We’ve all been there—you’re trying to book more demos, hop on more discovery calls, and ultimately close more sales. But when nothing seems to be working, and you’re finding yourself stuck in a rut, it's time to step back, reevaluate your approach, and implement new strategies. That’s where a SWOT analysis can help.
A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool that helps businesses and sales teams evaluate strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. However, it can also be used by sales teams to help them to identify:
In this article, we’ll explore the basics of SWOT analysis, go over some SWOT analysis examples, and uncover how it can help your sales team achieve its goals.
The acronym SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This framework is commonly used to evaluate the internal and external factors that impact a business and can be useful for brainstorming new ideas.
Developed in the 1960s and early 1970s by Albert Humphrey at the Stanford Research Institute, it’s still used by many organizations today.
Its four-quadrant design enables it to be versatile enough for any department within an organization to map out what they need to improve, capitalize on, or mitigate.
Now let’s dig deeper into each part of a SWOT analysis:
Utilizing this four-piece framework helps paint a well-rounded picture of the organization's current standing and future potential.
Now that you’re familiar with a SWOT analysis, you’re probably thinking, “Great, but how can I use this to improve my sales team’s performance?”.
Well, the SWOT framework is versatile enough to uncover multiple areas of improvement in your sales team's operations and workflow.
Here are a few examples of how a SWOT analysis can help.
Sales department heads should continuously re-invest in their team’s competencies and education. Otherwise, team members may not be able to perform to the best of their abilities. Plus, failing to invest in training will make team members feel undervalued and unappreciated—which is a recipe for decreased job satisfaction and increased turnover rates.
That being said, it can sometimes be difficult to determine what training type you should invest in.
A SWOT analysis can help sales teams identify where they need more training by examining their internal weaknesses and external threats.
For example, consider the following SWOT matrix for a software sales team:
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
If we focus on the weaknesses and threats highlighted in this example, we can see that one of the sales team’s weaknesses is a limited understanding of competitors' products. This could be an area where more training is needed to help the team better position their own product and address objections.
Additionally, if technological advancements or smaller budgets are a potential threat, training could be done to educate the sales team on how to handle those sorts of pushbacks.
It’s a great big world out there, and finding new untapped markets can sometimes be extremely lucrative for your sales team.
But finding a new market to penetrate isn’t always easy. You’ll need to determine if your ideal customer profile lives in the area. Depending on your niche, you’ll need to investigate multiple demographics and specific factors, a few of which include:
A savvy sales team can use SWOT analysis learnings to get a high-level overview of where to potentially begin looking. Here's an example of how a SWOT analysis can help a small business in the electronic health records (EHR) software niche find new markets to target:
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
Based on this SWOT analysis, the sales team could identify new markets by leaning into the organization’s strengths, acknowledging its weaknesses, and taking advantage of opportunities.
For example, they could leverage their established expertise in healthcare software to expand into related markets. This would allow the sales team to generate more revenue per customer by offering a comprehensive suite of solutions.
Additionally, they could develop marketing materials and use cost-effective solutions such as targeted ads or cold calling to specifically target large healthcare providers. The sales team could then showcase their customizable and user-friendly EHR software as a competitive advantage over more complex solutions.
It goes without saying, your sales team knows the importance of lead generation strategies. They help educate, qualify, and ultimately convert leads into customers.
Not all lead generation strategies deliver results. A sales SWOT analysis helps identify which tactics have high ROI and which drain resources.
Conducting a SWOT analysis for sales team to help discover which lead generation strategies aren't paying off can provide valuable insights. Here's an example for a B2B marketing agency:
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
Based on the company’s weaknesses outlined above, the sales team can conclude that certain strategies aren't yielding the desired results. Primarily, the team has low conversion rates from paid advertising campaigns and limited success with cold outreach efforts.
By focusing on their strengths and opportunities, the team can double down on what’s currently working for them. In this case, that means having the marketing team create more top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel content that ranks in search engines to drive organic traffic. They can also focus on their social media presence while scaling back on paid ads and cold outreach.
With this in mind, the sales team can focus their efforts on nurturing and onboarding leads that come through organic channels. By providing personalized and valuable content to these leads, the sales team can establish trust and build stronger relationships, increasing the chances of converting leads into customers.
