Your product or service is top-notch and can solve the problems of your target audience. But here comes the more significant challenge- creating a B2B sales strategy framework that will work. Your revenue is directly dependent on your sales and your company’s future.
Knowing how to plan your sales process to get the maximum results is crucial. Let’s find out more about B2B sales strategy! You will find a method and 3 bonus tips to up-level your sales process.
B2B sales process is where one business sells products or services to another company. It is essential to build a proper B2B sales strategy that your sales team will follow so that you can generate effective results without wasting resources and everyone knows what to do. Your marketing campaigns and full-proof plans can go to waste without a proper sales strategy.
The first step in designing any marketing or sales campaign is getting to know the people you want to target. Research what kind of businesses they have and the challenges they are trying to solve. Make customer personas based on your research in this process. These customer personas are artificial that reflect the characteristics of the people you want to sell to. Your sales reps can show better understanding and empathy when they know the person and their business problems.
Some ways to research are client interviews, customer surveys, and social media engagement. You can also study the existing customers by collecting data from your sales team. Dig deep to know the pain points of your target audience so that you can offer to solve them in the best possible way.
This step involves analyzing market trends and your competitors. Research your target market and find out how you need to place your product there. Your competitors are the already available substitutes for your product in the market, and therefore, you need to know their strengths and weaknesses to pitch your product better. Look at whom your competitors are selling to and how they do it. Find your competitors’ weak spots and overlooked areas in the market to leverage them. To analyze your competition, you can check out their website, marketing campaigns, social media, reviews, etc.
You will have to find a way to stand out from your competitors. Today’s customers are well educated, especially when you’re in the B2B market, and they have internet resources to research the product and analyze all their options. People will buy from you only when they find you give them more value than your competitors.
You need to know what pain points you are trying to solve, how you will solve them, why your product is relevant to your target audience, how you will provide customer support, etc. you will have this data if you did the first and second step correctly. Then you need to place these points appealingly to show how you are different from the rest in the industry. Portray your message through social media, newsletters, blogs, and other content forms. Don’t focus on your product’s features; focus on how these features will benefit your customers. Convey what change your product can bring to your customer’s business.
Map out how you will make the first conversation with them and how to grab their attention. B2B buyers are very skeptical of sales reps, so if you lose credibility in the initial stages, buyers won’t waste their precious time on you as there are other sellers. You can automate your marketing and sales processes to get important metrics like open email rates, video views, website activity, etc. You can reach out to people who seem interested in your product. After reaching out, you can take them through the stages of your sales funnel. Based on which stage of the sales funnel they are at, you can send them the right sources and call to action.
Not all prospects are relevant enough to put your time into. It would help if you filtered out hot and cold leads so that your efforts are directed in the most productive direction. Only 27% of the prospects are qualified leads. It is bad to put in the effort and realize later that they don’t have the budget to buy from you. Therefore, it is better to match your prospects with the ideal buyer personas you have in mind.
CRM software applications are used for lead management. These applications let you know what actions your leads have taken and also help you rank your leads. You can assign the hot leads to best-performing sales reps to convert them to clients and put the dead tips in the reengagement category. A CRM helps you to do much more than this. Read more here.
Tailor a personalized pitch for every relevant prospect. It is more productive to pitch nicely to a few highly pertinent prospects than to waste resources and generalize pitches to a broader audience. Make personalized pitches that address the specific pain points of your prospects. You can pitch through live video conferences, calls, in-person, and emails but make sure you talk more about the customer and the value he is getting instead of speaking mundane details about your company and the product. Customers care less about the products’ features and more about what benefit they are getting from them.
The key is in the follow-up. But following up with your B2B buyers is also a dilemma for the sales reps as B2B buyers are business people who remain busy and may get annoyed with excessive follow-up calls or messages. The best following-up technique is to personalize each follow-up message and deliver some extra value they might be interested in. It can be achieved when you have deliberately followed the first step of getting to know your customer.
If you have built a good rapport with your buyer, closing doesn’t require much effort, but if your prospect is still hesitant, you can try to solve their concerns and address their queries. You can give them offers they can avail themselves of by making a fast decision.
In addition, you can also deploy a sales rep application to help your sales team do their jobs the best way possible. Investing in a sales rep application equips you with robust salesforce solutions.
Planning your way with essential business functions is necessary to maximize your profits over time. Your entire business depends on how effectively you can sell your product. Therefore, you should craft your B2B sales strategy framework. In the end, remember that you are selling to people only; build relationships that last long with the b2b buyer. You must show people that you care beyond just selling your product to them. Apply the above knowledge, create a B2B sales strategy, and get on track with your sales process.
You can also read How to calculate and improve the customer lifetime value of your B2B customers while we are on the subject of B2B sales and customer relationships.
