I often say when you grow your business you have two main resource limitations, your time and money. This blog will deal with how to develop B2B Sales Strategies on a shoestring budget. The great news is there are a lot of free and nearly free sales and marketing resources and tactics that you can leverage. Here are some of my top resources and tools to help you generate your B2B sales strategies.
Sales Planning
There are lots of great free resources and tools to help you grow your business. Find a couple and pick the best parts of each. Examples could be this sales planning template from Hubspot or the VA Partners white paper: Building a Startup Sales Team.
Learn from your Peers
One of the best ways to get some free and valuable B2B sales strategy support is through a P2P group. There may be a one in your area for entrepreneurs or even sales specific ones. I currently attend Sales P2P at the Innovation Factory and the Sales Leaders P2P at Communitech.
CRM
Every B2B sales company should use a CRM. A modern sales organization should be using a CRM to keep track of accounts, contacts, completed activities, future activities, deals, and other information related to the sales effort. There are lots of affordable and free options for CRMs, one of our favourites is the free Hubspot CRM.
Research
The best research tool for B2B companies is still LinkedIn. They have moved some of the more detailed filters to their paid version, but it is still very powerful. Don’t forget to be active and post regularly to stay top of mind with customers and prospects.
Email is still a powerful tool to support your sales and marketing effort. Hubspot for individual emails and bulk email tools like Mailchimp provide great analytics on opens and clicks. These are effective sales triggers and very useful to the sales team.
Hiring
Hiring can be a slow and expensive experience. Using a recruiting company or having a full time recruiter is not feasible for many startups. Universities and colleges have graduating classes of hungry, smart and hard-working individuals. They often provide free posting and sometimes can help coordinate interviews. Your local technology cluster may have free postings for job seekers. We used the free version of Indeed for a hire and it worked out very well.
If you need some help with your B2B sales strategies please contact me and we can talk about it.