It is no secret that B2B selling is hard. Sometimes, it can even feel impossible. In this article, we’ll be sharing some tactics for B2B sales across the entire buyer journey. These tactics will surely make you win more customers over, so make sure you read to the end.
What Is B2B Sales?
Business-to-business sales or B2B sales refers to sell products and services directly to other businesses. Compared to B2C sales, where businesses sell to customers, B2B sales can be more challenging. This is because B2B customers have more rules and restrictions within their procurement process.
The Importance of knowing the buyer journey In B2B Sales
The buyer journey refers to the process a customer goes through before finally deciding to buy your product. The more detailed your understanding is of a buyer’s journey, the more precise your messaging, positioning, and branding can be.
Let’s think of it this way. If you are an expert in sales and it’s obvious that your product is the best one, you know that your target market will buy from you.
Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. It is not because most products lack quality, but because it’s almost totally random what markets will go into a frenzy about. A lot of the best SaaS tools out there make fewer sales than fidget spinners.
Different buyers have their own unique journey and it is hard to comprehend. But if you just understand the basics, it will be easy for you to properly model your approach.
A buyer’s journey usually has three stages—Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. Though different buyers will have different journeys, it will all boil down to these broad categories. Throughout these stages, you have to make sure that consumers are online and more informed than ever.
Data-Driven Approach In B2B Sales
Data-driven sales mean leveraging data collected to refine your strategies to win customers. With the data you collect from your sales, you will be able to know what kind of messaging you will do, who to target and what could be improved. Data helps you continuously steer your corporate decision-making.
The Ideal Customer Profile
The ideal customer profile or ICP is the foundation of data-driven sales. It is a set of characteristics that describe your ideal customer. It also contains different types of data that are combined in order for you to identify the best opportunities for sales, real-time. ICP can be also used to qualify marketing leads, to prioritize account activities, or to prospect new customers. Though it is quite challenging, you can derive an exceptional ICP, by looking at all the different sources of data tied to your sales that you can get your hands on.
Targets In Data-Driven Sales Approach
1. Contact Based Sales
Contact-based selling refers to focusing on individual contacts or potentials prospects and nurturing them until they buy the product. Using this strategy, you will have a collective understanding and output of the conversation between the salesperson and the customer. It will also help point out the needs of that contact at that point in time.
2. Account Bases Sales
Account-based selling is parallel to inbound and leads-based sales methodologies. Instead of targeting individuals as leads, this strategy targets the account first and foremost—then identifies multiple potential stakeholders and decision-makers to reach out to. In this strategy, on teams across practically all departments.
Your Sales Process
B2B sales process takes time, energy, and effort to work, but the rewards are definitely worth it.
1. Target Your List
Targeting your list means knowing your customers and knowing when to engage with them. When you target and analyze your best customers, you will know what to do next and you will do it more efficiently. To do this, you need to find your sales navigator in your b2b databases.
2. Engage Them
Next is to prioritize each list that you have and then take some time each day to engage with them. Engaging with them does not mean that you have to call them every day, you can do other strategies like sending personalized emails and posting social media content. When engaging with your customers you have to put these things in mind:
- 300 contact info: You might think it’s quite low but this approach gives you an effective way to focus on your prospects more.
- Drip Campaign: You can run a drip campaign on your 300 contacts first and see how it works.
- Hyper personalization: Make sure that you are going to hyper-personalize your campaign as it results in a higher open-rate.
3. Close Them
If you are doing well in your lead nurturing process, closing the sales is easy. So it is not a one-time process, you have to invest time, effort, and energy in order to educate your prospects so closing would be easy.
4. Grow Them
When your customers buy, the process will not end there. You have to continuously grow them to show them that you are not just after money. You need to let them feel that you want to grow with them.
Cold Mailing In B2B Sales
Cold Email outreach is one effective way to win customers in B2B sales. Check these important tactics you can do to perfect cold mailing in B2B.
1. Keep it short.
Keeping your emails short will create more engagement. It helps readers easily understand the message you want to tell them.
2. Hyper-Personalization
When it comes to Email outreach, personalization is your best friend. Making the prospects feel that you are directly talking to them can gain trust and loyalty.
3. Single CTA
Of course, you do not want to confuse your prospects. So if you are going to add CTA, make sure it is direct and it is what you really want to achieve.
4. Multi-channel follow-up
Leveraging multi-channel marketing is very important in B2B sales as well. It does not just help you connect with your prospects but it also gives you the chance to attain a wider reach.
Conclusion
Knowing what you have to do in every stage of your buyer’s journey will give you endless growth possibilities. Even though B2B sales are challenging, these tactics can be your fuel to grow and be familiar with every aspect of B2B sales.
Gain deeper insights into the world of B2B sales tactics across the entire buyer journey from Carsten, the founder of Sales.Rocks. Watch him in an exclusive edition of Saastrotalks here:
