How to Build a Rocksolid Sales Strategy With 3 Questions
Use the 3Ws framework to build a strong foundation for your sales strategy
Most visionary leaders, especially those in early-stage companies, devise sales strategies intuitively based on their deep understanding of the product and market.
But ask them to put it into words and formulate a blueprint, they’ll probably choke attempting to explain what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
An effective sales strategy uniquely defines how you’ll position and sell your product or service to qualified buyers to stand out from competitors. So you can safely skip the “erms” and “uhs” when asked about your plan.
That’s the thing about an intuitive sales strategy: it’s tailored to your memory and experiences–not anyone else’s. So, when you’re working with different minds, forecasting, and pitching to clients, your team can get caught in an ambiguous fog, trying to guess who buys what and why. The chaos will wreak havoc on your sales before you can even get off the ground.
That’s why you need to formulate a thorough sales strategy. For that, you need to ask the right questions–this article covers that.
Using The 3Ws Framework
A well-defined and articulated sales strategy is the key to having an effective sales department (and company). It’s not a suggestion: it’s a requirement. Sustainable results come from a strategy everyone can get behind.
The first step to a well-structured sales strategy is asking the right questions–in the right order and with accurate, actionable answers.
Amos Schwartzfarb is the Managing Director of Austin’s Techstars Accelerator (leading startup accelerator for over 15 years, with $15.7B total funding to date), and in his book Sell More Faster, he recommends the W3 framework for startups as the first step to developing a sales strategy.
This expert-backed framework is what separates an organized startup from a poorly structured one because it allows you to organize ideas and holistically set expectations, goals, and strategies.
A startup’s game-plan is more than the founder’s intuition; the 3Ws helps translate blurry thoughts from one mind to definitive information everyone can understand and execute.
So, what are the 3Ws? It’s an acronym that represents three critical elements of a sale:
- WHO are you selling to?
- WHAT are they buying?
- WHY are they buying it?
As you go through each subsection, you’ll find that there are multiple supplementary questions that help answer the original question. It’s highly recommended that you take a pen and paper and write an explicit answer for each question.
Once you have everything painted out, you’ll be surprised at how helpful the documented game-plan is in keeping your team on track with the right goals.
WHO are you selling to?
Fleshing out a precise customer persona will help you highlight and appeal to a prospect’s specific interests and needs to deliver real value and win over market share. Understanding your customers will also help build a stronger rapport, which will inspire brand loyalty.
To begin, identify your target industry. Which segment(s) will get the most value? What’s your strategy for identifying and prioritizing targets (interest/demographic targeting)? Within each company, who is the target buyer? What makes the target buyer or company you’re selling to unique?
When building out your customer persona, see that you keep these two best practices in mind:
- Get granular. Fit your customer persona to the bone. That means building out a company profile: start with industry, geolocation, installed tech stack, company size (revenue, # of employees). Then comes the decision maker profile: target the prospect’s title, geolocation, skillset, seniority, and department.
NOTE: Granularity may seem limiting for your market potential, but what you’re really doing is building your business around exactly the right customers to buy your product. After scaling, you can serve a broader range of buyers with more data on your side.
- Try and disprove it. After you build a customer profile, prove yourself right by trying to prove yourself wrong. Interview at least 20–30 companies and ask if yourself: is the defined customer segment accurate? Are they short-term customers? Will you sell faster or for more money to someone else?
Knowing exactly who you’re selling to will help your team create a relevant sales and marketing strategy catered to their pain points. Happy customers mean successful, sustainable sales.
WHAT are they buying?
You worked hard to develop your product, and you probably have your own perception of what you want your product to be. The truth is, the customer may see it as something else entirely.
Ultimately, positioning your product or service in a desirable light to them will prompt more purchases.
A successful sales strategy will require you to differentiate between what you intend to sell and what the customer actually perceives the product as.
The following are some questions you want to be answered for that case:
- Write down what you’re selling. What’s the problem you’re trying to fix?
- Write down what they’re buying. How does the customer see your product in terms of value? Interview people if you have to.
- If you’re selling something different from what they’re buying, write it down.
Once you understand the product you’re selling, pair it with your customer persona and sell to their exact pain points with the right features of your product or service. It will make the customer go “this is exactly what I need.”
WHY are they buying it?
If you recall back to when you bought something, do you remember trying to justify the purchase? You likely asked yourself why you needed it and answered reasonably before buying it–even if it was a split-second subconscious decision, it happened.
Similarly, when your buyers ask the same question, you need to be there to make them damn sure of their purchase. Show them why they need your product or service. People are more likely to buy something seemingly valuable because it’s a justifiable and logical purchasing decision.
So, ask yourself: What’s your value to the buyer? What value do you bring to the company? How will the company measure it? How will they themselves be measured on that value? How will you measure the value you bring?
- Make a list of why you think they’ll buy your product.
- Write down why the customer actually buys your product.
- If there’s a difference between what you think they’ll buy and what they actually buy, write it down.
Once you know exactly why a customer would be interested in your product or service, you can accurately meet their needs. You can eliminate the strategies you had in place for why you thought people would want it and instead employ more effective customer-centric tactics.
Suppose you answer those three core elements clearly. In that case, your customers, employees, executives, and investors will see why you’re worth working with -and you’ll be one step closer to having a scalable strategy and building a world-class business.
You may still be wondering how important asking the 3Ws is. The following section outlines three main reasons why you should follow the framework.
The Importance of a Sales Strategy: Why You Need One.
This all may seem a little pointless to you. You might think, “I have everything in my head, I don’t need any of this.” You would be making a rookie mistake. If you want to uplift your startup, you can’t follow the average mindset. The following three reasons are a large part of why startups with a sales strategy see more success and coordination than ones without:
Employee Alignment
You can’t develop effective tools for employees to be successful long term without a system. Workers won’t understand direction, the team won’t be aligned, and managers can’t provide practical tools to make sure they’re successful long term. This will lead to poor strategy execution and impact your company’s sales.
Missing Out on Valuable Insight & Advice
If founders keep their strategy in their heads, not only does it become difficult for everyone to execute it properly, but it closes opportunities for criticism from outside minds. Senior leadership can have valuable lessons and expertise to share if they read your answers to the 3Ws.
And, without definitive answers in a sales plan, founders, senior leadership, and board members may find it difficult to align with the company vision because they may have different ideas. When you lack clarity about what you do and why it becomes nearly impossible to work together.
Avoid Rocky Relationships with Investors
Last but not least, investors will have a difficult time understanding how your company plans to grow and scale if your sales strategy is unclear. You may lose valuable funding capital and miss out on insight with no sales strategy to critique. Furthermore, investors may own a controlling portion of the company and, if you don’t have a plan, they may turn it into something they see fit.
Parting Words
W3 applies to every company, no matter what stage or customer. Whether you’re making enterprise software, consumer apps, or CPG products, you need a sales strategy.
The first step into developing a proper sales strategy is to ask the right questions. The framework provided in this article helps you do that. Not only will you coordinate your sales team more efficiently and generate better results, but formulating a sales plan can help you holistically understand your product and its impact more than keeping it stored in your head.
