensive training in-house? In these situations, think about combining organization-specific training with online sales training programs .

Create a motivational compensation and rewards plan.

Many organizations connect sales compensation to organizational sales goals. Regardless of what compensation plan you choose, make sure that it meets or exceeds industry expectations. It should also inspire your team to celebrate individual and team achievements.

4. Create a plan to generate demand.

This section should include a detailed plan for how to target potential customers to increase awareness of your offering. For example, using paid social acquisition channels, creating e-books, hosting webinars, and other strategies in this post.

Featured Resource: Sales Plan Template

Hubspot sales plan template offer

Download the Template for Free

As you create your sales plan, be sure to consider these tips:

Create targeted messaging and positioning for your target audience.

This positioning will help your team create a foundation for targeting your top audience. It will also help you choose the best channels and tactics for each campaign. This boosts your chances of increasing demand and qualified leads with each sales strategy.

Add clear goals and KPIs to your sales plan.

This step will help you stay motivated and track the effectiveness of your sales strategies. This approach can also help you change or update your strategies for effectiveness over time.

Create processes for lead nurturing and follow-up.

Once you've generated demand, it's time to convert. But not every lead generation opportunity translates to qualified leads or sales opportunities.

As you track your newly generated demand, find ways to align your processes with your buyer's journey. Then, use sales automation tools to manage leads and create personalized follow-ups. This can help every rep on your team send the right message at the right time.

Optimize your sales plan and process.

Build in time to review your metrics. Then, use A/B testing, customer feedback, and sales team insights to refine your sales strategy plan.

5. Measure individual and team performance.

Time to track! Once the infrastructure is set up, create a procedure for tracking performance on the individual, team, and company levels.

Tracking your efforts is imperative if you plan to optimize your processes and practices for growth in the future. Even if you’re just getting started setting benchmarks for the team, write those down and track your progress toward them.

Build useful metrics to track sales performance.

This measurement can take the form of quarterly KPIs, weekly dashboards, monthly reviews, or some combination of all three. It should also highlight the specific metrics that the team should focus on.

If you're not sure where to start, these KPIs can help you align performance expectations with sales goals :

  • Revenue targets
  • Sales quotas
  • Conversion rates
  • Lead-to-opportunity ratios
  • Average deal size
  • Pipeline velocity

Think about real-time performance tracking.

While business KPIs are useful for the long-term, fast-moving industries may need real-time tracking. To get an at-a-glance look at sales team performance, choose tools that can give you instant visibility, like Sales Hub .

Real-time insights can help you find and address issues more quickly. They also create opportunities for proactive sales performance management.

Create a process for sharing performance data.

With performance metrics, you have data that can help you offer constructive feedback and coaching to each member of your team.

Whether you offer one-on-one meetings, performance reviews, or team huddles, be sure to make space for these conversations. They’re a great way to understand performance gaps, offer guidance, and share best practices. This process also supports individual and team development.

It can also help you understand whether it’s your team or your strategy that needs extra attention.

6. Track sales activities.

Data is key to an effective sales strategy plan and sales activity metrics can help you go beyond individual team performance.

Collect a range of sales activity data.

Sales activity metrics can help you understand how the team approaches day-to-day sales as a whole. You should track everything from the sales presentation to closing techniques.

Collect data to see how your sales team performs beyond call or deal numbers, in individual activities such as:

  • Meetings scheduled
  • Presentations delivered
  • Proposals submitted
  • Sales presentation success rates
  • Closing techniques

Comparing this data to other goal metrics can show you patterns, best practices, and areas for improvement.

Track lead and prospect sources.

If you’ll be publishing thought leadership content or sourcing leads from social media, make sure that any link you share is trackable with a UTM parameter.

Trackable links aren't just valuable for learning which channels are generating the most leads. They can also help you focus your resources on the channels that generate the most relevant qualified leads for driving sales.

Focus on continuous improvement.

Once you have a complete set of analytics to track your strategy, use it to refine your sales strategies, team knowledge, and plans. A clear data-driven process will make it easier to use customer feedback to grow your sales. It will also give your sales team the ability to flex with industry and market changes that could impact your business.

  • Refresh your buyer personas regularly.
  • Actively align sales and marketing.
  • Listen to your prospects.
  • Invest in sales development and team-building.

Businesses should always be looking for ways to innovate their approach to sales . Here are some creative things sales reps and teams can do on their own to jumpstart their performance, stand out from the competition, and boost team productivity.

1. Refresh your buyer personas regularly.

Buyer personas inform all kinds of activity at your business, including (and most importantly) who your marketing and sales teams pursue as customers. But as your market and company shift, your buyer personas can become out-of-date — which can cause your sales team's work to become stagnant and ineffective. Work with your marketing team to refresh your buyer personas to best equip your sales team for prospecting and outreach.

2. Actively align sales and marketing.

Speaking of marketing, create and honor a service-level agreement (SLA) between your sales and marketing teams. This agreement will detail how each team can support each other, contribute to the other's goals, and honor boundaries in a way that still moves prospects toward conversion.

Download our free SLA Template for Sales & Marketing to align Sales & Marketing goals and activities.

3. Use a CRM.

Successful sales teams and strategies require the right tools. HubSpot all-in-one CRM eliminates manual work and streamlines your sales activity and data. It also keeps your sales team up-to-date about all relevant activity with your prospects — an important transparency factor that helps motivate and align your team.

4. Listen to your prospects.

Just because prospects aren't customers doesn't mean they can't give valuable feedback. As you move prospects through their sales funnel and (especially) when they drop off, ask for candid feedback about their experience with your team and products. You may learn something that can help convert them or your next prospect.

5. Invest in sales development and team-building.

The best sales teams not only align with customers but also with their coworkers. Sales is a difficult career and can lead to burnout without proper encouragement and camaraderie. Invest in sales development and team-building activities to keep your sales team feeling satisfied and supported.

Sales Strategy Examples from Successful Sales Teams

In this section, we’ve analyzed two incredibly high-performing sales teams and how they achieved success using their unique sales strategies.

Founded in 2006, HubSpot has since grown to over 184,000 customers in over 120 countries and over $1.7 billion in annual revenue. With an IPO in 2014, HubSpot is now valued at over $24.63 billion.

That said, we want to share a few pages from our own sales strategy playbook.

Hire the right people according to repeatable evaluation criteria.

We first started by determining a list of attributes that made a successful sales rep: Work ethic, coachability, intelligence, passion, preparation and knowledge of HubSpot, adaptability to change, prior success, organizational skills, competitiveness, and brevity.

From there, we established a repeatable process to evaluate candidates during interviews based on these weighted criteria.

Train the sales team by making them wear customers’ shoes.

Again, the first step we took was to define the sales process that we thought would be most successful. We outlined our unique value proposition, target customer, competition, most common objections, product features and benefits, and so forth.

Then we created a hands-on training program that would not only imitate the sales process for reps before they actually began selling but also allow them to experience our target customers’ pain points.

Today, a large part of our training program involves making reps create their own website and blog, and then drive traffic to it. This exercise allows reps to better consult potential customers in the future. We also use exams, certification programs, and presentations to measure each rep’s performance.

After employees are onboarded, we continue tracking their progress throughout the various stages of our sales process. The primary criteria we look at includes: leads created, leads worked, demos delivered, and leads won. Then we measure these criteria against each other to create ratios such as leads created to leads won.

We track each stage in the process so that if a rep is struggling with any particular metric, we can dig deeper to understand why that’s the case.

Align sales and marketing.

The sales and marketing teams work closely together in a process we call " Smarketing " to generate consistent leads each month.

In this process, marketing understands which qualities a sales lead needs to meet before it’s handed over to sales as well as how many of those qualified leads it must create each month to meet our sales projections.

Meanwhile, the sales team understands how long they should wait before contacting a lead and how many attempts they should make to contact that lead. All of these decisions are led by data and science, not by gut.

Shopify is known for consistent momentum and customer satisfaction.

Loren Padelford, VP at Shopify and General Manager of Shopify Plus, shared his secret sauce for increasing sales .

Hire great people, not necessarily great salespeople.

Hiring is arguably one of the most essential components of a great sales strategy. Many sales managers , though, are misled into believing that they must hire sales superstars. Padelford looks for six key personality traits when hiring salespeople: intelligence, work ethic, history of success, creativity, entrepreneurship, and competitiveness.

The truth of the matter is that sales teams first must look for great people and then train them so they become great salespeople.

Treat sales as a science, not an art.

According to Padelford, we can now measure sales down to the second. We can explain success according to cold, hard data points rather than mystical qualitative assessments. Every sales team should be tracking their average deal size, average sales cycle length, lead-to-deal conversion rate, calls per day per rep, and the number of deals in the pipeline.

Each of these metrics, tracked over longer periods of time, will inform companies about the health of their sales process and pinpoint areas they need to improve upon.

Build a smart, technological foundation.

Before Padelford took over the sales process at Shopify, sales reps would manually log phone calls and emails into the CRM, consuming five precious hours each week. With a sales force of 26, that added up to 130 wasted hours per week.

Realizing this misuse of time and capital, Padelford led Shopify to adopt the HubSpot CRM . With the CRM, sales reps were able to receive notifications when prospects opened their emails, clicked links, and viewed document attachments.

With the prospecting tool , they also have access to over 19 million prospects as well as detailed information about said prospects like estimated revenue, the number of employees, suggested email addresses, and so forth.

Maintain a high-quality pipeline by eliminating unqualified leads.

Shopify uses the 4/5 Threshold to filter out unqualified leads, thereby allowing its sales reps to focus on selling to leads who have a higher probability of becoming customers.

When evaluating whether a lead is qualified, a rep must have a concrete answer to four of the following five variables:

  • Pain : Is the prospective customer experiencing a prominent business issue or challenge that requires them to make a change?
  • Power : Is the prospective customer directly involved with the decision-making process? If not, who is?
  • Money : Does our offering fall within their budget constraints?
  • Process : What's their buying process?
  • Timeline : What stage are they in the buyer’s journey? Will they purchase within a reasonable time frame?

Grow Better with Sales Strategies, Initiatives, and Templates

Every company can benefit from crafting a sales strategy plan. The free template below includes everything you’ll need to customize your strategy for your business and sales team. Regardless of what strategy you choose, always implement a buyer-first approach. Learn from these winning sales team examples, too, to grow your sales team and performance.

Editor's note: This post was originally written in April 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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The sales and marketing section of your business plan is especially crucial because it determines how you’ll plan on generating profit and describes how you intend to create exposure to best sell your product. It’s in this area of your business plan that you’ll hone the key elements of your marketing strategy. The actual implementation of your sales and marketing initiatives actually occurs before you launch, when you’ve set your go-to-market date so strategize the components of your sales and marketing plan early on.

Here’s a quick guide on what your key sales and marketing considerations should be:

This section should contain the following elements and should be no more than four pages.

Unique Value Proposition

Pricing strategy.

  • Sales/Distribution Plan

Marketing Plan

Your unique value proposition is the market need you’re planning to solve. Think of it as your secret ingredient – your “special sauce.” This may be a combination of factors including customer service, technology, a twist on a product or service, etc. Create the case for why your product deserves to have a sustainable business built around it.

Determine your pricing scheme. First, check what your competition is charging. This should give you an indication of what customers are willing to spend. Then, determine how you can add value. Until you get your product out there, it’s hard to know for sure how much your added benefit is worth in the customer’s mind. The keyword here is “reasonable.” You can charge any price you want to, but for every product or service, there’s a limit to how much the consumer is willing to pay.

Remember, even if you’re trying to be the lowest-cost provider, give a higher perceived value to your ideal customer to stand apart from the competition. Competitors can slash their prices to meet or beat yours, so be very careful if you decide to compete on cost.

Sales & Distribution Plan

This section describes how you intend to get your product to customers and how you’ll measure the effectiveness of those methods. For example, once you figure out where you’ll be selling your product – online, at a retail outlet, door-to-door – determine the type of sales team you’ll need and how you’ll compensate them.

In terms of distribution, think about how you’ll actually get the product or service into the hands of the customer. Ultimately, you’ll want to sell your product or service in as many ways that make sense for your company: online, at a retail outlet, via house parties or mail order, or through other companies. Initially, however, focus on selling through just one of these channels so you can build your business before comfortably extending to others.

