Selling services to businesses entails a different approach than selling products. Services are by their nature intangible, so your customers have to trust your brand and your ability to deliver. B2B business development is therefore highly personal and requires a tightly focused approach from every member of your team.
B2B sales are not always a quick process, but by implementing the following five inexpensive tips you will soon see an increase in productivity and revenue.
1) Get Your Sales And Marketing Teams Working Together
The old-fashioned tension between sales and marketing teams has to end if you are going to noticeably increase your sales. Traditionally, sales and marketing teams have operated in their own world, despite having the same end goal. By aligning your sales and marketing teams you can see a rapid boast in sales, simply from people working together more effectively. It ensures that both sales and marketing professionals are working with the same sales tunnel; and understand the customer journey and how each lead fits in. We have covered this topic – quaintly called Smarketing – in a previous article.
2) Upsell To Your Existing Customers
Existing customers are a fertile market for the cross selling of new services. They already trust your brand, are familiar with your company and may know you personally, so you have already won half the battle. Don’t be afraid to approach them with new, complementary services if you have a new launch or need a quick sales boost. You can increase your chances of a sale by offering your customers exclusive discounts, or early access to new deals before general release.
3) Give Away Freebies Or Value-Added Services
For new customer acquisition, discounts may be less cost-effective, especially if you are looking for a quick increase in sales revenue. Instead of discounts, encourage new sales by giving away a freebie or additional service. A freebie could be an eBook or software demo, which could be given away at the point of sale, or when a website visitor becomes a lead. An added value service could be some free consultancy or analysis.
4) Understand Your Customer’s Business Model
For B2B business development, relationship building is the key to a successful sales strategy. You need to personalise your content to address the specific needs of your customers. For this to work it is vital that you understand your customer’s business model. It may be helpful to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and do a hypothetical SWOT analysis on their behalf. This will identify weaknesses, opportunities and threats that you can directly address with your services.
Also consider the individual human beings you will be dealing with as decision-makers in your target businesses. What motivates them and makes them tick? What would make their job easier? Answers to these questions will help you build ‘buyer personas’ for your key customers. You can then stratify your leads database and target them with personalised content that is more likely to result in a conversion.
5) Prioritise Your Metrics
Once your sales and marketing people are working closely together and your business development strategy is in full swing, you will find a lot of data flooding into your business. This is an invaluable resource that can be used to target your sales efforts and get better results, but it needs to be used properly. There are thousands of different metrics you could focus on, so prioritise the most valuable ones.
We think the following are the most useful for tracking your progress and identifying areas for improvement:
- Web visitor to lead conversion rate
- Lead to Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
- MQL to Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)
- SAL to customer conversion rate
- Average length of sales cycle
- Average cost per lead
- Average cost per sale
These seven statistics will give you a complete overview of your sales and marketing tunnel. Blockages can then be identified and addressed, and your overall ROI understood.
Increase Your Sales ROI
Increased revenue from B2B service sales often requires a root and branch examination of your sales, marketing and business development strategies. Many different factors contribute to this. Some, such as the actions we have examined, involve a change of attitude and approach. Other, more structural changes may also be required, such as a new website. For advice on a bespoke sales and marketing strategy that works for you, please get in touch with one of our marketing experts today.
