Design and execute a high-impact sales strategy that supports immediate performance and sustained growth.
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Sales Strategy: Build a Sales Strategy That Drives Business Growth
Align your sales strategy to enterprise growth objectives
Sales leaders face mounting pressure from digital transformation, shifting buyer preferences and economic uncertainty. This sales strategy toolkit will help you:
Align your sales strategy with enterprise business objectives.
Assess your team’s ability to deliver on goals and address capability gaps.
Prioritize investments and manage budgets for maximum impact.
Select the right metrics to measure and communicate progress.
Document your sales strategy clearly—on a single page.
Inside, you’ll find a fillable template and a step-by-step process to verify business context, identify urgency drivers, outline critical initiatives and set your sales organization up for both short-term wins and long-term growth.
Download your sales strategy toolkit and apply proven practices so you can deliver on short-term revenue goals and ensure long-term success.
See Gartner research in action at our sales conferences and events.
Implement an effective, sustainable sales strategy amid disruption
A strong, adaptable sales organization thrives on a collaborative sales strategy that adjusts to market changes as it drives retention and growth.
Sales Strategy
Sales Strategic Planning
Capabilities
Unified Sales Strategies
Sales Goals
Connect your sales strategy to enterprise objectives
Strategy defines and creates a common understanding of the long-term direction of the enterprise and what the enterprise will do to achieve its mission. For sales specifically, constant change poses two challenges for CSOs with regard to sales strategy:
Keeping the sales team focused on hitting goals
Responding faster to threats and opportunities with proper forecasting and scenario planning
Change is no doubt challenging, but sales leaders can use it to their advantage. With a sales strategy designed for flexibility, today’s change-heavy environment can present a number of opportunities for growth.
According to Gartner research, executives spend an average of 25% of their time on planning. However, 56% of those executives see their current planning process as a waste of time, and only 31% feel their sales strategies position them to hit long-term goals. There are common pitfalls to success:
Overlooked sales function maturity gaps (see the Capabilities tab)
Failure to achieve clear goal setting
Failure to effectively communicate the sales strategy internally
Clear and actionable goal setting
Sales leaders must develop high-quality sales goals. But too often, effective goals are absent from the sales strategy. This occurs when an organization fails to create clear, outcome-oriented goals that are challenging but also realistic. Sales goals that are too broad, poorly defined or appear to be in conflict with the organization’s values are a common cause of strategic failure.
Ensure a goal development process that incorporates external trends, an assessment of the function and broader organizational priorities. These three inputs may not always be actionable on their own, but they can yield high-quality goals aligned with both business realities and higher-level priorities.
Another critical component to a sales strategy are the KPIs that measure your progress toward your goals, budget your resources, collaborate with other functions and ultimately drive change. When measured and communicated correctly, strategic KPIs provide actionable business insights and organizational intelligence.
However, organizations are awash in data and can easily lose sight of the right questions to ask and the best ways to act on the answers. By simply “reporting the news” — providing descriptive data that quantifies past events — sales fails to provide the actionable intelligence the organization requires. This is amplified by the need to react quickly in a volatile economic landscape. According to Gartner research, 40% of CSOs identify accurate and actionable forecasting as a top 3 internal challenge.
Internal plan communication
According to Gartner research, 61% of executives feel their organization struggles to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and day-to-day implementation. This is because key stakeholders often struggle to understand and build a connection to strategies when they are not communicated effectively. In fact, employees are 77% more likely to be high performers when their level of understanding of goals and their connection to work is higher than when their understanding is low.
An effective way to communicate sales strategy is through a strategic plan — a succinct, one-page document that communicates high-level themes and lists the most important goals, initiatives and urgency drivers. This method ensures everyone agrees on how to communicate the plan as concisely as possible and can also be shared with all stakeholders to bring them up to speed.
Ensure a customer-centric buying experience while improving productivity
A good sales strategy template documents the choices and actions needed for the function to move from the current state to the desired end state and contribute effectively to the enterprise business model and goals.
