With the establishment of digital communication channels such as social media, messaging apps and remote work collaboration tools, personalization and emotional investment have become hard to come by. According to LinkedIn, the biggest challenges of today’s sales consist of establishing urgency (42%), getting in touch with prospects (37%), as well as overcoming price objections (35%).
Whether you work with long-time B2B leads or aim to convert cold contacts into recurrent buyers, emotional triggers and sales psychology should indeed find its place in your business model. With that said, let’s take a closer look at what makes emotions such a pivotal addition to modern B2B sales in order to understand how we can take advantage of it in 2020.
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Brand Humanization
The first and most relevant way in which adding an emotional touch to your content marketing, sales outreach and correspondence can help is by humanizing your brand. After all, with such a vast array of companies and businesses across the globe, standing out as a humane, personalized and approachable venture on the market is beneficial.
Samantha Nicole, Head of Sales Department at Studyker spoke on the topic recently: “Both in B2B and B2C sales, you want to be seen as a provider of goods and services – not as another logo on packaging. Segmenting your target audience and delivering personalized content to their preferred communication channels will do just that for your brand and facilitate a far more effective emotional response for your advantage.”
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Corporate Storytelling
It goes without saying that even though you work with B2B prospects, your marketing budget is still limited and should be used in a smart and efficient way. Thus, opting for storytelling in your marketing efforts can ensure that your business is seen as a family of likeminded individuals instead of a warehouse full of products in need of selling.
Corporate storytelling can take different shapes – articles published on your site’s blog section can talk about your mission statements and vision in greater detail, while case studies of previous successful projects can elevate your business’ professional image in the eyes of potential leads. “Tell your brand’s story through digital channels and the emotional triggers you incite will work in your favor without error”, advises Angela Baker, content marketing specialist at WriteScout.
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Meaningful Visual Content
What most businesses, especially in B2B, fail to understand is that original content should always take precedent before stock photography and staged, smiling faces of undefined individuals. With that in mind, investing in original photography, infographics, video content and other multimedia materials that showcase your company’s goals and portfolio is a must in emotion-centric marketing.
The initiative to introduce unique multimedia into your B2B sales strategy will undoubtedly add to the effort to make your content viral and ensure that potential prospects see beyond your value proposition and gleam the character and emotion behind the veil. In doing so, you will effectively place your brand above the competition and build trust which will slowly lead to more B2B sales as a direct result.
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Employee Showcasing
Behind every successful company stands a group of people who share a common passion for the work they collaborate on. As such, you can take full advantage of the fact by introducing your colleagues, employees and associates to potential B2B prospects via content marketing.
Monique Albert, Chief Sales Officer at Subjecto spoke highly on the matter: “Even though you may collaborate with other CEOs and managers in companies akin to yours, the majority of every business is made up of individuals doing their best to contribute to the whole. Give these people in your company a face and a voice as a means to market your brand to the B2B market and you will effectively elevate your position above most other businesses in the industry going forward.”
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Social Proof Integration
Lastly, while social proof is mainly focused on B2C conversion, it can still prove highly beneficial in B2B sales to create emotional triggers for would-be prospects. Just like customers and clients, B2B associates like to see public satisfaction with the companies they collaborate with.
As such, social proof in the form of testimonials, sales figures, customer interviews and other curated, well-presented data can introduce a new level of empathy and urgency with your B2B prospects. This content can then be distributed via your mailing list, published in the form of social media or blog posts, as well as printed as ads and other media with the intent to garner B2B attention and entice company representatives to reach out.
In Conclusion
The more brands, startups and companies there are on the market, the higher the value people will place in businesses which offer emotional content to their associates. Treat your B2B (as well as B2C) leads as human beings with wants and needs – not as corporate targets with numeric values attached to them. While your bottom line remains pivotal to efficiently run as a business in 2020, adding a little personal touch to the affair won’t hurt your company in any way in the long run – quite the contrary in fact.