A sales strategy gives teams a clear path to revenue goals and a framework for deciding where to focus when markets and customer needs shift. That clarity matters more than ever — 81% of leaders say their team’s deals are now more complex than at any point in recent memory. 
This guide covers what a sales strategy is, how it differs from a sales plan, the main strategy types, and how to build one that supports consistent growth.
Table of Contents
- What is a sales strategy?
- Sales Strategy Types
- Best Sales Strategies and Techniques
- How to Build a Sales Strategy
- Sales Initiatives
- Sales Strategy Examples from Successful Sales Teams
- Frequently Asked Questions About Sales Strategy
- Grow better with a smart sales strategy.
What is a sales strategy?
A sales strategy is a high-level plan for reaching revenue goals through targeted selling. It spans a long-term approach for reaching prospective customers and converting them into paying ones.
A thorough sales strategy framework defines who to sell to, why they should buy, and how to move them through the buying process. Building a sales strategy brings together several interconnected decisions. Each one shapes how the team finds, engages, and closes the right customers.
- Target market: Which markets, industries, or customer segments represent the strongest opportunities?
- Ideal customer profile: Which businesses or buyers are the best fit for the product or service?
- Value proposition and positioning: Why should target customers choose this solution over alternatives?
- Sales process and methodology: How will sales reps qualify, engage, progress, and close opportunities?
- Team and channel strategy: Which roles, territories, channels, and routes to market will support growth?
- Technology and enablement: Which tools, content, training, and processes will help reps execute the strategy?
- Performance measurement: Which metrics will indicate whether the strategy is working?
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Sales Strategy vs. Sales Plan
A sales strategy defines the overall approach a business will use to achieve its revenue goals. A sales plan turns that approach into specific actions, targets, timelines, and responsibilities.
For example, a sales strategy might focus on expanding into the mid-market through a consultative sales process. The corresponding sales plan could identify target accounts, set quarterly revenue targets, assign territories, and outline the outreach activities and milestones needed to execute it.
The distinction is simple: a sales strategy sets the direction, while a sales plan organizes the execution.
Why is a sales strategy important?
Research shows that 54% of sales pros feel selling is harder in 2026 than before. A clear sales strategy helps teams navigate that complexity by defining which goals and activities to prioritize. It also ensures consistent messaging, focuses resources on high-potential opportunities, and improves the allocation of time and effort. A well-rounded strategy provides a framework for planning, problem-solving, and managing sales performance as the business grows.
Here’s how an effective sales strategy can help:
- Give your team direction and focus. Strategic clarity helps sales reps and managers understand which goals and activities to prioritize. Since the average salesperson spends only two hours daily on active selling, this shift improves productivity and outcomes.
- Ensure consistent messaging. A holistic sales strategy helps the team deliver a consistent message to prospects, partners, and customers, thereby increasing both trust and effectiveness.
- Optimize opportunities. Strong sales strategies simplify the targeting of appropriate prospects and the customization of outreach, helping the team make the most of every opportunity.
- Improve resource allocation. A sales strategy outlines priorities and available resources, helping sales teams use their time, effort, and other resources more effectively and focus on high-potential deals.
Sales Strategy Types
Types of sales strategies vary in how they create demand, identify potential customers, and guide buyers toward a purchase. Some approaches focus on proactively reaching prospects — outbound and social selling fall into this category. Others emphasize understanding buyer needs and helping prospects make informed decisions. Inbound, consultative, solution, and value-based selling all take this approach. Account-based and partner selling take a more targeted angle, focusing on high-value accounts or new markets.
Outbound Sales Strategy
An outbound sales strategy proactively targets potential customers through seller-initiated outreach. Under this, sales teams identify prospects based on characteristics such as industry, company size, or job title, then initiate contact before the prospect has necessarily expressed interest in a solution. The effectiveness of an outbound sales strategy depends on the relevance and quality of the outreach.
