4 Modern B2B Sales Strategies to Acquire Customers In 2023
Turning your cold leads into brand-aware projects isn’t that straightforward today. To ensure you meet your sales quotes without leaving everything to chance, focus on giving buyers what they want; a highly tuned digital experience.
Most people think of B2C or selling to customers at physical retail locations or online when they hear the word “sales .”In contrast, B2B or business-to-business sales refer to the commercial transaction of selling products or services directly to other companies instead of individual customers.
What Are The 3 Types Of B2B Sales Funnel?
Supply, distribution, and service sales are the three main types of B2B sales. Supply rates are the purchase essential to business on a larger scale. For example, a factory sell heaving construction equipment to a real estate builder.
Distribution sales refer to purchases at a wholesale price either to resell to market at a markup or use as feed for new products. And service sales are about offering a specific service instead of a product. For example, many software sells access to the product on a monthly or annual subscription instead of selling the software itself.
How Does The B2B Sales Process Differ From B2C?
While consumers might buy something with a passion, B2B is a massive market with much larger transaction values and longer sales cycles. It is even more complicated as multiple stakeholders and decision-makers within the company are involved. Also, B2B buyers are much more research-driven before contacting a potential vendor. All thanks to the complete access to the internet!
5 Steps In The B2b Decision-Making Process
B2B Sales Funnel used to be much simpler when marketing was responsible for filling up the sales funnel with leads. Now, B2B buyers go through the following steps.
- Identifying a problem;
- Researching it online and discovering all potential solutions;
- Reach out to peer networks, social media, and review sites for recommendations;
- Might click the ad offering a solution and make a buying decision based on all information;
- Finally, contact top vendors.
B2B Sales Strategies for Businesses
Generating B2B sales funnel in this buyer-centric reality cannot be mastered overnight. You can better turn your funnel into a revenue-generating machine by constantly applying the following effective tactics.
Here are our top four suggestions to drive B2B sales today.
Align Sales and Marketing with ABS
A shared view of customer data across marketing, sales, and customer service increases customer satisfaction and maximizes results. Reach out to potential customers using ICP (ideal customer profile), help them in decision-making and suggest the perfect solution before they go for competitive offerings. Align your departments to focus on Account Based Selling (ABS) to keep multiple stakeholders engaged.
For the ABS approach, a multi-channel strategy establishes contacts with multiple stakeholders. To implement ABS, you need to record enough information about your ideal customers or target market in your CRM and easily access the data throughout the company. Such information-based prospecting is ideal for organizations with complex sB2B sales funnel interactions with a higher chance of up-selling and cross-selling.
Moreover, the email marketing team should sync with the social media team to produce personalized content for specific companies, such as presentations, intro videos, eBooks, case studies, and targeted ads. Besides leading to high-value conversions, the goal is to build trust by investing in long-term relationships.
Nurture Leads On Social Media (Social Selling)
Most internet users use social media on their product or service research journey. Engaging customers on social media where they spend their time will let your customers find you there before they embark on their research. The action of establishing your business relationships with the defined target audience is social selling.
Social selling works for B2B businesses because business users now use social media as their primary form of communication. It first focuses on building relationships with prospective companies and then selling. Unlike ABS, it can be done on a large scale without requiring the same level of customization. In addition, social selling and marketing are not the same, as the former focuses on establishing one-on-one relationships, whereas the latter is about advertising messages from one to many.
Therefore, don’t neglect the value of social media outreach and promote relevant content across channels where deeper conversations are more likely to occur. In the B2B context, turn to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and others to engage potential buyers and address their issues.
Create Engaging Content for the B2B Sales Funnel
Strategic, creative content is critical, so your company is inevitably discovered. The best way to attract prospects and capture their attention is to create long-form content that solves every potential issue your customers might have. The first step is to define your audience and ensure the content speaks your audience’s language.
At the top of the sales funnel, content should be relevant to your industry and product or services. Generate awareness of your brand without attempting to sell. As the customer builds trust, they should see content showing your offerings. It could be in the form of actionable blogs, case studies, webinars, infographics, white papers, high-quality articles, demos, eBooks, podcasts, or webinar series.
Finally, the bottom-of-funnel content requires content driven by sales, where the customers make decisions—for example, pricing, competitor comparison charts, datasheets, etc.
Customer stories and testimonials can perfectly drive organic website traffic and generate sales. Moreover, bring the right proof to back up your claim and win deals with a competitive battlecard template.
If each mentioned asset is highly SEO-optimized, it will significantly turn their purchasing decision in your favor. Some actionable tips for making your content more engaging include using customer personas, telling a compelling story, optimizing the content design, and getting the structure right.
To develop your content database, ask the existing buyers about their needs and what they find valuable in your services. Track the queries on search engines and have salespeople share content relative to the buyer’s pain points.
Make Your Website Inviting
After the pandemic, websites are the new customer meeting place instead of conferences and industry events. It is the need of every business. However, not all the webpages guide the same way. Some websites are developed with a thorough understanding of the way how users make buying decisions through websites. In comparison, some websites aren’t designed to meet customer needs and navigate exactly where customers need to be to acquire the products quickly.
The typical contact information and demo registrations do not guarantee a satisfactory online purchasing experience. Such tricks to capture emails only engage a small fraction of the possible chances on the website. However, B2B websites enable us to connect with more leads as the chat platforms proliferate.
Identify the buying intent of your site traffic and get them interested in your product. No problem if all of your website visitors are anonymous. AI-powered software solutions and the chat platform can identify anonymous website users and dramatically increase your conversion rates.
B2B Sales Strategies: Conclusion
B2B buyers aren’t buying impulsively anymore. They make high-value purchases to meet specific needs and think about long-term solutions. Therefore, your business needs to follow all the valuable B2B sales strategies to turn your leads into sales.
So, leverage your website more than ever, as it can have a powerful impact on your sales. Remember, “If you’re not taking care of the customer, your competitor will.”
