B2B Sales Top Challenges: Sales Funnel Optimization

The buyer’s journey is the process that your leads go through: it involves getting to know your brand, thinking about and evaluating a potential purchase, and finally deciding to purchase your product or service.

This process should form the basis of your sales funnel: it’s how you understand what your users are looking for, what experience they expect to have, and what information they need to complete the purchase.

Decision-making process and its speed

The speed of decision-making in B2C and B2B businesses differs significantly. In B2C businesses targeting end consumers, the buying process is usually fast: the customer sees an advertisement for a product, compares offers, makes an order and receives the product. When buying expensive goods, it may be longer, but in any case it is much shorter than in the B2B area.

In B2B areas, the decision-making process is more complex and slower. The sales funnel includes many stages, and the decision to close a deal is often made collegially. Different individuals may be involved at different stages – purchasing managers, CFOs and business owners. Consequently, the sales funnel for B2B may include negotiations with each of the decision makers, preparation of commercial proposals, calculation of the final cost, etc.

What tactics are recommended at each stage of the sales funnel?

A sales funnel consists of four stages, each reflecting a specific period of the buyer’s journey:

• Brand awareness and brand recognition is the top of the sales funnel.
• Interest in the brand and thinking about the purchase is the middle.
• Decision making and the conversion stage is the bottom of the funnel.
• The customer retention and loyalty phase is the post-sale or post-funnel phase.

For each of these phases, there are several tactics that you can use to successfully move potential buyers to the bottom of the funnel.

1.         Top of the sales funnel: the brand awareness phase

Potential customers have their own pain points and problems that they need to solve. At this stage, they’re trying to figure out if your business can help them meet those challenges.

That’s why at this stage of the funnel, it’s crucial for you to clearly communicate to them what your business is about, as well as provide a B2B digital presentation and content that will help users learn more about you.

Recommended tactics for this stage of the sales funnel include:

• Use concise and informative texts to talk about your benefits. At this stage of his journey, a potential customer wants to know what your product can do for him. You need to convey this to him as quickly and informatively as possible: to do this, focus on writing short texts for product pages that clearly emphasize the benefits of your brand.
• Use video. Videos are very good at persuading customers: statistically, 90% of consumers say that watching product videos helps them make a purchase decision, and integrating videos into email campaigns results in a 200-300% increase in clicks. Most users would rather watch a video than read text; that’s why when you add videos showing your products in action, you provide more information to your audience.
• Write catchy and useful articles for your blog. Many companies don’t have blogs of their own, which is surprising considering how effective blogs are for providing information to prospects and improving SEO.

2.         Middle of the sales funnel: the purchase consideration stage

When your business finally manages to attract targeted and extremely valuable users with the help of online prospecting solutions, you can say that you now have a database of potential buyers.

Given that they didn’t leave the sales funnel in the first stage, they are surely interested in what you have to offer and are browsing product pages in order to make a final purchase decision.

At this stage, your goal is to get potential buyers to add your offers to their wishlist, thereby moving them to the next stage of the sales funnel.

The following content types will help you remove any doubts that your prospects have at this stage:

• Detailed product descriptions
• Product demos
• Customer testimonials

You can also offer promotions and discounts through email campaigns, using catchy and persuasive texts for them.

Recommended tactics for this stage of the sales funnel:

• Use social proof. Research shows that approximately 98% of buyers say reviews are an important source of information when making a purchase decision. Testimonials and reviews give your potential buyers confidence that their decision to buy from you is the right one.
• Optimize product pages. These pages are extremely important for conversions. Optimizing them is quite simple: you need to make them answer the questions that users most often have about a product. Add standardized information on the topic to the pages:

1. Product category/type
2. Product name
3. Product description
4. Call to action (CTA): “buy now”, “add to wishlist”, “ask a question”
5. Shipping and return information.

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