When a business’s systems work together, sales increase. Pricing, customer experience, marketing, and sales execution all depend on one another. One study found that businesses that aligned sales and marketing saw 32% annual revenue growth on average. When you align the different domains of your business, you can grow exponentially. Sales climb, deals grow bigger, and customer acquisition becomes more efficient.

Below, we’ll explain how a business can increase sales and the core factors that influence sales growth, including pricing, value positioning, demand generation, sales processes, and measurement.

What’s in this article?

• How can a business increase sales in a competitive global market?
  
• How do pricing, packaging, and value positioning affect sales?
  
• How can improving the sales pathway increase conversion?
  
• How do marketing channels and demand generation help to scale sales?
  
• How do sales processes and incentives impact performance?
  
• What factors can limit sales growth?
  
• How can businesses identify and measure the most effective sales growth strategies?
  
• How Stripe Payments can help
  

How can a business increase sales in a competitive global market?

Businesses that grow consistently tend to do a few things well. Four pillars should shape your strategy: market fit, product clarity, customer experience, and sales execution.

Market fit

Effective businesses know what problem their product or service solves, and how it’s better than the alternatives. Their offering fills a straightforward and persistent customer need.

Product clarity

Attractive products are packaged fairly and clearly and emphasize outcomes over features. When customers easily understand the value of what they’re paying for, sales grow.

Customer experience

Good sales flows build momentum from start to finish. They avoid obstacles such as confusing messaging, slow checkouts, missing payment options, and unclear pricing.

Sales execution

Sales grow when a business turns hypothetical interest into concrete revenue. Lead generation, follow-up, pricing, and approvals processes determine how quickly this happens.

How do pricing, packaging, and value positioning affect sales?

Pricing is one of the fastest ways to change sales performance. The cost of a product determines who buys it and how confident they feel afterward. Packaging and positioning determine how customers understand that price.

Pricing signals value

In many markets, customers use price as a shortcut for value. Set prices too low, and you might increase volume at the expense of trust or margins. Set them too high, and sales could slow.

Meet your customers where they are: set prices according to the value they expect to receive from the product, rather than drawing on your own internal cost structures or the prices of competitors.

Packaging offers choice

How you structure your offerings has a huge impact on sales. Effective packaging guides customers toward the option that fits their needs today while leaving room to grow. It might include straightforward tiers, useful bundles, well-defined entry points, or all three.

Value positioning speeds up purchases

Strong positioning focuses on the outcomes customers care about. It tells them how this product will solve a specific problem they’re facing. When the value is clear, customers buy confidently.

How can improving the sales pathway increase conversion?

Customers leave when their experience is interrupted. Eliminating doubt and delay can decrease this kind of churn.

Here’s how to clear the way:

• Reduce friction: Accelerate load times and reduce the number of required fields. If checkout takes too long or asks for unnecessary information, conversion rates can drop.

• Build confidence: Customers often look for reassurance as they move closer to buying. Straightforward pricing prevents last-minute drops, as does easy access to support.

• Offer the right payment options: Payment preferences vary widely by geography and customer type. When customers can’t use their preferred method, they might abandon their carts instead of trying another.

• Increase order size with relevant suggestions: Upsells and cross-sells work when they feel helpful rather than opportunistic. Showing complementary products or upgrades at the right moment can increase average order value without slowing conversion.

How do marketing channels and demand generation help to scale sales?

Sales increase when demand is consistent, qualified, and predictable. Effective marketing creates those conditions.

Focus on the following:

• Create demand in advance: Customers should arrive at a sales conversation with an understanding of the problem and the category. This shortens sales cycles and improves close rates.

• Meet customers where they’re spending time: Customers today move fluidly across search, content, email, social, and events. A focused, multichannel approach increases recall and conversion quality. Repeat encounters also reinforce credibility and reduce perceived risk.

• Optimize for lead quality, not volume: To improve sales, prioritize leads that are more likely to convert and stay. The best-performing teams find their most valuable customers and learn where they came from and how to bring in more.

• Invest in helpful content: People value channels that offer useful information. Produce quality content with thoughtful messaging, and they’ll associate that value with your business.

How do sales processes and incentives impact performance?

Consistent execution improves sales performance. With the right processes, incentives, and tools, effort translates to repeatable results.

Here’s what to do:

• Create a sales process that reflects how customers decide: Sales processes should match real buying behavior step by step. A consistent process also helps teams find patterns, such as where deals tend to stall.

• Focus sales effort on high-value opportunities: Prioritizing leads with real intent cuts down on wasted time and increases sales performance.

• Incentivize long-term revenue: Compensation quickly shapes behavior. Set up incentives tied to sales quality, expansion, or retention to encourage smarter selling.

• Bring in tools: Software tools such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, automation, and analytics can help your team follow up, personalize outreach, and spot risks early. The best tools integrate into the workflow and give teams more time to sell.

• Train continuously: As markets change, competitors adapt and customer expectations shift. Ongoing coaching keeps sales conversations relevant. Over time, it can also improve confidence and deal size.

What factors can limit sales growth?

When structural issues cap demand growth, sales slow as a result. These limits often show up directly in revenue, even though they have nothing to do with the sales team.

Here’s what can slow things down:

• Capacity and capital constraints: Growth requires investment in inventory, people, infrastructure, and marketing. When a business can’t scale or expand fast enough, demand outpaces delivery and sales flatten.

• High customer churn: When you lose customers, you need new sales to replace that revenue. High churn raises acquisition costs and makes scaling inefficient.

• System fragility: Systems that work fine at low volumes often break when that volume increases. Slow fulfillment, brittle technology, or inconsistent service can undercut a sales win by upsetting customers later.

• Market saturation or intense competition: As markets mature, growth requires expansion or new differentiators. Competitive pressure can drive longer sales cycles as well as margin compression.

How can businesses identify and measure the most effective sales growth strategies?

Improving sales growth means making decisions about how to spend money and time. The most successful changes are based on hard evidence.

Here’s how to enhance your strategy:

• Define metrics that reflect real progress: The right metrics show where growth is coming from and what’s preventing it. Specific measurements, such as conversion rates, average order value, deal size, retention, and customer lifetime value, can reveal more than top-line revenue numbers.

• Test your changes: Pricing updates, messaging shifts, new channels, or process changes should be treated as experiments. Before-and-after results clarify what works and what doesn’t.

• Combine types of feedback: Quantitative data shows what happened; customer feedback explains why. Using both leads to better decisions.

• Track the full sales path: Sales performance rarely hinges on one moment. Visibility across marketing touchpoints, sales activity, and post-purchase behavior helps teams understand what moves customers forward.

How Stripe Payments can help

Stripe Payments provides a unified, global payments solution that helps any business—from scaling startups to global enterprises—accept payments online, in person, and around the world.

Stripe Payments can help you:

• Optimize your checkout experience: Create a frictionless customer experience and save thousands of engineering hours with prebuilt payment UIs, access to 125+ payment methods, and Link, a wallet built by Stripe.

• Expand to new markets faster: Reach customers worldwide and reduce the complexity and cost of multicurrency management with cross-border payment options, available in 195 countries across 135+ currencies.

• Unify payments in person and online: Build a unified commerce experience across online and in-person channels to personalize interactions, reward loyalty, and grow revenue.

• Improve payments performance: Increase revenue with a range of customizable, easy-to-configure payment tools, including no-code fraud protection and advanced capabilities to improve authorization rates.

• Move faster with a flexible, reliable platform for growth: Build on a platform designed to scale with you, with 99.999% historical uptime and industry-leading reliability.

Learn more about how Stripe Payments can power your online and in-person payments, or get started today.