You’re going to need customers to buy your product. How do you plan to get them? There are many free or low-cost strategies such as referrals, word-of-mouth, public relations, and marketing partners to help cross-promote or sell your product, so I would avoid any expensive print, TV, or radio advertising campaigns at these early stages.

Create your strategy for attracting customers. Before you start actually executing your marketing strategy, however, think about “branding.” This is the look and feel of your business, what customers experience when interacting with it, from the fonts, colors, and text of the website and your business cards to the overall image you portray in the product itself. This branding will be reflected in the execution of your marketing strategy.

Describe how you want customers to experience your product or service. Take a look at products or companies that you really like, and think about why you like them. What makes you feel good about them? Do these characteristics permeate all aspects of the product, from website to packaging to letterhead?

After you document the marketing plan activities, calculate the costs that you expect to incur. For example, if referrals are part of the strategy, then calculate how much you’re willing to pay a referral partner for each new customer they bring your way. Will it be $1, $20, $50, or more? Let’s say, for example, you expect a referral partner to refer 100 clients to you, and each of those referred clients spends $10, giving you a total of $1,000. You’ve agreed to pay this partner $1 for each referral, so you’ll spend $100 on referrals for your marketing strategy. In this example, your cost of acquisition – the cost you pay for each new customer – is $1. You’ll need to know this number, especially when you draft your financial plan.

Business Plan Template for a Startup Business To increase your odds of a successful business startup, download this step-by-step business plan template you can use to plan for your new business.

Every Business Deserves Planning Don’t make the common mistake of dismissing the value of planning. Every well-run business needs to manage strategy, metrics and essential business numbers.

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Funded, in part, through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.

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How to Write a Sales and Marketing Plan

Bag of money and a megaphone. Represents creating a sales and marketing plan.

2 min. read

Updated January 3, 2024

You’ve addressed what you’re selling and why in the products and services section. You now have an understanding of the market and an ideal customer in mind thanks to your market analysis. Now, you need to explain how you will actually reach and sell to them.

The marketing and sales section of your business plan dives into how you’re going to accomplish your goals. You’ll be answering questions like:

  • Based on your audience, how will you position your product or service in the current market?
  • What marketing channels, messaging, and sales tactics will you implement?
  • What’s your business model and how will your business operate day-to-day?

By the end of this section, you should have an outline of what growth looks like, what milestones you intend to hit, and how you’ll measure success. Basically, you’re backing up the opportunity you’ve identified with a solid go-to-market plan.

What to include in the sales and marketing section

The sections you should include act as a useful framework for exploring and defining your marketing and sales tactics.

Create a positioning statement

How does your business differ? What do you do that others don’t? If you’re unsure, work through a handful of strategic exercises to create a simple but convincing positioning statement.

Outline your marketing strategy

A marketing plan brings together strategic goals with tangible marketing activities designed to reach and engage your target market—ultimately convincing them to purchase your product.

Craft your sales plan

A good sales strategy provides actionable steps to reach your goals. Estimate how much you intend to sell and outline a process that anyone else in your business can execute.

Optional sales and marketing information to include

The basics of a marketing and sales plan are fairly straightforward. However, it’s also the perfect place to flesh out any details that you think will make your outreach efforts successful.

Create a unique value proposition

What makes your business unique? How does the solution you provide stand out? This is your chance to point to what you believe potential customers will find more valuable about your business over the competition.

Don't forget digital marketing

While we don’t recommend creating separate traditional and digital marketing plans, it may be wise to explore and address them separately within your plan.

Build your promotional plan

How will you convince your customers to buy your products or services? While actual ads and promotions may be months away, it’s best to think through and even mock up designs now.

Conduct a SWOT analysis

With this simple analysis, you’ll better understand your strengths and weaknesses, along with the opportunities and threats you should account for.

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Content Author: Kody Wirth

Kody Wirth is a content writer and SEO specialist for Palo Alto Software—the creator's of Bplans and LivePlan. He has 3+ years experience covering small business topics and runs a part-time content writing service in his spare time.

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Table of Contents

  • What to include
  • Optional information

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How to Build a Sales Strategy Plan for Your Business

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Building and developing a sales strategy plan is arguably the most crucial activity your business will engage in. Whether focused on B2B sales strategy, inbound, outbound, small-to-medium business (SMB) or enterprise, the company needs a dependable source of income to survive.

The key to achieving dependable revenue is in tying specific sales activity to solid, thoughtful, and data-backed objectives formed with the company’s long-term goals in mind.  

While proponents of the adage  stop planning, start doing  have a point in case (no sales strategy plan succeeds without execution) I would argue it’s akin to the famous idiom  shoot first, ask questions later.   

Without a sales strategy plan in place, sales reps and directors make decisions based on what is in front of them at that given time. Not because they’re careless or foolish, but rather unaware of the company’s long-term goals. As a result, it becomes challenging to tie sales activity to specific data-backed objectives.     

So, to create dependable, long-lasting growth throughout the business, sales directors need a strategy. And that, ladies and gents, starts with a solid sales strategy plan.

What is a sales strategy plan?

A sales strategy plan is a company’s roadmap for securing dependable, long-term revenue through the retention and acquisition of new and existing customers. 

They typically encompass everything from specific tactics, market strategy, processes, objectives, forecasting, budgeting, and timeline. Also, plans vary in length, often spanning over a year, maybe two, with an added focus to each fiscal quarter.       

Most businesses’ sales strategy plans are top-down, with revenue targets commonly stipulated by investors, shareholders, and other C-Level executives with a vested financial interest in the company. These are either achieved through the increase of revenue, reduction in expenses, or a combination of both.     

How to develop a sales strategy plan

As I just mentioned, its those at the top that generally implement sales strategy plans. Someone decides on an arbitrary revenue or growth figure based on external factors, divides the number evenly amongst sales territories, and hits the trigger button. 

The problem with this approach is that it’s far too simplistic . It fails to take into account which markets and territories could support the most growth, the continually evolving customer journey, competitors, market maturity, etc.

Consequently, these poorly-planned strategies lose traction over time, create confusion amongst the sales team, and fail to achieve their overall objectives.

So, to build a successful sales strategy plan directors should follow this five-stage sales strategy plan template:  

  • Put the customer at the center of your business
  • Align with overall business goals

SWOT Analysis

  • Go-to-customer strategy

Setting goals

Customer centricity.

Every company starts and ends with its customers. Period. This is why how you hold your customers, or the customer experience you want to create, is the driving force behind all sales strategy plans. 

While customer experience isn’t exclusively a sales issue, we inevitably find ourselves communicating with them daily as they build their primary relationships with our brand. 

Therefore, the experience they have with the sales team shapes their opinion of the company, and in extension, how they share that experience with their peers or through social networks, either good or bad.

As a result, customer experience is critical to the success of the sales strategy plan, forcing sales teams to think about:

  • How they want their customers to view the brand?
  • Around which fundamental values do they want to build their customer experience?
  • Are the field reps aware and communicating appropriately during their face-to-face visits?

What I’m trying to say is, before engaging in budget talks, sales forecasting , and annual sales objectives, the entire organization and sales team need to put the customer at the heart of everything. They need to take an outside-in approach to the sales plan and consider what kind of experience they’d like to create. 

Corporate alignment

The sales team is responsible for executing the corporate strategy. Sure, marketing, customer success, and other internal and external communication programs play a part in creating awareness around the brand, but it’s sales that get the job done.

It’s important to note that this means more than just hitting target revenue. Senior executives are concerned about market positioning, maturity, customer perception, and what they stand for as a brand. As a result, they will have various goals other than pure revenue, such as:

  • Increase market share
  • New product line revenue
  • Increase share of wallet
  • Territorial expansion

The “big picture” enterprise goals must be taken into consideration when building a sales strategy plan. If not, the entire future of the organization is put in jeopardy.

Let me give you an example.

Imagine you are given an annual target revenue of $99m at a company with three primary service plans. 

The first represents your traditional business model, the one your sales team has sold for years. It’s a maturing market, and your company has a solid reputation and an established client base.

The second service plan is an ambitious entry into a new vertical and market segment. It’s a potentially lucrative gamble being a relatively unexplored segment, but the sales team lacks experience and reputation. 

The third and final service plan requires expansion into a new sales territory . Again, this is an unexplored ground that senior executives have earmarked for potential in the future.

As the sales director, you have two options to hit your target revenue of $99m. You could:

  • Focus on your traditional service plan . Your sales team knows the market well, has an established reputation amongst industry leaders, and with a bit of luck, could reach target revenue without worrying too much about the success of the new service plans.
  • Develop a sales strategy plan balanced across all three . You might decide to split your annual revenue target into three, smaller $33m pieces – one for each service plan. You choose to reallocate resources and training budget to help with the two untested plans.

If it were you, what option would you choose? Option 1 or Option 2?

Hopefully, you avoided the potential trap of Option 1. 

While it may bring you short-term success (your target is to hit $99m after all), the long-term future of the company is at risk. Investments made within these new divisions that widen the organization’s revenue plan may be forced to scale back or shut down completely, severely impacting the company’s long-term growth strategy. 

Another critical step in building a sales strategy plan is SWOT analysis . This tactic is handy when assessing the challenges your organization faces when venturing into a new market or under pressure from increasing competition, by looking at a company’s:

Opportunities

By analyzing each of these areas, businesses can build on their strengths, mitigate their weaknesses, uncover new opportunities while blunting the various threats that may crop up down the line.

So how do you undertake a SWOT analysis?

First of all, you will need to allocate an hour, maybe two, to gather a diverse group of colleagues (both internal and external if possible) as well as company leadership. This diversity is critical in providing differing perspectives on each of the four points of your SWOT analysis.

Once you’ve gathered everybody, I recommend handing out a pad of sticky notes and asking each person to come up with five separate points for each quadrant. Doing this exercise first gives every member of the team a voice while reducing the pressure of “group think.”

To help in your analysis mull over some of the following questions: 

  • What are your most substantial assets?
  • Which of those assets would you consider the strongest and why?
  • What is unique about your company?
  • What advantages do you hold over your competitors?
  • How skilled are your sales team?
  • Which of the business processes are most successful?
  • What are the potential areas for improvement?
  • What is it customers are saying they would like to see more of?
  • Are there any physical or tangible assets the company lacks?
  • Are there skill gaps within the sales team?
  • Where do your competitors have an edge?
  • What are some of the current market trends?
  • Is the market expanding or constricting?
  • Are there any upcoming industry events?
  • Do you need to consider any upcoming regulatory changes?
  • Is your chief competitor losing traction with their customer base?
  • Is there something clear and obvious missing from your market?
  • Are there any competitors that could be a potential threat in the future?
  • Is the current customer base satisfied with your services?
  • Is the sales team happy?
  • Is customer behavior changing?
  • Are there any legal threats facing the company in the near future?

Once you’ve completed this exercise, you should end up with a prioritized list of points up for debate amongst the leadership group. You can then convert these points to real-time strategy and add actionable objectives to the sales strategy plan.

Go-to-Customer Strategy

This section of the sales strategy plans focuses on how, as an organization, you can most effectively reach your target customer base.

Figuring out the pros and cons, risks, and costs to all the possible routes to your customers is an extremely time-consuming, complex task. Sales directors must look at:

  • Field sales
  • Inside sales
  • Channel partners

Each route also has its subset of implementations, such as SDRs, territory account management, product specialists, outsourced lead scoring, the primary account managers…the list is truly endless!

What’s more, the go-to-customer strategy is a continually evolving process that needs constant revision to match real-time market changes.

Fortunately for us, sales author David Brock came up with three questions to help analyze core issues within the customer-go-to strategy:

  • How do we find and engage all our target customers?
  • What’s the most effective method in engaging them?
  • How can we achieve this at the lowest possible cost/risk?  

So let’s start by answering our first question. 

To do that, we need to know who our customers are. Now, this doesn’t include everyone; you need to identify your company’s “ sweet spot .” What is your company the absolute best at doing in the world, and who benefits from it?