Successful organizations are moving to a strategic model that spans functions and silos, employing a hybrid approach that leverages virtual and digital interaction. To succeed, sales leaders must cultivate a buyer engagement experience that helps buyers feel confident in their purchase decisions. This requires orchestration across key players — such as marketing, customer service, customer success, product and even IT — through the effective use of technology.
End-to-end revenue growth requires three revisions to today’s type of sales strategy:
A buyer-centric operating model
Digital buying and hybrid selling
An adaptable sales force that can deliver value to today’s customers
Buyer-centric operating model
A buyer-centric operating model requires visibility, collaboration and coordination across all customer-facing functions. CSOs should start by improving collaboration with marketing in six areas: customer profiles, messaging, measurement, enablement, process design, and customer data and systems. Create consistency in messaging and communication across the customer journey so it’s less likely that sellers inadvertently create inconsistencies with what buyers independently find online.
Digital buying and hybrid selling
As the usability and customization of digital commerce platforms continue to improve, buyers will be more comfortable making large, complex, online purchases. By 2025, Gartner predicts 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. The trade-off between digital and human-led channels is a false one. Both channels are necessary and complementary. CSOs must create a sales strategic plan where sellers and digital channels work together to deepen customer learning.
CSOs should invest in a combination of dynamic personalization merged with new seller skills and behaviors that span traditional channels. This is necessary because the multichannel paths that buyers take are likely to include a mix of digital channels, human-led interactions and even hybrid experiences. By creating a system where sellers and digital channels work together to help customers learn, CSOs and their teams can create a customer experience that buyers value.
Deliver value to customers
Buying groups change rapidly and sellers need to be armed with the resources to adapt on the fly. Make buyer enablement resources available that enable sellers to work collaboratively with the buying group. Equip sellers with:
Dynamic customer verifiers
Buyer enablement resources
Sense Making training
Combined with digital tools like:
Real-time conversational analytics
AI-guided next-best actions
Intelligent coordination
Identify maturity gaps to evaluate strengths and shortcomings
Sales strategies and sales strategic plans must be built on a realistic understanding of your team’s capabilities. A challenge for many sales leaders is gaining an objective view into the function’s capabilities to evaluate strengths and shortcomings to prioritize next year’s investments.
A thorough diagnostic exercise is often the most effective way to build an objective picture of organizational maturity. Collecting data from key sales leaders on the capabilities most critical to their ability to hit sales goals can focus planning discussions, accelerate the process and increase accuracy.
We recommend a diagnostic examination spanning the entire sales organization, including account management and growth; customer acquisition and retention; sales and revenue technology strategy; sales operations; sales enablement; sales strategy and design; and talent management. The findings from this type of comprehensive review will pay dividends, both in defining plan goals and in designing actions to take against these goals.
Key resource:
Sales Score — a customizable, comprehensive maturity assessment and prioritization tool for sales leaders
Build influence and secure sales strategy buy-in from the C-suite and board
Today’s B2B selling and buying environment makes executive support of your sales strategy essential. Influence your C-suite colleagues by demonstrating how sales strategy unites the commercial enterprise.
Identify where growth will come from.
Establish how customer-facing teams will collaborate.
Determine how to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with each C-suite colleague.
And don’t stop at your C-suite peers. Evolve your sales strategy proactively with input from the board.
CSOs and boards have different perspectives. Where CSOs typically focus on nearer-term goals, boards have long-term, strategic oversight. Yet many board members have never been a sales or commercial leader. Embrace this opportunity to craft a well-rounded sales strategy.
Use your unique access to direct feedback on the brand, product performance, service levels and competition to craft a well-rounded sales strategy that factors in the board’s perspective.
Be honest and transparent about the state of sales. Take a holistic look at outcomes, such as revenue performance and market penetration. And examine the health of the sales organization, including metrics on seller productivity, turnover and employee satisfaction.
Include customer and partner insights. What do they like about working with your organization or solutions? Where do they feel more is needed?
Align with the head of corporate strategy on messaging, especially around internal disruptors like employee risks, external disruptors like competitors, and macrodisruptors like generative AI. All of these impact sales strategy.
