The success of any business can be boiled down to the most important task: making the sale.
However, for many companies, that’s a challenge – closing a customer requires understanding his needs and desires on a deep level and offering the unique value that your products or services can provide.
This is even more difficult in the B2B world, where the customers are more sophisticated and not easily sold on an emotional pitch. Often, to turn a prospective client into a customer, you will need to convince multiple decision-makers at a company, all of whom may require a slightly different approach to get them onboard.
Luckily, there are ways that you can break down the B2B sales process into actionable steps and use them to maximize your chances of success. To get you started, here are ten effective hacks that can help you amplify your B2B sales efforts and ensure that you never run out of fresh customers.
Do Your Research
Most companies have a rough idea of who they want to target – they understand that there’s a type of customer that’s more likely to be interested in what they have to offer, even if they couldn’t clearly describe who he was.
But unfortunately, in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace, that’s simply not enough.
If you want to compete, you need to provide hyper-targeted messages to your audience that speak to their specific problems and help address them. And to do that, you need to laser-in and define your ideal customer, mapping out every relevant detail that affects your sales approach.
The best way to do that is to study your current customers that you feel are the most valuable – learn all you can about their problems, concerns, as well as why they became interested in your services in the first place.
You can then use this information for crafting messages that will grab the attention of people with similar problems, and will allow you to work with the customers that you know you can help the most.
Develop a Kickass Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is one of the best marketing strategies for reaching your target audience and positioning yourself as an authority in the field, which is an essential part of the sales process as B2B audiences are especially careful about choosing who to work with.
In fact, 95% of B2B buyers consider content as a reliable way to evaluate a company and its expertise on a subject, so while developing and implementing a content strategy may take longer than some of the other approaches, it does have massive potential with B2B audiences and is thus definitely worth the time.
Utilize Email Marketing
In order to make a sale, you will likely need to engage your prospects multiple times to build trust and showcase your expertise in the field.
That’s where email marketing can be so useful.
It provides you with the opportunity to nurture and educate your leads, building long-lasting relationships that eventually evolve into them becoming your loyal customers.
However, to reap the most benefits from email marketing, you shouldn’t use it to bombard your prospective customers with endless offers and promotions – that kind of approach rarely works with B2B audiences because they need to trust a service before they’ll be willing to commit.
Instead, you should try to understand where each particular prospect is on his buyer’s journey and try to guide him through the obstacles that he’s facing towards making a buying decision.
If your emails educate your readers and help them understand their problems better than they currently do, that will position you as an authority that will be perceived as someone having the solution to the problem as well.
Start Making Videos
If you want to maximize your chances of converting each lead, you must engage them in different ways to cater to all the segments of your audience.
And with 70% of B2B marketers claiming that videos are more effective than other content for converting visitors to leads, you need to take notice and add video to your content production strategy as well.
But how exactly can you use videos in your marketing?
Well, there are a few ways how you can enhance your efforts using video at various stages of the buyer’s journey.
One of the most popular and effective ways to boost your sales efforts is to use video testimonials showcasing your happy customers. Social proof is extremely important for B2B audiences, and a video of an actual person talking about your services will be much more effective than a text quote.
You could also showcase your products or services in action using video – instead of relying on text to get the message across, you should create explainer videos, demos, or how-to manuals that help prospects understand your product’s benefits and make it more appealing.
If you can, you should try to develop videos that showcase different aspects of your products or services, so that each would be more relevant to specific target audiences and not try to appeal to everyone at once.
Build a Mobile App
If you want to ensure that you’re not leaving out any of your prospective customers, you must ensure that you make it easy to consume your content and learn more about your services.
That’s why, in today’s online marketing landscape, it’s essential to take a mobile-first approach that focuses on providing the best possible experience to mobile users.
The first step to this process is designing a responsive website that’s adaptive to any screen size and is easy to navigate on all devices.
But many B2B companies choose to take it a step further.
In some instances, creating a mobile app can help to provide a more immersive experience for your prospective and current customers, and even expand your list of features if you can offer mobile functionality that helps to make your services or products better.