As soon as we begin to move away from that sweet spot, the quicker the win rate plummets and the costlier the sales cycle becomes.

To answer the second question, we need to look at our customer’s buying process. How do they initiate contact with the business? Is the first touch online, or through outreach via the outside sales team? How do they want to buy from us? 

The simplest and easiest way to find out is by asking your customers. 

Finally, after settling on the customer’s preferred method or process of engagement, how can we achieve this with the lowest cost/risk? The most economic risk deployment model is rarely the cheapest, so strike a balance between both customer and budget allowance.

Now that we’ve taken an in-depth look at our organizational objectives, market positioning, customers, and devised a go-to strategy, it’s time to put this all together with some actionable goals.

Setting  goals for sales reps  is mandatory. Not only as necessary incentives that push them to the limit, but also for keeping their activity aligned to overall business objectives.

This is why all sales goals should follow the SMART principle:

TIME-SENSITIVE 

The more specific you can be when setting sales goals, the more likely your team is to hit them. 

Their primary goal is probably to increase revenue. So instead of giving them an arbitrary figure, ask yourself how much would you like to increase revenue? By when? Why? And How? The more specific you can be, the better.

To evaluate your field sales team’s progress, asses them against some form of quantitative yardstick. If not, how can we know they’re on track or, more importantly, if they are falling short, how we can interject and provide the necessary support?

When setting goals, directors need to toe a fine line between ambition and reality. Yes, we want ambitious objectives that force our reps to go above and beyond what’s expected, but on the flip side, set them too high, and it has the opposite effect – demoralizing and alienating the team from management.

Find that sweet spot somewhere in the middle, and you’ll find your reps much more driven to carry out your sales strategy plan.

The sales goals directors and managers set have to be tied to a relevant, quantitative objective. It goes back to the point I made earlier regarding corporate alignment. If the sales strategy plan fails to execute the bigger picture set out by the company executives, then its future success and longevity are put in jeopardy.

Let’s take a look at a quick example.

Imagine our corporate team tasks us with increasing market share by 20% over the next financial year. 

As sales directors, we must decide on the most cost-effective yet risk-averse strategy to achieve that goal. One option would be to increase our Share of Wallet by  boosting customer retention  figures or reducing churn. 

Now, an actionable sales objective for our reps would be to improve our customer satisfaction ranking, or in other words, where a customer places us against our competitors in loyalty and satisfaction.

Setting relevant sales goals

Time-Sensitive

Finally, our sales goals need an expiry date. If sales reps believe they have all year to hit their objectives, then where’s the incentive? Again, it will need to be achievable as I alluded to earlier, but with just enough stick to get things moving at the business end of the quarter.

Well, I hope that’s given you a head start when developing your next sales strategy plan! Just remember, there is no one-size-fits-all sales plan. Customize the sales strategy plan template provided to fit your needs, those of the organization, and their goals. 

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Marketing & Sales Section in Your Home Business Plan

How To Write the Marketing Section of Your Business Plan

  • Why You Need a Business Plan
  • What To Include in the Marketing & Sales Section
  • The 5 P's of Marketing

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

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Before starting your home business, it's important to outline all the details in a business plan. Creating the plan not only forces you take a good look at all aspects of your business, but it also becomes the roadmap for your success. 

One of the most important sections of a business plan is the Marketing and Sales Strategies section, which outlines your plan for reaching and selling to your target market . While you want to have a wonderful product or provide stellar service, it's all for nothing if you don't have customers or clients.

Your marketing plan is the key to effectively and affordably finding your buyers, and is crucial for potential investors and lenders.

Key Takeaways

  • A marketing plan is an essential part of a business plan.
  • Business plans and marketing plans are important even if you're not seeking funding.
  • A marketing plan can be built around the 5 P's: product, price, place, promotion, and people.
  • You should set up metrics to measure how your marketing plan is working.

Why You Need a Business Plan for a Home Business

There is some debate regarding the need for home business owners to have a formal business plan, especially if you're not asking for startup funding. However, a business plan isn't only about appealing to banks and investors. The truth is, every business, regardless of size, needs a business plan . A business plan helps you:

Make smart decisions : A business plan helps you focus your ideas and forces you to spell out strategies for everything from human resources, to technology, to marketing.

Identify potential weaknesses : As you go through the work of creating a business plan, you may spot pitfalls in your ideas. It's also a good idea to share the plan with experts who can give you advice and tell you what they think won't work.

Convince people to give you money : If you do need startup funding, investors and lenders will definitely want to see a detailed business plan so that they can assess how likely you are to be successful with your business.

Communicate your ideas with other stakeholders : You can share your plan with people you want to recruit to work with you, suppliers you need to ask for credit, and potential clients.

What To Include in the Marketing & Sales Section

The basics of the marketing and sales section have to do with knowing your market and competition, and designing your product messaging, pricing, and other marketing strategies to maximize sales. It involves the 5 P's of marketing , as well as figuring out how you'll measure your marketing mix 's success. 

The 5 P's of Marketing

The 5 P's started out as 4 P's, a construct developed by E. Jerome McCarthy more than 50 years ago. The 4 P's include basic elements of marketing, which are product, price, place, and promotion. In later years, people or personnel was added by some marketers to become the fifth P.

Describe the product or service offered to the customer by your home business, including the physical attributes of your products or services, what they do, how they differ from your competitors', and what benefits they provide to your potential customers.

Outline pricing strategies that will help you reach your target profit margin . How you will price your product or service so that the price remains competitive while still allowing you to make a good profit ?

When calculating price, make sure you take into consideration both fixed expenses (those that don't change) and variable expenses  (costs that aren't set), as well as your time and expertise, to insure you're charging enough to make a profit. Also discuss if your price will be lower or higher than your competition, and how you can justify the difference (i.e. what do buyers get by paying more for your product?).

Place (Distribution)

Indicate where your business will sell its products or services, and how it will get those products or services to consumers. For example, will you sell online ? Will you consign your products into local stores?

When you know what outlets your product and services will be available in, indicate how much you expect to sell in each location. For example, will 65% of your sales be done online and 35% through face-to-face appointments?

Also include any delivery terms and costs, and how those expenses will be covered (e.g., added to the sale of the item). Indicate if there are any shipping or labeling requirements that need to be considered and how you will meet those requirements. Finally, outline the transaction process and your return policies.

What methods of promotion will you use to communicate the features and benefits of your products or services to your target customers? Will you advertise? If so, where? What percentage of advertising will be handled by each advertising option? How much business do you anticipate each form of advertising will result in? How much is this all going to cost?

Also indicate if you plan to offer coupons or other incentives to get customers in the door.

Decide on the people who will the provide sales and service that will be used in marketing your products or services to the customer. Who are the people or sales team that will be selling or providing customer service, and what kind of training will they receive? Do you plan to offer any incentives to your customer service representatives and how do you plan to measure customer satisfaction?

Essentially, the 5 P's of marketing forms the basis of your marketing plan. If you want to make your marketing plan a standalone document, you'll also want to include the information you prepared in the Market Analysis section for your business plan.

Some marketers consider the 4 P's or 5 P's to be too focused on the producer and have instead adopted the 4 C's, which look at marketing from the customer's point of view. So, "place" becomes "convenience," "price" becomes "cost to the user," "promotion" becomes "communication," and "product" becomes "customer needs and wants."

Evaluating Marketing Effectiveness

As you make your marketing decisions, consider how you'll know what strategies are working and those that aren't. There's no sense in wasting time or money on promotional tactics that don't work.

If you use social media to promote your business, you'll want to measure changes in your social media analytics. Consider using A/B testing techniques to make sure you're using marketing messages or materials that customers respond to best.

Whatever form of marketing you use, find a way to quantify results so you can know whether it's worth your time and money to continue to use it.

What is a marketing plan in a business plan?

A marketing plan is a strategic document outlining the steps you intend to take to achieve your marketing objectives. It helps you define your product or service, identify customers and competitors, think about how you'll attract customers, and how you'll react to marketplace changes. It's an important component of a business plan, which also includes strategies for other parts of the business.

How can I promote my home-based business?

You'll want to start with some free or low-cost ways to get the word out about your business. Some to consider: setting up a blog, using social media (either to post information on your personal or business page, or to buy ads), pitching media outlets that are a good fit for your business, and offering deals through sites like Goupon that can help you attract new customers fast.

Small Business Development Center, Duquesne University. " Do You Really Need a Business Plan? "

University of Maryland Extension. " Marketing Mix ."

University of Florida, IFAS Extension. " Eight Steps To Developing a Simple Marketing Plan ."

Business Plan Section 6: Sales and Marketing

Learn about the points to address in the sales and marketing section of your business plan, plus key aspects for a successful sales strategy.

market and sales strategy in a business plan

Remember all that research and hard work you put into the Market Analysis section of your business plan? You learned all about your company, your customers, and your competition. This is where it will all pay off: sales and marketing!

In this section of the plan, you’re actually going to spell out how you’ll market your idea, along with the specifics of how you’ll get business. Sales and marketing are what will grow your business and help you achieve success.

As always, keep your audience in mind. If your business plan is meant for your eyes only, or as an internal document for your staff, you won’t have to be as detailed or specific as you should if it’s intended for a lender or potential investors. In the latter case, you’ll want to demonstrate a very well-planned strategy that will give them confidence in your proposal and make them more likely to want to fund your business.

Sales and marketing strategies will vary by industry, and your strategy will be individually tailored to your company, but there are general guidelines that cover most businesses. Because your marketing plan will lead to sales, let’s start there.

4 Things Your Marketing Plan Must Cover

Many marketing textbooks refer to the “four Ps” of marketing, which is an easy way to remember what’s involved in a solid plan.

Explain in detail the product(s) or service(s) you’re offering, particularly how they are different from or better than what’s already available. What benefits do they provide to your potential customers? What ways is your product or service unique? What makes doing business with you preferable to dealing with someone else? All of these things will help make up your marketing message.

Talk about how you’ll portray the company and what kind of image you’ll present, especially how it will help connect you to your potential customers. Include a picture of your logo and anything that might carry your image, such as vans, trucks, or uniforms. Show screenshots of your website, photos of your store, pictures of your packaging, and anything else that conveys your company’s brand.

Once you’ve gotten the customers in the door (or online), you have to deliver on what you’ve sold them. Marketing isn’t just about promising, it’s also following through and delivering what you said you would.

You may find it helpful to outline exactly how a transaction with your business would take place. Also touch on return policies and customer service. You may not immediately think of these as “marketing” issues, but think back to the last time you had difficulty with a company and told five friends you’d never do business with them again, or you saw someone complain about a company on Facebook or Twitter. Cover your bases before you get caught short in a situation you hadn’t planned for.

It’s important to talk about where you’ll be located and how you’ll get your products and services to your customers. If you’re planning an online business, will you also have a brick and mortar store? What percentage of sales do you project will come from each?

If your business involves manufacturing or distribution of a product, discuss shipping and labeling requirements, and how you’ll meet them. What are your delivery terms and costs? Are you using distributors, and will you charge separately for shipping or build that into the product price?

How you decide to price your product or service is key to how much you’ll sell and how much profit you can make. Again, the Market Analysis work you did will come in very handy in helping you to price your product competitively while still turning a worthwhile profit.

By now, you should have a solid understanding of what your expenses will be, so you know how much you need to make to break even. Of course, if you have startup expenses (and who doesn’t?), you will need to factor those in, as well, understanding that your profit margin will grow when they’re paid off.

Discuss how you’ve arrived at the prices you have, where they fit in with what the competition is doing, and what kind of volume you’ll need to do to be profitable.

You can have the best idea in the world, but if no one knows about it, it won’t sell. So, how are you going to reach your target audience and turn them into customers? Will you advertise? Which media? How often? And how will you split up the budget?

Keep in mind that some forms of traditional and digital advertising cost money, such as buying radio or print ads, or advertising through Google. Some, such as social media or public relations can be handled in-house by a staff member (or outsourced for a fee). And others can be quite variable in cost, such as printing brochures, flyers, catalogs, etc.

How much business do you think you’ll get from each campaign? Will you give coupons, discounts, or offer other incentives to get people to try you out?

