6 B2B Sales Strategies That Every Sales Person Should Know

‍Introduction

Sales is a tricky business. Not only do you've to deal with demanding clients, but you also have to do multiple rounds of proposal writing, learn how to write complex purchase orders, and deal with a slew of other issues.

If you are a salesperson and your target market is a business, you can't use the sales strategies designed for consumer marketing. In reality, for the most part, the ways you sell to consumers are very different from how you sell to businesses. Remember that companies are all about making a profit. No companies will purchase products because the products are new, excellent, or just because you are a good salesman. Businesses buy products because they see the benefit they would be receiving.

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If you're looking to improve your B2B sales skills, you've come to the right place. It's no secret that B2B sales are a challenging space to excel in. The transaction can be long, drawn-out, and full of obstacles. You need to know more than the product and pricing to succeed.

Why do you need an effective B2B strategy?

Companies are fighting tooth and nail for new clients. Why? Because a new customer is worth a staggering $4,818 every year. Yet, the vast majority of companies don't even know how to spot new customers. If your organization is one of them, you're at the right place! I won't sugarcoat it – B2B sales are complicated. 

However, these six sales strategies can help make sales easier and more predictable.

Different Types of Sales Strategies

Before discussing effective sales strategies that could boost your sales, let's first understand the different types of sales strategies that B2B companies use based on their goals which are as follows,

1. Sales Strategies for Repeat Business 

This strategy is quite simple and focuses on generating repeat business from your existing clients. Though it might seem easy, it still needs a well-organized approach as existing clients often make a new list of terms and conditions while becoming repeat businesses. Cross-sells and upsells are a part of this strategy. 

The advantage is that your current customers already know your company and trust your product or service. Therefore, repeat customers are more likely to buy rather than the new leads who are just visiting your website or exploring your product.

2. Sales Strategies for Generating New Leads 

The best way to have consistent revenue generation and grow customers for B2B businesses is by reaching untapped audiences.

Selling gets very critical, as lead databases usually degrade over 22.5% each year. This statistics indicates that sales teams should look for new ways to tap into the prospects and get them into the sales funnel.

But it takes time to recognize and reach new b2b sales leads. And, this is where SmartWriter helps you find and verify the email address of the decision-makers, also helps create personalized and unique high-converting prospecting messages for your email marketing and other social media channels as well. 

3. Sales Strategies for Lead Conversion

Sales strategies focus on increasing the lead-to-customer conversion rate. This type of strategy requires great teamwork between marketing and sales teams. While the marketing team generates qualified leads, the sales team should capitalize on the opportunities produced by the marketing team.

The key is to optimize the sales process and get better at giving lead-nurturing, presentations, handling objections, and more.

Top 6 B2B Sales Strategies to Boost Sales

Now that you know the type of sales to start with let's talk about the top 6 B2B sales strategies to boost your sales and profits.

1. Sales and marketing teams working towards the same goal

When the sales and marketing teams collaborate and work towards the same goal, it results in better leads and revenue. To achieve this, the sales team should acquire new customers, ensuring steady revenue growth, and the marketing team should support them with qualified B2B lead generation. According to reports, 56% of companies with both teams aligned met their revenue goals, and 19% exceeded them. 

Social media channels could be a powerful tool for the sales teams to identify potential leads and engage with them. Statistics state that 82% of prospects are okay with being reached out to via social networks. Also, the sales team may help the social media marketing team find ideal clients and challenges they face, which can benefit while planning the ads and social posts. Contrarily, the marketing team should help identify critical conversations and target customers on social media and convey those to salespeople to reach out.

Further, generating leads from your site using B2B SEO tactics to up the sales pipeline is a great way to boost sales. 

Both teams must collaborate to create a successful content marketing strategy. For example, sales reps usually communicate with the prospects daily to understand their challenges. And those inputs can help the marketing team create engaging and relevant content around those challenges to build more engagement. 

2. Sales Experience throughout the Buyer's Journey matters

Do you know about the sales experience during the buyer's journey? Did you ever try to identify why you lose a potential lead when you're about to close the deal? The buyer journey is one of the essential components of a B2B sales strategy. 

Most people think about pricing. But lead qualification is also vital. Lead qualification is the process of determining the potential customers who are most likely to make an actual purchase. So you have to study the lead's potential before nurturing them.

Many potential clients look at the value and experience a company offers during the buying process. However, you may lose the deal due to a lousy selling experience in the B2B sales process. 

So, it is crucial to create a winning sales experience. To do so, you should try to understand the following sales tips,

• What are their pain points, motivations, key challenges, and fears?
• Do they prefer conversation over calls or emails? Always respect their preference. 
• What influences their buying decisions?
• What is the type of content or information they need to make the decision?
• Their convenient time to contact them

You can also offer a better buying experience by boosting your sales reps via healthy competition. You can give them the best sales tool, other productivity tools, and generous incentives.

