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How To Analyze The Profitability Of A New Sales Strategy

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You might have a sales strategy that works excellently for you today, but by next month it might be outdated. And that’s not even considering that there’s no perfect strategy. However, as good your pipeline might be, it can always be better.

This all means that a great sales team must be open to new ideas and methods, embracing a new sales strategy whenever things are starting to lose efficacy. But if you’re going to implement a new strategy, you need to be able to meaningfully appraise it: otherwise, you’ll have no way of knowing how useful it is, or whether it’s even an improvement.

In the end, it comes down to profitability. Here’s how you can analyze the profitability of a new sales strategy to gauge its overall impact upon your business:

Embrace complete CRM

Complete CRM is about going beyond classic CRM methods to achieve sophisticated and wide-ranging integration — bringing every last element of the sales process into one cohesive system. This is so valuable because profitability (as noted) can be tricky to discern in full, and being able to determine exactly which routes are taken to conversion (and how valuable customers are in general, considering more than their specific purchases) is essential.

If nothing else, ensure that you have every type and route of conversion reliably tracked, allowing you to consult the analytics to see the general impact of your tactics. The more data you have at your fingertips, the better you can understand the performance of your business at a representative macro level.

Carefully tally the costs

When trying to determine profitability, it’s surprisingly easy to overlook costs and end up concluding that something is achieving a greater ROI than it really is. If you’re not paying close attention, you can miss numerous minor costs (particularly in large companies with multiple departments that don’t always communicate fully).

You can also forget to consider things like how much time is spent on implementation, or how much productivity is lost or gained through varying stress. Beyond that, you must factor in the post-sale costs, because if you change your sales strategy, it can have effects that ripple throughout your entire funnel.

Imagine, for instance, attempting a move to the increasingly-popular account-based marketing (ABM) approach. When you market broadly, you can follow up broadly, which allows for great efficiency: for example, if you use a proposal template like Proposify to bring in clients, a free-to-use invoice maker like Wave’s might be sufficient for chasing payment (you don’t need anything fancy, just something that ticks the boxes). Even so, it's important that you're able to write an efficient invoice in order to properly charge your clients. 

But if you’re going all-in on client personalization, standard invoicing might not work — that’s where the well-rounded customization of something like the GreenRope Sales Suite really shines.

Here’s the takeaway: adopting a new sales strategy could radically change your entire sales pipeline, even including aftercare. Don’t look at the change in isolation. Review your complete business to trace all the reverberations.

Meaningfully compare to previous strategies

Simply gauging the profitability of your new sales strategy in isolation won’t be that useful, because what can you do with that information by itself? Suppose that it seems to yield 30% profit, all things considered. How does it help you to know that? It’s all about drawing direct comparisons with both previous sales strategies and potential sales strategies.

For instance, if you know that your previous sales strategy achieved only 15% profit, you can feel assured that you were correct in making the change, and can learn some valuable lessons that will further steer your future. If your previous strategy reached 50% profit, however, you can logically assess whether you’d be better served returning to it and chalking the newer strategy down as a failed (but informative) experiment.

Achieving profitability in general may be a huge milestone for a new business, but you always need to be aiming higher — striving to lower your overheads, increase your efficiency, bring in more leads, and make your life easier. Treat every fresh sales strategy as an opportunity to A/B test and draw clear parallels with previous efforts: that way, you’ll be able to keep getting better over time, even as your competitors start to stagnate.

Moving to a new sales strategy is always an invigorating step, breathing fresh life into a business and sharpening overall focus, but don’t get so fixated on the operational changes that you forget the core purpose: making money. How much you like a strategy is only one part of the equation: if it isn’t a moneymaker, it needs a rethink.

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