10.7 C
London
Thursday, March 28, 2024
£0.00

No products in the basket.

HomeBcs guide to efficient B2B selling

Bcs guide to efficient B2B selling

Sales teams typically face a few challenges while dealing with B2B customers. The industry has traditionally relied on face to face meetings and lengthy sales cycles. However, with increasing competition and the emergence of a global clientele, B2B SDRs now struggle to balance their personalized sales approach with scale.

A global clientele also means that face-to-face meetings are not always possible. While technology tools make it possible for such conversations to happen in the first place, they are not always seamless like face to face communications are.

In this article, we will go through the three primary segments of a sales cycle to see how to ensure a seamless transaction.

Outreach

Sales outreach has always been a numbers game. Increasing the number of people you outreach to, brings in a larger absolute number of interested prospects into your sales funnel. This contributes to a larger number of paying customers even if the conversion rates themselves stay low. 

Cold email outreach is proven to be more effective in this aspect compared to cold calling simply because the former can be automated and also takes lesser time to reach out to a larger pool of customers. 

However, unlike a phone call, emails are relatively much less regulated and are hence more abused. This means that your prospective buyer has to wade through hundreds of spam emails every day that clutter their inbox. 

Personalizing each of your emails with content that appeals to the respective recipient is key to successful outreach. It’s worth noting here that personalization does not stop with addressing the recipient by their name or their organization. The message has to appeal at a personal level and your personalization must strive towards this. 

Consider using cold email personalization tools that can dynamically alter the screenshots you share, the logos you include and the thumbnails in your messages that are personal to the recipient. This allows your message to stand out from the clutter and thus helps you achieve a vastly improved ROI.

A big challenge while reaching prospects at scale is the inability to uniquely monitor engagement and response of each of these recipients. Knowing when your recipients open their email and what links they click go a long way in making your outreach process seamless. When you reach out to hundreds of prospects every day, reports from such tools also help you plan your outreach better in terms of when you send your messages and what content you include for maximum engagement.

Sales pitch

Once you hear back from a prospect, the next step is to meet them face to face or online to pitch your product. Regardless of the medium you use to pitch your prospect, one of the most common mistakes that sales reps make is being inadequately prepared for the meeting. Understanding what your customer does, what their expectations are, and how your product solves their needs is primary to convincing a customer on the border to convert.

With online pitches, many reps choose to “let the product do the talking”. it is important to let your prospect see the product for themselves. Consider investing in co-browsing software tools that lets the user try out the product and learn why it’s worth buying.

However, what is worth noting is that a demo session is not the time to train your prospect how to use your software. But that is what most demo sessions end up being. A good way to work around this is by capturing your most important pages as screenshots on your presentation and showing your listener what your software is capable of.

This strategy however does not work when you are selling ‘convenience’ to your customer. For instance, take the example of codeless app building tools – these applications add a great deal of value to the buyer by letting them create apps without the need to code them from scratch. However, this message is not rendered effectively until you let a novice programmer (like a marketing or sales head in an organization) use your product and create an application by themselves. Co-browsing allows you to fix this.

Closing a sale and post-sale experience

Your customer giving a verbal approval to the sale is not the end of the sale process. As the seller, it is important to quickly switch to the next steps in the transaction which includes setting up the necessary documentation, getting them signed and passing the order to your operations team for delivery.

Ensuring smooth delivery of your product or service has a direct impact on your buyer’s loyalty to your business, and in effect, the customer lifetime value. Some studies estimate that increasing retention by even 5% could lead to an increase of between 25% to 95% in profits.

Overall, a lot of the inefficiencies in B2B sales exist because of the very nature of the industry. But with the tips mentioned here, a lot of inefficiencies can be removed to build a sales structure that is efficient and also effective. 

Recent Articles