B2B sales can be complicated in certain ways, the longer sales cycles in this domain only makes it more difficult for sales people to ensure they are always following up at the right time to drive ROI from their prospecting efforts.
In most cases, sales people are usually onboarded into a team to drive sales quotas and win commissions on each deal. But as the B2B market becomes more competitive and also, complex, B2B sales teams need to find newer ways to stand out from the crowd and boost traction from every prospecting effort they undertake.
For B2B teams, learning to ‘’sell as a team’’ is actually a great way to drive ROI as a brand and keep most prospect interactions healthy and up to date as possible.
But what does it mean to model a core B2B process that allows teams to sell in a more unified manner?
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A few starter tips:
1. Selling as a Team with other Salespeople or in Collaboration with Marketing Teams
Most B2B companies assign unique accounts to individual sales reps based on different parameters (geography/size/top tier versus mid-level accounts, etc). Sales reps are then responsible for the account assigned to them and have to prove ROI from it within a certain time duration.
A unified platform (CRM/CDP) that allows sales people and their marketing/customer success counterparts to have a single source of truth into which sales rep is chasing which account and what the current status of any prospecting effort is viz a viz each of those accounts can allow teams to build a more inclusive selling model that can either:
-allow salespeople to chase certain accounts as a unified sales team or
-work closely with marketing and similar functions to initiative interest and complement the sales process
In the first option, the idea is to put in place a standard that allows reps to start their prospecting for a list of target accounts, regularly asses how their email outreach / cold call / LinkedIn campaigns to those prospects are working before getting other sales people to complement the effort with different kinds of outreach.
In the second option, the idea lies in creating unified martech-salestech stacks and processes that allow multiple teams to have a single source of truth into the current prospects and their buying stages. Sales people can then use this info to get marketing teams and other customer facing executives to run complementary campaigns that tie back into their own rep outreach out process.
In either process, ensuring that the complementary campaign is aligned to the messaging and theme of the sales rep handling the account, that it has a unified goal and CTA are crucial to delivering value.
2. Selling as a Team makes it Easier During Attrition/Employee Departures
The tech industry has been seeing it’s fair share of layoffs through 2022. The largest tech brands have been terminating employees and contracts in the hundreds and thousands.
During this uncertain period where a lot of business leaders are cautioning brands to prep for a recessionary period or slowdown, it is key to keep in mind that attrition levels will be high too.
Sudden terminations or resignations can impact how current sales processes are being undertaken.
When trying to implement a model that allows a brand to sell as a team with more collaborative efforts, layoffs and attritions will not necessarily impact present day sales output, if transitions are handled seamlessly, the best way to ensure a seamless experience here is by having a back-up sales person or account executive who is always working as a team duplicate for every active account or accounts in the pipeline.
3. Selling as a Team optimizes other areas like Content Creation and Content ROI
Most brands have a dedicated marketing / content marketing team that takes care of elements like the brand’s ebooks, blogs, podcasts, social media and other types of marketing campaigns or content development efforts.
When marketers do this, the best way to measure the success of each of these content assets is by:
-evaluating how much relevant traffic and MQL/SQL’s those assets helped bring in.
Aligning these content development efforts to the state of a brand’s prospecting activity can actually help drive ROI from content creation efforts as well.
When sales teams and marketers work more closely on elements like:
-identifying blogs that prospects and customers want to read about
-using certain marketing channels like podcasts, to drive interest with key prospects (by bringing them as guests onto your brand’s show)
-building brand centric offers on downloads of ebooks/whitepapers (example: get a 1 month product trial for our enterprise plan by downloading this ebook)
It can help both teams execute a more tightly knit sales-marketing process that is data and ROI driven and also helps measure the effectiveness of every content activity.
Read More: Doing More With Less: Organic Ways to Grow Your B2B Sales Funnel
Last Words
B2B Sales can be challenging and now is the time for sales leaders to pay attention to changing market dynamics so that they can find ways to understand what problems the industry is going through. Working as a team, having everyone work towards a unified goal – selling and generating ROI for every activity – can help tighten and optimize a lot of hidden waste within teams while enabling a more ‘’work smart, not hard’’ model.