Describe how you’ll know whether or not your marketing strategy is effective, such as how many coupons are redeemed or how much of an increase in web or store traffic you expect. You’ll need to project what kind of a return on your advertising investment you anticipate to figure out how much you should be spending.

The Fifth P: People

Some marketing experts think a fifth “P” should be added to the four we’ve already discussed: people. We touched on it under customer service, but a big part of marketing is the level of service you’re able to offer to your customers, and your people are the ones responsible for that.

Your restaurant might serve the best food in town, but your servers can have an even greater impact on the dining experience. You can discuss it here or in the next section, sales, but do make sure to talk about the people who will deal with your customers and handle your customer service, what kind of training they’ll get, and how you’ll measure their effectiveness.

Now that you have your marketing plan together, you need to close the sale and make it pay off. Marketing will help you get customers in the door, to your website, or on the phone, but the best marketing in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t make the sale. That brings us to the next step of the plan, your sales strategy.

What to include in your sales plan:

How much product will you sell or how many contracts will you close over the first month, six months, and year? Be specific, understanding what your cash flow needs to be to keep the lights on and your employees paid. Keep the numbers realistic, however, even though you may want to impress potential funders.

How will you make the sale, and who will do it? Are you selling a product directly to users through a website? Will you bring your merchandise to retailers for them to sell? Are you doing the selling yourself or will you have a sales force? If you have salespeople, will they be paid a straight salary or commission? If you have a service business, where will you get your leads, and how will you follow up? Perhaps you’ll offer an incentive program to current customers for referrals. Describe the sales effort in your plan.

If you offer different product lines or services, you may need a separate strategy for each. Similarly, if you’re selling to different segments of the market, you shouldn’t rely on the same approach to sell everyone. Selling at a craft fair is quite different than setting up a website or offering your product through ebay.com or etsy.com.

Detail whichever approaches you’ve decided on and spell out how you’ll proceed, including any sales quotas you may have established.

Get specific about the numbers you’re looking to achieve over a specific time period. Not only will investors want to see that, it’s an important way for you to know if you’re meeting your targets so you can make any necessary adjustments along the way.

Once you’ve established yourself, how will you continue to expand? This covers both your internal growth as a company, such as how you’ll increase your staff, and how you’ll grow beyond your current boundaries, such as buying another business or setting up franchises, if that’s applicable. Will you grow by offering a wider range of products and services? Perhaps you’ll expand by offering your current goods to a wider audience.

Perhaps more than any other section of your business plan, the Sales and Marketing section will act as your playbook for the actual running of your company , so think it through very carefully and use it!

Next Article: Business Plan Section 7 – Financial Information

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market and sales strategy in a business plan

  • Marketing and Sales Strategy
  • 4 April, 2022

How to Develop a Complete Sales and Marketing Strategy

Peanut butter and jelly. Salt and pepper. Puppies and treats. Beach days and ice cream. 

Some things are inseparable and are bound to go together. 

Sales and marketing cannot be done well without the other. 

Creating a synergy between sales and marketing lets you build a connected business that attracts more leads and converts higher-quality customers. 

In this article, we’ll share everything you need to know to create a cohesive sales and marketing strategy. You’ll learn: 

  • What sales and marketing are.
  • How to develop a sales and marketing strategy.
  • How to align them to maximize growth and productivity.

Let’s begin! 

Building a sales and marketing strategy to create alignment and increase revenue

The first step is to distinguish the differences between the two and learn how to integrate them , so they work in tandem. 

Traditionally, sales and marketing teams have worked on polar opposites of the spectrum. In reality, they are two alliances working together to accomplish the same mission — grow your business. 

A marketing strategy is how you reach your target audience, while a sales strategy is how you convert those leads into customers. 

Your marketing efforts should deliver your core message and build interest in your brand.

Conversely, a sales strategy maps the process of turning leads and prospects into paying customers.

Both endeavors are crucial to the success of a business. Each side plays a vital role in the customer journey from awareness to end purchase.

Why is it important to have a sales AND marketing strategy? 

Every aspect of your business needs a plan. Without a plan, your business is bound to wander aimlessly. 

Your marketing strategy should clearly define the activities and processes needed to attract the right audience to your business.

Additionally, the marketing needs to nurture prospects so they are more likely to buy. 

The sales strategy focuses on tactics and processes to forge a relationship with prospective clients to convert them faster.

A sales and marketing strategy is the cornerstone of alignment. If the two teams aren’t fully in-sync about their responsibilities and what is going on on both sides of the fence, you will end up with a lot of miscommunication, missed opportunities, and stagnant growth. 

58% of marketing and sales professionals reported that collaboration provides increased customer retention. Furthermore, highly-aligned sales and marketing strategies experience 32% year-over-year growth, while less aligned businesses see a 7% decline in revenue. 

Understanding the competitive landscape 

Before developing your sales and marketing strategy, a business owner should clearly understand the market landscape. 

A competitive landscape analysis lets you analyze your competitor’s strategies, so you can define your value proposition and develop strategies that can outperform the competition. 

Here are two competitive landscape frameworks you can implement to collect insights for your marketing and sales processes. 

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning method that puts your organization in perspective using a visual quadrant with strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 

Using a SWOT analysis helps identify areas where your business can improve and maximize opportunities while simultaneously determining negative aspects that could reduce your chances of success. 

Use the SWOT analysis to identify: 

  • What do you do better than others (strengths)?
  • What are weak areas in your business (weaknesses)?
  • Opportunities to stand out above the competition.
  • Things that could be a roadblock, such as competitors, market conditions, lack of automation, etc. 

How does this tie into sales and marketing strategy? 

Using SWOT analysis lets you identify your value proposition so that you can identify the right audience for your product or service. 

You’ll also know opportunities you can leverage to help build your brand and help your brand “stick” in the minds of other companies. 

For example, Peloton offers convenience to customers by providing customers the ability to create a fitness regime around their own timetable instead of a gym’s schedule. It’s highly customizable since they allow users to attend live-streaming studio cycling classes based on their fitness level. 

In fact, it was the ultimate “covid proof” business model. While many gyms were forced to implement restrictions and shut down, Peloton was growing.

Peloton sees the lack of convenience in most fitness models. Gyms can be inconvenient because consumers have to go to the location physically. Online personal classes or trainers were great, but it’s difficult to customize to your personal needs and interests. Peloton has developed equipment and an array of classes that suit the end-user.

BCG Matrix 

The BCG Matrix is a framework that helps businesses decide how to strategically prioritize products, services, or particular areas of the business. This matrix categorizes products into four categories: 

  • Pets: Products with low market growth and low market share.
  • Question marks: Products with high market growth but low market share.
  • Stars: Products with high market growth and high market share.
  • Cash Cow: Products with low market growth and high market share.

To place your products into one of these four categories, you’ll need to gather data on your sales growth year over year and compare that to the market share within the industry. 

Here’s an example of what Apple’s BCG Matrix would look like: 

Apple BCG Matrix

Why are these products categorized this way? 

Question mark: Apple TV has seen tremendous growth, but it still is a question mark as to how it’ll perform long term. It may become more popular when people begin to appreciate the importance of the Apple ecosystem. 

Star: The iPhone is the clear star product of Apple. With every new update, they are adding an innovative feature that is breaking record sales and cementing themselves further as the leader in market share for mobile devices. 

Pet: iPods are probably one of their least purchased items compared to the iPhone and iPads. Although they one sold many of them, the longevity of the music player isn’t viable. 

Cash cow: Macbooks and iPad still hold a lot of popularity and dominance in their respective markets. These products may not grow exponentially in revenue but offer a steady repeatable source of sales for Apple. 

How it applies to your sales and marketing strategy: 

Getting clear on how your product fits can help your sales and marketing teams determine which products to push. 

When there is a disconnect between what your audience wants and what you’re trying to sell, there’s a lack of product-market fit. 

Your sales team should have a strong pulse on what the product does and its benefits. Ideally, the sales and marketing personnel should actively use the product themselves so that they can put themselves in the customer’s shoes. 

Developing a Marketing Strategy 

When developing a marketing strategy, it’s crucial to understand the sales funnel stages and define the leads based on their demographics, firmographics, and readiness to buy.  

These are the 7 most commonly used leads that you’ll run across in your business: 

Cold leads are generally unresponsive to interactions. Perhaps, they recently signed up to your email list but haven’t yet opened any of the emails. Fortunately, with a good lead nurturing email sequence , you can turn a cold lead into a warm lead. 

Information qualified leads

Informational leads have performed an action where they request more information from you. This could be submitting their contact information to receive a free webinar or report about a form on your website. 

Warm leads have demonstrated interest in your product or service. Maybe they’ve gone through your webinar or viewed your sales page but haven’t taken action yet. 

Hot leads have shown significant interest in your product. They may have booked a call with your sales rep to learn more about your product. 

Sales-ready leads

sales-ready leads have contacted your businesses inquiring about your help. These prospects may have reached your live chat or customer service to learn more about your product. 

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) 

Marketing qualified leads have been qualified by your marketing team. The process entails leading scoring your leads by assigning numerical values to them based on their behaviors, demographics, and psychographics. Once they pass a given threshold, they’ll be considered as MQLs and sent to your sales team for contact. 

Sales qualified leads (MQLs)

Sales-qualified leads have been qualified by your sales team. You have many appointment setters to hop on brief calls to qualify your prospects. They typically ask qualifying questions to ensure the person is a good fit for your product. 

Demand generation 

Demand generation is the process of generating awareness and interest for your products and services. It means growing your audience and attracting new visitors to your website and introducing them to your offerings. Generally, it’s when the prospect first becomes aware of your brand. 

Demand generation entails: 

  • Increasing brand awareness to attract the target audience 
  • Educate your audience 
  • Build trust 
  • Spark interest 

Lead generation 

Lead generation is the process of converting your audience into leads by capturing their information. Note that most people aren’t ready to opt-in immediately; therefore, demand generation is essential to generate interest in your brand and product. 

Marketing channel strategy 

With new platforms arising every year, many marketers are getting “shiny-object syndrome” trying to hop from one platform to the next. Learning where your audience hangs out, and each platform’s value is critical to determining your marketing channel strategy. Without knowing where to distribute your content, you won’t be able to build demand or lead generation. 

According to HubSpot, the top marketing channels are social media, SEO, email, and content marketing. 

We’ll cover the best channels you can use for your business. 

Search engine optimization (SEO)

62% of customers turn to the search engine when they want to learn more about a new product, service, or business, while 41% use the search engine when they’re ready to make a purchase. Not to mention trillions of searches on Google are made annually, making them the go-to place for finding information online. 

Search engine optimization is the process of getting your website to rank high on the search engine results pages for a specific keyword or term. This ensures your content is easily accessible and visible to people searching for the term. 

Some of the common ranking factors include 

  • Keywords: What’s your website’s content about? 
  • Site structure: How can the search engine organize and prioritize your content? 
  • Crawlability: Can your content be easily found by the search engines? 
  • Backlinks: Does your content provide credible information on the topics you’re writing about 

Most users never scroll past the first page on the search engine result pages. That’s why it’s critical to rank high on Google. Here are some ways to improve your SEO. 

  • Learn keyword optimization: Find relevant keywords that your ideal audience is searching for online. Make sure it has a large volume yet is still realistic enough to rank for. 
  • Optimize your website for mobile search: 48% of buyers use their mobile phones to begin their search, and they account for 53% of paid-search clicks. Mobile optimization means adjusting your site’s structure, design, and speed so that it is more conducive for mobile browsing. Google has a mobile-first indexing policy, meaning they predominantly use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking. 
  • Produce high-quality content: Visitors won’t stay on your site very long if you’re not providing them with valuable content. Over-deliver on content by providing better, easy-to-read, or more in-depth content than other sites. 

Content marketing 

Bombarding prospective customers with “buy now” messages simply doesn’t work anymore. They’ll likely run to hills and avoid you like the plague. Not to mention, that’ll earn you a negative word of mouth and a bad reputation for being overly salesy. 

Content marketing is a consumer-centric approach centered on consistently producing and distributing valuable content such as blog posts, infographics , case studies , videos, white papers, interviews, and others to attract a targeted audience. The goal is to attract the right audience, drive leads and nurture them into customers. 

