Creative Ways to Drive Better B2B Sales!

A Few Best Practices every B2B Sales Team Needs to Consider!

B2B sales has evolved and how! Over the years, a gradual shift in customer behaviors, sales technologies, marketing technologies and sales processes has led to more sophisticated sales models that are less dependent on how individual sales people act but based more on the intent and behaviors of customers.

If you’re not tracking and deepening your understanding of your prospects intent to buy and past purchase behavior, you are losing out!

If you step back and look at these changes, one good thing is that it helps sales people now identify the best-fit prospects to go after and how to nurture and convert them. Enriched data and business insights can help sales people discover better selling opportunities while ensuring their prioritize their time to follow through on only those accounts and prospects that will lead to a purchase down the line.

B2B sales is now set to evolve further, with businesses getting accustomed to adjusting to hybrid sales models and a post-pandemic world, now is the time for sales teams and sales leaders to identify what should be their key focus areas and high priority plans that can lead to increased sales and revenue.

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A few best practices that should figure on every B2B sales team list:

Customers and Prospects Need to ‘’Know their Sales Reps’’

Although B2B sales is largely considered more complex that B2C selling, at the end of the day, in both segments brands are still selling to people.

Customers today demand authenticity. A sudden sales pitch via a cold call or cold email to a prospect who is not expecting an outreach from your brand can lead to nil ROI or customer reactions.

This is where sales teams can utilize an element of creativity to drive these initial messaging tactics. Once a strong foundation is set, it is easier to nurture prospects and eventually lead them to a purchase.

Marketing and sales leaders can come together at this stage to create not just the typical sales and marketing collaterals that B2B processes demand of them, but they can build out-of-the-box documents, including documents that allow customers to ‘’know their sales reps’’ better, in lieu of a just an introduction to the brand.

A good example of a ‘’Know your Sales Rep’’ starter document:

I’m XYX, I’m 29 and I work as ABC company as a Sales/Account Rep. I’d love to get to know you better and I’d love to understand more about your role! I’m currently trying to help my team break into a segment of the market and if you have some ideas, it would be great to hear about them!

On the other side, I love dogs, I enjoy interacting with people from the industry (who knows when a prominent idea might surface through a random discussion!) and I usually spend my weekends trekking or exploring the countryside! Let’s connect at some point, here’s a link to my calendar!

Find a Common Angle, or Any other Common Point of Reference

Referrals can go a long way in marketing and sales. In fact, research suggests that 83% of customers are open to referring a business after a successful purchase.

Sales teams can capitalize further on this mindset and customer trend to boost their sales perspectives in different ways.

For prospects who are not currently looking to invest in your product, sales reps can still ask if they know of anyone else who’d be interested. For prospects who are keen on your product or service but don’t have the budget at the moment, sales reps can still follow up a few months later while in the interim asking them for a referral to another department or team head that might have the available budget at the moment. In technology sales after all, most enterprise companies will have a range of buying centres and what might not fit well as a sales opportunity in one might work very well for another at any given point.

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Getting Sales Reps to Blog, Be Active on Social Media, Have a Stronger Online Presence

Modern day buyers are not only inundated with information and pitches, all the time; they are also more independent than buyers from yesteryear and prefer relying on peer references, online review sites, blogs and other recommendation engines to evaluate if a particular product is a good fit for them or not.  Sales leaders who support and boost the idea of key sales reps being more active on online channels like LinkedIn or Twitter and those that push their sales reps to provide value through well written articles can benefit more because B2B buyers (more often than not) are bound to look up a new product or service and would even want to look up a sales rep before continuing an interaction. A strong online presence on the part of the salesperson can influence a buyer to at least have those initial conversations.

Revisit your SalesTech Stack

Salestech has been evolving rapidly, with new acquisitions, product enhancements and the drive to support every sales outreach with a data-driven strategy, the onus lies on sales leaders to keep optimizing what salestech they use to drive their company’s and sales team’s sales goals.

A perfect salestech stack is one that needs to keep evolving, for a salestech stack to give a business optimum results, it’s not only about investing in new salestech but also training teams to use every capability and feature properly.

2022 will be an exciting year for Salestech and B2B sales teams!

Traditional sales best practices like dipping into your existing customer base to upsell or cross sell services, identifying other USPs for your product, driving customer retention, improving sales-marketing alignment capitalizing on customer success stories and existing use cases, driving sales processes with competitor intelligence are all still an integral part of every modern day sales process and sales activity. Now is as good a time as any to begin re-evaluating all of these processes and techniques to ensure there is a more solid foundation set in place before you step into 2022!

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