The Covid-19 pandemic undoubtedly changed the business landscape and created waves of unprecedented consequences. No market was left untouched.
Amid all the disruptions came new opportunities in the digital marketing space to help businesses overcome challenges and even prosper.
Even though business hasn’t gone back to the way it used to be, companies with the right mindset can turn this situation to their advantage. Here are five success strategies to help rev up B2B sales post Covid-19.
- Re-invent Your Business for Revenue Recovery
In the post covid era, creativity, swift response, and efficiency will probably determine who is left standing and who falls on the sideways.
B2B buyer behavior has changed with every purchase undergoing greater scrutiny or being avoided altogether.
By reviewing your sales processes and prices while digitizing your tasks, you’ll have a greater chance of retaining customers and attracting new ones. Sales enablement software provides tools for sales teams to become more productive and effective. These tools automate tasks for your sales reps, reducing distractions and overall complexity thanks to less administrative work. Thus, allowing them to focus on nurturing existing leads, creating new ones, and closing deals.
So how do you go about re-inventing your business?
- Have a start-up mentality: the secret lies in rediscovering your customers and their new buyer journey. Research what customers value now, test, and analyze results to identify new opportunities.
- Be human: show empathy to your customers as they navigate tough times and let this be extended to your staff as well. Equip your sales, marketing, and customer care teams with the tools they need to carry out their work efficiently.
- Use analytics to understand which strategies are working and prioritize them to ensure you capture revenue quickly.
- Think about businesses you can partner with to better your products or services and boost sales for all parties.
- Run Promotions
Promotions are attractive offers that you give your clients for a limited period to boost sales, increase product/service awareness, and move stagnating solutions. They also help you stay ahead of the competition.
In running a promotion, businesses should tie goals and targets to the campaigns.
It will help you measure the success of the promotion, including what products/services were the most productive.
Here are some ways to run effective promotions:
- Offer free samples to existing and new customers. Allowing your target audience to sample your offerings may push them to make purchase decisions in your favor.
- Bundle products to help push out slow-moving products, launch new stuff, and upsell.
- Where possible offer trade-ins where customers get discounts on newer models of your product for older versions.
- Reduce prices. Everyone loves a discount, but it’s important to note that B2B buyers also place a high emphasis on things like technical specifications and partnership agreements.
- Introduce loyalty programs for existing customers to encourage repeat purchases. The program may be volume discounts, reduced or free shipping, free items, and other incentives.
- Invest in promotional products like key chains, pens, water bottles, coffee mugs, or t-shirts with your company’s logo on them. It will help keep you at the forefront of your customer’s mind.
- Make Cold Calling
Hundreds of businesses around the globe rely on cold calling to introduce their brand to would-be prospects.
In an age where deals are done over a computer, phone calls facilitate the human connection needed to start and build relationships with customers.
As you engage your prospects, cold calling provides an opportunity to learn more about them, their challenges, existing solutions, and their opinion of your offerings. Cold calling practices include:
- Be comfortable: cold calling can be stressful, try cutting distractions and maintain a clear head to help you stay focussed on the call.
- Extract value from your calls. It’s not just about dialing 100 numbers in a day, rather about accomplishing goals and making connections that pave the way for more engagement.
- Maintain natural and valuable conversations. The marketplace is full of script-reading callers that speak at listeners and not to listeners. Break through that and have a real human conversation.
- Ask open-ended questions (i.e. not those that end with a simple “yes” or “no.”) and listen carefully to the answers you receive. They will help you gauge how well you can solve the problems and identify other opportunities to sell.
- Understand your prospect’s drivers and points. Prospects look for different things. Some are interested in the technical aspects while others want to know how your solutions can contribute to their bottom-line. Frame your offerings as solutions to their problems.
- Allow your prospect to ask questions and answer them honestly. If they are asking questions, it’s a step in the right direction.
- Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing is a highly focused strategy where sales and marketing teams join efforts to high-value accounts to convert them to customers.
Since the ABM strategy focuses on high-value accounts, your teams can channel resources on worthwhile pursuits that may result in higher returns.
With ABM, you send out personalized messages geared towards the prospects’ business and their journey leading to better engagement. Prospects who feel understood are likely to convert.
Here’s how you can create a successful ABM initiative:
- Define your best-fit accounts. Use data to identify revenue potential, profit margins, the likelihood of repeat purchase, and market influence.
- Identify key internal players. Look at how the accounts are structured, the decision-making processes, influencers, and decision-makers.
- Create content that addresses specific business challenges faced by your target accounts.
- Determine which channels will be most effective for communicating with your target audience. Are there company restrictions surrounding opt-ins or subscriptions, etc?
- Align your marketing and sales team’s efforts to execute and coordinate targeted campaigns across all channels.
- Measure and analyze individual campaigns for effectiveness and improvement of weak points.
- Work With Influencers
Influencer marketing is an increasingly popular way of generating new business. B2B influencers are usually industry insiders, prominent consumers, or company employees with high levels of awareness, authority, authenticity.
Today’s savvy B2B buyers are always looking for expert opinions before making purchases, which means credible influencers may hold sway over them.
Buyers are more likely to believe an influencer’s opinion of a product or service than any product description or benefits you list down.
How do you come up with a B2B influencer marketing strategy?
- Determine what you want to achieve. Is it an increase in leads or revenue? Are you looking for higher brand awareness?
- Tell a story. Who are you and how do your solutions add value to other companies? What differentiates you from the competition?
- Identify a suitable influencer. An ideal influencer is one with whom your industry can identify. Look at their experience, influence, and social presence.
- Connect with the influencer to plan the content that will be used in the campaign and set up a calendar for content creation, publishing, and distribution.
- Measure results. Track the results of the campaign to know what works, what needs improvement, and what doesn’t work at all. It will help improve future campaigns.