Creating sales management strategies for B2B companies can be quite a long and overwhelming process. Every day, you have to face tough competition, complete long sales cycles, and finish lead generation to constantly update your business in the changing buyer-seller relationship.
Let’s take a look at some of the sales strategies for B2B business and how you can adapt to the changing environment.
Table of Contents
Understand Your Target Audience
Learning about your target audience helps you understand the new sales opportunities that open different doors for your sales team. According to a research study by McKinsey & Co, a few key trends have emerged in the B2B space.
- Customers expect more from the company: Now, any customer wants a fast, simple and affordable solution. At the same time, they also want highly complex solutions designed by the sales team. To meet those expectations, companies have to create a multi-channel sales model to talk with their customers and understand their needs. For this you should build an exceptional sales team.
- Customers want expert advice: While buying any product, customers seek to get their questions answered by someone who has specialized knowledge regarding that field.
- Customers are looking to seek information through different ways: Instead of doing face-to-face meetings, customers are more comfortable getting information from different sources like telephone, emails, or zoom meetings.
- Companies are using the data to their full capacity: Now, the sales team is taking the lead from customer data and analytics to predict customer behavior, analyze different sales strategies, drive leads and deepen relationships.
Learn About Your Customers and their Needs
A wide range of information about B2B customers is available on the internet. Using different social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, you can study them as much as possible. Through different sources, you can research different questions like:
- What are their pain points, their needs, and wants?
- Is there anything they’re struggling with?
- Who are their competitors?
- Are they hiring for any particular department?
- Any area of their business that is losing revenue or not performing well?
- Any important leadership changes happened recently?
When you have researched their struggles and pain points, you’ll understand how much they want a particular solution.
If there’s an inbound client, you can check their website analytics and determine which areas of your business they are most interested in. Then, you can tailor your email response according to their interest and their requirements.
Also Read: 9 Quickest Ways to Increase eCommerce Sales
Build Case Studies With Your Current Clients
Around 73% of buyers look at case studies and testimonials to decide whether to buy a product. If you haven’t, you should create some case studies based on your past and current clients on what pain points your product helped them, what benefits it provides, how it increases their revenue. Data and statistics include customer quotes and stories, which will help to leverage the data and attract the customer’s attention.
Understand Your Buyer’s Journey
How do your customers make a decision? What factors influence their decision-making process? These are some of the things that help to understand and map out the buyer’s journey.
You should try to understand the different steps, the information they need, along with the number of decision-makers that will influence the decision. Understanding the process allows you to adjust your marketing and sales efforts accordingly.
Usually, the marketing team finds the leads (through lead generation) and passes them to the sales team to follow up with them.
Gather Feedback About Your Product or Service
Asking for feedback is a great way to identify new features and areas that needs developing, if changes in pricing are required, etc., There are different ways through which you can collect feedback:
- Through website surveys
- Taking feedback interview
- Asking questions through feedback forms
- Doing email surveys through your newsletters
Always Listen to Your Customer’s Needs
Just doing online research is not enough to understand your customer’s needs. To know more about their needs, wants and pain points, it’s important to talk with them one-on-one.
Reach out and have a conversation with them. Listen to their needs and ask them questions. Try to ask them open-ended questions and make sure to listen to them more.
Leverage the Value of Content Marketing
Many customers make their decisions based on data and analytics. To educate them and provide them more information about their product, you can reach out to them by providing value through content marketing.
Hubspot has provided some important statistics related to content marketing:
- Google gets around 100 billion searches every month.
- About 71% of B2B researchers start their research with a generic Google search.
- B2B marketers do 12 searches before connecting with a particular brand’s site.
- 72% of marketers mention that relevant content creation is the most effective SEO tactic.
- 47% of buyers read at least 3-5 pieces of content before connecting with a sales team.
- 96% of buyers want more content with input from industry thought leaders.
- B2B companies that publish 16+ blog posts every month get about 3.5x more traffic than companies that only publish 0-4 blog posts every month.
Study Your Competitors
To stand out yourself from your competitors, you have to study them first. You’ll have to figure out their strengths, what makes them the best, any of their weaknesses. Then, you’ll have to figure out strengths in your services where your competitors are lacking and what makes you the best.
Make full use of customer relationship management (CRM) system
Using a CRM system helps you to track progress of leads with emails, sales pitches and calls. You can add analytics integration in your CRM to get access to data so that you can make better strategic decisions. This will help you to understand what you need to measure, what clients need to know so that you can decide the next steps.
Is there any sales management strategy that you should opt for? There aren’t any particular sales strategies but it’s up to decide which strategy will suit your business needs. Different strategies work for different businesses. To define your perfect sales management strategy: you’ll have to take a look into your current sales processes, figure out your target market segments, how many decision makers are involved, how long do you want a sales cycle to be, what kind of engagement do you want and the list of resources available for you to use. Once you define your perfect sales strategy, it will be easy to reach out to the maximum number of prospects with the right message, at the right time through the right channel.
