If you’re the one tasked with generating revenue from your B2B sales efforts, you already know the challenges. It’s harder than ever to get in touch with people. It’s challenging to find and retain great salespeople. Longer sales cycles. Larger buying teams. Endless information online. The list goes on and on.
Continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done is not the solution to growing revenue amid today’s evolving B2B sales environment.
So, what’s a sales leader to do to navigate the new normal? Here are five B2B sales trends that are cutting through the marketing clutter, making marketing and sales teams more efficient and productive, and helping close more deals.
1. Marketing and Sales Automation
B2B sales today require leveraging sales automation to maximize results. Automation allows you to scale lead generation, nurturing, and sales tactics at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Digital tools and AI-enhanced automation tools can handle many of the manual or repetitive tasks to free up time for more focused strategies. Sales automation can help with:
- Sales outreach and lead nurturing
- Lead tracking and lead scoring
- Onboarding customers
- Upselling and cross-selling
You can use sales automation to manage just about any task that can be defined by specific rules. For example, you can set triggers to automatically respond to specific inquiries with specific information. So, if you get regular queries about something, you can create an optimized response that generates further engagement. With the right automation tools, you can automatically A/B test responses to find which response gets the best results and continually improve your performance.
Automation helps build sales pipelines and nurture leads while freeing up sales teams to focus on their best prospects and closing deals.
2. Social Selling
Social selling is all about using social media to find prospects and build relationships. For B2B sales, LinkedIn can be a powerful tool with its ability to find the right person within target organizations. You can sort by company or role and connect with prospects.
Gartner forecasts that 80% of all B2B sales communications will take place in digital channels by 2025, yet customers today are already bombarded with email messages and generic sales outreach. The key to breaking through the clutter is customizing marketing and sales approaches – and social selling lets you do exactly that.
Social selling makes it easy to find the right targets and personalize your approach. Sales teams that embrace social selling generate an average of 45% more sales opportunities. 78% of social sellers outsell their peers, according to data from LinkedIn.
Using reviews and case studies to demonstrate specific ways your products or services solve problems in similar situations can be especially effective.
3. Leverage Your CRM
If you’ve been using your customer relationship management (CRM) platform for some time now, there’s an incredible amount of information there. The software does more than just track your clients or customers. It can provide a wealth of information that you can use to serve your clients or prospects more relevant and valuable content, and develop deeper relationships.
You can also analyze the data within your CRM to look for helpful clues to find new customers.
Define Target Customers
By identifying the key characteristics, demographics, and criteria of your current customers, you can get a better idea of who potential new customers might be. For example, data analysis can help you build the profile of your ideal customer — your ideal customer profile (ICP) — and create rich buyer personas to help you customize content and offers.
Identify High-Value Customers
Analyzing this data can also help identify patterns and commonalities among your high-value customers. This information can help your target prospects in line with what you find.
Segmenting Leads
Your CRM can also help you to segment customers and leads. Custom tags or attributes let you sort customers by types, products, or potential to better craft customized sales messages and create targeted marketing campaigns.
Automated Workflows
Automated workflows help you nurture prospects and clients over time. Email sequences, personalized content, auto reminders, and content delivery at the right time in the sales cycle can help trigger queries and keep customers engaged.
4. Sales and Marketing Alignment
Too often, sales and marketing efforts simply don’t align. Marketing generates leads and then complains that the sales team can’t convert them. Sales teams complain that the leads aren’t good. In both cases, there’s a disconnect.
To be effective, marketing and sales have to work together as one. Businesses with aligned teams are 67% more effective at closing deals. With alignment, companies also see a higher volume of sales wins, customer retention, and revenue growth.
Customers win, too. Alignment creates a better buying experience, ensuring the right information is available at the right time in the buyer’s journey.
Many organizations have created cross-functional teams that collaborate on the development of marketing collateral and strategies in concert with sales teams. They also hold both teams accountable to the same goal: revenue generation. This ensures that marketing focuses efforts on the types of customers that are most likely to convert. After all, it’s not about generating the most leads — it’s about producing the best leads.
Define Terms
A good place to start is by defining what makes a qualified lead. CSO Insights reports that more than half of companies don’t have an agreed-upon definition for leads. Without this definition, it’s too easy to chase the wrong leads or ignore high-quality leads.
Agree on Strategy
With a clear understanding of what makes a quality marketing-qualified lead (MQL) and sales-qualified lead (SQL), marketing and sales teams can align their workflow properly. Today’s software automation can help with strategies such as automated lead scoring to surface the best potential leads based on the aligned definition.
A well-defined sales funnel can also help you identify when leads transition from MQLs to SQLs and are ready for more active sales team engagement.
Create the Right Messaging
Marketing and sales teams need the right messaging at each stage of the buyer’s journey to nurture prospects and move them forward in the sales funnel. By identifying each stage and honing in on what prospects need at each stage, you can create the collateral that sales teams need to respond quickly and efficiently with the right content.
Measure Performance
Like anything else in business, you need a way to track results at each step to ensure your strategy is performing at optimal levels. By tracking how prospects and customers respond to your marketing and sales efforts, you can refine your strategy over time to maximize your results.
5. Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a highly-targeted growth strategy to identify high-value accounts and micro-target them with personalized marketing.
ABM is effective at generating revenue. In the 2023 ABM Leadership Alliance and ITSMA study, organizations deploying ABM tactics do more than just generate better leads. Companies are seeing significant improvements, such as 84% growth in B2B sales pipelines and 77% revenue growth. On average, 72% of companies say ABM delivers higher ROI than any other form of marketing.
ABM works differently than the traditional sales funnel. It brings together all of the tools in your organization that we’ve discussed above for a focused effort on specific types of buyers and individuals within target organizations.
Determine Qualified ABM Targets
With your buyer personas and ideal customer profiles, you can identify specific target companies that meet your criteria. Then, within those companies, you can find the right individuals that are part of the decision-making teams.
Research ABM Targets
By focusing on fewer leads and high-value prospects, you can super-serve them. By understanding their unique needs and motivations, you can customize your approach. For example, by determining their specific pain points, you can focus your marketing efforts on how your products or services solve their specific problems.
Target Key Stakeholders
Today’s B2B sales cycles are more complex and involve more stakeholders. Gartner says the average buying team often includes 14 or more people. Forrester says that two-thirds of B2B sales require input from six or more people. When you can figure out the right people and what their roles are within the organization, you can better refine your sales approach.
For example, a CFO might be more interested in how a product or service can generate revenue or reduce costs. A line manager, however, might be more interested in productivity and efficiency. A “generic” marketing approach might misfire for both of these ABM targets.
Targeting key stakeholders with customized content will help improve engagement and provide additional insights. It can help you identify influencers within an organization that can help carry your message to the right people.
Accelerate Your B2B Sales Strategy
Sitejabber can help with your B2B sales strategy by collecting and displaying reviews to build trust and reputation. By allowing customers to leave reviews directly from your website, via an automated email request, or by inviting past customers, you can increase the volume of reviews. You can then showcase your top reviews on your website, in your social selling campaigns, or as part of your content marketing and sales outreach efforts.
Interested in learning more? Connect with the Sitejabber team today and request a demo.
