1. Prospect Qualification

Should you spend time selling this prospect or not?

How close is the prospect to making purchase decisions?

What action would you need to take to increase your chances of closing a deal?

These are questions teams need to ask before going full throttle on a potential customer.

Prospect qualification allows you to gather insights that inform your next move aka whether pursuing them is worth the resources and man-hours you’ll spend. 

The questions you raise help you understand the lead and craft custom messages and experiences. This goes a long way in helping persuade them.

On the other hand, when your team dives straight into pitching without qualifying the prospect or handling it poorly may hurt your efforts. Some of the dangers may include

• Wastage of time. Your team may put in plenty of effort and resources to sell to a company that isn’t interested or doesn’t fit your customer profile.
• Closing bad deals. It’s possible to successfully sell to clients that your solutions aren’t built for, leading to frustrations on both sides. Your customer support team may need to work double to make these solutions work for the client and the experiences may not be so great. 
• Losing deals at later stages. What is the potential client’s buying process? What’s the deal value? How long do purchases take to complete? Without this information, your team may find itself in for “bad surprises” after spending resources on such clients.

2. Engage in Social Selling

Here’s an interesting statistic—up to 78 percent of brands engaging in social selling outsell peers who aren’t engaging in it. In other words, through social selling, you’re better positioned to identify sales opportunities and exploit them.

So, should you set camp on your favorite social platforms and pitch to everyone you’re connected to? 

Camping on the platforms is agreeable, but your approach needs to focus on building relationships, credibility, and humanizing your brand.

To maximize this strategy

• Start by fleshing out your social selling strategy. What are you looking for? Brand awareness? Generating leads. What platforms will you use? Which channels are your competitors using?
• Consider the value you’re bringing to the table. How quickly would you unfollow a person that’s constantly posting ads? Your followers will probably do the same. People are more interested in content that improves their lives. Focus on creating such content.
• Engage meaningfully. Post thought leadership pieces, valuable research, studies, and videos. Pose questions to followers regarding recent developments that impact their industry (to gather feedback) and offer meaningful responses whenever people comment on your posts.
• Consistency is precious. Don’t be the brand that publishes posts, disappears for weeks, comes back posts, and goes away again. You won’t build relationships that way. Be regular and split your time between creating content and engaging other people’s content.

3. Make Cold Calls

This strategy isn’t a breeze. If you want to succeed at cold calling, you’ll need to put in research time, effort, and practice. 

Or, you can engage a lead generation agency to do the heavy lifting. Agencies price their services differently, so you’ll want to check how that lines up with your goals and budget.

If you opt to keep things in-house, here are some helpful tips

• Refine your calling script. That script is meant for your prospect’s ears. Does it resonate with their situation? Will it inspire them to act? Tweak your script to suit the prospect—sometimes this could be amending your opening statement based off what you’ve learned about them.
• Mind your tone. In addition to what you say, think about how you say it. Speaking too softly says you aren’t confident and the listener may not hear you while being too loud can come off as pushy. Pace yourself to ensure the prospect captures every word.
• Work with three points. What top three challenges does your prospect’s industry face? How do your solutions tackle these challenges? Focus on these to ensure you keep your listener’s attention.
• Take a value-first approach. Rushing through your script to get the prospect to agree to a meeting or demo won’t get you far. Neither is quoting the price—even when your solutions are the cheapest in your industry. Prove value and the sales will come.

4. Leverage Data Analytics

The challenge many vendors face today is not in gathering data, but rather how to use it to answer sales and marketing questions and help advance business.

Here are some ways you can use the data lying in your CRM and other customer data management software:

• Streamlining operations for greater efficiency. Through analytics, leaders can assess existing workflows to pick up complex or budget-draining processes. The results they get may help them refine their workflows or develop new ones to improve efficiency.
• Enhancing cybersecurity by monitoring data. With COVID-19 came spikes in cybersecurity threats, including account takeovers. When you embed data analytics into your risk management processes, you’ll be better placed to identify, monitor, mitigate, and report risks faster.
• Tracking consumer behavior. With info on customer attitudes, preferences, and interactions, you can personalize experiences to improve satisfaction.
• Monitoring market trends. Brands that use analytics to discern market changes and evolving customer demands to ideate new solutions quickly and test their offerings before the competition catches on. It leads to greater market share and increased revenues.

