How to fine tune your B2B sales strategy for best results

Your B2B sales strategy is getting results, but it could be stronger. Here are several ways to optimize your B2B strategy for more conversions.

35% of B2B marketers can measure ROI, 47% admit that they can’t measure Return on investment and 18% state they aren’t sure. Imagine your B2B Sales Strategy was able to curb this problem and others too.

Business to business sales and marketing is never an easy process, making sure all your boxes are checked in the beginning is the first step to success.

The right first step in your journey starts with your B2B Sales Strategy.

Your B2B sales strategy is most likely already getting results, but it could be stronger. Here are several ways to optimize your B2B strategy for more conversions.

Research Your Target Audience

Research forms such an integral part of a B2B sales strategy. There is no point in having qualified leads if you have no intention of knowing more about them.

You or your sales team need to spend some time going through their websites and follow them on social media. Look into the discussions that they’re provoking online and what type of engagement their brand gets from their customers. Odds are, if you can offer a solution to them for a problem that is evident within their business community, you’re more than halfway there.

Through your research, you should be able to recognize and catalog your prospect’s challenges, goals, and potential pain points. If you’re smart in the way that you research their brand and business, you may even be able to get a rough idea of what their budget might be.

The research phase is paramount to forming an ongoing part of your B2B sales strategy.

Industry and Product Knowledge

Your entire sales team should be knowledgeable, and impressively so. Simply knowing your product and business is not enough.

They need to be clued up on the state of your business’ industry as well as incoming trends and activities that are no longer relevant in said industry.

Industry knowledge coupled with an in-depth knowledge of your product’s functions and features will take your sales team from zero to hero. There’s no doubt that a salesperson that can answer even the most arbitrary of questions is impressive.

Training your sales team needs to form a core part of your B2B sales strategy.

Be Customer Centric

Being customer centric is about showing empathy and understanding with your customers. Your customer doesn’t want to feel like a simple number on a spreadsheet.

They want to feel heard, understood and special to your sales team and your business. Your marketing and sales team needs to be open to adopting a customer-centric approach to their research on leads and customers. This will allow both your B2B marketing and your sales team to understand prospects and qualified leads before they set up an initial meeting.

Your salespeople need to be able to demonstrate to customers helpful insight, patient listening, and incredible work ethic. If the customer-centricity flows from the top of your B2B sales strategy right to the man on the street, you’ll see nothing but success.

Focus on Your Funnel

Your B2B sales funnel will show how your marketing and sales teams progress through their sales journey. It shows the progress of a lead from the initial visit, through to becoming a qualified lead and eventually becoming a customer, and then, in turn, a recurring customer.

Nurturing leads has many steps, so your B2B sales funnel needs to be one of the biggest priority within your B2B sales strategy.

Understanding where a prospect is within your sales funnel can assist your sales and marketing team with everything from tactics to messaging, to the type of content that you share. Each stage of your B2B sales funnel will have different indicators, and leads sitting at different levels will need different nurturing.

You wouldn’t send the same email to a prospect that you’ve just met at an exhibition that you would send to a qualified lead who has already indicated interest in your products.

The same way that a lead whose just sent their first inquiry through your website wouldn’t get the same information that a lead whose already used your product demo would.

Your digital marketing strategy will be largely based on the findings in your B2B sales funnel.

It’s vital that the sales funnel is taken care of, it needs to be a core component in your B2B sales strategy and a driver behind your customer contacting tactics.

Conversion Rates are King

Conversion rates can sometimes be treated as taboo. It’s not always enough to benchmark your conversion rate against the standard of the industry that you operate in.

Your conversion rates need to be measured within a proper context, if you lack the right context, your marketing and sales team would not be able to analyze the data correctly and make the right calls for change.

Only about 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates.

So prioritizing your conversion rates needs to be top of mind from the start of your B2B sales strategy, so it can filter down to your end conversion rate reports.

Industry benchmarks are not the best way to measure your conversion rate. They fail to truly answer the questions of what you’re measuring and against whom. For example, you cannot measure a blog subscriber as the same quality lead as a potential customer who inquired about a specific product and asked for a quote.

Another measurement would be the sales made to a lead, a truly successful conversion would be one with a higher sale amount that one that bought a simple product and had no likelihood of a repeat sale. The big data behind your conversion rate needs to be treated like gold.

B2B Sales Strategy Success

The success of your B2B sales strategy lies in your ability to implement all of these components into the entire strategy.

Simply actioning one fine-tuning tip will not optimize your strategy for ultimate lead conversion. The key is making sure that your B2B sales strategy incorporates elements across the board, so you’re increasing your results in all areas of your business’ performance.

Our sales and marketing solutions can assist you in generating qualified leads in little to no time and can integrate with your CRM system to ensure ultimate usability, check it out!

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