7 Techniques to Supercharge Your B2B Sales
Sales reps are always looking for the magic formula to boost their sales output and numbers.
Yet, any expert in the B2B space knows such a search is futile. There is no shortcut to success.
The unfortunate truth is that boosting B2B sales requires a long and arduous process and is a neverending endeavor.
There are many factors to get right in your B2B sales strategy, and even if you hit upon something that works, you can't get complacent - perfecting your performance is an ever-evolving process.
What is B2B Sales?
B2B is an acronym for business to business. So, it follows that B2B sales refer to transactions between businesses - one company sells a product or service to another company. This is instead of transactions where a business sells to individuals, called business to consumer sales, or B2C.
Common examples include a risk assessment firm offering its professional services to other companies or a cable company selling wholesale cable to a construction company.
Effective B2B marketing frequently involves more planning and groundwork than conventional B2C selling. You frequently communicate with multiple stakeholders and decision-makers along the buyer's journey at the prospect company, and the sales cycle is therefore often a lot longer.
Across that long B2B sales process, sometimes taking over a year from lead generation to closing deals, there are numerous steps of the sales pipeline to progress through, with potential pitfalls at every turn.
Let's run through a quick summary of the challenges faced by B2B sales teams.
Challenges for B2B Sales
Here are some of the challenges that sales professionals face along the B2B sales process. You'll need to overcome these to close deals and land more sales.
Building Trust
The modern buyer is increasingly skeptical of sales techniques. Many potential customers have become increasingly familiar with seeing empty promises and overly aggressive sales reps.
They see a sales pitch for what it often is - an unwelcome invasion of their time.
To combat this, your sales team must adopt a customer-centric approach to B2B sales. As a general rule, you need to embrace the mentality that you are not a business selling products but a business providing potential solutions to the client's pain points.
This approach enables a sales organization to build trust with prospective customers.
The Age of Information
Having so much information on hand and utilizing it effectively will be a running theme in this article.
However, don't forget that this is a two-way street.
Other businesses can read reviews and testimonials about your products and services. Key decision-makers will do market research before committing to a significant purchase.
With so much choice in the modern marketplace, prospective buyers can simply take their business elsewhere if your reviews aren't positive.
Make sure you gather social proof to raise people's faith in your company and boost B2B sales. Create case studies, invite current clients to contribute their feedback, and post them on your website or company blog.
Purchasing Can Be Risky
The stakes are often high in business-to-business sales as higher price points are involved. A wrong business decision can have disastrous effects on business operations.
Great sales managers are aware of this and prepare their sales teams accordingly for a long sales process where you may need to reassure prospects at every turn.
Let's examine some of the interconnected techniques you'll need to adopt to ensure you turn as many potential customers into loyal clients as possible.
Effective Sales Techniques
Rome wasn't built in a day, so don't imagine you can transform your fortunes and supercharge sales in one fell swoop.
Implement these best practices to give you the best chance of supercharging your sales in the long run.
#1 Do Your Research
Before making the first contact, do your homework and learn all you can about your prospect. Pay close attention to any challenges and potential friction points for them so that you can directly frame your product as a solution.
Knowing your prospective customer will help tailor your selling process to suit each specific context.
Here are some steps to follow to identify quality leads:
In essence, a buyer persona is a fictionalized, generalized depiction of your ideal client.
Knowing what your ideal client looks like will help you filter out incompatible leads, allowing you to focus your time on leads you want to pursue.
Having a clear buyer persona also enables a sales rep to customize and personalize their B2B sales pitch since they understand their customer on a deeper level.
Make your sales reps do their own research on the company, its products, and its goals.
This research should go beyond scanning their website to get a feel for their vibe as a business. Subscribe to newsletters and follow their social media channels, understand their target audience and ideal customers, and get to grips with their challenges
Knowing their future objectives will help you demonstrate how your solution can help them achieve their goals.
All of this information will prove valuable as you enter into a mutually beneficial relationship instead of a mere sales transaction.
Once you've identified your ideal buyer persona and picked out some quality leads, you'll need to know exactly where they are in the buyer's journey.
Are they at the awareness stage, the consideration stage, or the decision stage?
Whichever stage of the sales funnel the buyer is at will dictate the actions that your sales reps need to take.
If the lead comes from inbound marketing efforts, then there are ways to subtly deduce which stage of the customer journey they are at. Using B2B sales tools, you can check how they arrived at your website, which links or paid ads they clicked on, or if they found you through a Google search.
With this information, you can identify if they are close to a purchasing decision, weighing their opinions, or in need of education. Again, this data can help inform your next steps.
However, for your outside sales reps, those reaching out to cold leads sometimes still through cold-calling or email outreach, they'll need to ask prospecting questions to find out where they are in the buying process.
#2 Align Marketing with the Sales Team
Bring your sales and marketing teams together to work in tandem to maximize potential.
Both teams gather a wealth of information that the 'other side' would benefit from, so it makes sense to ensure everybody is on the same page.
Get your marketing staff to consistently produce content assets and distribute them to the sales team.
Let them instruct the sales team on when and how to nurture a qualified lead using the assets. Your sales messaging should align with the inbound marketing messaging to not confuse the client.
In return, B2B sales teams should give feedback on the quality of leads that marketing efforts generate - do they fit with established buyer personas?