5. Brand Differentiation

It’s interesting how the moment a company innovates and launches a new solution on the market, its competitors go into overdrive.

They will straight up copy, duplicate, or build on it. They will try to nullify your offerings and claim your ideas as your own.

This shouldn’t stop you from distinguishing your brand. People know a good thing when they see it, and here are some top ways to differentiate your way

• Market responsiveness. Up to 90 percent of customers consider immediate responses essential when they have questions. So, how quickly can your brand respond to or anticipate needs?
• Market dominance. While it might take Herculean effort to unseat larger brands with bigger market share, find their weakness, and exploit them maximumly to differentiate your offering.
• Distribution methods. How seamlessly can you get your products to customers? Re-look at your supply chain and smoothen hiccups to make it more effective. In some cases, you may need to partner with a logistics company while in other cases, cutting them out.
• Technological advantage. Investing in advanced hardware, software, and intellectual property may help improve efficiency and effectiveness leading to greater customer satisfaction.

The post Top Digital Marketing Strategies That Improve B2B Conversions appeared first on TechReviewsCorner.

This change significantly affects the B2B sector with a buyer (buyer persona) that has started in an accelerated way to search for its suppliers on Google and increase its purchases.

What Digital Actions Focused On Ecommerce Are Being Developed?

This essential and accentuated change during the period in which commercial networks could not visit customers leads B2B companies to make a series of changes in their ways of selling, and digital is imposed.

Based on several projects we have worked on in B2B Ecommerce, we can point out that they are fundamentally focusing on:

• Development and improvement of its own direct sales platforms (own On-Line store), providing more functionalities and improving its usability.

• Hiring “digital” staff for your sales and marketing structures.

• Increase in Digital Marketing budgets with particular emphasis on SEO / Link Building campaigns, usually in the hands of a specialized Agency and with measurable and quantifiable objectives of expected results.

• Generation of “digital” content of interest to the “buyer persona”… Ebooks, guides, webinars … With particular emphasis on the development of YouTube channels.
• Intensive use of CRM programs seeking greater loyalty from “web” customers and increasing purchase volumes through cross-selling actions.

And the most important of all … Establishing specific 3-year B2B Ecommerce digital strategies contemplating the following items:

• Generation volumes of “qualified leads.

• Necessary investments are especially broken down in Marketing items. 

• Roadmap to follow when implementing them.

• Approach to the responsibilities of the Marketing and Sales departments, requiring clarification of the teams’ duties.

Do we need to develop an Ecommerce strategy to grow in the B2B sector?

Changes are taking place very quickly, and the way the buyer persona in the B2B sector purchases has changed … we have competitors who are doing their homework and implementing strategies similar to those we have mentioned … It is essential to focus our digital and Ecommerce strategy as soon as possible.

Also Read: Inbound Marketing & Account-Based Marketing – The Winning Strategies of B2B?

The post Five Essential Actions To Develop A Good B2B Ecommerce Strategy appeared first on TechReviewsCorner.

B2B being in substantial evolution, these two strategies are set to gain momentum in the years to come. Find out why one or the other of these strategies, very different but complementary! They are currently in vogue and are developing very strongly and rapidly.

How To Set Up An Inbound Marketing Strategy?

Inbound marketing is a B2B strategy that attracts your ideal prospects, also called persona, to convert them into leads and then transform them into customers through marketing automation, lead nurturing and content creation actions.

Step 1: Define Your Buyer’s Personas 

To attract your personas, you have to start by defining them. This way, you will know who to contact, why and how.

After having created your persona (s), it is essential to understand the stages that make up their customer journey, leading them to their purchasing decision.

The creation of personas allows you to identify your customers’ problems and how you position yourself to respond to them. This is the first step in building your editorial strategy.

