What is a business strategy?

April 22, 2021 4 min read

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Depending on the model and product or service you offer, your business must have a commercial strategy . This goes far beyond just looking to sell more at any given time; rather, the objective is the sustainability of sales over time to guarantee the permanence of the company.

But first of all, what is a business strategy ? It is a constant and evolving flow of actions adjusted to the needs of each business to increase and / or maintain clients and improve their experience with said business.

For this reason, the commercial strategy must have our customer as the ultimate beneficiary and not our product or service as some think, since sales and customer satisfaction are the engine of any company.

Then the commercial strategy must be tailored to each business, since it is different to market a product, a service, a product and a service at the same time, online or physically, and take into account both climatic, social, idiosyncratic factors and potential eventualities. market as has happened with the pandemic but in reality the list can be endless.

What do we need to know before formulating our business strategy?

• What are your potential customers looking for? The market is always ahead, it is not if you believe that your product is the best, it is if it is the one that customers want.
• Your competitors: What they sell, how, when, where, at what price, what qualities does their product or service have. How can you differentiate yourself if you don’t know your competition?

Variables to use in a commercial strategy

• By product or service qualities, what makes you better?
• By price, more expensive or cheaper depending on our market segment.
• By type of communication, that is, the type of message and channels we use for dissemination.
• By distribution, how do you get your product or service to the consumer?
• By cross selling it means cross selling and is to offer our customers complementary products to what they have already bought.
• By up selling which is an additional sale, that is, offering the consumer a product or service above what they already bought.
• For promotions, which can be time-limited offers to achieve specific short-term objectives, discounts, gifts, 3X2-style packages, point cards or reimbursements, samples or tastings.

It is advisable not to take only one of these variables for our commercial strategy, but to use them in a complementary or staggered way for a comprehensive strategy.

Aspects to consider in a business strategy

• The physical or digital channels that will be used to prospect and get new potential customers or leads.
• Attention, monitoring and statistics software for both past, current and potential customers, generally a CRM ( Customer Relationship Management )
• Sellers: Remember that there are different styles of sellers and that it will be your duty to enhance the capacities of each one to achieve the objectives of the commercial strategy.

What numbers do you need to know to develop your business strategy

• CAC ( Customer Acquisition Cost ): All the inherent costs of customer acquisition.
• LTV ( Lifetime Value ): Lifetime of the customer, if the customer is a recurring customer or is a monthly paid service then the return on investment may be higher but longer than the acquisition cost.
• ROI ( Return Of Investment ): Return on investment, what you invested VS. what you generated.

Metrics

How many leads arrive, how many go to a negotiation and how many buy, with this information we can calculate what our conversion rate is and where we are losing more contacts.

• Set goals and objectives
• Beware of vanity metrics, numbers can be manipulated to enhance the good results and hide the bad, try to be objective.

Attention: It is important to separate each goal into smaller steps to move forward.

Digital tools to aid measurement

There are endless programs and platforms that can help you in this, I leave you only three: