Sales Strategy in API Growth Framework

A sales plan helps B2B sales teams meet sales goals and engage in direct selling. A sales plan determines who we’ll sell to and how we’ll accomplish it, which is vital to any business’s revenue. Implementing a sales plan improves team performance, targeting, and a closed-won deals ratio.

In order to win in B2B sales, we must be strategic. It also requires developing a sales process so that our team can track won and lost deals methodically. Ultimately, better strategies generate more revenue. As we saw earlier in the digital value chain, APIs are products that are focused on B2B sales, and we'll often work with a sales team as an API product manager.

There are two ways to sell something—inbound sales and outbound sales. We can choose one or the other, or we can do both.

Inbound marketing can be thought of as a sales strategy because marketing materials grab the attention of buyers. Through this process, they already know what our company sells, so they are warmer than outbound leads when they enter the sales funnel. The content is then used to teach, inform, and guide prospects through the process of making a decision.

Outbound lead generation is more about sending emails and making cold calls to prospects. These buyers haven’t shown any interest and often don’t know anything about our company, so it’s down to our rep to convince them that our solution is a good fit.

Many different parts make up an excellent B2B sales strategy, but they all work together. Each piece of the strategy is linked to the others, creating a feedback loop that improves performance and makes the process more efficient.

An effective sales strategy is made up of five parts: