How to Create a Sales Strategy for a Growing Business

Sales strategy has a reputation for being a document nobody reads. That is usually because it was written as a description of ambition rather than a set of decisions.

A working sales strategy answers seven questions. If you can answer them clearly, the team knows what to do on Monday. If you cannot, no amount of activity will compensate.

1. Where is the growth coming from?

There are only four sources: existing customers buying more, lapsed customers returning, new customers in markets you already serve, and new markets or channels. They cost different amounts and take different lengths of time.

Put a number against each for the coming year. A business that needs £600k of growth and expects £250k from account development, £150k from reactivation and £200k from new names has a plan. One that expects "growth" has a hope.

2. Who exactly are we selling to?

Define the target market by evidence, not aspiration: look at your most profitable customers and describe the pattern. Sector, size, geography, buying trigger, decision-maker.

Then say what you are not chasing. Strategy is mostly exclusion, and it is the part businesses find hardest — declining work is uncomfortable when the order book has gaps.

3. Why should they buy from us?

The proposition has to survive being read by a buyer who has three other quotes. "Quality, service and reliability" fails that test because every competitor claims it.

If a competitor could put their logo on your proposition and it would still read true, it is not a proposition.

Specificity is what makes it credible: a lead time you can guarantee, an accreditation that removes risk, engineering support that others charge for, a sector you know deeply enough to anticipate problems.

4. How do we reach them?

Route to market: direct, distribution, partners, agents, online, or a combination. Each has implications for margin, control and speed, and mixing them badly creates channel conflict that shows up as price erosion.

• Direct gives control and margin but costs capacity.
• Distribution buys reach quickly and costs margin and customer intimacy.
• Partners and agents suit new territories where local credibility matters more than presence.

5. What has to happen, weekly?

Convert the plan into activity. Given the target, the conversion rate and the cycle, how many opportunities must be created each month and how many conversations does that require each week? A strategy that does not resolve into a weekly number is not implementable.

6. Who does it, and how are they managed?

Structure follows the plan, not the other way round. Account development and new business need different people, different targets and different management, and asking one person to do both usually results in only the comfortable half getting done.

7. How will we know it is working?

Choose leading indicators, not just revenue. Opportunities created, conversion rate, average order value, pipeline coverage, cycle length. Review monthly and be prepared to change the plan on evidence rather than at year end.

Keep it to two pages

The strategy should fit on two pages and be usable as the agenda for the monthly commercial review. Anything longer becomes a document; anything shorter is a slogan.

1. 01Growth sources with numbers against each.
2. 02Target market, defined and bounded.
3. 03Proposition, in language a buyer would use.
4. 04Route to market and channel decisions.
5. 05Required monthly opportunity and weekly activity.
6. 06Structure, ownership and targets.
7. 07The five measures reviewed monthly.