By having an app, you’re not only providing a better user experience for your customers but also adding yet another communication channel that allows you to reach your target audience, which is crucial for continued growth.
And while the app development process may seem complicated, it really isn’t that different from today’s web design. If you find the right company to work with, it can guide you through the entire process and implement all the functionality that you need to make your app worth it the investment.
Get Feedback from Your Customers
If you want to ensure that your communications and your products remain relevant to your audience, you can’t allow yourself to operate in a vacuum – keeping in touch with your customers and finding out what they think is essential for staying ahead of the competition and making sure that your sales strategies are working.
By conducting surveys or just interacting in person, you can find out everything you need to know about what you’re doing right and what you need to improve. What’s more, people love giving feedback because it makes them feel appreciated and heard, which can help you form a stronger bond with your current customers as well.
Check out: 6 Tips To Get Customer Feedback
Be Active on Social Media
Social media plays a vital role in the B2B sales process because it allows you to expand your reach and raise brand awareness in your market, helping to bring in leads that you couldn’t identify otherwise.
But in order to make social media serve your sales efforts, you need to make it all about your target customers, becoming a part of the conversation that they’re already having instead of an unwanted disruption.
If you can create content that’s relevant and engaging, it can quickly spread through social media, allowing your messages to reach the feeds of the very best customers you would want to target.
But that’s easier said than done – there’s a reason why so many B2B companies choose to outsource internet marketing to a social media marketing agency instead of trying to do it themselves.
But if executed correctly, social media marketing can become an integral part of your funnel and provide you with a virtually endless stream of hyper-targeted leads that already trust you.
Run Lead Generation Ads
To even have the opportunity to nurture your list, you must first have a method for generating leads on demand.
And while organic traffic from SEO, content marketing or your social media efforts do work very well, you cannot ignore the potential of paid ads for quickly adding targeted subscribers to your list.
In fact, with the help of Facebook and Twitter ads, you can collect email addresses of your very best customers without them even having to leave the platform.
Instead of needing your prospects to click through your ads and then find the opt-in box on your website, you can allow them to input their email right there on the social media platform, which is much more convenient.
Obviously, as with any paid ads strategy, you need to ensure that the offer is relevant and compelling enough for them to input their email because otherwise, the costs can rack up quickly.
Don’t Waste Your Client’s Time
As already mentioned before, B2B audiences are typically very sophisticated and resistant to emotion-based pitches. That’s why you can’t allow yourself to waste their time with anything that’s not immediately relevant to them.
These people are running a business just like you, and they don’t have time for emotional stories or wild promises. In the end, they want you to present a sound argument for why they should work with you, see proof that you can solve their problem, and believe that your offer provides enough value for them to be worth it.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t nurture your leads, but every communication that you send out should be aimed at providing actionable information that they can use because otherwise, you won’t be able to keep their attention for long.
Utilize Your Company Email Signature
Your company email signature can be a powerful tool for driving sales when used properly. How can you leverage your company email signature to drive conversions?
For starters, you should have an email signature management tool that lets you centrally manage your company’s email signatures. This helps you to brand and unify the messaging of email signatures company-wide at the click of a button.
To convert sales, you should also add clickable content to your company email signatures, which can be customized for different teams. For example, your sales team’s signature can promote a sale or upcoming events like a webinar or conference.
Meanwhile, your customer service team’s signature could link to a product rating site or feedback form. See how the company email signature in the example below promotes a summer sale.
Always Follow-Up
Attracting a lead is expensive – you’re either spending time and resources developing engaging content or spending money on ad campaigns, so you need to make sure that you make the most out of the leads that you do attract.
That’s why, no matter how you communicate with your prospective customers, you must follow up consistently to avoid them forgetting about your offer or getting snatched up by the competition.
Making sales often takes more than one conversation – B2B customers need to think over their decision and aren’t likely to commit immediately. That’s why it’s up to you to maintain the communications and build a rapport that leads towards them making the purchase.
If you can start developing a trust-based relationship from day one, that can make a tremendous difference to your business by helping to increase sales with loyal customers.