Common outbound tactics include cold calling, cold emailing, purchasing prospect lists, and other forms of direct prospecting.
Most teams approach outbound sales with software such as Sales Hub, which automates repetitive tasks, personalizes outreach, organizes prospect data, and tracks sales activity. Its AI Prospecting Agent, for instance, researches accounts and drafts personalized outreach so reps can execute an ICP-focused prospecting strategy at scale.
Inbound Sales Strategy
An inbound sales strategy aims to attract and engage potential customers by aligning with their interests, needs, and actions throughout the buying process. Rather than relying primarily on unsolicited outreach, inbound sales teams use information about buyer behavior and interactions to understand where prospects are in their journey and tailor their approach accordingly.
Inbound sales strategies typically align sales activities with the three stages of the buyer journey: awareness, consideration, and decision.
- At the awareness stage, a prospect may be identifying a problem or opportunity.
- During consideration, prospects evaluate potential approaches and solutions.
- At the decision stage, prospects assess specific products or vendors.
Sales reps can use the context available at each stage to provide relevant guidance instead of repeating information buyers can find through their own research. This approach aligns best with the fact that modern buyers(71%) prefer to research and evaluate products independently before speaking with a salesperson. Inbound sales reps add value by taking a consultative role, helping prospects understand their challenges, evaluate potential solutions, and determine whether a particular solution is right for them. This helps them build trust and create a more collaborative buying experience.
Consultative Selling
Consultative selling emphasizes leading with relationship-building, being helpful, and positioning the right product once that connection has been established. That focus on relationships is widely shared. Eighty-two percent of sales professionals view building strong relationships as the most crucial and rewarding aspect of the sales process.
Consultative selling involves actions such as balancing questions with insights, building trust through extensive product knowledge, practicing active listening, and letting feedback guide conversations.
Teams following the consultative selling approach can benefit from using tools such as HubSpot’s Sales Playbook Software to surface the right talk tracks and questions at each stage of the deal and simplify the process.
Account-Based Selling
Account-Based Selling (ABS) is a sales strategy that focuses on key, higher-value accounts rather than casting a wide net for a broad range of prospects. With an ABS strategy in place, salespeople identify and pursue specific accounts they believe have high conversion potential.
Under it, sales reps conduct thorough, thoughtful research on prospects to more effectively meet them where they are. The strategy also emphasizes collaboration with marketing. Sales teams lean on their marketing departments to create personalized, targeted content for each account. Such sales and marketing alignment is known to improve lead handoff, messaging consistency, and revenue performance.
In my experience, I’ve seen that while ABS can be extremely effective when done right, it comes with its share of risks. If sales teams elect to forgo reaching out to a wide range of prospects in favor of connecting with key accounts, there’s generally less room for error.
Partner Selling
Partner selling is a sales strategy that involves forming strategic partnerships with related brands. The approach gives a company access to new markets through its partner’s existing client base, without spending weeks or months researching leads and refining messaging from scratch.
The tradeoff is control. The in-house sales team is not the one directly selling to customers — the partner’s team is. That means relying on another organization to represent the brand accurately and favorably.
Value-Based Selling
Value-based selling focuses on highlighting the benefits of a product or service rather than its features. Most sales conversations already incorporate elements of this approach — the difference is applying it deliberately.
To use value-based selling effectively, sales teams need a deep understanding of the ideal client’s pain points and challenges. When done well, it builds stronger client relationships and positions the company as a trusted solution in the market.
Solution Selling
Solution selling as a sales strategy focuses on understanding a prospect’s specific challenges and recommending a solution that addresses those needs. Instead of leading with a product’s features, sales reps diagnose the customer’s problems, explore their impact, and connect the solution to the customer’s desired outcomes.
A solution-selling strategy typically involves discovery conversations, needs analysis, tailored demonstrations, and consultative follow-up.
In my experience, I’ve seen this approach work particularly well for selling complex products and services that require customization, consultation, or multiple stakeholders in the buying process.
