Do You Have a Winning Sales Strategy for 2013?

If you’re a Sales SVP, EVP, VP or head of sales, there are things you should be doing in 2013 to boost sales. You need to adopt a sales strategy that addresses the many unique challenges of your business, one that fully exploits the rising opportunities this year will bring.

 

Sales coach and founder of A Sales Guy Consulting, Jim Keenan, lays out three things your 2013 sales strategy must have to succeed: a social selling strategy, a content marketing strategy and deliberate learning plan.

 

 

Social Selling

 

To connect and engage with your customers and prospects, you must embrace social media--Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, GooglePlus and other sites. Social media gives you new insights and connectivity to your target market. Social selling opens up a whole new selling paradigm you can’t afford to ignore. In fact, besides acknowledging it, you must proactively integrate it into your sales organization through proper training and tools.

 

 

Content Marketing 

 

Lead generation is the lifeblood of any sales organization. Keenan insists that cold calling is alive and well, but you must augment cold calling with content driven leads. To be effective, your 2013 sales and marketing strategy must have a content-driven lead generation campaign, one that engages prospects with both quality and depth of content. Keenan favors content marketing because the best salespeople have always possessed the “greatest command of information and insight.” Long before social media, content marketing or the Internet, the real rainmakers had the best and most compelling insights and information. Content marketing allows these individuals to leverage their insights and knowledge in a powerful new way. Success goes to those who have the most relevant, game changing insights and information, and content marketing provides the stage that lets you separate your organization from the competition. 

 

 

Deliberate Learning

 

Few sales organizations place enough emphasis on deliberate learning. Keenan defines deliberate learning as increasing a sales organization’s knowledge to close a recognized gap or develop a trend they may not understand. It’s a commitment to fill a specific knowledge vacuum. If you’ve seized and benefited from the opportunities opened up by social media, content marketing, blogging and challenger selling, you’ve become a deliberate learner. You’ve successfully built the acquisition of specific knowledge and understanding into your sales strategy. Fail to embrace deliberate learning and you’ll have to play catch-up when it comes to innovation and creativity.

 

Review your 2013 sales plan. Does it include a social selling strategy, a content marketing strategy and deliberate learning plan? If not, you need to be proactive and ensure your sales plan is ready to meet the challenges of 2013.

 

Check out Jim Keenan’s 2013 Sales Plan Development Tool Kit. It will help you build a winning plan for 2013.

 

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