Most organizations use content marketing for the following reasons: 

  • Build and position a brand 
  • Generate leads 
  • Improve brand awareness 
  • Increase sales 
  • Provide pre-and post-sale information that their prospects are looking for 
  • Established credibility and authority in their market 
  • Support social media marketing and SEO initiatives
  • Retain customers 

Here are ways you can get content marketing to work in your favor: 

Content marketing is meant to help you in the long run: Rome wasn’t built overnight, and neither are digital companies. It takes time to build trust and authority. However, consistently delivering highly shareable and valuable content helps to become the go-to expert in your industry. Content lets you reach out to prospects and customers, address their pain points, and allow them to get to know, like, and trust you. 

It shouldn’t be used as a standalone marketing distribution strategy: Content marketing helps drive other forms of marketing. Therefore it’s best used in combination with other digital marketing channels. For instance, social media marketing can amplify the reach of your high-quality content, while gated content like email can bridge the gap between a traffic visitor to a buyer. 

Email marketing 

By the end of 2023, there will be over 4.3 billion email users worldwide. The widespread use of emails is why they are a powerful way to engage your audience, especially if they have demonstrated interest in your brand, product, or service. 

Email marketing is the process of using emails to forge relationships with prospective and current customers. It’s a channel typically used to nurture leads based on where they are in the buying journey, as well as onboard trial users and customers . 

Here are tips to help you succeed with email marketing: 

Personalize your campaigns and messages with segmentation:

 Don’t send out random emails to random people on your list. Instead, you should find ways to segment your audience . Create multiple lead magnets to better segment your list and categorize them by groups. Then create unique email sequences based on their segmentation. 

Improve your subject lines and email copy skills:

  64% of people will determine whether or not to open the email based on the subject line. You can follow these guidelines to improve your email copy instantly: 

  • Personalize emails by referring to their name 
  • Take commonly asked questions about your product or service, and answer that in your email. For example, let’s say prospects are concerned that marketing automation is expensive. Your email subject line could be “Es marketing automation expensive?” Then we’ll explain how Encharge can save you money based on not hiring X employees and saving you time from doing unnecessary tasks. 
  • Use specific numbers in your subject line. Numbers add specificity and prevent your message from sounding vague. For example, if I was writing an email for Encharge, our subject line could be, “how this one mistake cost me $109,894” Then I’d write about how marketing automation cost me a lot of money and a big mistake. Tie the message back to the product, which is Encharge. 

Need some subject line inspiration? Try out our Free AI-powered Email Subject Line Generator .

Social media marketing 

3.6 billion people use social media, and the average person spends 144 minutes per day on it. 

Social media marketing leverages social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, YouTube, Pinterest to build their brand, establish relationships, grow their audience, and generate sales. Follow these tips to boost your social media marketing strategy: 

  • Create a social media calendar. Just like content marketing, you’ll need to post high-quality and relevant content on a regular basis to build a strong social media presence. A social media calendar helps you to build brand voice consistency and demonstrates to followers that you are a reliable source of information. 
  • Focus on in-platform strategies: Each strategy has its own algorithms that make them unique. YouTube is a search platform; therefore, using keywords, attractive thumbnails, and increasing watch time will help YouTube push your content to new people. Conversely, Instagram posts won’t be seen on the feed more than a few days out. Thus, it’s better to use hashtags and collaborate with other people within your niche to grow. 

Online advertising

Online advertising uses various platforms to promote a product or service. These ads typically appear on Google, Facebook , Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, and others. Advertisement types include 

  • PPC Ads: Advertisers pay every time a visitor clicks on their search ad. These ads appear on the first page of the search engine, typically at the top or bottom of SERPs. 
  • Social Ads: Ads in the form of pictures or videos that appear on the social platform. In the case of Facebook, they can appear on the timeline, messenger, or right column. 
  • Retargeting Ads: Retargeting ads consist of targeting people who have already seen or interacted with your content. 
  • Influencer ads: An brand pays an influencer to promote their product or service to their audience. 

There’s a place for every marketing channel. The challenge is to choose the right channels that are best suited for your business. It may be advantageous to leverage multiple channels together to increase your chances of success. For instance, producing blog content consistently while sending paid ads to visitors who didn’t opt-in your leads is a great way to ensure you’re maximizing the traffic visitors you’re receiving from search engines. 

Lead nurturing 

Lead nurturing is the process of developing relations with prospects to move them to the sales funnel . Unlike demand or lead generation, lead nurturing is focused on getting to know your prospects and tailoring your marketing and sales communication according to their needs and preferences. Here are the types of lead nurturing campaigns you can use: 

  • Educational content: Use education content to set up promotions in the future. This means describing the problem in greater detail. Perhaps answer common questions or misconceptions in your industry. 
  • Promotional content: Advertise your product by finding creative ways like customer testimonials, case studies, brand stories, etc. 
  • Product/Demo offer: If a prospect has already signed up for a free trial, they might be interested in delving deeper into the full functionalities of the product or service. 

Developing a Sales Strategy

Without a sales strategy in place, your sales teams will make decisions based on what’s in front of them. Not because they’re careless but rather unaware of the company’s long-term goals. Creating processes for sales and making data-driven decisions will help to improve your sales and increase your conversion rates. The last thing you want is to accumulate a lot of leads only to let them slip through the cracks with a poor sales strategy. 

Proactive outreach to inbound leads 

Relying sole on outbound sales strategies isn’t sustainable for a company. It takes a lot of investment in the form of prospecting tools, contact lists, hiring more reps, and promoting a “churn and burn” environment. 

Inbound marketing allows you to build lasting relationships with prospects and converts them when they are ready to purchase. 

Inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound leads and coverts 10x more effective when executed properly. 

Fortunately, outbound tactics can still be done in an inbound way to complement your marketing team’s inbound efforts. 

When prospects subscribe to your email list, you can simply have a sales rep reach out. This can help speed up the process and shorten the lifecycle. 

Here are scenarios when a salesperson can reach out to inbound leads: 

  • A prospect submits a form to learn more information about a product or service. 
  • A prospect has recently attended an event such as a virtual webinar, training, or even a live event.
  • A prospect has recently purchased from you, and a sales rep can help to push a complimentary product.

The key is to be proactive and reach out promptly. When a prospect interacts with your brand by submitting contact forms, attending your training, or even having already made a purchase, they are hot leads begging to be closed. 

The longer you wait, the more likely they’ll look elsewhere or simply change their mind about purchasing in front of you. Most businesses are scared to reach out to leads in fear of “bombarding” them. However, it’s ironic that the opposite is true. They become less responsive if you wait longer. 

Many of the current studies and data compiled point to the importance of timeliness and how delayed responses can impact your results: 

  • It takes B2B sales departments 42 hours to respond to new leads, and 38% never respond. Additionally, it takes 4.3 days of back-and-forth communication before the first call happens. 
  • Companies are 7x more likely to have meaningful conversations with decisions made when they are contacted within an hour of submitting a query. 
Companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly 7 times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision-makers as firms that try to contact prospects even an hour later. Yet only 37% of companies respond to queries within an hour. Source: HubSpot

Moreover, if leads are already in your lead nurturing funnel, your sales reps can start contacting them when they’re about halfway through the funnel. Businesses should meet their buyers where they are within the sales process . If the buyer has already gone through 57% of your sales process, there’s a good chance they are already educated, warmed up, and ready to talk. 

One study even found that 35 to 50% of sales will go to the vendor that reaches out first. It pays to reach out to your prospects first before your competitors do. 

Create a warm pitch 

The warm pitch is contacting prospective customers when they are already familiar with your brand. There are different channels you can use to pitch your prospects, such as through email, text, social messaging like LinkedIn, or even calling them. 

The most important factor in the success of your warm pitch is to focus on the actual prospect, not your personal agenda. If the thought of:

  • Closing more deals 
  • Hitting your sales quota
  • Beating another rep on the sales leaderboard

enters your mind, it’s likely you’re warm pitch will reflect that. 

You could come off as desperate, pushy, and arrogant, which decreases your odds of a sale. Instead, focus on the prospect and how you can help them. 

Furthermore, it’s important to refer to your ideal customer profiles to help you craft your pitch.

Every pitch should consist of an:

  • Introduction:  Mention something that you like about their business or something relatable you’ve found out about them 
  • Hook: State the problem they might be facing
  • Value and Solution : State your solution and the benefits or results they’ll receive from your product or service 
  • CTA: Deliver a clear call to action 

For a warm pitch, the CTA generally involves hopping on a sales call. However, the call to action might also be to refer you to a decision-maker in the company, click on a link, start a free trial, etc. 

If you’re unsure what problem your prospect is facing, you can use the warm pitch to clarify what the problem is and tailor your offering to meet their needs. 

Here’s an example of a 1,2,3 warm pitch: 

This pitch works incredibly well because it’s easy to respond to and shows that you probably understand the problems that they face. Not to mention, you are telling them you’ll send something to fix that. 

Once you send them the lead magnet or something quick to help their problem, you can then pitch the idea of hopping on a sales call. 

Sales calls 

Just like with the warm pitch, it’s important to focus on the customer and get clear on the problems they’re facing with their business. Rather than diving straight into your product and the features, it’s vital to leave that until the end. 

Think of a doctor who diagnoses a problem before prescribing a solution. Here’s an outline of how you can conduct your sales calls:

  • Meet – build rapport 
  • Probe – ask the right questions 
  • Prescribe – tell them about your solution 
  • Close – ask for their sale and get paid right away 

Here’s a quick guide on how to go about each phase of the sales call. 

“I see that that you’re working towards [goal] , but are currently facing [challenges] , is that right?”

The idea is to build rapport and get them to do the talking. Let them explain to you their situation in their own words. Make sure to truly listen and get a sense of how they’re feeling. 

You can segue into the probe by saying, 

“I’m not sure if I can help or if you’d be a good fit for us. But to see if I may help you, would you might if I ask you some questions?” 

Ask the following questions to get them to describe their problem. Also, these questions will help them understand the cost of not getting the problem fixed immediately. 

  • Why is it important to get [problem] solved? 
  • What is the cost of not having [goal] ?
  • If you did ultimately achieve [goal] , what would that mean to you? 
  • What are the roadblocks that are preventing you from getting [goal] ? 

Then transition from the probe to prescribe. 

“So, what you’re looking for is ___ [repeat back what the prospect has told you in the probe stage] ”
“Based on what you’re telling me, here’s what I recommend [your offer] ”

Talk about your solution, but only in terms of what the prospect has told you they want. Make sure to describe the benefits of your product that they told you were important to them. Prove to your prospect that you are the person to help them get to their desired result. 

Here you can mention your company’s features, accolades, or unique value proposition to prove that you’re credible to help them. 

Close: 

Now ask them, “how does that sound to you?” 

When they respond, “is there anything that would keep you from going ahead with this [offer]?” 

At that point, you can handle all objections before you close. 

Once you’ve handled the objections, you can tell them the price and get to sending the invoice or taking their credit card info to charge them on the phone. 

The idea of this sales framework is to get clear on your prospect’s problems and aspirations. Then help them see that you have the solution that can bridge the gap between their current situation and the ideal situation. 

Sales results 

You can’t improve if you aren’t measuring your results. Decisions should be driven by concrete data so that you aren’t relying solely on intuition. 

Sales metrics are data points that represent your sales team’s performance. They can the conversion rates, progress towards goals, and other metrics that identify strategic issues. 

When it comes to your sales team, there are several types of sales metrics: 

Conversion metrics

Conversion metrics determine how effective your sales strategies are. If your reps are struggling to close hot leads, it can be a sign that you need more in-depth sales training. 

Here are some examples of conversion metrics to track: 

  • Percentage of opportunities lose
  • Percentage of opportunities won 
  • Average number of won opportunities for each sales rep 
  • Average number of lost opportunities for each sales rep

Sales team productivity 

It’s vital to measure how productive your sales reps are. For example, are your reps focused on selling, or are they busy with administrative tasks? 

