Entrepreneur Resources Your source for small business information
If you are selling to commercial and business operations, you can’t afford to miss out on the information below.
Don’t get left out in the cold
One of the easiest ways you can improve your company’s business to business sales is to stop cold calling. What is the conversion rate of this tactic anyway, like 0.01%? You have to have one hell of a sales team to have any success in this area, and why bother when it’s much simpler to focus on warm leads instead?
Warm leads are other companies that have already shown some interest in your products or services. This may be through downloading a resource you have offered them, completing an inquiry form, or from just visiting your site.
Unfortunately, the latter type of visitor usually goes unlogged. Meaning you are hemorrhaging warm leads all over the place. So what are you supposed to do? Well, take a peek at Visual Visitor: Taking Lead Generation to the Next Level, and services like them. As they can help you to capture the basic data of everyone that visits your site, providing you will oodles of warm leads to mine to make more sales. As well as allowing you to avoid tricky gatekeepers and target specific decision makers instead.
So don’t get left out in the cold with cold leads, and switch to a warm lead focus instead if you want your B2B sales to soar.
Get your friends to talk you up
Did you know that one of the most effective ways of making B2B sales is through recommendations? In fact, this is often a fantastic untapped resource, just waiting ready to be used.
To exploit recommendations, you can try several different strategies. The first is harnessing the great power of review sites. To do this, you need to incentivize real customers to leave honest, positive reviews. Then others consider using your product will see these, and be reassured that they are making the right choice and so close the deal.
The second strategy is advocacy. To do this, you need to reward recommendations to your customer’s contacts by offering discounts and money off of your current customers next purchases. This usually works by getting current customers to send of marketing materials like a call to sign up for a newsletter, or even a call to buy a particular product. Then when the new customer enters the system, they use a code or email address to acknowledge from whom they received the link. Meaning you have a new lead, and your original customer is rewarded for this.
B2B should be face 2 face
Lastly, never underestimate the power of a face to face meeting, especially B2B sales. Meeting with potential clients can help in all sorts of ways.
The first is that they get that added reassurance, making them feel more confident to purchase. Something that is valuable when huge sums of money are often involved. As well as people’s position and level of respect in the workplace.
Meeting in person can also help to improve communication between you and your client. Enabling you to better tailor your product or approach to meet their need. Something that is also very valuable when in the process of closing a sale.