A sales team is just that: a team. It can only get better if everyone on the team is able to identify where they excel and where they need additional support.
And you guessed it—a SWOT analysis can help with that.
Let's say a sales team is responsible for selling project management software to businesses in the tech industry. The sales manager decides to use a SWOT analysis to evaluate each team member.
For this example, we'll focus on one team member, Emily.
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
By conducting a SWOT analysis on team members, a sales manager can identify areas of improvement and leverage individual strengths to optimize team performance.
As a starting point, the sales manager could encourage Emily to follow through with the suggestions outlined in this example’s “Opportunities” section.
In this case, a SWOT analysis becomes a type of performance review. It helps in planning what each employee needs and identifies skill gaps or areas of improvement for human resources to address through hiring.
So, you’ve got customers who are happy with your product or service. But you can’t help but think, “What could I be doing to build stronger relationships with them?”
After all, stronger customer relationships typically result in higher annual contract value, more referrals, and longer-lasting customers.
Figuring out how to build strong relationships with your customers isn’t always easy, or top of mind for that matter. However, taking the proactive step of creating a SWOT analysis allows your team to create a roadmap toward achieving that goal. This way, you know what needs to be done and can start chipping away at each opportunity as time goes on.
Here's an example SWOT analysis targeted towards building stronger customer relationships for a company that provides managed IT services.
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
Based on this information, there are a few opportunities for fostering stronger customer relationships.
The company could address the limited personalization in customer interactions by implementing a CRM system. This would enable better tracking of customer preferences and communication history, leading to informed decision-making by salespeople during their interactions.
To improve the onboarding process, the sales team could develop a standardized communication plan that provides clear expectations and timelines for new clients. Regular follow-ups with both new and long-term clients ensure their needs are met and provide salespeople the opportunity for upselling or cross-selling.
To top it off, another opportunity in this example was to host webinars or workshops. This allows the sales team to provide value-added content to clients, further solidifying the relationship and setting up a competitive position as a trusted partner.
Although examples are great for inspiration, sometimes we need a more concrete process to follow. So, let’s break down, step-by-step, how to perform a SWOT analysis for sales teams in particular.
We’ll use a fictional company called ABC Inc. and assume they're a mid-sized tech company.
The first step in performing a SWOT analysis for sales is to decide your objective.
As shown in our previous examples, a SWOT analysis can be conducted on a wide variety of things.
ABC Inc.'s objective might be to increase their sales revenue by 10 percent over the next year. This objective will guide the rest of the SWOT analysis and help them focus their efforts on the areas that will have the biggest impact on achieving this goal.
To conduct a thorough SWOT analysis with the goal of increasing revenue by 10 percent, ABC Inc. will need to gather resources such as sales data, customer feedback, and information about its competitors.
To help organize their information and conduct a thorough analysis, ABC Inc. should use a SWOT template.
A SWOT template basically provides you with guiding questions that will help you identify and categorize your company's internal factors (strengths & weaknesses) and external factors (opportunities & threats).
We provide a full SWOT template a little later in this article. It’s specifically geared toward sales teams, so you can use it to kickstart your own SWOT analysis.
No analysis of any kind is truly complete without value-added feedback. That’s why step four is getting feedback from key stakeholders and management.
Refining your SWOT analysis findings to only include only the best opportunities or highlighting the greatest risks is essential for crafting a well-informed strategy.
After all, if the goal here is to increase revenue by 10 percent, ABC Inc. will want to focus on the methods with the highest chance of success.
Once ABC Inc. has conducted its SWOT analysis and gathered feedback, it's time to move on to the business planning process and start leveraging the data they've gathered. ABC Inc. might:
To help you conduct a SWOT analysis for your sales team, essential for effective sales performance management, we've created a SWOT analysis template complete with guiding questions.
You can customize the template to fit the specific needs of your sales team and use it to analyze your sales performance more effectively.
Now that you've conducted your SWOT analysis, it's time to take action!
Use the insights you've gathered to develop a targeted action plan that addresses your sales team’s weaknesses and threats while capitalizing on their strengths and opportunities.
Set measurable KPIs to help you track your progress and ensure that you're on the right track.
By leveraging your gathered data, you’ll have a better shot at driving improved sales performance and achieving your goals.