Step 2: Create Downloadable Content and Blog Posts

To set up an Inbound Marketing strategy, you will have to create content on the web for your personas. Within this content, do not talk about yourself but rather respond to issues your prospects may encounter.

Creating content that meets your prospects’ challenges is the best or the only way for them to download your content and thus turn it into a lead!

Here are some examples of Inbound Marketing content that you can set up:

• Blog post
• Webinar
• White Book
• Infographics
• Podcast
• Customer cases
• Tool
• Marketing video
• Checklist

Once your content is created, you must promote it to make it shine and reach your target: share on your social networks, your website or blog, generate SEA campaigns with particular attention to your keywords and your targeting, create an emailing campaign by segmenting your database, etc.

Step 3: Create Landing Pages and Forms That Will Collect Information About Your Leads

When your prospect wants to download your content, you will land him on a landing page to make him fill out a form to send him the content by email. Within this form, you fill in the fields you want: name, first name, email, phone number …

You will also be able to collect behavioural data (which article he read, on which pages he browses, etc.) to subsequently be able to personalize your content and better respond to the challenges of prospects. Thus, you will make him understand that you are a credible interlocutor.

Step 4: Set Up Marketing Automation To Personalize Your Messages And Score Your Leads

Send personalized messages throughout the customer journey (acquisition, loyalty, etc.): you will thus create a customized relationship and increase efficiency.

Also, set up a lead scoring system. This consists of assigning a score to your leads, allowing their engagement and quality to be measured according to their behaviour. Thanks to marketing automation, this attribution is done automatically: the more points a lead has, the more commercially attractive it is!

These lead scoring and marketing automation actions are often linked to a strategy called lead nurturing.

Also Read: B2B Digital Marketing Automation Report 2021

Step 5: Convert a Lead Into a Customer!

Never forget the end goal: convert your leads into customers.

Once your leads have reached a score threshold (defined by you beforehand) and they are sufficiently qualified (first name, last name, department, phone number, etc.), you can then send them to your sales teams. They thus have the complete history of the behavioural data of the leads and are ready to start prospecting actions with them.

The Advantages of Inbound Marketing

It appeals to your prospects!

The era is in “permission marketing”: the consumer is in power, and he wants to consent to communicate with you.

She concludes long sales cycles!

With Inbound Marketing, you stay in the consumer’s mind, and you will close the sales.

It builds customer loyalty!

Once your prospect has been transformed into a customer, inbound marketing will not give up and will make them become an ambassador.

It accelerates your profitability!

Studies show that companies with an inbound marketing strategy have a better ROI.

How To Set Up an Account-Based Marketing Strategy?

Account-based marketing (ABM) concentrates its efforts on a list of target customers called “strategic accounts”. So you don’t exhaust yourself selling to everyone!

This strategy allows you to make more gross margins, upsell, attack or explore a new market or develop customers similar to (also called the one to few). This strategy should create something that you have never made before.

Step 1: Identify Your Strategic Accounts

Build a contact mapping to know who to target in a company. These must be specific vital accounts. For your strategy to be profitable, these accounts must be large enough or have substantial business potential.

Step 2: Perform Research on Your Identified Profiles

You need to know your strategic accounts both inside and out! Find out about the company’s key figures, the brand’s identity, projects, values, issues, etc.

Google, Twitter, Linked In, and the company’s website will be your allies for its research.

Step 3: Push Hyper-Personalized Content

To design your hyper-personalized campaigns, identify the channels that work best for your target (digital content, physical demonstration, etc.) as well as the ideal frequency.

Here are some examples of account-based marketing content that you can set up:

• White Book
• Box
• Sample
• Email
• Inmail
• Mail
• Invitation to an event

Creativity has its place within an ABM strategy, for example, focusing on sending personalized goodies.

Step 4: Engage Your Target Accounts

Make yourself known to your target accounts. Connect to LinkedIn, first get a telephone discovery meeting, for example.

Then schedule a physical meeting. Then comes the time to send the business proposal.

Remember to contextualize your commercial approach and be “customer-centric” properly!