Follow these metrics to see how productive your sales reps are: 

  • Average time spent on manual data entry
  • Percentage of time spent on selling activities 
  • Percentage of marketing collateral used by sales reps 
  • Average times a high-quality lead is followed up with 
  • Percentage of high-quality leads followed up with 
  • Average number of sales tools used 

Email warm pitch metrics 

As your team is reaching out to inbound leads, it’s important to measure the results. Is your sales team struggling to book sales calls? Look for data points such as open rate, response rate, engagement rate, and percentage of prospects who move onto the sales call. 

Sales hiring metrics 

Many organizations overlook the sales hiring process. HR managers typically feel pressured to fill the sales roles quickly, leading to settling for mediocre candidates. Here are some hiring metrics to look at: 

  • Time spent recruiting 
  • Average time spent hiring 
  • Average cost to replace a sales position 
  • Average turnover rate 

Read next: The 3 Types of Sales and Marketing Analytics that Will Help You Grow

Align sales and marketing 

Aligning your sales and marketing teams means sharing data so that both parties have access to any lead that enters the funnel. By cross-sharing data, each team can utilize the data points to help in their daily roles.  

For instance, the marketing team can run through sales notes to learn more information about the buyer persona, common challenges, etc. As a result, they can generate content, lead magnets, and other marketing collateral to attract higher-quality leads. 

Additionally, the marketing team can lead score each prospect and categorize each by certain lead types (hot, warm, or cold lead) and whether they are sales-ready or not.

To achieve this alignment, you’d want to integrate your CRM with your marketing automation suite . The marketing automation tool needs to be able to lead score and segment leads effectively. Conversely, CRM software is required to track the sales process of each lead. 

Fortunately, Encharge offers a robust HubSpot CRM integration along with other CRM integrations allowing you to easily cross-share data. The Encharge integration supports a two-way sync of contact and company data. That means that when a contact field in Encharge is updated, it will automatically sync with your CRM, so sales will have the latest up-to-date contact information, as well as a full view of the marketing journey of the lead.

Apart from contact data, Encharge syncs email marketing activity – email opens, clicks, and replies. That way, sales reps can find which marketing messages your leads are interacting with and be more prepared when following up and selling to them.

Last but not least, you can automate sales processes in your CRM by using flows. The example below automates the whole CRM deal creation process based on the stage of the lead in the customer journey – when they book a demo call, and when they become a customer.

You can learn more about our HubSpot integration here . The end result is better sales and marking alignment. 

Further Reading

  • 12 Sales and Marketing Strategy Examples from Real Companies
  • Understanding the Difference Between Sales and Marketing
  • The Last Guide to Marketing and Sales Automation You’ll Need
  • 15 Ways Marketing and Sales Work Together to Drive Growth
  • The 8 Critical Elements of Sales and Marketing Operations
  • 10 Steps to Create a Sales and Marketing Business Plan [Templates included]

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Running a thriving online business requires a robust sales and marketing strategy. There’s no “winging” it when it comes to business practices. 

Creating thorough processes that align both teams together helps to create synergy in your company. 

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What Are Sales Goals? S.M.A.R.T. Strategies + Examples

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Help your team succeed with sales goals that build confidence while increasing revenue.

market and sales strategy in a business plan

Donald Kelly

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If you’re only thinking about how your reps can hit quota, you’re missing out. As a leader, you have to set broader sales goals, track your team’s progress, and keep your team accountable if you want to see real payoff. But setting goals that are both challenging and achievable is easier said than done. Start small with weekly or monthly goals, and build up your confidence to work towards bigger and more lucrative goals down the road. We’ll show you how to get started.

What you’ll learn:

What are sales goals, why sales goals are important, s.m.a.r.t. goals explained.

  • 14 common sales goals with examples

How to track your goals

The biggest challenge when setting and tracking sales goals, attain quota faster and speed up sales ops .

Learn how Sales Performance Management helps you connect customer data to sales planning and execution. 

market and sales strategy in a business plan

At their core, sales goals are objectives that a company wants to achieve over a set period of time. But sales goals aren’t just dry, impersonal measurements. If you don’t have any benchmarks for success, you’re going to encourage mediocrity and accept the status quo, losing team engagement. When your team sets concrete goals, it helps them hit their sales targets and gives them ownership over their success: They know what it takes to win.

As the CEO of sales training firm The Sales Evangelist , my role does not always allow me to do outbound sales. Most of my leads come directly from the podcast, website, referrals, and my deep network. However, I understand the power of outbound selling so I set a goal for myself to bring in $250,000 each quarter — driven in part by outbound efforts. During Q3 of last year, I beat this goal, clocking in at $300,000. Not only that, I was able to validate to my team that setting goals really works. If I can do it while running my business, they certainly can do it.

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Setting sales goals gives your team a north star — something to aim for. But that’s not the only reason why they’re important. Here are a few other things sales goal-setting does:

  • Helps create forecasts: From a business perspective, sales goals give you a picture of potential sales revenue .
  • Creates learning opportunities: If it turns out a particular sales strategy fails to accomplish a goal, this is valuable data. Failing to meet a sales goal offers a chance for reps to innovate and try different approaches. And if a goal is particularly challenging, it can improve focus and prompt creative problem-solving.
  • Encourages teamwork: Group goals increase the stakes because they affect everyone. They can also spark competition, which can be motivating to reps.
  • Sparks process development: A roadmap helps you get where you need to go, but only works. if you know where you’re going. Once you have your sales goals lined up, you can create a path to get there.

One proven way to set yourself up for success is to set S.M.A.R.T. goals. Let’s dive into that methodology.

S.M.A.R.T. is an easy-to-remember acronym for the five steps of effective goal-setting. If you want your goals to fuel success, makes sure they are:

  • Specific: It’s easy to say to your team, “Let’s increase sales!” But after the cheers and high-fives die down, this vague statement doesn’t help anyone. Why? It lacks detail. Get specific. Deliver concrete numbers and explain how you plan to raise revenue with actionable guidance. For example, you might want to increase your monthly revenue by 5% over the next quarter using a consultative sales approach .
  • Measurable: Numeric benchmarks can be helpful because they record progress while removing subjectivity. Remember those fundraising events that used a poster of a giant, old-fashioned thermometer? For each donation received, the thermometer would be filled with red ink to show that the organization was inching closer to its goal. You can do the same with your team by tracking progress to help them reach goals and motivate at the same time.
  • Achievable: Ambitious goals are great, but you want to set your team up for success. You need to make sure that your goals are sensible and not totally out of reach. Review your team’s past performance data and be honest about what you can accomplish during a set period of time. Instead of setting a goal to double sales by the end of the month for example, a more achievable goal would be to make 10 more cold calls per week, which you could break down further into two per day.
  • Relevant: When setting goals for your team, whether individual or team goals, you should keep three things in mind: Do they align with your reps’ existing goals, personal and professional? Do they align with your organization’s goals? How will the results matter? If goals resonate personally with reps, that could drive motivation. As an illustration, if a rep meets their goal of 100% subscription renewals for their existing accounts, they might receive a bonus or promotion, helping them meet a personal goal of earning a higher salary.
  • Time-bound: When goals have a clear starting time and end date, it makes it easier for your team to plan how they’ll get to the finish line. Setting small weekly or monthly sales goals can help your team get focused, build confidence, and enjoy smaller wins. For example, you might set a goal for yourself to provide at least one week of one-to-one coaching per quarter to your sales reps.

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14 common goals with examples.

Setting clear goals for your sales team can go a long way in improving the bottom line of your business. To illustrate these examples, we’ll look at the goals of a fictional roller skate company in Florida, SpinzFlip:

1. Grow revenue

Every company needs to grow their revenue to remain profitable. To do this, you’ll need to set a specific target for how much gross or net profit you want to see increase over a set period of time. Revenue targets are typically set monthly, quarterly, or annually.

Example: The sales team at SpinzFlip has ambitious goals for the new year. They want to increase year-over-year revenue by 100%.

2. Increase quota attainment

To understand how close your sales reps are to meeting their targets, you need to track their quota attainment , measured as a percentage of total quota achieved out of quota targets.

Example: The SpinzFlip sales team set an annual team quota goal of $3 million for last year. By the end of the year, they hit $2.5 million in sales for a quota attainment of about 83%, which shows them there’s room for improvement.

3. Acquire new customers

Another important sales goal is to increase the number of new customers purchasing your products or services. Gaining new customers over time will lead to a healthy and profitable business, ensuring that profits don’t slide backwards when you lose longstanding customers.

Example: SpinzFlip set a goal of increasing its customer acquisition rate by 8.5% monthly. This is to offset the customer attrition rate of 7% while still ensuring growth.

4. Increase market share

A company’s market share is the total percentage of the sales they control in the market for their products or services. Increasing market share is a clear indicator of a company’s competitiveness. As a matter of fact, when a business improves its market share, it often improves profitability.

Example: The global roller skate industry is worth about $600 million . SpinzFlip has $3 million in annual sales or about 0.5% of the market. If they want to double their market share, they need to set a goal to increase their annual sales to $6 million.

5. Increase unit sales

If you want to get a specific product into market faster, you might set a goal for the number of units sold. Increasing the number of units each rep needs to sell pushes them to pursue more leads.

Example: SpinzFlip currently sells 60,000 pairs of skates annually. They want to double their unit sales, so their goal this year is to sell 120,000 pairs.

6. Minimize customer churn

Reducing customer churn (aka customer attrition), or the number of customers who leave your business during a specific period of time, is a worthwhile sales goal as it ensures you don’t have to constantly replace your customer base with new leads. If your business has a low churn rate, you are more likely to experience growth. For example, a subscription-based company likely needs more new subscriptions than lost subscriptions in a given period to be profitable.

Example: In addition to selling roller skates, SpinzFlip also sells a podcast subscription. Its podcast currently has a churn rate of 20%. This year, SpinzFlip’s goal is to use listener insights to produce a more engaging podcast and lower its churn rate to 10%.

7. Increase customer upsells

Upselling is when a company offers a premium or upgrade for products or services. At the end of the day, setting a sales goal for upselling is a great way to increase the profitability of each sale.

Example: SpinzFlip offers a premium podcast with exclusive celebrity interviews for an additional monthly fee. Last year, SpinzFlip managed to convert 1% of its regular podcast audience to the premium service. The sales team wants to double that number this year by upselling 2% of SpinzFlip’s regular podcast audience.

8. Boost customer cross-sells

Cross-selling is when a company offers complimentary products or services in addition to its primary product or service. If you improve your cross-selling rate, you could see increased revenue and higher customer satisfaction rates.

Example: Roller skates are SpinzFlip primary product, but it also sells rollerblades. Last year, cross-sales of rollerblades were non-existent. According to an internal survey, 99% of SpinzFlip customers weren’t even aware that the company sold rollerblades. This year, SpinzFlip set a modest cross-sales goal of 0.25% to increase brand and product awareness.

9. Improve lead generation

Above all, lead generation attracts customers to your business. You can generate leads by collecting customer information like phone numbers and email addresses. If you want your business to grow, a meaningful goal would be to improve your lead gen process so you can identify more qualified leads who are ready to buy.

Example: Before this year, SpinzFlip was not capturing email addresses when customers purchased its skates at retail stores. Now, SpinzFlip offers a free, three-month subscription to its premium podcast to retail store customers. Consequently, they can capture the email addresses of customers interested in the podcast subscription. With this new offer in place, SpinzFlip hopes to improve its lead generation by 10% this year.

10. Improve sales forecast accuracy goals

Accurate sales forecasts are kind of like a crystal ball. They help you identify where you’re going — and where sales pitfalls might scuttle your target attainment. Businesses that can forecast their sales witt a +/- 5% accuracy enjoy the confidence that comes with being able to plan for the future.

Example: SpinzFlip needs to work on the accuracy of its sales forecast. Last year, it hovered around -15% (that is, they were 15% shy of their targets), but this year, they want to reach -10% accuracy. If SpinzFlip meets or exceeds that goal, they’ll join an elite group of sales organizations — just 21% manage to forecast sales within 10% accuracy, according to SiriusDecisions research .

11. Increase customer lifetime value (CLV)

This metric reveals the total revenue a company can expect to gain from a single customer over the course of their relationship with the brand. This is a keen interest for ROI-focus leaders: It is much easier to increase the value of a current customer than hoping to get the same value from a new customer.