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Social Selling
A social selling strategy uses social media and digital networks to identify and build relationships with potential customers. Reps might share relevant content, participate in industry conversations, or research a prospect’s priorities before reaching out directly.
Social selling works best when the focus is on building credibility rather than mass outreach. When integrated with a broader sales strategy, it helps reps identify warmer opportunities and have more informed conversations with prospective customers.
Pro tip: Explore the best sales methodologies to find approaches that complement the strategy.
Best Sales Strategies and Techniques
- Increase inline sales through social media.
- Become a thought leader.
- Prioritize inbound sales calls as hot leads.
- Implement a free trial.
- Don't shy away from cold calling.
- Offer a demonstration of the product.
- Provide a personalized, clear result.
- Be willing to adapt your offering.
- Close deals with confidence.
- Nurture existing accounts for future selling opportunities.
The most effective sales techniques help teams attract the right prospects, build trust, convert opportunities, and grow customer relationships over time. Getting there requires combining the right demand generation, selling techniques, and account nurturing approaches into a cohesive motion.
The techniques below cover the most practical and proven approaches. Each one can be adapted to fit different teams, products, and growth stages.
1. Increase online sales through social media.
Focusing on online sales through social media is one of the best sales strategies available. According to research, sales professionals say social media generates 33% of the highest-quality leads, on par with referrals from existing customers.
As teams pursue different sales channels, tone and voice should be adjusted to suit each platform. Content that blends in naturally with a platform’s style performs better than outreach that feels out of place.
Pro tip: While it may be tempting to follow the hottest social media trend or mirror competitors, discretion pays off. The more reliable approach is identifying where target customers spend their time and focusing there. For some companies, that means advertising on TikTok. For others, it means avoiding TikTok in favor of LinkedIn.
2. Become a thought leader.
Thought leadership is more than a trendy buzzword. It is a sales and marketing strategy designed to position a company as an industry leader, and it requires dedication and cross-departmental collaboration. When done well, it builds a brand narrative that attracts the right leads.
Sharing advice, tried-and-true best practices, and niche expertise are among the most enduring ways to build credibility and strengthen that narrative.
Pro tip: Not all thought leadership content is created equal. Poor thought leadership can undermine sales goals. Before planning a content push, teams should consider who the audience is, what they need to know, and how the organization can help. Thought leaders can come from anywhere in the organization — C-level executives, sales leaders, marketers, and customer service representatives all have a role to play. Marketing, communications, and PR teams should review the plan before anything goes out to ensure it stays on-brand and trackable.
3. Prioritize inbound sales calls as hot leads.
Inbound sales calls should be treated as the highest-priority leads. These are prospects who have already expressed interest — before making a decision, they want information about how a solution will benefit them. Responding quickly and helpfully shows prospects that the team is solution-oriented and respectful of their time.
Pro tip: Every sales team knows its own process best. If pitching with pricing first, last, or somewhere in between has proven effective, stick with what works when prioritizing these warm leads
4. Implement a free trial.
Research shows that 47% of sales pros who offer buyers self-service tools are more likely to exceed their sales goals than those who do not offer them. In fact, a free trial is among the top 2 ways to get prospects interested in your offerings and make purchase decisions. After all, it allows potential customers to test your product before committing. Following this helps create interest while also nudging leads through the conversion funnel.
Pro tip: To encourage users to switch to a paid version from the free trial, consider placing restrictions on the free version, such as limited features or usage caps. That said, ensure that people still have a positive experience with the free trial.
5. Don’t shy away from cold calling.
In sales, cold calling is unavoidable. But it doesn’t have to be miserable. Several cold-calling techniques really work, including HubSpot’s bulletproof cold-calling template.
I would also highly recommend using HubSpot Sales Hub‘s playbooks and conversation intelligence features here. Playbooks allow sales teams to store call scripts for various scenarios, along with other resources, in a centralized database — helping reps adjust their approach on the fly as needed.