The Advantages of Account-Based Marketing

It is efficient!

With ABM, you don’t focus on the number of leads but the quality of information and contacts. By concentrating on prospects with high potential to become customers, you gain inefficiency.

It optimizes conversions!

ABM content is relevant and personalized. It converts more.

It promotes marketing!

Smarketing is aligning your sales and marketing teams. Your teams work more collaboratively.

It has a better return on investment!

With ABM, you do not exhaust your resources for prospects with low added value. Instead, you focus on high potential accounts.

It saves your customers time!

Your customers are in a hurry. They will appreciate that you save them time.

Should I Be Doing Inbound Marketing Only, ABM Only, or Both?

These two strategies are both different and complementary. Depending on your business and your offer, you may or may not be able to implement these two strategies.

Who Is Inbound Marketing For?

The inbound marketing strategy is made for you:

• If your persona uses the internet when doing research.
• If you are on a long buying cycle (4 to 6 months).
• If you are targeting a particular professional function (a CFO, a CIO, a Marketing Director, etc.).
• If you are in a large market.
• If you need to evangelize your offering.

Who is Account-Based Marketing For?

The ABM strategy is made for you:

• If you have a significant value proposition/promise.
• If you are in a small market, a market segment, a new territory, on the pursuit of customers of your competitors.
• If your account decides with several stakeholders (the CEO, the CFO, the marketing department, the department concerned).
• If you can acquire these accounts with a hyper-personalization strategy.

Also Read: Apple vs. Samsung vs. Google – Three Heavyweights Meet

The post Inbound Marketing & Account-Based Marketing – The Winning Strategies of B2B? appeared first on TechReviewsCorner.

The central result of the Marketing Automation Report 2021 is: For B2B companies, it is essential to make better use of digital channels and automate marketing processes to establish successful marketing solutions for online sales.

The survey was carried out with around a hundred specialists and decision-makers from marketing, sales, CRM and IT from B2B companies. The results of the study were published in the Marketing Automation Report 2021.

Digital Marketing Automation B2B Report 2021

The results at a glance

• Content Marketing g is the top topic in 2021 but continues to prioritize optimizing marketing and sales processes and lead management.
• Changes in marketing in 2021 are primarily online marketing and online events instead of on-site events and the digitization of marketing & sales.
• Another important topic in 2021 is marketing automation. Overall, however, only 58% of the companies surveyed currently use automation software.
• Conversion rate and generated leads are still the most important key figures for measuring the success of marketing automation.
• The topic of AI in Marketing & Sales is rarely on the agenda at the moment. Only 9% have either started or already completed a project.
• The biggest challenges in 2021 are content production, acceptance of modern approaches in your organization and collaboration between marketing and sales.
• Performance marketing, tracking & reporting, and customer analytics/data science are the employee skills that will be required in the future for the transition to data-driven marketing.
• Increasing lead generation and making marketing activities measurable are the primary goals of marketing automation.

Marketing Automation For B2B Companies

Many B2B companies focus on marketing automation to optimize marketing and sales processes, social media marketing and digital awareness generation. Most B2B companies (78 per cent) have recognized the advantages of a marketing automation solution, are planning or implementing the implementation or have even completed it.

Through marketing automation, B2B companies hope to increase their lead generation, make their lead nurturing more targeted, and create transparency about their marketing activities or make them measurable. Performance plays an essential role for them. Analytics and reporting are classified as very important. But this shows deficits in the skills of the employees. It is, therefore, all the more likely that B2B companies will plan to exploit all potential in this area this year.

The Four Most Significant Challenges for B2B Companies in 2021 at a Glance

• Content production
• Acceptance in your organization for modern marketing and sales approaches
• Marketing & sales collaboration
• 360 ° view of the customer 360 ° view of the customer

Also Read: Use Of Display Marketing And Programmatic Advertising

Solution Approaches for B2B Digital Marketing.

To solve the increasing challenges in marketing, marketing managers rely on increasing media budgets to expand awareness (generation of attention) via digital channels (e.g. social media, SEO, SEA) and modern content formats (video, online -Events etc.).

