Business to business sales can be a long process, requiring numerous touch points and follow-ups with prospects. For businesses with limited resources, generating quality leads to push through the sales funnel is a challenge. It’s not something that just happens. It takes continuous investment over time to generate results and requires multiple approaches for success.
Through the years, I’ve found how to efficiently drive business to business sales success. Below are a few tips to help you in your own B2B sales efforts.
Targeting
I have always believed that targeting individuals in the company who have the most to gain from your solution is the best way to start. Take the time to do some research and identify who in your target account(s) would be interested and could make a decision: this may be an individual or multiple contacts. They are likely to be the most interested in your solution, so go after them! I also shy away from massive shotgun campaigns because your message is often lost among other mass campaigns and can lump you with spam.
Be Persistent
Being persistent with your prospect is one of my top business to business sales suggestions. High level contacts are often busy and it could take multiple touches to get onto their radar. Sales research shows that most salespeople don’t bother to make more than and 1 or 2 attempts to contact their lead, but that it can take 8 to 13 or more touches to close a business deal. If your solutions provides value, you must be persistent.
Utilize multiple channels
With all that is going on in the business world today, the amount of input professionals receive can be overwhelming. Think of how many unread email messages you have in your inbox. In today’s market, you need to utilize multiple touch points across traditional platforms (email, calls and trade shows) and social platforms (LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter). This helps you stand out from the tired inbox noise. I would also recommend scheduling your outbound efforts at different times – early morning, late in the evening, etc. Don’t be afraid to mix it up.
Leverage Social Media
It’s becoming the norm to do research and contact your prospects over social media instead of traditional emails (when appropriate). If your prospect is frequently sharing content on LinkedIn, that might be the best way to get your message in front of him or her. My response rate on LinkedIn (including yes’s and no’s) is about 30%. This is actually higher than the expected response rate from outbound emails and calls: these seem to fall in the 10-15% range. With all the content being shared, social media is also a great source to research a company or gather preliminary information on a prospect.
In addition to using social media to reach out, make sure you are posting relevant information about your product or service – this could be an update on LinkedIn, a tweet or a video on your company’s YouTube channel. Ensure the content has all the proper meta descriptions so that it’ll be searchable, and incorporates the key words your prospects are searching for. This benefits your inbound marketing plan: the goal of this is to have prospects find you! We have an extensive library of blogs and helpful hints on our website around inbound marketing and B2B lead generation – take a look.
Attend Relevant Events
Events are still a good place to network and make contacts. I think the key now is to be very selective about what events you attend and what the ROI is, post-event. Events also provide a good place for you to meet with prospects that may be in your current sales funnel or ones that you want to be. Run an outbound campaign prior to the event to see if you can drive any one on one meetings at the event.
If you’re looking for tips on how to improve your B2B sales lead generation efforts or are considering outsourcing your business to business sales and marketing, please don’t hesitate to contact us. For great insight into startup sales and marketing, feel free to sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Twitter.
