Outstanding B2B Sales Techniques

Hey everyone, Dacia Coffey here and welcome to Wednesday!

This is the written edition of my weekly series called, Corporate Caffeine. 

FYI - I host this series live on Facebook & LinkedIn, post these episodes to YouTube, and have a bonus podcast covering a lot of this content and more. 

So, let's jump right in! 

Outstanding B2B Sales Techniques 

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Is your company having problems converting your B2B marketing leads into sales? Or maybe your salespeople find it challenging to overcome client objections?

Perhaps you're not using the proper sales technique in your sales process. 

We'll discuss part two of the outstanding B2B sales techniques that will help you shorten your sales cycle so you can grow faster and be good to everyone you meet. 

Streamline Your Sales Pipeline

Lead generation is an integral part of your sales pipeline. Lead generation can be cold calling, digital marketing, or other tactics. These techniques, called marketing qualified leads (MQL), generate lukewarm leads.

Lukewarm leads mean somebody is interested and paying attention to what you are saying, but they are not yet ready to buy. 

When you work with your marketing team, there should be a straightforward process for how your sales team will qualify people when these leads get handed to them. You want to ask these questions:

•  What activity metric does the salesperson need to be accountable for?
•  What is the outcome you're looking for?
•  What are the common questions that are being asked?
•  What is the psychological handoff you need from somebody to bounce from high-value marketing content into a real-world sales conversation?

Remember, people love to buy, but they hate to be sold.

Your sales prospect may feel nervous because they don't want to be sold. Identifying the answers to the questions above will help your sales team define expectations and navigate the conversation in the marketing pipeline. 

Garbage in Garbage Out

Your marketing and sales teams need to have a consistent conversation on how marketing qualified leads turn out. Your marketing team should be able to go into the CRM and look at the notes and the success ratios.

This way, they'll clearly understand what's working and what's not.

Human conversations will support this because marketing is all about gathering intel. With recorded calls, you'll hear the exact language exchange happening on both sides of the conversation. 

There are many places for optimization; sales need to validate if those leads are worthy and timely. If they're not, they will never be interested. 

Garbage in, garbage out. 

Marketing and Sales Play for the Same Team

Marketing should strongly connect with sales and feel they play for the same team.

The sales team should be careful not to point fingers at marketers because not only can those marketers get defensive, but they have a right to because pointing fingers is inappropriate.

Marketing is only trying to help the sales team. If you and the sales team constantly complain that the MQLs are terrible and marketing doesn't send anything of quality, then you are not part of the solution. 

You need to be part of the system, and you need to be a fantastic team.

Being a team means you need to appreciate and improve each other. 

Think about how to work with qualified leads and define the metrics on both sides of the track.

When you're moving around the pipeline, handling marketing qualified leads, find out where they are in your prioritization and what else you're competing against from a broad perspective. 

Regular Conversation Is Key  

Timeline is one thing, but be bold and discuss what's happening in your businesses.

Find out what else could be affecting and aggravating problems or standing in the way. Regular conversations can uncover hidden objections.

For example, someone might be trying to allocate dollars to an ERP implementation instead of what you're selling.

There might be an internal competition happening, and it could be something you can advise on both sides of the spectrum on how to navigate.

But you can't help if you don't know what's happening. 

This type of conversation shifts you into a business advisory mindset. With a business advisory mindset, you answer the following questions:

•  What is the maximum impact you can have on business?
•  How do you help people navigate their conflicting priorities?
•  How do these conflicting priorities impact the success of where you are trying to guide them?

If you're talking about marketing leads, they are still in that early situational awareness of:

•  How important do I think this is?
•  What do I want to do?
•  What are my strategic initiatives?
•  Where is my alignment?
•  What is the impact on the business?

In this way, you're looking at a bigger picture. You're permitting yourself to talk beyond your industry in your offering.

It's transformative to what happens because you're bringing in more value before you issue an invoice.  

Tell the Truth When Handling Objections

When you move down the conversation, you'll encounter the sales techniques for handling objections.

When a prospective client says they're concerned about the price, the implementation, the change of management, or the technology, those are not necessarily objections.

Instead, your clients are generous with you by letting you know their thoughts. They're inviting you to be a business advisor and think these through with them. 

Serve, don't sell.

