Your sales strategy is failing for 5 reasons. Read and find out what you can do about it.

Sales Managers, Vice Presidents, Presidents, and anyone in position of authority over most sales teams pay attention.

Your strategies and tactics are causing your teams not to succeed.  Let me rephrase that...   You're causing them to fail - fail at closing sales, fail at meeting goals you set for them (another problem all together), and fail at meeting your company's budget. 

It's not that you intend too.  It's that you've been taught that to be successful in sales you have to learn a sales process.  This process is usually a combination of both strategic and tactical tools.

The strategy is the high level overview of your sales process, and the tactical is the mechanics of implementing the strategy.  Sales tactics at their core essence are; find the pain using questions and diagnosis, create solutions matched up to the pain/problems, sell yourself and your company, how to present, how to handle objections, and how to close.

While all useful tactics, if you use them with the wrong top level strategy, your team will fail for the following 5 reasons:

1. Your top level strategy focuses on you, your offer and how to handle buyers
   
2. Your top level process focuses on how you should sell
   
3. Your top level process does not focus on how the customers buys
   
4. Your top level process does not match up the prospects buying motives
   
5. Your top level process does not mirror your prospects buying cycle
   

Notice how each reason is strategy related and not tactical.  That's because the tactics will be right if you match them to the right top level strategy.  So what can you do?

Change your strategic approach.  Find out what stage the prospect is in their buying cycle and match your approach to that stage.  Discover how they make decisions and how they like to buy.  Investigate past purchases/investments and look for commonalities.  Hint, they'll be obvious.  Have open discussions where you're not focused on the objections to come, but rather serving your prospects real needs and projected needs.

If you don't change the top level strategy it doesn't matter what tactics you use, your team will fail.  Set them up to succeed by teaching them a strategy focused on learning about your prospects buying motives, patterns, strategy, history and what stage they're in.  Then and only then, can you and your team apply the correct tactical strategy to close more sales.

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