You involve the entire organization or all experts in the content production or get external support. The majority of the experts questioned have recognized the relevance of lead management and intensify the collaboration between Marketing & Sales.

These processes and the automation of marketing are technically supported by the introduction of marketing technologies and integrated systems (CRM, Marketing Automation) and the qualification of employees and the expansion of resources.

B2B Digital Marketing Solutions at a Glance

• Increasing the online media budget to increase awareness: social media, SEO, SEA
• Intensive interface management between marketing and sales
• Inbound marketing and modern content formats: webinars, video, etc.
• Involvement of the entire organization in content production
• Introduction of technologies and integrated systems: CRM, marketing automation
• External support from specialists and agencies
• Employee qualification and expansion of resources
• Clear process definition: lead management
• Target definition in marketing: reporting based on defined KPIs

Digital B2B Growth Strategy For More Success!

With this proven digital strategy and the online sales system, you gain a booster for your business for B2B customer acquisition! This means that you have significantly less stress in acquiring customers, employees and partners. Because you continuously gain new inquiries online through the compelling mix of measures of premium positioning, content marketing and social selling on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Marketing and Sales is a booster to B2B business success!

The post B2B Digital Marketing Automation Report 2021 appeared first on TechReviewsCorner.

What are B2B sales?

As I mentioned initially, they are the sales that take place between companies, business to business. In this case, the commercialization of the services or products will not reach the final consumer.

What are the different types of sales?

If we refer to customer contact, we can differentiate the two most common types of sales: B2B and B2C sales. The latter is developed focused on the consumer, as an abbreviation for Business-to-Consumer.

Examples of B2B and B2C sales

A B2B sale would consist of the hiring of marketing services by another company. On the other hand, if a dentist makes a campaign to attract patients, it would be a B2C sale.
How to increase sales? It’s a good question. In the corporate world at any level, there is no magic or tricks. I think that before developing a sales strategy, we must analyze our business.

Corporate culture

We must have our values ​​established, detailing our mission and vision to establish ourselves in our sector and seek success.

Competition analysis

Once our organization is defined, it will be necessary to know what our competition does to feel competitive. In this case, we can help ourselves with benchmarking and SWOT Analysis.

Take care of branding or brand image

• The branding gives us the possibility to get an identity to seek differentiation from our competitors, including our value proposition.
• Marketing actions to increase business to business sales.
• Having seen what B2B sales are and having defined our project, we are going to assess what we can do to expand the business to business sales.

Traditional Marketing

We have options through marketing to increase sales:

Commercial visits:  if our business is focused on generic products or services, it will be advisable to go out to visit clients cold. To give an example, any energy service, electricity, water, gas, …

Telemarketing:  consists of developing the commercial action by telephone. In order to target and achieve sales, it is advisable to focus on one sector to pique the interest of the potential customer. If we sell tires, any workshop will be interested in knowing us.

Mailbox:  in this case, it happened as in commercial visits: if the service or product is popular, it could be profitable to leave our flyer in any business through our distributors.

Digital marketing

If we focus on expanding B2B sales through the internet, we have more variables to market our services or products:

SEO positioning:  if we have a web page, we can gradually position our project in our market niche so that future clients can find us in the search engine. In this case, being a natural positioning using SEO techniques, it will not be necessary for Google.

Google Ads campaigns: in this case, the objective is the same as SEO positioning but paying Google. It is advisable to take advantage of the two formulas but we do refer to ad campaigns in Google, it would be perfect for making specific promotions or at the beginning of the life of our website because initially, it would be difficult to place it in the first positions

Ad campaigns on social networks: it is a good idea to get brand recognition, use social networks to make ourselves known, and try to get sales. The main advantage is the cost compared to Google Ads, which is cheaper. Although the ads are directed to people to achieve B2B sales, we can always segment by criteria that interest us to reach companies: entrepreneur, page manager, small business, or similar.

I trust that you know a little more about business to business sales and that you can develop your marketing strategy to increase them.

Also Read: How to improve your SEO using content authoring

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