Conversation intelligence records and stores calls directly within the platform. The tool then lets reps examine each call and leave feedback at any point in a conversation.
Pro tip: If reps are feeling nervous, have them practice cold calls with one another before making actual calls. In my experience, that can be a great way to boost a sales team’s confidence and get everyone comfortable with the script.
6. Offer a demonstration of the product.
Pitching can be the make-or-break moment in a sales strategy. A sales pitch has to be powerful and compelling without coming on too strong — a pitch that pushes too hard risks losing the prospect entirely.
Studying the elements of a successful sales pitch and crafting a narrative around how prospects will benefit is a strong starting point. Testing presentations with a few loyal customers and gathering their feedback helps refine the pitch and ensure it clearly demonstrates value.
Pro tip: The marketing team can be a valuable resource when building a sales pitch. Their understanding of the audience can help shape a more compelling message for the sales team to deliver.
7. Provide a personalized, clear result.
Prospects want to purchase a means to improve their own operations. After walking through an offering, the explanation of its benefits should be personalized to each prospect’s specific situation.
Value-based selling is an effective framework for doing this. The focus should be on highlighting how the solution helps each prospect in a way that is meaningful to them.
For example, when selling customer service software to a small business with no experience using similar tools, the conversation should focus on how the solution adds value in a small business setting. Explaining how the product has helped large enterprises manage hundreds of employees would be irrelevant and potentially confusing in that context.
A personalized approach makes it easier for prospects to see how they would use the product, rather than getting stuck on whether they need it at all.
8. Be willing to adapt your offering.
In sales conversations, clients may have unique demands. Every company has its own structures and needs, so encountering some variability is only natural.
As Marco Sandrone, a sales leader for the global staffing company Gi Group, explains, “Sales is a dynamic and competitive field that requires constant learning and improvement … that’s why one of the key skills that salespeople need to succeed in today’s fast-changing business environment is adaptability.”
Sandrone notes that adaptability enables teams to adjust to varying situations. Salespeople can then “respond effectively to new challenges and opportunities. It involves being flexible, creative, and resilient in the face of change,” Sandrone says.
You can’t say yes to everything. But instead of immediately saying “we won’t” or “we can’t” to every customer request, make sure your sales strategy (and your reps!) is adaptable and can accommodate your customers’ requests.
9. Close deals with confidence.
How a team closes a sale is just as important as how it starts the conversation. Clear, concise, and firm closing techniques help set the right expectations and deliver on promises. Keeping a list of proven closing techniques helps salespeople win deals more consistently.
Some of my favorite techniques include:
- The now-or-never close: “If you commit now, I can get you a 20% discount.”
- The question close: “In your opinion, does what I am offering solve your problem?”
Pro tip: Forty-seven percent of sales pros use generative AI to write sales content or outreach. Giving the team access to an AI tool can help support sales messaging and speed up the closing process. For a deeper look at closing techniques, download the free Sales Closing Guide.
10. Nurture existing accounts for future selling opportunities.
Account management is a critical part of the sales process. It is how teams foster loyal customers and identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Once a sales strategy starts delivering results, establishing a strong partnership between sales and customer service or success teams becomes essential.
Keeping customers satisfied with a product or service makes them more likely to do business again — and in some cases, to advocate for it proactively.
How to Build a Sales Strategy
A strong sales strategy turns business goals into a repeatable plan for generating revenue. Building one means aligning the right customers, talent, and demand generation activities around a clear set of priorities — and tracking whether it all works.
AI can support these processes by helping teams analyze data, refine goals, automate repetitive work, and identify opportunities to improve sales performance. Salesforce research shows that 83% of sales reps who use AI see revenue growth, compared with 66% of those who do not.
1. Develop organizational goals.
Clear organizational goals are the foundation of an effective sales strategy. Three approaches help teams get there: involving cross-departmental stakeholders, setting SMART goals, and connecting individual goals to broader organizational targets.
