5 Steps To Growing Your B2B Business

In this article I'll specifically go over the sales (as opposed to marketing) approach to generating leads and closing deals. Overall, the approach is very simple: identify the right companies to target, qualify them, offer your solution to their problem, and ask repeatedly to close them. However, unless you know the key specifics of how to perform all these steps, your outbound sales efforts are bound to lead to more frustration than success.

1. Define Your Ideal Customer

It all begins with identifying your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Without this you can not run a successful lead generation campaign.

To identify your ICP you want to list all your current and past clients into a spreadsheet column and then add two extra columns. In the one you rate all clients on a scale from 1 to 3 based on how valuable they are to you. In the other you do the same but in regards to how valuable you are to them. Clients that score 3 for both columns are in your ICP.

Why do we need to rate for both directions of value? Because if you're valuable to them, it's easier to pitch to them and they will stay with you for the long run. And if they're valuable to you, it's worth spending time on them.

Once you've identified these companies, the next step is to analyze them based on common criteria. For instance, if you're a customer support company, one of the common criteria of your ICP clients might be: a complicated product, high user volume, etc.

2. Pre-Qualify Your Leads

The ICP exercise from the previous step will help you identify the key criteria to use when searching for leads. However, in order to have good results with an outbound email campaign (see step 3), there's a second layer of qualification that you need to account for – the 'situational' criteria, as I call it.

The best companies to reach out to are those that are receptive to solutions in the first place. A company might already have a solution in place for what you're selling. Or maybe it's simply not a high enough priority. In either of these cases they are highly unlikely to be receptive to your cold outreach. You will be spending 10 times the amount of time on outreach unless you pre-qualify your leads for 'situational' criteria as well.

An article by the Harvard Business Review talks about this concept in more detail. Namely it says that top-performing salespeople focus on companies "that have an emerging need or are in a state of organizational flux".

3. Run Personalized Outbound Email Campaigns

Once you've built your initial list of pre-qualified leads, the next step is to run an automated yet personlized email campaign. By 'automated' I mean having an email sequence of at least 7 well-crafted emails that you can automatically send out to every lead on your list. By 'personalized' I mean personalizing the email sequence to the specific vertical and contact you're sending it too.

The automation part is pretty straighforward. Depending on where you're at you can either use robust sales platforms tools like GrowLabs, Outreach.io, Prospect.io and others, or you can simply go with something cheap and easy like MixMax or Vocus.io. To find emails of contacts for free you can use Name2Email by Reply.

The automation tools can be easily mastered, but what's more important is the personalization aspect of your email sequences. This comes back to knowing who your ICP is and what your value proposition is for them. But you need to be more granular than that. You also need to figure out who the ideal positions, aka buyer personas, to contact are. Who are the people within their company that are most likely to be interested in buying your product? You need to craft your email sequences to target these specific people. Any email you send is always to a specific person and not the company in general.

Finally, a major aspect of personalization is providing value to those buyer personas. Don't just outreach in the hopes that at least some will respond positively. Even if you were to only target companies that have "an emerging need" this would still not be enough. We are now in a value market so don't expect anything if you haven't provided enough value in advance.

How do you do that, you may ask? Well, the good news is it's quite simple. You don't necessarily have to develop a lot of expensive sales-enabling collateral. You can simply research resources (that abound plenty on the internet) that would be relevant to your ideal buyer personas. Dan Smith has a great article about how to do this at scale.

4. Sell The Solution And Yourself

There's a notion that solution-based selling is outdated. The aforementioned Harvard Business Review article talks about just that (its title, "The End of Solution Sales", is kind of a giveaway). In some sense this is true, but in another sense this is very misleading.

The problem today is that people are bombareded with information and solutions from competitors. Secondly, people today are not ignorant – anyone can go on Google and do their own research. So mainly identifying a prospect that can benefit from your solution and then listing your benefits and features to them is not going to work (or at the most it's going to work very poorly).

However, this does not in any way imply the end of 'deeper' solution sales, so to speak. The premise is still the same as in the pre-Web 2.0 era: you must identify what your client's main problem is and then sell them the solution, not your product. It's just that today you want to really 'hear them out', i.e. connect with your client by understanding the specifics of their situation and then talk the details through as to a possible solution.

In essence, this is what modern sales methodologies are about: the Challenger Sale, Sandler Selling, SPIN Selling, etc. – they all try to get into the client's problem on a deeper level.

The second component of selling is, no doubt, selling yourself and not just the product. If they don't trust you, if you're not confident or you're not interesting, then they won't trust or like your product. This doesn't mean you have to have a personality like Jim Carey. It just means you have to have a certain level of presence, so to speak.

If you are naturally extraverted, then most likely this won't be a problem for you. If, however, you are naturally introverted, there is a very straightforward solution: become a Subject-Matter Expert. As all us introverts know (yes, I'm one of them, and I'm not ashamed of it), if you study something for a long enough time and really sink your teeth into, soon you find yourself being "charged" with the subject. You can discuss it naturally, at length and even have a degree of excitement when talking to others about it. This is all that's needed in terms of "selling yourself" – it will instill a sense of confidence in your clients and they will appreciate your ability to talk freely and in detail regarding a specific solution to their specific problem.

5. Close By Doing These Two Things

1) Ask Repeatedly

Grant Cardon stresses the importance of this concept (see video below). The key in closing is in asking repeatedly. But off course you don't want to be pushy, so what's the solution? The solution is in having multiple ways/reasons for asking again. For instance, if you've been following up with email, than give them a call to ask how things are going – less annoying than sending another email. If you're asking with email again, ask in a different way by offering some kind of value. You want to have dozens of these, not just 2 or 3.

2) Do The 'Virtual Close'

There's no need to talk about this at length as this is well described by Steli Efti (from whom I got the tactic) in his article at Sales Hacker. Essentialy, though, you want to have a clear roadmap of the client's buying process by asking them what their next steps are. At the same time, you're guiding them through this process in a so called 'virtual close'. This way your client already has the idea of buying your product in their head and there's no ambiguity in their minds as to how it can happen.

Closing Thoughts

There is so much information and advice out there regarding sales. Whatever you go with, it's crucial that you actually do it and experiment with it so that you can start matching up the theory with actual experiences. In this regard, you want to have adapt the 'fail fast and learn faster' approach. In the end, despite your failures, or rather through your failures, you want to discover the methods that are congruent with who you are.