Creating The Right Sales Strategy: 4 Things Jewelry Businesses Need To Know

A typical jewelry business directly serves the customers. While the mass production sectors may not fall in this category, they also are required to develop effective sales strategies. 

Developing a sales strategy is fundamentally very different than implementing it. You may be successful by following a tried and tested strategy that works for other sectors, it isn’t guaranteed. 

An average salesperson spends only 33% of their time on active selling. 

To minimize that, you need the right sales strategy that revolves around the existing and potential jewelry customers who are momentarily interested in purchasing your product. 

Since jewelry isn’t only limited to specific products and custom options are made available, it’s up to you to understand what your leads want and develop a personalized sales experience for them. 

But first,

A sales strategy is a plan—mostly documented—that targets and sells your products to a segment of buyers in a way that is different from your competitors. 

The fundamental objectives of a sales strategy are to guide your sales representatives, target the appropriate customers, and maximize profit. 

However, to create the right sales strategy, you must consider several elements that contribute to the development of an effective one. 

1. Understand Your Market

Your jewelry business deserves more than hiring the best sales executives, utilizing the best CRM tools, or delivering the best products. 

You need to understand your market.

As a jeweler, you probably are aware of different diamond markets consisting of lab created diamonds and mined ones. Lab created diamonds are the talk of the town lately because they are

• Ethically sourced
• Less expensive 
• Created in weeks unlike mined diamonds
• Real as Mined diamonds

Since diamonds are considered luxury products, in addition to offering the best products, delivering the finest customer service and providing a personal experience is critical. 

While understanding your target customers is the key element, competitive analysis and identifying your value proposition are equivalently substantial. 

Understanding Your Target Customers

Not everyone intends to buy a diamond engagement ring. Even if they do, a plethora of research may follow. 

You need to understand these traits: 

• What your potential customers are looking for
• What their demographic is
• How financially capable they are
• Their age, gender, and race
• Lifestyle, attitude, interests, and personality 
• What their pain points are—where your competitors are lacking

These psychological, demographical, and behavioral segmentations will help you assess the market from a sales perspective. By being equipped with this information, your sales executives can refine their approach to cater to each customer. 

Competitive Analysis

Following your understanding of customers, you need to research your competitors and understand what they’re doing right in terms of sales and where they are lacking. 

For a compelling competitive analysis, determining who your competitors are is the first step. It shouldn’t be very challenging for you as you may already have a faint idea. But doing a SWOT analysis may also be effective. 

Your direct competitors—selling the same product and catering to the same customers—should be the priority, and not the indirect competitors—selling similar products to the same market, but not the same.  

It may be a bit tricky to assess the sales process of your competitors. You may need to indulge in their sales process directly by presenting yourself as a potential customer in addition to doing independent research. 

You want to know: 

• How their sales process works
• Their sales channels and lead management strategies
• How do they offer discounts to interested leads
• Do they operate from multiple locations
• How capable and involved their salesperson is 

Identifying Value Proposition

By assessing your customers and competitors, you should have a clear idea about the direction you want your sales process to go. 

You need to find your value proposition by striving to fulfill the pain points and delivering top-notch sales support. 

Implement this value proposition in your sales strategy and emphasize highlighting it while communicating with your target customers. 

2. Set Realistic Sales Goals

No one benefits from a sales goal set unrealistically high. Neither your salesperson nor your customers, and especially—not you.

Determining your sales goal should revolve around the leads you have and the traffic you get. As stated by Harvard Business Review, if a few of your salespeople miss the goal, it might be a problem with them, but if most of them do, it’s an issue with your goal. 

The first step toward setting a realistic goal is to understand the market potential. If your product is potent enough to survive the competitive jewelry market and you’re growing faster than you can hire, the sales goal should reflect that. 

But, if you, for whatever reason, aren’t getting the desired outcomes, it may be time to assess your marketing and business strategies rather than pushing salespeople. 

3. Clearly Define Responsibilities

For a small business, the ambiguity of responsibilities often limits the potential of sales. 

Only if they had clearly defined responsibilities and were only responsible for securing the sale only, could they generate more revenue for your jewelry business. 

Don’t expect your sales executives to fill out spreadsheets, schedule meetings, do fieldwork, and successfully meet their quota every month. It doesn’t happen. 

Give your sales process the much-needed definition to boost productivity and morale. 

4. Set Navigable Guidelines 

From the first contact to the follow-ups, your sales team needs to be on the same page. Communication and process guidelines can be quite effective to streamline your sales strategy. 

Develop a sales guideline that informs your team about initiating the contact, your value proposition, their bargaining liberty, and behavioral attributes. Without clear documentation, they may stumble upon situations that require your intervention—making them look like amateurs.  

Your sales guidelines should also include the priority of the leads. If you have a system in place that categorizes the quality of leads, the documentation should also reflect how much effort is to be made for each category of customers. 

The Bottom Line

Creating the right sales strategy requires that you understand your market and set realistic sales goals. To understand the market, SWOT analysis, customer profiling, and identification of value proposition are critical. And for setting realistic goals, marketing efforts are to be considered. 

To maximize the productivity of your sales process, promoting a sales process where minimum time is wasted—is critical. Set your sales guidelines by focusing on experience and communications.