Sales Strategy
The Problem: Most organisations build sales strategy, sales messaging, market segmentation, and the audits that test how each performs as separate projects, run by different people, on different timelines, that rarely talk to each other.
The Shift: Sales strategy isn’t one document. It’s an internal audit, an external audit, a clear strategy and message, and a sharp view of who you’re actually selling to, working as one connected system.
The Solution: Barrett’s Sales Strategy & Operations System ties these together: where you stand internally, how buyers see you externally, what you say and to whom, one system, not four side projects.
It's About De-Risking Your Business
No one wants to be the next Kodak. Underpinning your business strategy, sales strategy should sit alongside marketing strategy as an equal partner in building a better business. Yet it’s too often poorly understood and under-resourced, by the time competitive pressure arrives, it’s too late to retrofit.
What Is Sales Strategy?
Often confused with marketing strategy, your sales strategy is how your business organises its commercial effort, across sales, digital, and the buying committee, to reach the right buyers in the channels where they actually research and decide, and deliver real value to the segments where you have genuine competitive advantage. It doesn’t replace marketing strategy; it’s the commercial engine that sits alongside it, increasingly playing out across digital and social channels as much as face to face. Unlike a multi-year business strategy, sales strategy works on an 18-month to 2-year horizon, built to flex as markets, buyers, and technology shift around it.
You can’t do strategy without input from sales
How We Help You Build It
- Commercial Alignment Audit (CAA) – How buyers see you, before they ever speak to you.
- Sales Strategy Operations Audit & Plan (SSOA) – How your strategy and operations actually function internally, across 17 core elements.
- Sales Strategy & Messaging Design – Designing your strategy and your value proposition together, so segments and story line up.
- Sales Market Segmentation & Personas – Defining exactly who you’re targeting, and the individual people inside each account who decide.
1. External Review
Cost of sales activity is rising, differentiation is falling, competition is coming from every direction.
Buyers research and shortlist using AI before any human conversation happens. A strategy that doesn’t account for this is already behind.
Organisations without a current sales strategy see continued pressure on price and margin, and in the worst cases, the kind of disruption that ended companies like Kodak
2. Score & Benchmark
3. Findings Report & Action Plan
What’s the difference between the CAA and the SSOA? The CAA is external, how buyers see you. The SSOA is internal, how your strategy and operations actually function.
Do I need all four of these, or can I start with one?
Most clients start with one audit, internal or external, depending on what’s most urgent, then build out from the findings.
How does this connect to sales training?
Strategy tells you what to do and say. Training builds the skill to execute it. We often run both together, but strategy work doesn’t require a training commitment
Ready to audit and realign your sales strategy and operations?
Barrett Sales Blog
