The New Guidelines for Generating B2B Leads

By the beginning of 2020, it was typical for any reputable business-to-business (B2B) technology leader to spend more than 80% of their time traveling to meet with clients. Through face-to-face interactions, taking prospective clients to athletic events, and conducting interviews at yearly conferences, they will be actively searching for new prospects and suitable leaders. Ironically, there isn't much science or technology that enables pipeline development or contract closure in the business world.

The global epidemic has caused this trader to move too slowly or not at all, leaving him with a lot of time on his hands but the same or even bigger proportions that they need to discover in the upcoming quarter. It is unknown whether buyers wish to return as previously or whether businesses would permit seller trips for legal reasons, despite the fact that the seller may benefit from an active travel schedule as the world adopts a new standard. Over 70% of B2B decision-makers favor digital self-help over in-person assistance.

The difficulty presented by this new environment is how to locate new clients whose problems they can answer when clients do not want to go back to the old method of doing business.

In this article, we'll use a real-world instance to demonstrate how a $10 billion worldwide technology corporation effectively introduced a new method of cutting-edge digital manufacturing, which encouraged the general adoption of fresh digital tactics. We advise businesses to follow a five-step process to support sales on this journey towards developing a better generation of leadership. This is based on the author's experience leading the transformation projects in this technology company and their combined more than 30 years of experience helping Fortune 500 sales teams transform their operations to market.

What Clients Want Right Now

Organizations must better facilitate sales lead gen efforts in the new environment rather than instructing their B2B salespeople to make individual improvements. At this time, salespeople are urged to spend more time prospecting, talking to customers online with tools like Zoom and Teams, and organizing events. Even while these steps could be helpful, they won't be sufficient to repair the seller's pipeline's big gap, especially if they don't have the luxury of stable customer accounts or a consistent stream of renewal business.

The B2B salesforce needs to connect with potential clients online, particularly on LinkedIn and Twitter, in order to generate more leads. As part of this initiative, your salesforce must establish themselves as recognized thought leaders in their industries and participate in online discussions in fresh, thought-provoking ways, a position previously held by employees in the company's product, customer success, or professional service departments. Additionally, they must employ solution selling, which is more important than ever in a digital context and is a client- and industry-specific.

Individually, most salesmen are unable to achieve this vision. The organization has a responsibility to offer the appropriate support. In order for salespeople to establish themselves as thought leaders, B2B salesforce leaders, particularly those in forward-thinking sectors like technology, must produce marketable content. Examples of this include white papers, 1-3-year technology transformation roadmaps, and standard pitch materials.

The New B2B Sales Playbook

1. Create the best go-to-market team possible. A cross-functional team must develop global, repeatable standards for businesses in order to compete in this new environment. These standards will be utilized to construct comprehensive go-to-market material. The procedures must be streamlined with the intention of producing no more than three industry-specific, standardized marketing materials. It is crucial to involve local stakeholders in the design of the content and to take global field sales and marketing teams' opinions into account as well. Although the company began with regional sales and marketing teams, there were many participants in the content creation process at the global technology company.

2. Simplify the material that describes the company's industry offers. The "outcome-based" nature of the material your team creates—that is, a focus on the issues clients face rather than the solutions the industry is peddling—is essential. The team should put up the architecture so that some of this information may be made available externally on social media and other digital channels by marketing teams, in addition, to housing it on internal landing pages. For instance, the business we researched previously had tens of thousands of pieces of sales collateral dispersed over numerous websites. The cross-functional team concentrated on developing sales materials for just a small number of industries, and each piece of collateral expressed the value of the customer, rather than just listing the features of the products.

3. Get the stuff out there. Here, awareness is crucial. The go-to-market program and content need to be broadly disseminated within the organization by leaders. After the conversation, leaders need to make sure salespeople can quickly access the content. Additionally, after the content has been released in the field, salespeople must be able to push it to market by using platforms for distribution and, optionally, sales productivity tools for tracking and performance data.

4. Demand generation teams provide sales with pertinent leads. Through certain of their actions, such as emailing prospects with the content and publishing it on particular digital media sites, sales will generate leads directly. Sales leads will need to make sure that information is shared with the field in other situations, such as when prospects are sent to a corporate website that gathers customer information, in order for the field to be adequately motivated.

5. Measure outcomes at multiple levels.?Reps in the field must be able to monitor the overall performance of their content, including views and impact on deals. Meanwhile, the organization can build on sales content that is doing well and remove collateral that doesn’t quickly gain traction. Internal performance metrics for maximizing quality content and leads must be present. This last step ensures that the content library only includes sales motions that deliver value, both to clients and to the field.