THE NEW SaaS NORMAL
How to Keep B2B Sales Rising Throughout the Year
What to Expect from this article:
The New Normal is Emerging
In the B2B world, one SAAS strategy, which is the foundation of all the following strategies, is giving your customers a reason to buy from you in this competitive playing field by increasing the value of your services and products year after year.
THE B2B needs of people are constantly increasing. Keeping apace with their changing needs and ensuring they are aware of your products and services are the basics of the coming year. It’s that simple. But you must be mindful of what you need to do to cover these changing bases. Add to that the ever-changing economic conditions and worldwide happenings that affect your business.
As a business owner, you need to focus your eyes on the road ahead, but you also need to have a plan to pivot when an unexpected turn of events hits your market.
What to Expect
1. Data
B2B data-driven principles will improve lead generation and conversion rates. Customer information is at the centre of this collection of facts and opinions to predict customers’ wants, needs, future behaviours and desires. Data is essential to personalize your marketing strategies.
2. Social Responsibility.
With growing corporate social responsibility and more B2B customers spreading their wings, they are being found on many platforms to show their authenticity and human side. Environmental Social Governance is a growing expectation across the skies of all businesses.
Deloitte’s recent survey of 11.500 consumers worldwide found that consumers took into account companies loyal to addressing social inequalities.
3. Conversational
Which emails do you delete the quickest? If you are like me, those that read like sales essays from faceless monsters. The trend is towards polite, warm, friendly and personalized authentic emails.
As most sales will be made virtually in the future, knowing your buyer and building a relationship via conversations is the trend for the future.
4. Smarketing
Smarketing is the process of integrating a business’s sales and marketing processes. The objective is for the sales and marketing functions to have a common integrated approach.
The function of the Chief Marketing Officer is vital for any organization, and we should see them permanently in the boardroom.
Expect so much more as virtual marketing and sales grow exponentially in unexpected directions. This muti-directional growth will diversify leadership thinking and industry content writing. This will result in CEOs reading more about what is evolving in their industry and perhaps becoming lead thinkers.
CEOs will need to know their specific industry inside out, not only keeping an eye on the volatile worldwide events that will affect them but knowing what lies ahead in the journey forward closer to home.
5. Viral is the new normal
Why have brands spent millions of dollars on TikTok? Most of it is on Influencers. Viral marketing is currently unpredictable – more reason to watch it. Short videos across various platforms exploded into significance in the past year.
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Viral marketing is a trend to watch, take risks, and get involved.
6. Artificial Intelligence is taking the lead.
Over the past years, the rise and sophistication of ever-evolving CRMs have driven automation in the marketing sector. This AI trend will continue to grow into the years ahead and push more into the sales funnel, allowing humans more time to get involved in human-to-human activities. This AI trend will generate valuable data about how your customers behave and what works and does not.
B2B CRM automation is a no-brainer as we move into the new normal.
7. Become agile
Change is part of the new normal. Future work is going to happen in fits and starts. Agile methods bring people together when they have to work together for speed and content contribution – especially to sprint to change a direction.
This could mean taking away hierarchies, simplifying the approval process and getting all departments into the process using AI data and simulations for all contributors to discuss.
8. New normal in Google
In the past, SEO was about content. This resulted in stuffed words into paragraphs to get the top spot. But that has changed. Google now recognizes good content with the help of its sophisticated AI.
What is now important is the “click-through Rate” (CTR). It is a metric used to measure the number of times a user clicks on a link or an ad from the total number of times it is viewed.
Some ways to improve CTR:
9. Outsourcing Digital Marketing.
Social media management and content creation are being outsourced more than previously. B2B businesses realize the value of digital and social media marketing for brand building and lead generation. For this reason, companies turn to professionals to help get them ahead of the game.
Expect outsourcing to continue growing throughout the years ahead.
The key takeaways.
This year is one of uncertainty, and exciting change for B2B marketing trends as the new normal fully exposes itself. In-person, hard selling dissipates and is replaced with viral videos, personalized emails and content diversification. Marketers must be well-versed in the constantly changing new normal and have an influential voice on the board.
Volatility management is becoming critical to the new normal, as are AI automation data and simulations.
Let’s work together!
Jan
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