B2B sales strategies are plans of action aimed at helping salespeople sell effectively to prospective buyers.
These plans of action are conceptualized by considering the following typical stages of a B2B buyer’s journey:
- Lead generation: Find and gather contact information of individuals who have expressed interest voluntarily in your products or services.
- Discovery: Understand their pain points and the value they are seeking.
- Qualification: Compare the value they seek with the one gained through your products/services and ensure their overlap.
- Pitch: Make them an offer by sending a personalized quote (using a CPQ process, which we’ll touch upon soon) where you explain how your business will benefit them in terms of measurable ROI.
- Objection handling: Nurture the prospects by listening to them and educating them through valuable content if they aren’t immediately buying for any reason.
- Closing: After the prospect is finally ready, you send them the quote where the prospect finally gets the value they have been looking for.
- Follow up: Send them instructions and valuable material on how they can get the most out of your services.
- Check-in: In this stage, you ask for feedback and improve your services to deliver an even better experience to your present and future customers.
At every stage of the buyer’s journey, keeping the prospect engaged is important. Engagement retains the attention and interest of the prospect that will grow to become a satisfied buyer.
Let’s take a closer look at the importance of buyer engagement in B2B purchases.
Importance of B2B buyer engagement
B2B buyer engagement is valuable for both buyer and seller. It gets the buyer faster to the value offered and helps the seller close more deals profitably. Buyer engagement helps in the following ways:
- Boosts brand experience for the buyer as they will understand the values offered quickly and start getting them.
- Increases customer loyalty and trust as they will find a seller that understands their requirements and answers their questions.
- Provides valuable customer feedback and insight that will help the seller serve the existing and new customers better.
- Improves customer experience by ensuring the customer’s expectations can be met or exceeded before making a sale.
- Increases sales funnel velocity through content that makes the prospect realize the benefits of the services they are about to avail of.
All the aforementioned benefits of a B2B sales strategy with buyer engagement at its heart make it a top priority. So let’s look into four such plans of action that you can start following immediately.
4 B2B Sales Strategies That Boost Buyer Engagement
1. Learn about your audience and create ICPs
ICPs (ideal customer profiles) contain values of parameters of attributes that help businesses identify their ideal customers. These attributes are behavioral, firmographic, environmental, and circumstantial.
This is the first and most important strategy that you need to incorporate into your sales process. Below are some essential questions that will help you know your audience better:
- What are their pain points?
- How is this problem costing them?
- Are they doing anything to solve this problem?
- Who are the decision-makers in their organization?
Relying on your gut while answering the above questions will give you inaccurate answers. Ask these questions using tools like SurveyMonkey and Typeform to your target audience and understand the value they are after.
After gathering the answers you can put them in an ICP template so that you can visualize them better.
Building an accurate ICP will help you present your value proposition in a language they understand and on the platform they prefer the most. This will increase the quality and quantity of leads you capture.
2. Personalize their experiences
According to research, 55% of marketers agree that the top benefit of personalization is increased engagement. It also makes the buyer feel more valued.
When it comes to B2B sales transactions, your approach should be no different.
Every B2B service transaction is unique which means adopting a one-size-fits-all approach is detrimental to a business’ growth. As more and more customers in the B2B space are expecting personalization, it is crucial for companies to deliver the same.
In B2B sales, salespersons follow a process called configure price quote (CPQ) to assess the requirements of the buyer, determine a price, and produce a quote. A robust CPQ process personalizes one of the vital strategic steps in a B2B deal and has the following benefits:
- Produces more accurate quotations as per the buyer’s needs
- Faster sales cycle due to automated personalization
- Increased deal size through upsells and cross-sells
3. Prioritize sales enablement
Sales enablement is the continual process of improving the existing sales cycle by empowering the salespersons and managers with the right resources such as tools, technology, frameworks, and data.
Sales enablement can be achieved in six steps:
- Staying updated about the industry trends and competitors.
- Creating a knowledge base of guides and playbooks for salespersons.
- Encouraging thought leadership within teams.
- Empowering teams to build and run processes rather than imposing one on them.
- Investing resources in terms of time and human resources to train salespersons.
- Equipping buyers for self-service through search engine-friendly help docs.
Executing the above steps will help your sales team reach their full potential and outperform your competitors. Also, keep in mind that sales enablement takes time to show results and it depends on where you currently are and how deep you decide to go in each step.
4. Align sales and marketing
A company becomes successful if all of its components work together like a well-oiled machine.
Alignment of operations of sales and marketing grows the revenue stream consistently. This means getting accurate information passed through every department and in the right sequence. It can be achieved through the following methods:
- Efficient data sharing between both the departments where they have access to the same kind of data that is compiled and maintained by them. Fortunately, CRM solutions like HubSpot and Zoho make it really easy.
- Same dictionary. Meaning the terminologies and jargon used by them should be and mean the same. It will make communication and collaboration efficient.
- Clear objectives and processes. You should always keep in mind that sales and marketing are two unique departments and so are their functions, roles, and objectives. Ensuring that each team member of either department is aware of their individual responsibilities and tasks is crucial.
- Peer-to-peer communication is where the magic happens. People need to communicate like people, not robotic entities of a factory assembly line. Cultivating such an environment is necessary.
- Collaboration on every level of the hierarchy of either department will help create better content, attract more audiences, and convert more leads.
Wrapping up
B2B sales strategies that keep buyers engaged are crucial as it optimizes the sales cycle and customer satisfaction level. It delivers the buyers a great brand experience, forms an emotional connection between the buyer and your brand, helps you get actionable feedback, improves CX, and shortens the sales cycle.
There are four such strategies explained above and summarized below:
- Understand your audience and create an accurate buyer persona.
- Deliver personalized experiences based on their requirements and needs.
- Empower and equip the team members with authority, tools, and knowledge.
- Synchronize the operations in sales and marketing departments.
We hope that the above strategies will help you increase the engagement of your buyers with your brand during the sales process.
Why is FinancesOnline free?
Leave a comment!