A conversion-optimized website is crucial to driving traffic and keeping visitors on your site long enough to look around and generate interest.
But for the marketer who wants to drive conversions, you’ll need to do more to convert these visitors and grow the business.
We have five digital strategies teams can employ to improve B2B conversions.
Table of Contents
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.