By proactively engaging the board, you can demonstrate sales’ impact and shape an optimized sales strategy aligned to corporate strategy.
Achieve sales goals faster with a multidisciplinary hire
Compared to their C-suite peers, CSOs are in a unique position. Like their peers, they must make big bets for the future in the form of long-term growth — but CSOs are uniquely accountable for near-term performance in the form of sales goals.
On the one hand, many CSOs feel the nearer-term sales results are more significant to job security. As a result, longer-term strategies may lose priority. On the other hand, external risks and challenges, such as talent shortages, supply chain disruptions and economic uncertainty, put a strain on resources and distract CSOs from focusing on long-term growth strategies.
Nearly all CSOs want to dedicate time and resources to planning for the future, but when asked about their priorities, they often cite things like improving pipeline creation or maximizing key accounts. These are all worthy investments, but have a nearer-term bias.
Long-term growth requires an investment that spans long-term initiatives. CSOs need a delegate who has the skills, capacity and freedom to focus on the success of the next year and next decade. To prioritize sustained growth and avoid conflicts with near-term priorities, create a role dedicated to the growth acceleration mandate: the head of growth acceleration.
The head of growth acceleration moves beyond sales strategy to fit into the enterprise’s unified commercial strategy — an enterprisewide approach led by closely aligned go-to-market (GTM) executives who collectively orchestrate optimized customer experiences and maximize revenue potential. The head of growth acceleration leverages a mix of quantitative and qualitative assessments to set sales strategy, inform product roadmaps and prioritize commercial investments.
Although the head of growth acceleration does not necessarily require expertise across all aspects of commercial execution, the role does require a strong appreciation for the common mandates across:
Corporate strategy
Product development
Competitive intelligence
Enterprise analytics
Each organization will require a unique blend of this individual’s skills based on its GTM strategies, company profile and skills gap within the commercial functions. Ultimately, the role is accountable for enabling growth-accelerating initiatives. Additional responsibilities include:
Resolving cross-functional gridlock
Aligning commercial stakeholders
Harmonizing sales channels and the various routes to market
Allocating or mobilizing resources
Unlocking hidden insights
Attend a Conference
Join Gartner experts and your peers to accelerate growth
Gather alongside your peers in Las Vegas to gain insight on emerging trends, receive one-on-one guidance from a Gartner expert and create a strategy to tackle your priorities head-on.
19 – 20 May 2026
Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference
Las Vegas, NV
Related resources on sales strategy
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Sales Strategy FAQs
What is sales strategy?
A sales strategy is an organization’s detailed plan to drive sales performance, innovation and growth by better penetrating existing markets and growing share of current customer wallet.
How can I create a sales strategic plan to drive more sales?
Amid rapidly changing market conditions, use these three approaches to execute strategic sales planning effectively:
Craft an agile planning approach that focuses on a minimum viable strategy.
Elevate strategic proficiency by clarifying who owns what part of the sales strategic plan, and customizing planning activities.
Fortify plans for dynamic environments by pressure-testing plans against future scenarios.
What are some ways to close the skills gap on a sales team?
Changing talent needs in sales requires leaders to work with HR to co-create a robust plan that will secure critical skills. Typically this involves performing a capability gap analysis to identify the skills needed. From there, create a talent acquisition strategy that aligns to specific objectives and can be tracked for progress. Finally, reform the employee value proposition (EVP) to attract the right talent and promote a culture of continuous learning to help ensure that top talent can be developed and retained.
How will AI impact the sales industry in the future?
AI has enormous transformative potential for the future of sales as organizations shift from highly analog decision making to automated, algorithm-based decision making. AI capabilities can align and improve sales processes, identify selling opportunities, resolve sales challenges and boost overall sales performance — all of which have led sales organizations to take an active interest in AI. But reaching this potential requires a firm understanding of AI’s capabilities and limitations, as well as how AI fits into the overall sales strategy.
Drive stronger performance on your mission-critical priorities.