Why No One Cares About Your Sales Strategy… And You Shouldn’t Either

Written by Monica Stewart, Principal, Director of Account Management

Read Time: 8 Minutes

Having a sales strategy is great, but what’s most important is caring about your buyer. A buyer doesn’t see your strategy and they don’t care how many countless hours it took to refine it. They can only see the journey from awareness to decision from their perspective.

Often times, we forget the one thing buyers care about most is themselves.

Why Your Sales Strategy Sucks

It’s harsh to say your sales strategy sucks, but it is irrelevant because it’s focused on you and what you think is going to work based on what you heard on a webinar, at a conference, or in the last book that you read. Or maybe, it’s what the guy next to you on the phone is doing and he/she happens to be crushing it.

Unfortunately, there is no magic pill or silver bullet that will get through to everybody. Particularly in today’s environment when buyers are more sophisticated and selling things themselves more than ever. Therefore, they are sensitive to being sold to, and Salespeople now have to be able to connect with people on an individual level. 

That being said, there is 100% a value in having a framework that structures your day and structures your practice, so that you stay engaged and you’re having fun in your work.

But you have to realize that it’s not going to help you generate revenue. 

It’s just for you to stay motivated. If framework and structure and process is your whole strategy, you’re not in a very good position.

Sales training experts would say otherwise, and there are a number of sales training programs and methodologies out there that can help you stay motivated in your work and put science behind your day-to-day. However, it’s not enough when engaging with the modern buyer.

A simple Google search will connect you with dozens of sales trainings and sales strategies. Something you’ll have to dig deeper for is buyer psychology and what motivates people to make purchasing decisions.

What You Need to Change so Your Sales Strategy Doesn’t Suck

You may be thinking to yourself at this point that connecting with all of your buyers on a personal level, people you don’t even know, when you’re making 80 calls a day, seems really hard and probably unrealistic.

You’re half right. It is difficult, but it’s not impossible. What you need to do is shift your thinking to think about your buyer. Not about why they are going to be so excited about your amazing analytics dashboard, but who they are, where do they live, and what were they thinking about before you even called them today. If you were them, what would you want to hear? Then work your strategy and conversation backward from there.

Also, think about how this particular buyer communicates. Is this someone who has a formal style? An informal style? What channels do they live on? If you build your strategy around that, it will be much easier to have organic conversations with people and it will start to feel less impossible and more doable.

Organic conversations and buyer personalization need to be applied to every channel you communicate on. Not just on a video call or on social, but email as well. Email marketing automation is great and saves salespeople tons of time, but it’s lost a lot of its traction in connecting with buyers

Simple personalization and list segmentation can improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%. For B2B sales, we personalize our emails in two ways: with company-focused messaging and buyer-focused messaging. Which is more effective?

From Skaled’s own historical data, we’ve seen…

• 10% open rates/4-6% reply rates with company-focused messaging
• 50%-60% open rates/20-30% reply rates with buyer-focused messaging 

The data speaks for itself, but unfortunately, a lot of the companies we work with will fall back on templates in the interest of time and hitting their activity goals.

What a Buyer Focused Sales Strategy Looks Like in Practice

What does caring about your buyer look like in practice? Salespeople need to be able to talk about their buyer personas as knowledgeably as they would talk about their products. Having differentiated strategies and conversations for the different types of people they are communicating with is key to becoming more buyer-focused. 

For example:

[Overview of what the company is selling and the two people in the two example conversations below.]

Let’s say you sell HR software that enables companies to onboard employees faster and track engagement metrics. You have two potential contacts: the CFO and the Director of HR. 

The CFO likely cares about reducing costs, allocating resources effectively, and having good data to make decisions from. You notice that she has a LinkedIn profile but only has 240 connections and hasn’t posted anything in a few months.

[Example Conversation 1]

Hi Sheila,

You might be interested in this recent HBR article on the hidden costs of employee turnover. Factoring in time and resources required for onboarding, recruiting and lost productivity during ramp, most organizations spend an additional 30-40% of the first year’s salary to acquire an employee. Improving your onboarding process reduces the time to ROI for a new hire, and has been shown to significantly reduce churn.

We can make that happen for ABC Corp, while also generating targeted performance data to empower you to allocate resources more efficiently. 

I’m available to discuss more Thursday afternoon. Does that work for you?

The Director of HR cares about improving employee experience and engagement, implementing strategic programs and tracking results. He’s very active on LinkedIn and in promoting his company’s brand.

[Example Conversation 2]

Hey Scott,

Hope you’re doing great! Loved your recent post on the meditation initiatives you are rolling out at ABC Corp. We are seeing more and more companies invest in these types of initiatives to create a great employee experience and improve engagement.

We’re also seeing that HR teams like yours can easily get bogged down in admin work, which really limits their ability to roll out more strategic initiatives.

What if you could save 10% of your team’s time and get new hires to productivity faster? Based on the number of roles you’re currently hiring from across the company I think this could be a significant opportunity for you and I would love to get your take also.

Let’s connect Thursday? Looking forward to it.

Now What?

It’s simple. Skaled Consulting changes the way organizations engage today’s buyer. We align sales and marketing with modern technology and processes that drive sustainable results. Get in touch with our team for an assessment of your current sales strategy or connect with me on LinkedIn if you’re just looking to start a conversation.

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