David’s book Wind In Your Sails has ten strategies. If you want predictable revenue, document a proven sales process, then measure the activities that lead to the milestones in your process.

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Transcript of Sales Strategy

Hi I’m Coach David J. Greer and today I’m talking to you about sales strategy. If you want predictable revenue, you need to have a proven sales process. As entrepreneurs we focus on the outcome revenue, but the reality is that the only thing we have any control over are the activities that our sales people do.

We need a proven sales process so that we understand each of the activities that moves a prospect through the sales funnel. We need to start with what is a highly qualified lead [and] how do they fit in with our ideal customer profile. What do they need to do so that we know they are interested enough to move them into the next phase of the sales process? Each part of the sales process must have a milestone that that you can measure so that you know that people are successfully moving through the sales process.

If we want to assign percentages and actually be able to look at what revenue is coming down the road, we need to be able to look at each of those milestones and understand for each sales person where each prospect is in the process and how far along they are in the milestones. If we understand that, then we can assign reasonable probabilities that let us forecast how much revenue is coming.

If you don’t have a sales process, get all of your best sales people in a room and extract from them the best processes that they use. They will consciously or unconsciously understand each of the milestones and how to move people through them.

People sell to people. A lot of our investment in making sales people better needs to be in their people skills, understanding how they can interact better with prospects, [and] helping them with objection handling for the common objections that your prospects are going to come up with.

In my book Wind In Your Sails, I show how creating a proven sales process and then measuring the activities and milestones in that process lets you get the outcome you want—more revenue.