Unlock Higher B2B Sales Win Rates with These Proven Strategies

Master these five crucial sales strategies to significantly boost your win rates and improve your sales results.

1. Deeply Understand Your Clients' Challenges

I often wonder why salespeople ask their clients to name their problems and the implications of them. When you call your prospective client and ask for a meeting, what problem did you believe they were experiencing that you could solve? To prevent you from looking like a greenhorn—someone who doesn’t know what they should—you should know your client’s problems better than they do. This positions you as someone who can help your clients dispatch their problems and reach their desired results. I often tease salespeople by asking them what they would do if the client confessed they didn’t have enough parking spaces and needed better coffee filters.

2. Enhance Your Focus on Client Decision-Making Processes

For as long as anyone can remember, we have bowed down to the all-important solution. Salespeople tend to believe that their solution is everything, even though every one of your competitors has a similar solution. If you want to sell better and win more deals, let your competitors sing the same old song while you focus on the client’s decision-making. Your client is not going to find you consultative when you are pitching your solution. The more consultative you are, the more you will differentiate your approach from that of your competitors. By focusing on enabling the client’s decision, you will provide them with the confidence and certainty they need to move forward with their change initiative.

3. Strategically Deprioritize Your Solution in Sales Conversations

Maybe because of my experience selling a true commodity, I relied very little on my solution to provide differentiation. Even the largest competitors had a tough time finding something sexy enough to cause the client to buy from their salesperson. If you are able to deprioritize your solution, you can focus your attention on the sales conversation. If you have ever won a deal, it is only because you had a better conversation than your competitor. If you have ever lost a deal to a competitor, it isn’t likely that your solution wasn’t a fit. Instead, you lost because your competitor provided a better sales conversation.

4. Effectively Transfer Your Knowledge and Experience to Clients

When you are a young salesperson, you might believe that your client knows way more than you do. Your contact is One-Up when it comes to their industry and their company, while also being One-Down when it comes to a rare decision they must get right on the first attempt. We talk about empathy in sales, but unless you put yourself in your client’s shoes, you may not understand what they are feeling. Your contacts have a lot riding on their decision, including the possibility of making a mistake that makes things worse for them. To ensure your client gets their decision right on the first try, you have to transfer your knowledge and experience to your client’s decision makers and their stakeholders. One of the reasons you should deprioritize your solution is because, by providing an education on the decision, you will almost certainly lead your client to buy from you.

5. Lead Your Client through Their Buying Journey

It is doubtful that anyone will tell you that you are responsible for leading your client, but you are. The rare decision they face is something you deal with every day in sales. Your client takes this journey occasionally, so they don’t know what they don’t know. You have far greater experience, including with the mistakes clients tend to make when facing similar decisions, so you are responsible for educating them. By leading your client through their buyer’s journey, you are able to ensure they are able to make change and improve their results.

Most onboarding and B2B sales training does not include any of the five strategies you find here. Instead, most of what you will encounter on LinkedIn or some other social platform will establish you as One-Down, which means you lack the knowledge and expertise you need to be One-Up and know more than your contacts.

It is almost certain that your sales leaders and sales managers will tell you to pursue velocity, even though you can never go faster through the sales conversation than your client. Any hesitance to give your clients the time they need will find your competitor being generous with their time. Anything you won't do, your competitor will happily do in your stead.

If there is one thing you should prioritize, it is becoming One-Up. No one needs to buy from a salesperson who is not capable of executing the five strategies you find here. The average salesperson has no awareness of the need to be One-Up, especially in enterprise-level deals.

Leaving this article, spend time studying the strategies. The more time you spend practicing these ideas, the better your results will be. Start with the first strategy and work until you master it before moving on to the next strategy. Trying to attempt all of these simultaneously will slow you down, making it take more time for you to improve your sales approach.