Involve cross-departmental stakeholders.
Avoid formulating sales goals in silos. Get input from stakeholders across the organization, as every department is accountable to the company’s bottom line.
Create SMART goals.
SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Setting SMART goals can help teams simplify and track complex, long-term sales goals.
For example, a specific, measurable, and time-bound goal could be to sell 150% of the projected sales quota in Q2. Your internal team can propose this goal and then decide whether it is both relevant and attainable (attainability is particularly important because setting unrealistic goals can harm team motivation).
Connect individual goals to organizational goals.
When building a team-specific strategy, setting goals for individual team members is worth considering. Building ownership and accountability into sales goals helps keep the team aligned and makes the overall strategy more cohesive.
Pro tip: AI agents can help develop and refine sales goals. For teams that struggle to create SMART goals, AI can help build a realistic, measurable plan.
2. Create a customer profile that is tailored to a specific product offering.
A detailed profile of the target customer — a buyer persona — is an essential component of an effective sales strategy. When creating a buyer persona, the focus should be on identifying the right market segment, researching customer needs, and developing a value proposition that appeals to the target group.
Find target markets and segments.
Start by examining the industry as a whole. Getting a clear sense of the ideal customer’s company size, psychographics, and buying process is a useful starting point. Industry trends are worth reviewing at this stage too.
Conduct market research to understand customer needs and preferences.
Market research helps streamline the process and identify which types of research will be most useful. This template can help. Competitor analysis is also worth doing at this stage — understanding the strengths and weaknesses of competing brands helps identify gaps that can be filled for specific customers.
Create a clear value proposition to attract your ideal customer to your product or service.
The product offering should outline the benefits for the target customer. Insights from the customer profile can help emphasize the features that solve key pain points. If a value proposition isn’t already in place, these free value proposition templates are a good starting point.
Buyer personas should be reviewed and updated regularly to stay aligned with current customer trends and expectations.
Pro tip: AI can be a useful tool for building a buyer persona. After conducting research, consider using that information to create a CustomGPT that acts as the ideal client — helping refine messaging and develop a strategy that better resonates with the target audience.
3. Hire, onboard, and compensate sales team members adequately.
An effective sales strategy depends on a strong sales team. Building one requires hiring and retaining top talent, investing in robust onboarding and development programs, and implementing a motivating compensation plan.
Create great processes for hiring new members of your sales team.
Define a list of criteria for sales managers to use when screening candidates. A well-defined job description and competency framework help teams recruit and retain top talent.
Develop sales onboarding, training, and development programs.
Build training and onboarding programs to prepare the sales team to sell effectively and efficiently. Invest in sales training programs to help reps develop advanced skills and industry knowledge.
Create a motivational compensation and rewards plan.
Alongside a strong team, ensure a meaningful compensation plan is set up to motivate and retain them. This must be in line with or exceed industry expectations, and inspire the team to celebrate individual and team achievements.
Add a clear goal and KPIs to your sales plan.
4. Create a plan to generate demand.
The next step is putting together a detailed sales plan for targeting potential customers and increasing awareness of the offering. This may include paid social acquisition, e-books, webinars, and other demand generation activities. Targeted messaging, clear KPIs, and aligned workflows for lead nurturing and follow-up should all be part of the plan. Revisiting and optimizing these regularly keeps the strategy current.
Create targeted messaging and positioning for your target audience.
Targeted positioning creates a foundation for reaching top-priority audiences. It also helps identify the best channels and tactics for each campaign, improving the chances of generating demand and identifying qualified leads.
Add clear goals and KPIs to your sales plan.
Clear goals are critical for tracking the effectiveness of a sales strategy. HubSpot’s sales reporting tools can help teams adjust strategies and improve their effectiveness over time.
Create processes for lead nurturing and follow-up.
Once demand has been generated, the focus shifts to converting it. Not every lead generation opportunity translates into a qualified lead or sales opportunity. Aligning processes with the buyer’s journey helps teams make the most of newly generated demand. Sales automation tools can then manage leads and create personalized follow-ups at scale.