You should set regular meetings to align sales and marketing and ensure their operations coordinate effectively. They should performance-related data through all stages of the sales process.
#3 Always Follow Up
One element of B2B sales is that there are often longer sales cycles.
Show some understanding - many decision makers have annual budgets and so need to wait until a particular time to make a purchase. Be patient, but check back in from time to time to keep the relationship going.
When the duration of a sale sometimes stretches into months, it's vital that you make sure the conversation doesn't lose momentum - that those warm leads don't turn cold over time.
If a lead is progressing from one stage of the sales funnel to the next, reply promptly with clear communication outlining the next steps. You'll perhaps want to get sales reps to respond quickly to clients. You can do this by:
Recommended by LinkedIn
● training them to prioritize their time efficiently
● track response times through a customer relationship management tool (CRM)
● incentivize sales reps somehow
This is where a well-established B2B sales pipeline will stand you in good stead, as sales reps can be precise and confident about what needs to happen next.
#4 Engage Your Audience
B2B sales professionals should engage their audience across multiple touchpoints in whichever spaces they are active.
Many clients head to social media to start their buying journey, seeking information to solve their problems and challenges.
If they're active in that space, your sales teams should be, too.
Build relationships with a network of people involved in your industry. However, try not to see these interactions as sales activities but as opportunities to stay front-of-mind by sharing relevant content that helps solve issues.
Sales teams refer to this as social selling, with an emphasis on the social. Nurture leads on social media by offering insights and meaningfully responding to queries on time without being overly forceful.
Here are the benefits of reaching out on social media:
● You build rapport with other industry professionals and decision-makers
● This rapport makes it more likely a client will reply to your emails or messages
● Interacting on social media humanizes you
● You can at least get name recognition via your socials
● You gain insights into other businesses through employees' socials
#5 Make Full Use of Your Customer Relationship Management Tool
Almost all sales teams utilize a CRM.
A robust CRM automates the handling of prospects, outreach, deals in progress, sales meetings, and practically the entire sales cycle from beginning to end.
Using it well gives you more time to focus on one-on-one interactions with prospects and clients.
However, you should also use your CRM to identify bottlenecks in your sales funnel and act upon those weak links.
Pull up your CRM data on a regular basis and look at:
● Number of generated leads
● Number of calls made/messages sent
● Number of prospects reached
● Number of prospects qualified
● Number of sales (closed deals)
Once you have all your numbers in view, you'll see if there is a bottleneck. Hint* - this is where you should begin your optimization efforts.
#6 Empower Sales Reps
Don't leave your sales teams ill-equipped to perform their duties.
Invest in training programs to empower your team to be the best they can be. Ensure they are fully trained in your sales cadence and know the pipeline inside-out.
This empowerment extends to providing the proper sales tools. With the latest technology at their disposal, they can utilize new software to improve efficiency once they are trained in how to use it.
And, speaking of software...
#7 Automate Where Possible
Your CRM is just the start when it comes to technology that can help with your sales strategies.
You can invest in automation software that helps with all sales process elements, from sales engagement to data analysis.
We've already established that reaching the right people at the right time through the most suitable channels can be a huge difference-maker in B2B sales.
Therefore, leveraging data-enriched insights is a great sales technique to ensure you make the right B2B sales choices.
This is where a sales engagement tool is invaluable.
The primary purpose of a sales engagement tool is to optimize interactions and engage prospects while saving sellers time. It gathers sales intelligence and utilizes the latest automated sales technology to empower sellers and let them thrive.
Let's look at the specifics of what a sales engagement tool like Buzz can do for your B2B sales team:
● Automatically manages administrative chores, such as scheduling sales emails, direct mail, phone calls, and in-person meetings, and automating these operations using a variety of technologies. Where appropriate, provide extra assistance such as email templates. This saves your sales reps time to focus their efforts on other areas.
● Uses vast customer data and historical sales data to provide account executives with all the knowledge they need to manage accounts effectively. With detailed reports and analysis, sales teams can make better-informed decisions.
● Seamlessly integrate with your CRM in one navigable interface, managing everything from one place.
● Comprehensive A/B testing of different sales strategies.
● Ability to customize all workflow management.
● Automated personalized messaging to use that fits with your brand voice.
● Automated email outreach and LinkedIn outreach that tracks multiple campaigns.
In short, sales engagement tools are increasingly becoming a must-have for any sales team looking to supercharge sales.
The range of help that automation can offer sales professionals means that those who utilize these tools have a competitive edge over those who don't
Think about investing in a sales engagement tool like Buzz, with many pricing options available depending on your business' needs.
Key Takeaways
B2B sales is a competitive game, and you'll need to use the following best practices to supercharge sales and meet targets:
● Be aware that the modern buyer is well-informed, skeptical of sales, and aware of purchasing risks.
● Do as much research as possible to know everything about your clients - make buyer personas and map where clients are on the buyer journey.
● Ensure to align sales and marketing teams into a united force.
● Maintain effective communication with clients by following up at the right time.
● Empower your sales reps with the proper training to succeed.
● Utilize social media as a forum to connect with your target market.
● Make full use of the CRM tools at your disposal.
● Supercharge your sales process with the automation power of a sales engagement tool.