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:

• Setting up a sales process.

• Implementing sales tactics.

• Optimizing sales performance.

• Establishing data-driven tracking.

• Implementing sales tooling.

Let's dive deeper into each of these.

Setting up a sales process

The first step of a sales strategy for B2B is to step back and look at where a business currently is. By looking at the analytics, we can set goals, metrics, and KPIs and plan how to achieve them.

Start by setting B2B sales goals. How much do we want to make every quarter and every year? Then, custom make a plan based on that number.

Our KPIs and metrics for getting sales are the most critical part of our sales strategy. B2B sales metrics are the numbers we keep an eye on to ensure that we are on the right track. Our job is to figure out which metrics are the most important. Focus on those and work to improve them. If the numbers are going down, we need to do something.

Find the type of person in our target audience who will find our product the most useful; this is our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Look at the size of their company, the quality of their data, and how they buy things. Then, explain how our product’s features will help our target customers solve their problems. This is directly driven as a result of the TAM calculation.

The process of figuring out who our potential customers are, starting a conversation with them, and leading them to the next step is our SaaS sales strategy. The next stage is implementing this strategy.

Implementing sales tactics

Tactics are how an effective sales strategy is put into action. We know how we want to sell, so now we must ensure that we have a process that enables successful sales. How will we get in touch with our ICP, and what will we say?

Creating buyer personas will help us figure out which channels to use, and then create a sales process playbook that will help us get the desired results. User research teams are our partners in defining buyer personas. For example, if we think cold calling is the best way to reach our prospects, make sure our salespeople know how to talk about their problems and how our product can solve them. This will be the sales script or the pitch that sales teams are equipped with to be able to make cold calls.

Lead qualification is the process of dividing our customers into groups to find our best customers and the ones who will use our products the most. Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) will then try to reach out to sales-qualified leads; this process of initiating conversations with qualified leads is called cold calling. The digital part of our sales strategy can complement our cold calling and outbound email efforts. SDRs are also starting to use social media platforms as lead sources, where they can target potential leads with innovative content as well as paid advertising.

SDRs will work with Business Development Managers (BDMs) to develop business relationships or strategic partnerships to complete the most important part of the sales process—making the deal. This will often require multiple meetings and product demos to external stakeholders.