As the ways of conducting business continue to evolve, it’s important that companies find ways to evolve with it. That includes reevaluating your industry’s market or landscape and determining which of your strategies are most effective. One key area you should constantly reexamine for a B2B company is your sales department. The most effective ways to approach prospects and close sales are often changing. That’s why it’s important to see how you can update your current B2B sales strategy and which efforts or campaigns you might want to abandon.
There are a number of reasons why reexamining your current sales strategy is important for your business’s success and development, including:
Here are a few sales tactics and ideas that might be helpful to keep in mind as you reevaluate and change your B2B sales strategy:
It’s no longer enough to provide your prospects with helpful products and services. Buyers often expect some sort of immediate value you can offer them. For example, let’s say you sell equipment maintenance services. Before diving in to how you can benefit them after they purchase your services, consider offering them something upfront. For instance, try educating them with some very simple tips on things they can do to prevent unplanned maintenance and how they can determine if it’s time for a repair or even a replacement.
Using this approach allows you to demonstrate your company’s expertise while providing them with insight to do their own job better. Giving them this type of value upfront allows you to increase their satisfaction with your business before becoming a customer or client. A good way to think about it is that your prospects are coming to you with a problem. Explain to them how they can solve that problem and then tell them why your products or services are the best way to do it.
It’s important to understand that when your sales team talks with prospects, they often aren’t coming into the conversation from square one. In fact, B2B buyers are often 57% to 70% through their buying research before contacting a sales representative. That’s because 83% of buyers often view 5 to 8 pieces of content from a business before buying from them.
When talking with a prospective buyer, it’s important to understand that they might have already completed thorough research on the products or services you offer before talking with you. That means, as you reevaluate your current sales strategy, it’s important to find ways to determine where buyers are in their buying process and how to effectively communicate with them at different stages of the buyer’s journey.
Before you immediately reach out to someone at a company, it’s important to be aware of the fact that a lot of businesses have multiple entry points for a sales opportunity, regardless of their size. That’s because a business might have multiple decision makers whom you can contact about the products or services you offer. But contacting every single one of the entry points at the same time might make your sales pitch feel spammy.
Instead, research the roles of each decision maker at the business. Doing so can help you find the best candidate for your products or services and allow you to prepare for your cold call more efficiently. For example, when researching a decision maker’s role, think about what pain points they might be facing, what responsibilities they have, and how your products or services can benefit them directly. This will help you feel more prepared for the sales call and allow you to approach it with confidence.
As you develop your new sales strategy, it’s important to communicate often with your marketing team and collaborate with them to enhance your strategy’s performance. Create workflows that send marketing leads straight to your sales team. Use CRM systems and other data management tools to create a seamless information flow to all your company departments. For example, any time a website visitor fills out a lead generation form, create an automated system that sends that information directly to your sales team.
It’s also helpful to have frequent joint meetings with your marketing and sales teams. Your marketing team can provide insights into what content their leads are most interested in and what solutions they’re looking for. Your sales team can inform the group about what questions their prospects ask on a sales call or what they’re confused about, so the marketing team can develop more effective marketing materials and content.
Whether you’re looking for ways to revamp your sales strategy or you’re hoping to market your business more effectively, Randall Reilly has the tools and the experts to help. For marketing, we offer long-term content marketing solutions for your business, as well as programmatic advertising solutions that pair with our proprietary data to enhance your marketing efforts.
For sales, our data products like RigDig BI and EDA provide your business with expert data to arm your sales team with insights on potential prospects, what brands they prefer, and the knowledge of when they tend to buy. By adding our data products to your B2B strategies, you can improve your marketing and selling efforts. Contact us today to see how we can help your business grow and succeed.
