How to Increase B2B Sales

Businesses are always trying to grow. It's the way they stay afloat, and the way they prosper, by growing their customer base.

The best businesses also maintain their current customer base by offering the products and services they originally fell in love with, but also additions that are well-researched and thus well-received by their customers.

A great example of the best of both worlds is Starbucks, even if it is B2C. They originated as a lone coffee shop in Seattle, then grew in size when they standardized their product and made it unique nationwide.

The final new draw is their Mobile Order & Pay feature on their app which has now been copied elsewhere. The idea of paying for your coffee ahead of time and having it ready when you get there was innovative and drew in both old and new customers to the brand.

Let's take a look at how we can be inspired by the success of Starbucks to increase your own B2B sales.

Thinking creatively is easier said than done. In the world of business-to-business selling, tried and true methods may reign supreme, but times have changed and selling in a more digital, connected world gives spaces for salespeople to be creative.

You want to make sure your B2B sales strategy is not stale for the modern consumer and that you are following B2B sales best practices. And it is wholly possible to do so.

The first things to think about are the tried and true methods of old, and how to modernize them with some creativity. You want to build a sales cadence, that is a set of steps to accomplish a sale, that is creative and led by a solid strategy.

Let's take, for example, cold emailing. As a form of outbound lead generation, it continues to be well-received by prospects and is a great tool to inform them about your product or service, especially given how long we spend checking our emails every day. While the odd occasional email may require some work, the general rules of thumb have been the same since they began.

Keep it short, simple, and concise. Introduce yourself and have a clear focus. Be explicit about why you are reaching out to this prospect about your product or service. Be polite and personalize the content as much as possible where appropriate, and finish it off with a friendly invitation to discuss further.

You could send three such emails today in a sequence and not receive a reply, however, through no fault of your own. This would be because the game has changed, and so you need to change with the game.

Firstly, you want to check your email deliverability is good - you could be writing the perfect email to the perfect prospect, but if they never receive it, this does not matter.

Then you need to get creative and diversify your sales cadence and approach. Polite, straightforward emails on their own are a great way to start a conversation, but they're not the only way to get noticed.

A fun thing to do with email is to do the unexpected. Reference a meme or pop culture to get noticed. A popular one we like to use at SalesPipe is referencing DJ Khaled's "anotha one".

You also want to find your prospects and where they spend their time, and then work creatively from there. Most prospects you can find on LinkedIn with Sales Navigator, so you may want to approach them via a connection request, a comment on a post, or an InMail. Get creative with these approaches well - emojis, voice, and video messages are welcomed.

With voice and video messages your prospect knows the approach is hyper-personalized, and your sales team gets to truly shine. While a basic script is good to follow to make sure they hit all the right points, your salespeople should have the freedom to play around with background, lighting, and vocal tonalities to see what works best. It humanizes them and their approach to prospects as well, even further than an email.

Another great creative way to increase B2B sales is to create relevant content. On LinkedIn, this could be encouraging your sales team to aim to become top voices in their area. Ask them to share and create content relevant to potential clients that will draw them in naturally, resulting in a social sale.

There is a reason that marketing teams for large brands work with Instagram influencers - their proximity to the client via social media brings them directly into clients' homes. If your sales team fulfills a similar role, your prospects are more likely to listen to them and their suggestions when they are looking for a solution your product or service may address.

In addition to this, creating content relevant to your client beyond LinkedIn posts is also a strategy to be at the top of sales. Sales development representatives that include case studies or white papers as part of their outbound strategy are more likely to receive a response from decision-makers, making this a great strategy.

But even beyond attachments to emails, encourage your sales team to create content about their day-to-day. Ask them to write a guest blog post or an article on LinkedIn to feature their daily comings and goings working for you. It serves to both advertise you and your brand, them and their brand, and bring attention to the fact that you seem to be specialists in your field.