Example: This year, SpinzFlip aims to increase customer CLV by 15% year-over-year by extending customer tenure and introducing add-ons and cross-sells.

12. Improve Net Promoter Score® (NPS)

NPS is an important metric used to gauge customer loyalty. NPS scores are measured with a single question:

“On a scale from 1-10, how likely is it that you would recommend [company, product, service] to a friend or colleague?”

After surveying some customers with that question, an NPS score is calculated from -100 to +100, with the higher number being a better score.

Example: SpinzFlip sells an awesome pair of roller skates. When customers were surveyed about the buying experience, they averaged a score in the high 70s. But when customers were asked about SpinzFlip’s podcast, it scored closer to 40. SpinzFlip clearly needs to set a goal to improve the NPS score for its podcast.

13. Reduce the length of the sales cycle

A sales cycle is the average length of time that it takes for a rep to convert a lead into a closed sale. Shortening the sales cycle can help sales reps close more and grow revenue.

Example: It takes a SpinzFlip rep three months, on average, to go through an entire sales cycle. This includes a discovery call with a prospect, a roller skate demo, proposal drafting, negotiation, and finally closing the deal. This year, SpinzFlip set a goal of shortening its average sales cycle from three months to two. This will give SpinzFlip’s reps an extra month to get more prospects in the pipeline.

14. Reduce the average number of touches

Touches are contacts with prospects — over the phone, online, or face-to-face. In my experience, it takes the average sales rep nine or 10 touches to close a deal. Ideally, you want to reduce this to five, six, or seven touches, and that takes finessing. You get there by doing more research and coming prepared with solutions and value prospects understand.

Example: SpinzFlips has never kept track of the number of touches required for a rep to close a deal. Once they started tracking, they were surprised the average was 12. They set a goal to get the average under 10 by the end of the year. To help facilitate this, managers told reps to tailor sales pitches to each prospect.

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If you want your sales team to see success, tracking their progress toward a goal is essential. Technology is an effective way of doing just that: Sales Cloud offers sales management dashboards that provide team performance insights. These tools interpret raw data and transform them into insights that can help sales leaders identify top prospects and leads, evaluate marketing campaigns, and track the success of their team.

Here are the sales dashboards that every team needs :

  • State of sales Designed for sales managers and executives, a state-of-sales dashboard provides a snapshot of all key metrics that affect team-wide sales targets.
  • Forecasting Also designed for sales managers and executives, a forecasting dashboard provides a “weather report” for your sales team, forecasting whether or not you’re likely to hit your goals.
  • Sales rep performance Useful for sales managers, a sales rep performance dashboard typically measures three key metrics: conversion rate, total revenue generated, and quota attainment percentage.
  • Sales leaderboard This dashboard lets sales reps and managers see the entire team’s performance, encouraging healthy competition.
  • Win/loss Helpful to sales managers and executives, this dashboard tracks win/loss trends over time.
  • Sales lead Provides a closer look at sales reps and lead generation teams, whether or not leads are converting, and the effectiveness of prospecting and marketing efforts.
  • Pipeline generation Offers managers, reps, and marketing teams insights into a pipeline value-to-sales ratio, which is critical for hitting sales targets.

A huge roadblock salespeople have when setting sales goals for themselves is a lack of accountability. You might set goals at the beginning of the year and not look back on them until the end of the year when your team is not performing well. Clearly, you need more checks. However, that doesn’t mean you need to be on top of salespeople, reminding them of their goals every single day.

Think back to the S.M.A.R.T. method. This is where the T, time-bound, becomes extremely important. If you set a goal that wraps at the end of Q2, you have to follow up with your team, individually or as a group, to see if it was completed. In other words, match the check-in to the time period set for the goal. Of course, you need to check in with them a few times before the goal’s deadline to gauge their progress and support them if they need help, but the big review should happen at the end. Did they hit the goal? If not, why? How can you help them next time?

Use S.M.A.R.T. goals to fuel success

By setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, you give your sales team an outline for success. Make sure that the goals you set not only align with the goals of your business but also with your individual reps’ goals. When the benefits of a goal aren’t clear or the path to achieve it is too complicated or unrealistic, motivation suffers. Set your team up for success with a clear roadmap that puts them in the driver’s seat.

Use AI to hit your forecast every time

Spot and address pipeline gaps that threaten your forecast. Discover how with Sales Analytics from Sales Cloud.

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Donald’s mission is to evangelize the effective selling method and motivate sellers of all levels to do big things. As a former top-performing technology sales professional who has successfully sold in public and private sectors, Donald cracked the code of helping teams thrive in B2B sales. He is the author of several books and is a LinkedIn Top Voice in sales.

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The Future of Marketing Is Intergenerational

  • Mauro F. Guillén

market and sales strategy in a business plan

Older consumers can’t just be an afterthought for brands — but that doesn’t mean just shifting the focus from one generation to another.

Demographics suggest that Americans over the age of 60 will soon become a larger consumer group in terms of income than 20-to-34-year-olds, yet companies still position their brands as if the bulk of the market is people under the age of 40. The answer, however, is not to shift marketing strategies from one generation to another. Research has suggested that boundaries between generations are fuzzy, if not arbitrary. Plus there’s a bewildering degree of variability across individuals within the same generation. Instead, marketers should aim to emphasize common values across different age groups and build “post-generational” brands.

Policymakers, employers, and marketers traditionally have concentrated their attention on people in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s. After all, these have been the largest age groups, the biggest spenders, the trend-setters, and — so we thought — the embodiment of the future of consumption.

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  • Mauro F. Guillén is a vice dean at the Wharton School and the author of the new book, The Perennials: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society .

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Number of Stores and shoppings in Moscow Oblast

List of stores and shoppings in moscow oblast with email address, phone number, geocoded address, and other key details for download., number of stores and shoppings, smartscrapers has the most up to date and comprehensive stores and shoppings list in moscow oblast. our lists are constantly being verified and our database is constantly being updated..

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How many stores and shoppings are there in moscow oblast .

There are a total of 6 Stores and shoppings in Moscow Oblast as of January 09, 2024 .

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Market enriches

As nuclear power continues to be seen as and important part of the global energy mix, opportunities for the supply of parts, services and materials to the sector remains in demand. Yury Aleksandrovich Olenin, president of Russian Fuel Company TVEL, tells NEI of the business’s ambitions and shares his thoughts on the state of the global uranium enrichment market.

NEI: Describe TVEL’s main subsidiary enterprises and their activities?

Yury Aleksandrovich Olenin (YAO): Fuel Company TVEL is a Russian producer of nuclear fuel, a production holding, and part of the Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation. TVEL incorporates a number of enterprises that operate as subsidiaries within four complexes: separation-sublimation; fabrication of nuclear fuel; manufacture of gas centrifuges; and research and development.

The separation-sublimation complex includes JSC Angarsk Electrolysis and Chemical Plant (Angarsk, Irkutsk region), JSC Production Association Electrochemical Plant (Zelenogorsk, Krasnoyarsk region), JSC Siberian Chemical Plant (Seversk, Tomsk region), and JSC Ural Electrochemical Integrated Plant (Novouralsk, Sverdlovsk region). The main activity of the company is producing uranium hexafluoride, with the proportion of U-235 isotope enriched to five per cent

The complex fabricating the nuclear fuel includes the following companies: PJSC Machine Engineering Plant (Elektrostal, Moscow region) PJSC Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrates Plant (Novosibirsk, Novosibirsk region), JSC Chepetsk Mechanical Plant (Glazov, Udmurtia Republic), and JSC Moscow Polymetal Plant (Moscow). The plants produce nuclear fuel which is supplied in the form of fuel assemblies for different types of reactors. The fuel produced is used in nuclear power plants, propulsion reactors for the Russian fleet and research reactors.

The gas centrifuge complex comprises PJSC Kovrov Mechanical Plant (Kovrov, Vladimir region), LLC Uralpribor (Novouralsk, Sverdlovsk region), and Ural Gas Centrifuge Plant Ltd (Novouralsk, Sverdlovsk region). The complex produces gas centrifuges for the uranium enrichment enterprises and carries out research on behalf of the sublimation-separation units.

The research and development complex is principally based at the A.A. Bochvar High-Technology Scientific Research Institute for Inorganic Materials (VNIINM) in Moscow, and Novouralsk Scientific and Production Association (Novouralsk, Sverdlovsk region). It develops high performance, energy efficient, reliable and competitive equipment for nuclear facilities and improves technologies for radiochemical production and radioactive waste management.

Quality, safety and reliability are the determining parameters of the fuel fabricated by TVEL. We offer reference fuel assemblies whose characteristics and performance have been confirmed by operation in Russian nuclear plants; maximum customer focus; and a close collaboration and synergy with partners. TVEL’s nuclear fuel strategy is based on consumer needs – most importantly reliability, safety and economic efficiency.

NEI: Is JSC TVEL planning to increase its share of the nuclear fuel and uranium enrichment service markets?

YOA: Today, Rosatom’s TVEL has a 17% share of the global nuclear fuel market. Our position at this level has been stable for several years. One of the key success factors is rapid development of innovative technologies, as well as constant efforts to improve fuel safety and reduce the cost of its production. We lead the field and conduct research and development to improve the performance and customer appeal of the products, so the units we supply to our customers can be operated with the highest economic efficiency. The company remains committed to its strategic priority, which is the fullest satisfaction of our customers’ requirements. TVEL offers clients only reference product samples.

We foresee several future growth drivers. One of these is the new VVER reactors that are being manufactured and are planned for construction in Russia and abroad. Another is the TVS-Kvadrat project, which will enable TVEL to expand the geographical reach of its activities and enter a new fuel market segment for PWRs, in particular those with 17x17 fuel assemblies. In addition, of course, we are interested in strengthening our cooperation with our Chinese and Indian partners, who are committed to nuclear energy and rapidly developing it.

TVEL is actively working on the supply of zirconium products to the world market, as well as the fuel and components for the research reactors constructed abroad. The first commercial contracts have already been signed; our foreign partners are satisfied with the quality of Russian products, which fully meet their technical requirements.

With regard to the world enrichment market, the production of the enterprises is handled by two Russian companies in parallel. FC TVEL supplies its customers with ‘complete’ nuclear fuel assemblies, while JSC TENEX acts as an exporter of enriched uranium product and uranium enrichment services. In total, Russian companies’ joint share in the global enrichment market now exceeds 30%. In the coming years we expect to further strengthen our position.

NEI: Which countries does TVEL supply nuclear products at the moment and which countries are considered promising for the company in the future?

YOA: TVEL’s enterprises have been supplying fuel since the start-up of the world’s first nuclear plant, which in Russia took place over 60 years ago.

TVEL has broad competence and immense experience of fabricating nuclear fuel and fuel components for all major types of reactor. Today the geography of Russian nuclear fuel deliveries is extensive, comprising 15 countries around the world.

The company is active in Central and Eastern Europe, delivering its products to reactors of Russian design in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Finland and Bulgaria. It also supplies fuel assembles for plants in Ukraine and Armenia. We undertake projects in Asia, particularly in China and India, and also supply fuel to the Bushehr plant in Iran.

Since 1996, in cooperation with the Areva group, we have supplied fuel and components to Western Europe. Our cooperation with the French company has resulted in the supply of more than 3,500 ‘tetrahedral’ fuel assemblies, without a single complaint.

TVEL has its own fuel assembly design for 17x17 PWR reactors, based on the best technical solutions and materials used in the VVER sector. During the fuel design phase all test stages were carefully assessed and the fuel assemblies have been successfully operated in Western Europe.

In recent years TVEL has made significant progress in the US, and we now have a written alliance with Global Nuclear Fuel-Americas (GNF-A). For TVEL international business is among its strategic priorities and the company is open to cooperation with foreign global players in the fuel and fuel component market. The world market for nuclear energy is a delicate matter, one that calls for union rather than competition to obtain economic benefits.

NEI: Your recent agreement with GNF-A will ensure your entry into the US market. How does TVEL plan to develop this business?

