Strategy: I don’t need a sales strategy…I’ve a business plan (part 1)

You’ve started your business and you have a solid business plan in place which includes your estimates for the revenue you plan on generating. So why do I need to bother with a strategy?

A Business Plan will help you spend your investment money responsibly, and hopefully give you an idea of how much of this money you can spend on penetrating the market but will it actually help you generate that revenue?

To answer this question, we will use a sporting analogy. Let’s imagine you are a skier, and you participate in local and national competitions. You have the potential to go a long way and succeed - just like your company.

When you enter a competition, you probably set an objective - maybe to win or be on the winner’s podium. Your measurement of success is quite straightforward, namely your final ranking.

Throughout the season you can do things to improve your placement. Work on your fitness, your technique or even your skis. However, the way you do this depends on what type of skiing you do - is it downhill, cross-country, biathlon or something else. They may all involve standing on skis and trying to win, but when it comes to training your approach will be very different. In business, you need to know what market you are in because the rules of the game and the way you prepare will also differ.

Let’s recap what you do as a skier:

·         Set yourself a target (a Result)

·         Work out what you need to do to get there (objectives)

·         Measure your progress through metrics (your ranking)

·         Customise your training activities to the type of skiing you are engaged in. If you do both cross-country and downhill, you will use two quite different programs.

In other words, you have built yourself a strategy to succeed.

A strategy is simply “using the resources available to achieve the goals you set yourself”

If it’s so obvious when we perform a sport, why don’t we want to take the same approach with your company?

In sales, you will typically need to

·         Meet the sales targets

·         Build an opportunity pipeline

·         Look for new markets

But you only have limited resources, so which one should you focus on? The answer naturally is all of them. “Thanks a bunch” I hear you grumble!

One way to look at these is as horizons. This is described in great detail in the book “The Alchemy of Growth” by Baghai, Coley and White.

To explain this approach let’s go back to your skiing and say you are a Biathlon skier (cross-country skiing with a rifle.) You may be a great skier but a lousy shot - so you set yourself a short term objective to improve your shooting accuracy (horizon 1). However, it won’t help you win if you become a great shot but average skier, so you need to have a second target (horizon 2) to continue improving your skiing technique. And finally, you may want to participate in some international competitions next season, for which you need money. Horizon 3 may then be to look for sponsors.

We can take the same approach with our company.

Grow your short-term revenue (Horizon 1), and earn the “right to grow”. Build your opportunity pipeline so as that you can continue to grow (Horizon 2), and look for new markets for your offering. This could be geographical, applications or simply increasing the range of products you have (Horizon 3). These take time and investment, but if you don’t start now, they will never come to market.

Now you have the basics of a sales strategy. In Part 2 we will look at what it takes to make this happen.

Also posted on TOGConseil.com