For instance, using pipeline management software within a CRM like Sales Hub can provide a visual, stage-by-stage view of every active opportunity, so teams can prioritize effort and build a repeatable sales process. This can help every rep on the team send the right message at the right time.
Optimize your sales plan and process.
Build in time to review the metrics. Use A/B testing, customer feedback, and sales team insights to further refine the sales strategy.
Pro tip: AI sales tools can help optimize sales processes. Some identify hot leads quickly. Others verify data like phone numbers to make cold outreach more effective. Reviewing the strategy first helps identify the gaps an AI tool should fill.
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- Prospecting Strategy
- Budget
- Goals
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5. Measure individual and team performance.
Tracking performance is essential for optimizing processes and driving future growth. Even teams just getting started should establish metrics, measure progress, and share data consistently across the organization.
Build useful metrics to track sales performance.
Tracking can take the form of quarterly KPIs, weekly dashboards, monthly reviews, or some combination of all three. Whatever cadence works best, the process should highlight the specific metrics the team needs to focus on. These commonly used KPIs are a good starting point for aligning performance expectations with sales goals:
- Revenue targets.
- Sales quotas.
- Conversion rates.
- Lead-to-opportunity ratios.
- Average deal size.
- Pipeline velocity.
Think about real-time performance tracking.
While business KPIs are useful for the long-term, fast-moving industries often need real-time tracking as well. Tracking real-time insights can help to quickly find and address issues, creating opportunities for proactive sales performance management.
To get an at-a-glance look at sales team performance, look into tools such as HubSpot’s Sales Hub for instant visibility. Its Sales Reporting & Performance Management Software helps to analyze and visualize sales data, thereby delivering insights and empowering the team to optimize strategy and hit targets.
Create a process for sharing performance data.
Tracking performance metrics provides the data needed to offer constructive feedback and coaching to each team member. Research shows that sales reps who receive good coaching are 50% more likely to achieve or exceed their quotas.
Regularly sharing and discussing performance data helps the team understand performance gaps. Reviewing performance presents an opportunity to offer guidance and share best practices. Make space for these conversations via one-on-one meetings, performance reviews, or team huddles.
Pro tip: Consider using AI to support sharing performance data and provide coaching. HubSpot’s conversation intelligence features, for instance, help sales managers overcome the challenge of limited time to shadow calls, make it easy to identify performance patterns, and leave feedback at specific moments in a call for reps to learn from.
Source6. Track sales activities.
Solid data is key to an effective sales strategy plan. Track sales activity metrics religiously and go beyond individual team performance to understand the organization’s entire sales operation. To cast this net, collect sales data, track prospect sources, and work on continuous improvement.
Collect a range of sales activity data.
Studying sales activity helps teams understand how they approach day-to-day selling. Tracking everything from the sales presentation to closing techniques gives a complete picture. Comparing this data to goal metrics can reveal patterns, best practices, and areas for improvement.
Pro tip: Sales team performance should be measured beyond call or deal numbers. Activities worth tracking include:
- Meetings scheduled.
- Presentations delivered.
- Proposals submitted.
- Sales presentation success rates.
- Closing techniques.
Track, lead, and prospect sources.
Tracking where prospects are coming from helps focus resources on the channels that generate the most relevant, qualified leads. For example, when publishing thought leadership content or sourcing leads from social media, any shared link should include a UTM parameter.
Focus on continuous improvement.
With a complete set of analytics in place, teams can refine strategies, improve knowledge, and adjust plans over time. Following a clear, data-driven process makes it easier to act on customer feedback and gives the sales team the agility to adapt to industry and market changes.
Sales Initiatives
Sales initiatives give teams practical ways to improve performance beyond the core sales process. They cover everything from updating buyer personas and aligning sales and marketing to centralizing customer data in a CRM and investing in rep development. Together, these practices help teams adapt to changing customer needs and build a stronger foundation for growth.
