3 Critical Steps for B2B Sales Strategies That Work

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Ultimately, B2B sales leaders are tasked with ensuring leads are worked through the pipeline to close, resulting in a new customer growth and increased revenue. When sales numbers are down and not meeting goal, B2B sales leaders are also the ones tasked with determining the root cause of the downfall. This requires ensuring sales team members are following sales processes aligned with your organizational B2B sales strategies in pursuit of new business. It also requires B2B sales leaders to align with marketing to identify whether an underperforming marketing channel or underperforming B2B sales strategies are the cause to the low performance.

Undermining many viable marketing and sales programs are unidentified contributors to low performance. Critical to improving your sales team’s success is the ability to analyze marketing and sales data to identify root causes of underperformance. Using the following 3 steps, we show you how to determine if your B2B sales strategies are underperforming.

ALIGN B2B SALES STRATEGIES WITH MARKETING GOALS

A complex interworking of sales channels to reach buyers at various stages in a buying cycle is characteristic of most B2B organizations in an increasingly globalized economy. The success of your organization’s marketing department depends on identifying and targeting these buyers with the right channel and message at the right time. Leveraging your marketing team’s expertise by continuing to target prospects with this customer-focused approach is a low-hanging-fruit opportunity to increase the efficiency of your B2B sales strategies.

Thus, step one to determining the viability of your B2B sales strategies to close sales and secure new business is assessing the current level at which your strategies are aligned with marketing’s goals. Ultimately, the sales strategies you are using to instruct your team’s methodologies and selling tactics should be in tandem with your organization’s marketing goals, not only to ensure a consistent customer experience, but also to optimize the coupling of the two departments’ efforts for an overall lower cost per acquisition (CPA).

TRACK CUSTOMER INSIGHTS FOR B2B SALES STRATEGY ASSESSMENT

With an increasingly digital landscape for researching the products and services buyers are looking to purchase, B2B sales leaders require sophisticated marketing and sales tools to understand buyer intention. This phrase, “buyer intention,” is particularly representative of the type of information B2B marketing and sales leaders are leveraging to more effectively target buyers at the right time with a high-impact message.

For example, an abandoned shopping cart in an eCommerce store presents an opportunity to interpret buyer intention and follow up with a targeted nurture email with a subject line, “Ready to Buy?”.

Having the proper sales tools in place, to leverage these types of customer insights and inform sales conversations, positions your sales team to reach out with a timely touchpoint to influence buyer behavior. Tracking when these touchpoints occur relative to buyer behavior helps validate your B2B sales strategy’s effectiveness to woo prospects to becoming customers.

ANALYZE B2B SALES STRATEGIES RELATIVE TO CUSTOMER DATA

Using customer data that track not only when but how a customer is interacting with your organization’s marketing efforts before the hand-off to sales occurs is key to determining whether your B2B sales strategies are underperforming, or if the marketing channel upstream is driving unqualified leads.

A recent example comes from a leading financial institution and merchant services provider. We partnered with them to launch a paid media campaign, targeting small to medium businesses. This campaign combined paid search and retargeting to offer to “meet or beat” any competitor’s offer for processing fees to new merchants. A contact form and phone call were the two methods to contact a sales rep to sign up for merchant services. After a seven-month pilot, over 400 leads were passed off to sales from marketing, 11 were considered marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and only 1 was considered “Closed Won,” resulting in a new merchant.

This meant 96% of all leads driven through this paid media campaign did not result in a closed sale, resulting in only 4% that were considered qualified leads, all of which were ultimately disqualified for sale. With only 1 of the originally 400+ leads resulting in a sale, this resulted in a 0.37% lead to customer close rate. Given the strength of the offer and the optimizations performed to hone in on a targeted audience, the campaign should have been performing better. After an extensive cross-channel analysis, the data showed that a 4% MQL fall-off rate for this paid media campaign was the same or better than all other sales channels. In fact, this paid media campaign contributed to only 9% of unqualified leads in their pipeline during the 7-month time period – one of their sales channels contributed to over 79% of these “disqualified” MQLs.

Through a cross-channel analysis, assessing both marketing and sales combined efforts through customer data, this particular case study uncovered an opportunity for us to assist with lead qualification and transfer.

LEVERAGE B2B SALES ENABLEMENT PARTNER

Following the above steps will help you determine if your B2B sales strategies are in alignment with marketing’s goals which is step one to understanding if they are underperforming. From there, the customer data you are tracking and analyzing may validate the efficacy of your B2B sales strategies or may reveal an opportunity for B2B sales enablement.

Constructing and maintaining adaptive B2B sales strategies is critical to reaching a constantly-shifting buyer behavior – to learn more about how Overground helps B2B sales leaders develop strategies and plans that achieve growth goals and increase market share, contact us today!

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