YOA: In May this year we signed an agreement establishing a consortium between JSC TVEL and GNF-A. The purpose of this consortium is to license Russian-designed fuel for reactors of Western design in the US. Close collaboration with our US partner has allowed us to successfully complete all the necessary preparatory work and bring it into being.

The union of TVEL and GNF-A is exceptionally useful and well timed. A fundamentally new tetrahedral fuel design will appear in the US nuclear fuel market, which means an additional option for customers and the creation of a healthy and competitive environment. TVEL and our US partner will be able to combine our existing opportunities and the potential capacity for the promotion of Russian fuel in the US. We will provide the technology and the best practice related to the TVS-KVADRAT fuel, while our American partner, in turn, can provide excellent market opportunities and promote it.

The first contract has recently been signed for pilot operation with one of the US operators. As a result of our joint efforts, American operators will have access to a safe, referenced, high-performance, reliable nuclear fuel design.

The entry of TVS-KVADRAT fuel into the American market involves several stages: pilot operation of the fuel assemblies; licensing; and winning permits from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission for bulk supply.

Pilot fuel assemblies for US nuclear plants will be manufactured at Russian production facilities. It is planned that commercial batches of the fuel will be produced in the US, at the facilities of our US partner, but it will include industrial cooperation with Russian enterprises.

The operators of US nuclear plants are encouraging our alliance with GNF-A. They see that it will broaden the choice of fuel. The recent contract for pilot operation with one of the operators is recognition of this.

TVEL takes as much responsibility for TVS-Kvadrat fuel as for VVER fuel – we have carefully and consistently passed all the stages of fuel qualification before starting its commercial supply.

NEI: Ukraine plans to diversify its supplies of nuclear fuel. What potential problems may arise here?

YOA: In Ukraine, nuclear power plays a key role in the energy balance of the country. We respect the actions of the operator of Ukrainian nuclear plants, which are aimed at improving safety. This is the exclusive responsibility of the Ukrainian State Enterprise National Nuclear Energy Generating Company, Energoatom.

In 2010, Ukraine aimed to improve energy safety by developing plans to build its own nuclear fuel fabrication plant. This is the only effective way to reduce dependence on external supplies. Unfortunately, because of the general situation in Ukraine this project is now postponed, and Ukraine is moving towards increased dependence on external supplies, and may import fuel from the US. This, in our opinion, is diversification for its own sake.

NEI: TVEL has developed TVS-KVADRAT fuel for reactors of Western design. In your opinion, what are the main markets for this fuel? Has it already been tested in Western reactors?

YOA: TVS-Kvadrat fuel for Western design reactors is the driver of our growth. This fuel is already in operation in Western Europe. We have recently passed a number of key milestones in the process of fuel supply to the US. The first results of testing are quite encouraging, and together with our partners we look forward to gaining a substantial share of the market. Many other countries are closely watching the operation of our fuel in Europe and are awaiting the official feedback on it.

The geography of supply of TVS-Kvadrat may be extensive. Nuclear plant operators will be able to gain access to another design of fuel, which is structurally, technologically and generically different from the units fabricated by Western companies. We see this as a real diversification in the PWR market.

NEI: Tianwan plant in China is considering the use of your new FA-4 fuel. How does it differ from FA-2M, which is currently used at the Chinese plant?

YOA: In order to increase the energy production and of the operating VVER-1000 units and increase its capacity factor, we are offering our VVER-1000 fuel assembly customers a fourth generation fuel, known as FA-4. The FA-4 technical project, with the greatest possible uranium capacity for the VVER-1000, was developed by OKB GIDROPRESS in collaboration with the Kurchatov Institute Research and Development Centre and JSC VNIINM, with the financial support of JSC TVEL. It is based on reference designs for Russian fuel.

FA-4 has fuel elements where the fuel pellet does not have a central hole. The result is an eight percent increase in the mass of fuel in the assembly. The use of FA-4, within an 18-month fuel cycle at a 104% capacity, will reduce the amount of feed fuel assemblies by 10% and cut the consumption of natural uranium by two percent.

We are ready to intensify work with our Chinese partners so we can carry out the fastest implementation of this type of fuel assembly at the Tianwan plant. The new fuel will significantly improve the economic performance of the plant.

In general, TVEL pays great attention to cooperation with our Chinese partners. We envision large-scale cooperation and very high quality sharing of expertise.

NEI: At the recent meeting in St Petersburg, dedicated to the development of new-generation gas centrifuges, you noted the positive dynamics of reducing the cost of separation equipment, both through organisational and engineering activities. Could you comment on this?

YOA: A significant effect was achieved by increasing the speed of the centrifuge manufacturing process, which made it possible to reduce the production costs. We have also had great success in developing a new generations of gas centrifuges. Tests of the 10th generation are about to end, and fundamental advances have been achieved in developing the 11th, which has superior features compared with previous generations.

NEI: TVEL has stated that it plans to increase its non-nuclear business. Could you tell us which markets you are targeting, in which countries and which products you are planning to supply?

YOA: Developing production of non-nuclear products is one of TVEL’s most important tasks. Between 2012 and 2015 income from key non-nuclear products has more than doubled. The main product lines are lithium and lithium products, calcium and calcium wire, titanium, zirconium products, rare earth elements, isotope production, autocatalysts and zeolite catalysts. TVEL sees potential in developing general industrial activity to consolidate and expand its position on the domestic market, and to expand sales of its products in European and other markets.

The basis of TVEL’s export potential in the non-nuclear businesses is the materials produced by its subsidiaries JSC Chepetsk Mechanical Plant (CMP), PJSC Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrates Plant (NCCP) and JSC Production Association Electrochemical Plant. In particular, high-purity calcium metal, manufactured at CMP by electrolysis, is one of the most highly sought Russian products abroad. Calcium is supplied to the US, France, Germany, India, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Bulgaria and other countries. In the near future CMP plans to enter the European market with a new product – calcium injection wire used for secondary steel refinement.

Lithium products are also in great demand abroad. The main competitive advantage of the lithium products of NCCP, Russia’s largest manufacturer of lithium products, is its chemical purity. This is because the useful properties of lithium depend on maximum purification, and removal of natural and manmade impurities. Today NCCP exports a wide range of commercial lithium products to Germany and other countries. The lithium products proceeds of NCCP may more than double by 2020 as a result of the ongoing programme of modernisation and capacity expansion. 

About the author:   Yury Aleksandrovich Olenin graduated from Erevan Polytechnic University’s Faculty of Radio Engineering in 1976 and from Penza State Technical University with a specialisation in Jurisprudence 20 years later. In 2002, he he received a post-doctoral degree for his thesis on radar detection and identification of low level targets. He has worked in the nuclear industry since 1978 holding a number of senior positions. He has been President of TVEL since June 2007. 

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market and sales strategy in a business plan

Barclays reveals revival plan to woo investors as profits fall

Investors give a positive reaction to the chief executive's strategy update that aims to tackle many barriers identified by top shareholders.

market and sales strategy in a business plan

Business reporter @SkyNewsBiz

Tuesday 20 February 2024 13:31, UK

FILE PHOTO: A view shows signage on a branch of Barclays Bank in London, Britain, March 17, 2023. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls/File Photo

Barclays has revealed a revival plan to shore up support among investors that includes cutting costs and risk while bolstering returns.

The UK-based lender's shake-up, that Sky News reported last month had already resulted in 5,000 job losses , will also see an overhaul of management, some business disposals and £10bn returned to shareholders over three years.

A total of £3bn was planned for 2023 - up 37% on the previous year.

The plan was announced as Barclays reported a 6% decline in annual pre-tax profits to £6.6bn.

Shares, down by more than 3% in the year to date ahead of the updates, rose by 6% at the open.

Chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan, known as Venkat, told investors: "Our new three-year plan... is designed to further improve Barclays' operational and financial performance, driving higher returns, and predictable, attractive shareholder distributions."

He had previously pledged to listen to a growing number of investors seeking a streamlined business model and improved returns as the bank's share price lagged those of rivals.

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Venkat was head of global markets at Barclays ahead of his appointment in November 2021. Pic: Barclays

A top complaint has been Barclays' reliance on its high cost and high risk investment banking arm for profitability.

That business has attracted greater regulatory scrutiny industry wide since the financial crash of 2008, becoming even more vulnerable in times of economic uncertainty.

Its corporate and investment bank income fell by 4% to £12bn in 2023 as client activity dipped.

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Barclays said it would simplify its business through the creation of five divisions, boosting accountability in the process, with more investment money being directed at its UK consumer arm.

The company moved to strengthen its domestic retail bank earlier this month when it agreed to buy the bulk of Tesco Bank's operations in a deal worth up to £1bn.

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market and sales strategy in a business plan

John Moore, senior investment manager at RBC Brewin Dolphin, said of the bank's update: "Barclays has a habit of delivering mixed news - and today's results are no different.

"While the bank's results for last year are more or less in line with expectations, they are still behind 2022.

"Plans to make cost reductions and revise its corporate structure should help drive improved profitability in the next few years, underpinning shareholder returns of £10bn.

"The acquisition of Tesco Bank also looks like a good, low-risk deal in terms of overlap, cost savings, and gaining some market share.

"Barclays is in a reasonable position and appears to be cautiously optimistic about the future, but execution of the plan set out today will be key to its performance."

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Sony cuts PlayStation 5 sales forecast to 21 million units after posting record revenue

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  • Sony cut its sales forecast for its flagship PlayStation 5 console on Wednesday after warning of weaker sales in its key gaming division.

The Japanese gaming giant said it now expects to sell 21 million units of the PS5 in the fiscal year ending March, down from a previous forecast of 25 million units.

  • The cut comes after Sony posted record quarterly revenue in the all-important December quarter which encompasses the holiday season.

In this article

Sony cuts forecast for PlayStation 5 sales

Sony cut its sales forecast for its flagship PlayStation 5 console on Wednesday, after warning of weaker transactions in its key gaming division.

The cut in outlook comes after Sony posted record quarterly revenue in the all-important December quarter which encompasses the holiday season. Sony sold 8.2 million units of its flagship PlayStation 5 console in its fiscal third quarter, which runs from October to December. Sony has sold 16.4 million PS5 units so far in its fiscal year.

Sony also trimmed its fiscal year sales forecast for the gaming division by 210 billion yen to 4.15 trillion yen, saying it expects a decrease in sales of hardware.

The company's challenge now lies in trying to keep up momentum for the PS5, which was released more than three years ago. In October, Sony made available a refreshed version of the console with better specs.

Rival Nintendo has been grappling with a similar issue, managing to keep interest in its near seven-year old Switch console thanks to new game releases and movies associated with its famous characters, like Super Mario.

Sales at Sony's gaming business rose 16% year-on-year to 1.4 trillion yen in the December quarter, the company said on Wednesday. However, operating profit fell 26% in the division, due to increase losses from hardware due to promotions in the period as well as a decline in sales of first-party games.

Sony also lowered its sales forecast for the entire company to 12.3 trillion yen from 12.4 trillion yen for the fiscal year.

Sony beat analyst expectations by a wide margin in its fiscal third quarter when it reported results on Wednesday.

Here's how Sony did in the December quarter versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • Revenue: 3.75 trillion Japanese yen ($24.9 billion) versus 3.58 trillion yen expected
  • Operating profit: 463.3 billion yen versus 428.4 billion yen expected

Financial unit spinoff, chip boost

Sony said that it will partially spin off its financial services business via a public listing. The company plans to distribute slightly more than 80% of its shares of Sony Financial Group through dividends in kind as a result of the spinoff, in a listing due to take place in October 2025.

Sony's financial services unit saw revenue in the December quarter rise more than 1,100% to 311.7 billion yen. The company said this was thanks to a rise in sales at its insurance business.

Sony also reported a 21% jump in sales in its image sensor business, which it sells to companies like Apple for smartphones.

Meanwhile, Sony in January scrapped a planned merger with Indian firm Zee Entertainment. The deal, which was negotiated for more than two years, was seen as a way for Sony to get a foot into the lucrative Indian entertainment market.

Hiroki Totoki, Sony's chief financial officer, said on Wednesday that India has "great growth potential," adding that the company will "seek various opportunities" in the country and will look into plans to "replace" the failed merger with Zee.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect Sony's record revenues for the quarter.

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