You can use a free B2B data tool like RevDriver to get your prospects' contact and company details while visiting their Linkedin profile or company page.

3. Ask for Referrals

Do you know that about 91% of B2B buyers are open to giving referrals, but only 11% of salespeople actively seek referrals?

Also, 84% of B2B executives begin their buying journey based on a referral, which means not finding referrals is a significant wasted sales opportunity.

It is much easier to get referrals because you are already linked to the company's decision-maker, and someone they trust might have already suggested your name to them. 

Ask your reps to send all the closed customers a referral request in a follow-up note seeking referrals.

4. Identify the Opportunity for Repeat Business

The existing clients of an organization are responsible for its profits, but they are taken for granted by many businesses. It is better to expand on and maintain strong relationships with existing clients rather than chasing new leads that are difficult to sell to.

It is vital to maintain and win their loyalty to enhance the revenue from the current customers. To achieve this, you must build trust and a good relationship with your prospects.

An excellent way to do that is to monitor the prospective customer via salespeople and find out if they need any help with something. The secret sauce of many B2B companies is their customer relationship management handled by the customer service team. 

But since a sales representative is always one of a client's first interactions with a product, they might feel good about hearing "non-sales" stuff from them.

The sales team can keep them warm for learning about new offers or plans by keeping in touch in unselfish ways like sharing a positive article or sending out a brief, personalized letter.

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5. Account-Based Selling

Your prospect or the lead quality shows how good you will be at sales pitches.

One common mistake that every sales team makes is to consider every industry as a target market. So, the initial thing the sales team should do in a B2B sales cycle is to create prospects' databases for every industry separately. If not, you will end up with a homogeneous database with prospects from every industry you cater to.

Although, the problem with this strategy is that you can not do personalized selling at scale.

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You need to identify the select few industries you serve particularly well and take an account-based marketing approach. This approach will help you to personalize your sales strategies just for that industry.

For example, if you are an accounting SaaS service provider, who will be your target audience? Not all the companies that need SaaS services? 

There are SaaS service providers with a specific offering, like hiring solutions, and the others could be those who offer CRM services. Therefore, wasting your marketing efforts on all SaaS businesses will go in vain. 

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As a result, you will need an account-based marketing approach.

SalesIntel is one of the best B2B data providers for account-based teams. The tool helps you work on specific accounts that match your marketing and sales criteria with a wide range of filters.

6. Strategic selling

The Miller Heiman Group introduced the Strategic selling method. It is a tactic that centers on helping businesses win complex deals with a scalable and insights-driven approach.

The core of this method lies in identifying different points of contact at the company you are prospecting, based on their influence on your sales process. Next, you determine the level of support these contacts can provide during the prospect company's decision-making.

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For instance, assume you want to sell project management and automation tools like smartsheet software to a company. Now, your first point of contact should be the operations manager or marketing manager, looking for productivity tools to boost their team's effectiveness.

Now that you have contacted them, you might have realized that the marketing manager is a great person to promote the introduction of your tool in the company, and the operations manager will make the actual purchasing decision, a.k.a. economic buyer. So you have to establish your value proposition according to the marketing department's needs during sales outreach. This way, you can start the conversation in a meaningful way.

After this, you must provide the marketing manager with the information required to convince the operations manager. If not, make sure that you get a meeting with the marketing and operations manager together, possibly flanked by the IT manager, who'll probably be the technical buyer.

With the help of the marketing manager, make sure that the operations manager signs off on it, and the IT manager gives the approval. And that's strategic selling.

These tactics force the sales professionals to go beyond the usual contact they establish on the prospect's end. Also, it nudges them to dig deeper into the prospect's organizational chart.

By studying the complete account, they can identify all the people who can influence or make an actual purchase decision.

Summary

• B2B sales have changed a lot. It's not just about cold calling and emailing your potential buyers.
• Before you approach, you need to identify your target audience, the specific industry, and the buyer's business needs.
• Do research on the prospects' buying habits before you connect with them to build a strong relationship.
• After this, approach your prospects with appropriate sales strategies that will help you seal the deal.

Conclusion

If you better understand your target market and use these strategies to help you connect with your potential customers, you'll increase your chances of closing more deals and having a more fruitful career!

Sales have always been about relationships and providing value – not just about closing the deal. However, interactive and informative sales are the new norm for sales and encourage prospects to decide. Being more forward-thinking and providing the prospective buyer with a unique sales experience will help a business make the most out of every sales call and ensure products fit their needs.