Ask them their thoughts, what's happening in their company, why this is a concern, and if this type of thing has burned them before. 

Make sure you understand where they're coming from. 

After you've understood where they're coming from, the second step is to tell them the truth. Imagine your customer is your best friend, and in addition to making a sale, you want to ensure your best friend is not hurt by the decision.

If the product is not a right fit for them, you want to tell them.

You need to bring that type of meaning, connection, and integrity into that objection because your customers are giving you clear concerns about the success of your product or service.

Be good to them because they're being vulnerable.

Not having objections to handle is the worst possible scenario that could happen.

It's because you didn't create a situation where they could be comfortable enough to tell you things. You must be concerned if you see them nodding "no" late in the sales pipeline. 

Your customers genuinely believe they will receive something of value by sharing their thoughts. 

This attitude is a significant gift to you, so be careful with your language. You can overcome anything, walk through the maze, and figure out the labyrinth together.   

Be a problem solver, not a seller. 

Buyer's Remorse Happens Before They're a Buyer

The second they start to trust you, your customer's fear is triggered. They begin to worry about the risk and the impact of the things that can go wrong.  

At this point, they are in buyer's remorse, and it's your job to help them through that. This is where the no decision piece comes from. It's because sellers are too nervous about concerns that might slow something down.

Those things, when not addressed, will sink your deal.

Your clients are thinking about the implementation. They are future thinking, and they're scared something will go wrong.

You'll have to be there with them and paint a clear, frictionless picture of how things will be successful, how they will prepare, how they can mitigate risk, and how they can stay on top.

You've got to help them get over the hump and into that confident, optimistic posture that will create success once they say yes to you. And all these happen before you close the deal.

Choreograph Closing the Deal 

When you're closing the deal, you should choreograph how you close the deal. In the business of selling, closing the contract has a lot of levers and details.

It also has a lot of dotting the i's and crossing the t's.

In closing a deal, there is a demo or a technical review. There is consensus building that has to happen. There is also the budget and negotiation, and you might need to sign some terms and conditions. You have to go through a Request for Proposal (RFP) process.

You also need to do sales mapping.

When you do sales mapping with clients, you'll often see 3–10 specific actions that need to happen before you get a purchase order (PO) or a check and deliver or implement what you're selling. There might also be some technical reviews or compliance that can slow things down.

Try to stay on top of the game by reorganizing some aspects so you can prepare the client to make the closing a little smoother.

There are also many other ways to make these things easier for the client. There's automation, digitization, checklists, etc.

The important thing is you take the lead to prove that you've done this before. Taking the lead calms the fear and nervousness that happen when a big deal is about to close, so make sure you choreograph your closing process well.

The Truth About Pricing

Once you've been able to build value with your customer, you should have the pricing as early as possible.

If they already see the value of your offering, you need to have the conversation about the budget earlier, especially if they're the decision maker. 

It's essential to give your pricing with context, so make sure you know what you're talking about. Also, emphasize the value it can bring and talk about what the client can lose when they don't make a decision.

Discuss the ranges they see in the industry so they can understand why you're pricing the way you do. 

Educate them about the price and tell the truth because they will hear this from your competitors. They should hear the truth because you can lose the deal on this. 

Give Your Customers Options

Give customers options.

First, when you give customers options, you create space for them to ask better, more intelligent questions because they're looking at different options and saying, "Does that bring value to me? Do we have that covered?"

And, by seeing other options, they're gaining knowledge and becoming a more informed decision maker.

The other thing that happens with pricing is you're presenting options: you versus your defender or just you versus your competitor.

Stack the deck in your favor and give them more information and not less. Also, make sure your pricing models are well-thought-out.

Don't mistake a contract for a proposal.

When presenting proposals, they should be neat, tidy, crystal clear, and brilliantly simple so they can present this to their internal team.

What if you're aligned with everything about how you do business?

This alignment includes how you serve and not sell, bring value to the market, and impact the industry for the better. What if these things set you apart?

These do set you apart. If you work hard to do these things for your prospects and ensure you elevate everybody who talks to you, you can end all sales cycles with a customer, a friend, or both!

Both are great and worthy, and you deserve to have both! 

Are you ready to start converting your MQLs into sales?

Check out our other resources for more tips and advice on how to build effective sales strategies.