4 B2B Sales Strategies Guaranteed To Bring You More Customers

B2B sales can be hard if you don’t have the right strategy down.

You’ll be struggling to get more qualified leads to keep your?sales pipeline?healthy while needing to fill that pipeline way upfront because of the long sales cycles.

B2B sales is also more than a transaction; it requires intricate sales strategies to convince all parties involved in the business deal.

In this article, we will share four B2B sales strategies with you. They helped many of our customers overcome these challenges and stay on top of the game.

1. Strategic selling

Strategic selling was introduced by the?Miller Heiman Group.?It’s a tactic that focuses on helping businesses win complex deals with a scalable, insights-driven approach.

The core of the approach lies in being able to identify different points of contact at the company you’re prospecting, based on their influence on your sales process. Next, you determine the level of support these contacts can provide during decision making at the prospect company.

For example, imagine you want to sell project management and automation tool?to a company. In this case, your first point of contact could be the operations manager or a marketing manager, who has been looking for?productivity tools?to boost the team’s effectiveness.

Having contacted them, you might realize that the marketing manager is a good person to promote the introduction of your software in the company, a.k.a. “coach”, while the operations manager is the one who will make the actual decision, a.k.a. “economic buyer”. So you establish your value proposition according to the marketing department’s needs during outreach. This way, you can start the conversation on a meaningful footing.

After this, you provide the marketing manager with the type of information needed to convince the operations manager. Or you make sure that you get a meeting with the marketing and operations manager together, perhaps flanked by the IT manager, who will probably be the “technical buyer”.

With the help of the marketing manager, you make sure that the operations manager signs off on it and the IT manager gives her approval.

That’s strategic selling.

Why does it work?

This strategy forces the sales teams to go beyond the usual one contact they establish on the prospect’s end. It nudges them to dig deeper into the prospect company’s organizational chart.

By doing their homework on the complete account, they can actually identify all the people who can influence or make decisions.

2. Solution selling

As the name suggests, this B2B sales strategy focuses more on the needs of the prospect than it does on the actual product sale process.

Put more precisely, the salesperson focuses on diagnosing or helping identify the needs of the prospect, their challenges, and goals.

Next, they recommend products or services that will help them overcome these challenges.

This type of selling tactic is especially useful when your business offers (partly or fully) custom solutions to its?target market.

To explain this with an example, let’s say your business offers cloud storage. Here’s what the above process of solution selling would look like for you:

• Prepare?– Research the prospect’s pain points and the solutions they have been trying.
• Diagnose?– Talk to the prospect and ask open-ended questions to understand what business they have, what kind of data they want to store, how much space they would need, and more.
• Qualify?– Based on your conversation, see if the prospect fits your ideal customer persona and if they are interested in moving their data to the cloud. Find out who the final decision maker is. See whether they have a budget on hand and a timeline in mind.
• Educate?– If the prospect qualifies for the solution you offer, educate them about how the cloud storage you provide will help them overcome their current pain points, and why you’re better than others in the market.
• Solve?– Offer them a tailored solution based on their needs, along with case studies of how you helped similar clients.
• Close the deal?– You have convinced the prospect that they need your solution and work towards onboarding them on the cloud. Negotiate the terms and close the deal.

If you’re using?Salesflare, you can easily tailor your pipeline to reflect these steps of the solution selling process.

Why does it work?

Solution selling works for B2B businesses because right from the beginning of the sales cycle, the prospect feels valued. Being heard out and then offered solutions that are tailored to suit their needs helps establish stronger relationships between the business and the prospect, leading to higher conversions and sales.

You don’t close a sale; you open a relationship if you want to build a long-term, successful enterprise.

– Patricia Flipp

3. Account-Based Selling

This is a sales tactic that?Gartner predicted?would be adopted by 75% of B2B businesses by 2019.?Account-based selling?is all about treating every account as a market of one. It includes a multi-touch, multi-channel strategy, executed across the company, to establish contact with multiple stakeholders at the prospect’s company.

Account-based selling typically involves?four tactics:

Let’s look at an example again. Let’s say you’re selling service management software to a logistics company. Here’s what the process would look like for you:

• Select target accounts?– List down all the logistics companies that you can offer your solution to, based on the selection criteria you recognize in your current customers.
• Investigate & identify?– Delve into the data and conduct research on common challenges the above companies face, across various processes on multiple levels. Identify the key decision-makers and influencers.
• Personalized value?– Tailor your value proposition to create different variations that address the challenges and goals of the different stakeholders in the company.
• Outreach?– Reach out to the stakeholders you identified to start a conversation.

To implement account-based selling, you need to have enough data on either existing customers or your?target market?to be able to identify their common characteristics. This strategy is roughly 90% prospecting for information and 10% pitching the solution.

Typically, account-based selling is ideal for companies that have complex sales interactions, lengthier sales cycles, require the approval of several decision-makers, and have a higher chance of up-selling and cross-selling.

Why does it work?

Account-based selling works to keep multiple stakeholders at a prospective company engaged.

It uses different value propositions based on the buyer personas and the stages of the sales cycle they are at, addressing their challenges and goals. The right message at the right time to the right person helps build stronger relationships with the prospect company.

It additionally wins you more votes from the prospective company’s stakeholders, leading to high-value conversions.

If you’re not taking care of the customer, your competitor will.

– Bob Hooey

4. Social Selling

According to?Forrester, 68% of B2B customers research the solutions they need on search engines and social media. Social selling focuses on the latter.

Social selling refers to the tactic of first establishing your business in the defined?target market?and then focusing on building relationships with prospect companies as the first step of selling. Today, this usually includes?leveraging social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and others to share relevant content in order to engage potential buyers or nurture existing ones.

But there’s a critical difference between social selling and marketing – the former focuses on building one-on-one relationships with prospects across these channels; while the latter is all about broadcasting messages from one to many.

Here are the key components of social selling:

As an example, let’s take a look at how one of our co-founders uses LinkedIn.

With a profile optimized to talk clearly about what we’re building, he networks with prospects and influencers on a pre-understood footing. The addition of?‘Making CRM human’?to his profile tagline creates a conversation-starter.