1. Refresh your buyer personas regularly.
Buyer personas should inform all kinds of activities across the business, including who the marketing and sales teams pursue as customers. As the business landscape shifts, these personas can become outdated, rendering the sales team’s work stagnant and ineffective. Working with the marketing team to refresh personas regularly keeps the sales team well-equipped for prospecting and outreach.
Pro tip: If a CustomGPT has been created for a buyer persona, updating it as new information becomes available helps the team create better sales pitches as the target audience evolves.
2. Actively align sales and marketing.
Aligning sales and marketing starts with creating and honoring a service-level agreement (SLA) between the two teams. The SLA details how each team supports the other, contributes to shared goals, and maintains boundaries to keep prospects moving toward conversion.
Download our free SLA Template for Sales & Marketing to align sales and marketing goals and activities.
3. Use a CRM.
Successful sales teams and strategies require the right tools. A CRM is indispensable in this process.
HubSpot’s all-in-one CRM eliminates manual work and streamlines sales processes and data management. It keeps sales teams up to date on all relevant prospect activity, creating transparency that helps motivate and align the team. When paired with HubSpot’s marketing analytics software, it provides a complete overview of how prospects move through the sales funnel and streamlines operations across sales and marketing.
Source4. Listen to your prospects.
Prospects who haven’t converted yet can still offer valuable feedback. As they move through the sales funnel — especially when they drop off — asking for candid feedback on their experience with the team, and products is worth the effort. Even prospects who have lost interest can surface insights that help convert the next one.
5. Invest in sales development and team-building
The best sales teams align not only with their customers but also with their coworkers. Sales is a difficult career, and without proper encouragement and camaraderie, people can easily become burned out. So, to keep the sales team feeling satisfied and supported, don’t forget to invest in sales development and team-building activities.
Sales Strategy Examples from Successful Sales Teams
1. HubSpot
Founded in 2006, HubSpot has grown to serve more than 306,000 customers in over 135 countries, bringing in $3.1 billion in annual revenue. HubSpot IPO’d in 2014 and has since become one of the most widely used CRM platforms in the world. HubSpot’s sales strategy playbook reveals its success story, rooted in being propelled by the right people, effective training, and impeccable alignment between marketing and sales.
Hire the right people according to repeatable evaluation criteria.
HubSpot started by defining the attributes that made a successful sales rep. The list included strong work ethic, coachability, intelligence, passion, adaptability, organizational skills, and competitiveness.
From there, the team established a repeatable process to evaluate candidates during interviews based on weighted criteria.
Train the sales team by having them walk in customers’ shoes.
The team outlined its value proposition, target customer, common objections, and product features before building a hands-on training program. The curriculum simulated the sales process and gave reps firsthand experience with target customer pain points.
Today, a key part of HubSpot’s training involves having reps create their own website and blog and drive traffic to them — helping them better understand the challenges potential customers face. The organization also uses exams, certification programs, and presentations to measure rep performance.
Once onboarded, reps are tracked across each stage of the sales process. Key criteria include leads created, leads worked, demos delivered, and leads won. These are compared as ratios — leads created versus leads won, for example — to surface where reps need support.
Sales leaders monitor each stage so that when a rep struggles with a particular metric, they can dig into the root cause and take action.
Align sales and marketing.
HubSpot’s sales and marketing teams work closely together to generate consistent leads each month. Marketing has clear criteria for what qualifies a lead before it’s handed to sales, and how many qualified leads to produce each month. Sales knows how long to wait before contacting a lead and how many attempts to make. Every decision is driven by data rather than guesswork.
2. Shopify
Shopify is known for consistent sales momentum and customer satisfaction. Loren Padelford, former Shopify vice president of revenue, shared three principles behind their sales success: hiring great people, treating sales as a science, and building a strong tech foundation.
Hire great people, not necessarily great salespeople.