With LinkedIn being the most efficient social platform for lead generation, you want the content you and your team share to be of high quality and purposeful. Your sales team member being vulnerable and realistic about a bad cold call and the support your company provided is just as useful to your sales goals as sharing a note about your company going public.

The takeaway here? Creativity goes a long way. Take your current sales cadence and spend some time reconsidering it over the next few days. See what you can switch around and what works, so long as you know you're targeting the right prospects.

And if you want some help, you are always welcome to get in touch with us here at SalesPipe - this is what we do.

We talked briefly about making sure you know where your prospects are and approaching this search creatively. It might seem like a silly point to focus on, but it is worth a second look.

As mentioned above, most of your prospects in the B2B world will likely be found on LinkedIn. This might vary occasionally due to industry, but for the most part, they will be there. This is largely because 60% of tech buyers are millennials, and we live in a digital-heavy world.

This works in your favor to sell B2B however, because this age group has grown up with the internet, and so you can exercise some of the creative B2B sales examples mentioned above. For example, with InMail's and direct messages on LinkedIn, you can diversify yourself by using a fun, relevant GIF to stand out from the crowd.

You can join groups on LinkedIn that might be of interest to your potential clients. There you may be able to find posts to comment on that will serve to further help you suss out if the prospect is right for you, and how to approach them. Other options to find the right B2B prospects on LinkedIn are attending relevant events and reading through the attendee list, or joining classes.

If you're selling software related to 3D modeling, find events associated with that that your ideal customer profile might also be interested in - for example, an event on technology and architecture. Similarly, if you're selling a service within the marketing world, joining marketing LinkedIn classes can bring you closer to potential clients.

And remember to go beyond LinkedIn, to other forums you may find prospects, such as Reddit, that correspond to the interests and areas your prospects may engage with most. Begin interacting with them there as well.

A great example of something like this is the way Airbnb got creative at its start, by making use of Craigslist. Instead of limiting themselves, they went and focused on the space where they knew they could find their ideal customer and worked out how to engage them from there.

Getting out there and finding your prospects with an outbound-focused team in tandem with a great inbound strategy correctly aimed at the right groups will result in more B2B sales for your company.

Sales teams need to remember to spend time on B2B qualification. It is a tedious but necessary task. Elsewhere on the blog we've discussed how to qualify B2B leads, because it is an absolutely essential step of any sales process today.

If you are receiving a lot of leads on your website, but you are not qualifying them, you are only moving along leads of unknown caliber down your sales funnel. This can greatly impact your numbers at the end of each quarter, as it will seem like you are unable to capture the attention of potential customers. When, in fact, they may never be good targets in the first place.

The B2B qualification process may also turn up unexpected opportunities. During a qualifying call you might not be what the prospect is looking for, or maybe not right now, but make the right first impression and you may get a referral, one of the more valuable ways to make a connection with a real prospective client today.

Another part to consider is that while you are researching the lead that you are qualifying for, you may very well come across new prospects that might be an even better fit. If you're armed with your sales qualification scoring guide, you can do some preemptive scoring on the metrics of a partner or similar company that may actually be a better fit. So when you approach them, you're already more familiar with what they are looking for and what you can offer them.

B2B qualification is a bit like searching for treasure with a metal detector on the beach. Most of the time you will be turning up trash, but every once in a while, a bit of gold will cross your way. You want to make sure you don't miss, and a good B2B lead qualification process ensures you don't.

Increasing B2B sales may seem daunting at first, especially when, after your first period of growth, it seems like you're plateauing.

But you can turn this situation into a profitable one.

Start exercising your creative bones and get your message out there. Let your outbound team have some freedom and encourage them to create content. Explore unconventional spaces where your prospects might hang out. And make sure you're making the most of your B2B lead qualification processes to find those diamonds in the rough.

For further insights into B2B sales, you can feel free to peruse our blog. And if you want to increase your B2B sales, reach out to us here and we'll connect with you shortly.