You wouldn’t expect an NFL team to head into a game without having their plays ironed out. Similarly, your sales team can’t expect to succeed without robust B2B sales strategies.
When your team doesn’t have a solid strategy in place, you may struggle with challenges related to alignment, effectiveness, efficiency, and more.
A strategy can help you unify your team and encourage best practices. Without a unifying strategy, your team may end up following their own processes, whether or not those processes are proven to succeed.
But how can you identify the best B2B sales strategy for your team?
This post will walk you through six of my top B2B sales growth strategies for your team to start crushing your goals.
B2B Sales Strategies: Crush Your Targets
Before choosing the best B2B sales strategy for your business, you first need to understand a few things about B2B sales growth strategies in general.
B2B selling is a unique beast. When you work in B2B sales, you’ll encounter challenges that are not present in B2C sales. Some of these challenges include:
- Gaining access to stakeholders
- Building consensus among multiple stakeholders
- Long sales cycles
- Limited time with the buying task force
- Buyers doing their own research
If you don’t have a B2B sales strategy specific to the B2B market, you will struggle to find and target the right prospects for your business. If you want your sales team to hit the most aggressive targets you can set, you need a blueprint for success.
Let’s take a look at six strategies you can explore to level-up your team's skills, reduce friction in your sales cycle, and close more deals.
B2B Sales Strategies for High-Growth
- Nail Your Messaging
- Preparation, Preparation, Preparation
- Use Content to Facilitate the Buyer Journey
- Align Sales and Marketing Teams
- Take Advantage of Social Selling
- Leverage Your Existing Customers
Strategy #1: Nail Your Messaging
You need to communicate your value to your prospects effectively if you want them to invest their time and money in your organization.
Nailing your messaging is all about having the right language to advance every sale every time.
Equally important? Avoiding the wrong language. Legacy sales messaging focuses on why your product or company is superior to the competition. That kind of messaging simply doesn't resonate with the modern buyer.
Buyers aren’t interested in you or your product until you build the relationship. You need first to demonstrate that you can provide value to them. Then—and only then—will they want to hear about your solution.
Validate Their Struggle
Your prospects have challenges in their daily work. Your messaging should validate those challenges. Show your prospects that you not only understand their struggles, but also that you understand why they’re struggling—and you have the know-how they need to solve those challenges.
Related Read: 8 Ways to Increase the Perception of Value
Use an executive briefing to outline the forces and factors causing your prospects’ headaches. Include compelling data that shows them why they need to make a change from their current solution.
Highlight the Consequences of Making No Change
The last section was about showing the prospect why they need to make a change, this section is all about illustrating what will happen if they ignore their challenges and stick with the same old solution anyways.
Treat this part of the conversation like an exploration. Instead of directly pointing out the consequences of inaction, ask questions that will help them delve deeper into their challenges. Identify the gap between their goals and their results, and help them see that, without change, they won’t be able to close that gap.
Differentiate Yourself
Once you’ve helped them identify the need for a change, it’s finally time for you to show where your solution factors into the equation.
In other words, they know why they need to change. They need to see why they should choose you for that change.
Take steps to differentiate your company and yourself. Nurture the relationship and show how you can provide continued value that the competition can’t match.
Strategy #2: Preparation, Preparation, Preparation
As important as the right language is, it’s not enough to help your team crush their targets. To find consistent success, you team needs a killer sales outreach strategy.
Sales outreach includes engagement with new prospects or previous customers who have gone cold. You need a solid strategy to achieve this successfully.
The most important step in preparing to crush your sales outreach strategy is to create your ideal customer profile. Examine your ideal customer regarding their industry, business size, goals, and more.
Then, ensure you also consider the roles of the stakeholders you’ll need to approach in those organizations. What does their day-to-day look like? What are their biggest challenges? You can use this information to personalize your messaging.
Related Read: Legacy Approach vs. Modern Sales Conversation Structures
Strategy #3: Use Content to Facilitate the Buyer Journey
Gone are the days when you could expect to reach out to a buyer without knowledge of your product or solution. Today’s modern buyer tends to conduct their own research online. Your organization can benefit from this trend by providing marketing content designed to inform buyers in the awareness, consideration, and decision stages.
How can your sales team take advantage of this change? Create engaging content that will help them in their research. Instead of waiting for them to come to you, proactively help them solve their problems and answer your questions. This will help you build trust throughout the buyer's journey.
Buyers want to hear from sales reps who can help them when they’re in the awareness stage, looking for opportunities to improve their business.
Interacting with prospects who engage with your organization’s content on blogs, social media, and more can help nurture them from these early stages of their buyer’s journey and, ultimately, help you close the deal.
Strategy #4: Align Sales and Marketing Teams
Sales and marketing teams may be different, but if your organization wants to crush its targets and KPIs, they need to work together. This is particularly true in B2B sales.
Work with your marketing team to align on objectives and goals. Explore areas where your teams can interact for frictionless handoffs, enhanced customer experience, and more.
For example, with your help, your marketing team can more accurately identify what constitutes a quality lead. Armed with this information, they can focus on quality lead gen, increasing the quality of the leads your sales team receives, ultimately resulting in an easier sale.
Unite sales and marketing using a CRM tool and alignment meetings and watch your revenue soar.
Strategy #5: Take Advantage of Social Selling
Does social selling have a place in the B2B world? Yes, but only if you approach it in the right way. Begin any attempt at social selling by asking a vital question: Where are your potential customers?
For B2B, it’s mainly LinkedIn. You can find ninety million senior-level influencers and over sixty-five million decision-makers on LinkedIn. That’s almost 10% of LinkedIn users—and LinkedIn isn’t only for high-level decision-makers. Lower-level employees have considerable influence on what products are purchased in B2B companies, especially as they are often end-users.
Building relationships is vital in every type of sales, but it’s especially important in social selling. Accomplish this by sharing relevant and engaging content. You can also branch out by commenting on posts related to your prospects’ industry.
Strategy #6: Leverage Your Existing Customers
The last strategy I’ll mention here is also related to your CRM—specifically, leveraging the data in your CRM to see what opportunities exist among your existing customers.
Happy, existing customers are among the most likely people to buy from you again. You can leverage this population by creating new value for them. Can you provide or offer additional products or services that the customer is not currently using?
Has your product recently added new features? If your current customers are underutilizing your product, it might be a good opportunity to touch base with them. You can steer them toward an upsell or cross-sell opportunity during that conversation.
You can also leverage existing customers for reviews and referrals, which can help you earn new business down the line.
B2B Sales Strategies: Start With What You Have
B2B sales strategies are scalable. You can start with what you have and build. It doesn't cost much to develop a buyer persona, research, talk to people where they are, see what they’re struggling with, etc.
Leveraging existing customers takes some internal work, but it’s well worth it. However, you don’t need to do this alone.
What if you had a blueprint that helped you implement these strategies across your team? A blueprint that showed you how to create new opportunities by creating value? And armed your team with strategies, tactics, and talk tracks that helped them capture more opportunities?
My Revenue Growth Blueprint will help you hit aggressive sales targets and crush your goals. Request access to the Revenue Growth Blueprint to get started today!
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