Hiring right is arguably one of the most essential components of a great sales strategy. Many sales managers, though, are misled into believing they must hire only sales superstars.
At Shopify, they narrow it down. They shortlist candidates for six key traits when hiring salespeople: intelligence, work ethic, a history of success, creativity, entrepreneurship, and competitiveness. Once they find such individuals, they invest in them and coach them up to become sales superstars.
Treat sales as a science, not an art.
Padelford describes how, thanks to modern digital tools, Shopify’s team measures sales down to the second. He adds, “We can explain success with cold, hard data points, rather than turning to vague, qualitative assessments.”
Among other metrics, they closely track average deal size, average sales cycle length, lead-to-deal conversion rate, calls per day per rep, and the number of deals in the pipeline. Over time, each of these metrics provides insight into the health of their sales process and helps identify areas for improvement.
Build a smart, technological foundation.
Before Padelford took over the sales process at Shopify, their sales reps manually logged phone calls and emails in a CRM, which consumed five precious hours each week. With a sales force of 26 reps, that added up to 130 wasted hours per week.
Recognizing this misuse of time and capital, Padelford led Shopify in adopting HubSpot CRM. With this modern CRM, Shopify’s sales reps were able to receive notifications when prospects opened their emails, clicked links, and viewed document attachments.
In addition, the prospecting tool gave reps access to more than 19 million prospects, along with detailed information, such as estimated revenue, number of employees, suggested email addresses, and more.
Maintain a high-quality pipeline by eliminating unqualified leads.
Shopify uses a 4/5 Threshold to filter out unqualified leads, allowing its sales reps to focus on selling to leads with a higher probability of becoming customers. To evaluate whether a lead is qualified, they require reps to have a concrete answer to four of the following five variables:
- Pain. Is the prospective customer experiencing a prominent business issue or challenge that requires them to make a change?
- Power. Is the prospective customer directly involved with the decision-making process? If not, who is?
- Money. Does our offering fall within their budget constraints?
- Process. What’s their buying process?
- Timeline. What stage are they at in the buyer’s journey? Will they purchase within a reasonable time frame?
Frequently Asked Questions About Sales Strategy
What are the four sales strategies?
The four common sales strategies are solution selling, consultative selling, relationship selling, and social selling. Each approach emphasizes a different way to create value and engage prospects. Sales teams often combine multiple strategies depending on the product, target market, and the complexity of the buying process.
What are the five sales strategies?
Five common sales strategies are solution selling, consultative selling, relationship selling, social selling, and value-based selling. The most effective approach depends on factors such as the customer’s needs, the length of the sales cycle, the number of stakeholders involved, and whether the product requires customization or significant investment.
What are the seven steps of a sales strategy?
The seven steps of a sales strategy are:
- Define your target market and ideal customer profile.
- Set specific sales and revenue goals.
- Develop your value proposition and positioning.
- Choose your sales channels and methodology.
- Define your sales process and buyer journey.
- Equip and enable your sales team with the right tools, training, and resources.
- Measure performance and optimize the strategy over time.
These steps create a framework for moving from strategic direction to sales execution and continuous improvement.
What are the four P’s of sales strategy?
The four P’s of sales strategy are product, price, place, and promotion. This framework helps businesses evaluate what they sell, how they price it, where they make it available, and how they communicate its value. In a modern sales strategy, the four P’s are typically considered alongside customer needs, buyer behavior, and the broader customer experience.
Grow better with a smart sales strategy.
A strong sales strategy is more than a direction. It creates a framework for deciding who to target, how to sell, where to focus resources, and how to measure progress. The strategies, initiatives, and examples in this guide provide a starting point — the real work is refining the approach as market conditions and performance data evolve.
HubSpot helps sales teams manage customer relationships, streamline sales activities, and connect the data needed to execute a focused strategy. It’s a practical place to start putting these ideas into practice.
Editor’s note: This post was originally written in April 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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