B2B sales is complex and complicated. When you are selling to a business, your usual business tactics and customer service does not usually work. In a B2C environment, the customer may not know, or know a little about the intricacies of the business cycle. And so you have a natural knowledge advantage that makes it easier to pitch your product or service to the consumer.
However, in B2C, the potential customers are more like partners, and they are usually well research and therefore inflexible with respect to their buying position. This means they don’t readily agree on a purchase decision. They want better, more and active participation, points out a SEO company in Hyderabad.
This brings us to the million dollar question – How can you devise a strategy that is effective and offers better conversions? Let us find out.
Use multiple touch points:
A good B2B sales strategy reaches across to its customers proactively. A great strategy reaches out through multiple active channels – outbound, existing customer base, new to business, social media and everything one can think of. The other part of this multi-point touch base is nudging the customer at every point in their journey. Consider this scenario for instance – A B2B customer looks at an advertisement you ran on Facebook that is point 1, and gets directed to your blog that is point 2, clicks on the call to action for a free seminar and registers that is point 3, gets an email and sms confirming his reservation is point 4, then gets a reminder sms a day before the event which is point 5, attends the event and shows interest is point 6. The essence of this exercise is that you have to handhold the B2B customer all through.
Synergies and Share – Don’t work in organizational silos:
This is a very common thing in huge organisations, where data is coming in through multiple sources, 24 x 7 and may or may not be redundant. The danger here is decreased productivity in resources across functions, where everyone thinks they are using the data to their best capabilities. Each team independently interacts with the customers – sales, customer service and product development too in certain cases but because they are not sharing data amongst themselves there is a huge disconnect. Synergies and share – this is the mantra.
Pay attention to the customer journey:
This one is common to B2B and B2C processes. First understand your customer’s journey. Put it on a road map. B2B customers are very different from B2C customers and have unique needs. They are not for the fancy packaging or glitter usually reserved for the B2C consumers. Further within the B2B space, each business has a different need and may want customization at every level. Your aim here is to move the B2B consumer faster through the sales funnel. How do you do this? Once you understand the customer journey road map thoroughly, identify all the point you can touch base, and push them through the funnel. Visualization helps greatly. There are tools that help you create these road maps for easier understanding. Use them wisely.
Use market automation tools:
Marketing and sales automation tools are the flavor of the season, and are a must have. Not only do they help you find, inform and convert leads into sales, you must remember that B2B sales are spanned across a larger time. The returns are in bulk, the time taken is also more. Tools help you simplify processes – right from communication, quotations, legal contracts and reports. You can collate data across streams and get representations with insights on the dashboard. It helps boost ROI and productivity through automated workflows that take care of most of the mundane, repetitive jobs across function, especially sales and marketing in an organisation.
Get a solid strategy:
Last, and most importantly, use strategic selling. Introduced by Miller-Heiman group, this uses an insights driven approach that is identified, then scaled up to solve complex problems, and crack big clients. The central idea of this is the summary of the above four points, which is to identify every single point of contact the customer has through the marketing and sales funnel, and determining the amount of influence it has on the customer. Rank selling channels, and people of influence that engage and target buyers effectively. The next aspect is solution selling. Identify which pain point the B2B consumer is trying to solve and customize your product for his case. The sales or marketing guy of your organisation is therefore helping the B2B customer diagnose and resolve the issue.
Research client’s history, identify pain points, run diagnostic tests, see if your product or service would resolve or fit in for him. Next pitch your product, show him how it would work for his issue. The last step is to solve and seal the deal. The underlying idea is to make the business feel valued, and genuinely interested in resolution. Solution selling has a streak of empathy and it always works.
Alternatively, you could adopt social selling, account selling or targeted selling as your sales tactic in your strategy. What is important is having a strategy, and one that works, says a Digital Marketing Company in Hyderabad.
To sum it all up, B2B sales is a nuanced, customized process that has high returns, is well established but takes a lot of time and efforts to convert. Using the right strategy helps!
