Is Your B2B Sales Process Stalling? Here’s 5 Steps to Close More Deals, Faster!
In the age of AI and data, B2B sales prospecting strategies need a packaged rehauling. Many companies are understandably hesitant to rewire their process, particularly if it yields expected results. However, risk aversion and technophobia can blind sales leaders to the right opportunities to augment their sales process for improved productivity with less effort.
Having said that, it is critical to note that optimizing the sales process is not just a one-day task. It’s an ever-evolving, continuous process that needs in-depth market insights, customer understanding, and industry intelligence, such as current trends, technology use cases, and more.
The challenges of restructuring a B2B sales process
In the imaginable past, the science of B2B sales has never been as difficult as it is today. With the rising democratization of media and communications and technological encroachment in the early stages of a customer outreach process, B2B buyers are now interacting with salespeople at a much advanced stage in their buying journey. It has allowed marketing to take over a few stages (information gathering, query resolution, etc.) that were earlier manned by sales reps.
Furthermore, digital channels have allowed small players to effectively compete with large players in capturing marketing real estate online. This has additionally created margin pressures and price stabilization in the market, further giving power to the buyers, who have increased their expectations of the value they want from the vendors’ products and services.
With these challenges at play, it is crucial for B2B sales leaders to assemble a flexible sales workflow that allows their teams to effectively solve customer challenges, demonstrate their value proposition, and create distinctive customer experiences against other competitors.
A Gartner study reports that 60% of B2B sales organizations will pivot from experience and intuition-based selling to data-driven selling by 2025. The reason? B2B buyers, much like B2C buyers, prefer to engage with vendors through digital, self-service channels, thus making multi-experience selling a must.
As B2B sales leaders look to activate multi-channel selling, they must reconsider their sales force deployment and prioritize investments in digital commerce channels. To effectively restructure the sales process and build a winning strategy, sales leaders must first implement a 3-point action point:
1. Create a tech-enabled sales roadmap
The top priority for sales leaders is to visualize the elements that would constitute the sales process, including technology-driven approaches such as predictive analytics and guided selling. Applications like AI and data are also critical to building a sales process map. However, it is crucial to ensure that you maintain flexibility at high-value stages of the process.
2. Prioritize AI-based sales process
While developing a technology roadmap, sales leaders should identify the inefficient, time-consuming parts of the process and prioritize AI-based guided selling to maximize efficiencies across the sales value chain.
3. Develop buyer-centric sales process
Prioritize buyer-aligned selling by focusing on the needs and pain points of buyers. Incorporating advanced account, industry, and prospect intelligence in the workflow will arm sales reps with a deeper understanding of what potential customers are looking at each stage of their buyer journey, their pain points, their objectives, business initiatives, and more.
6 key Steps to Optimize B2B sales process
After building a sales process roadmap, the next step is to optimize it. Starting from market cataloguing to leveraging automation and AI, the focus should shift away from transactional relationships to more value-based engagements so that you close high LTV customers.
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1. Defining the buyer journey and creating ideal customer profiles (ICPs)
The first step to optimizing the B2B sales process is understanding how your prospects progress through the sales funnel and leveraging those insights to define the buyer journey. You have to answer questions like which decision-makers are involved in purchasing decisions. How to build trust and credibility with them? How many touchpoints are typically involved in buying decisions? ?These questions will help assess different aspects of the overall process, enabling reps to know what to expect from each sale.
Once you have efficiently mapped your buyer journey, crafting detailed ideal buyer profiles is crucial so your sales teams focus on the right type of prospects. Companies must leverage accurate, in-depth profiled B2B data services , encompassing technographic, firmographic, demographic, and B2B contact databases to build their ICP lists. Additionally, AI-curated account intelligence, like technographic use cases, sales and marketing initiatives, and recent growth/expansion initiatives, provides the most accurate reflection of different buyer personas and informs each stage of the sales process, from outreach to deals.
For those who are struggling with building their ICP- technographic, firmographic, and intent data can be a great starting point.
2. Prioritizing sales and marketing alignment
Sales and marketing teams must work in unison towards a unified goal and yet seldom does. Instead of working in silos, sales and marketing teams should work together to establish goals, define ICPs, qualify leads, and work on similar KPIs. One of the key aspects of sales and marketing alignment is communicating the knowledge of pain points down the funnel, drafting a unified messaging, sharing B2B buyer intelligence, and collaborating on content for customer outreach.
3. Deploying hyper-automation and AI-led selling
A B2B sales process comprises multiple moving parts,, from leveraging B2B data services to crafting personalized communication and content offers. According to Salesforce's state of sales report 2022, sales reps spend only 28% of their time on selling. This is why automation becomes a critical cog in streamlining sales processes, enabling smarter targeting, and freeing up valuable time for the sales reps. From mining account, industry, and buyer intelligence through GenAI capabilities to automating lead management and scoring, sales process automation will allow sales reps to focus more on closing deals.
4. Measuring KPIs
As buyers evolve with their buying behaviours and sellers evolve in their selling ways, there is an immediate need to pivot the sales KPIs for better revenue attribution and quota fulfilment. Metrics that directly correlate to sales performance should be prioritized, displacing vanity metrics:
Irrespective of your chosen metrics, ensure that the KPIs cover data from each sales pipeline stage.
5. Improving lead qualification parameters
Lead qualification and prioritization are among the first steps in the sales process and are extremely critical to its success. Why, you ask? Unless your pipeline is filled with high-intent qualified leads, the rest of the process won’t matter. Companies must keep the lead qualification criteria fluid to compensate for ever-changing key buying indicators. Additionally, sales leaders must train their teams on the latest changes in the leads-to-deals loop.
Sales process- a continuous juggle for improvement
It takes a lot of trial and error to determine what works best for your company’s sales process. What is important is to measure the KPIs and identify areas of improvement continuously. Denave empowers enterprise sales teams with AI-curated, human-verified B2B data intelligence to power up sales prospecting with 100% accuracy. Maximize your sales hit rates and convert deals faster.