Your new product or service is ready. You have even had a successful launch. Now, you need to sell it to clients. But how do you reach them?
When you design a business plan, you will have incorporated a few strategies—operational, marketing, and sales. At that stage, however, everything is theoretical.
You will find that when it comes to reality, a number of your strategies don’t quite pan out. So, with a product in hand, how can you sell it to clients and businesses?
The first thing you need to look at is integrating your marketing and sales strategies. Yes, they are very different aspects of a business, but in many ways, they are two sides of the same coin.
With that mindset in place, here are five sales strategies you can adopt by looking at the sales process through a wider lens.
1. Identifying Your Audience
This may seem like an obvious step in the business planning process, but when it comes to creating a sales strategy, you have to understand who your audience is.
Within the B2B field, there are numerous kinds of people who you could be reaching out to—sales professionals, managers, or C-Level executives.
Depending on who you want to reach, you will have to tailor your outreach campaign. After all, sales professionals aren’t exactly interested in the same thing as CEOs.
You also need to identify the businesses you want to reach according to their revenue profile.
Is your product or service geared towards businesses with multi-million dollar revenues? Or are you looking at smaller local companies?
Is your business looking for a one-time sale or a long-term partnership?
Segment your potential markets into groups using project management tools or these fun customer avatars, and then narrow down your list to a manageable number.
Once you have these conversations internally, you can structure your sales strategy around your target audience.
2. Sales Blogs
In the digital age of knowledge that we now live in, you have to be aware that potential clients don’t want to be sold to. That’s why advertising is making way for content marketing.
People want to be entertained and educated—and sales-focused content isn’t going to do that.
Though blogs have generally been associated with marketing tactics, in the B2B arena, they have a massive impact on your ability to reach new audiences.
Launching a sales blog allows you to educate your audience about the industry, what your company does, and how your product could benefit them.
With a blog, you can create an environment that encourages your audience to engage with you, which in turn, can lead to partnerships.
Another aspect of blogs is guest posting—you can invite members of your target audience to share their thoughts on your blog. They get their voice heard and you begin the process of collaborating.
It can be difficult to create content on a regular basis, so take some inspiration from these blogging ideas.
3. Email Automation
Email marketing is far from dead—it has the best ROI among all the marketing methods. Cold outreach is getting businesses the clients they want.
But, while manual email outreach has its benefits, it you want to reach a large audience—because of the small percentage of positive replies you will receive—you need some kind of email automation.
There are a number of methods you can use to make email lists, including referrals, signups, and off-line events.
Once you have those lists, use an online tool like Mailshake, which has cold email templates that you can automate to send out to your contacts.
Mailshake not only lets you personalize your mails, but also allows you to schedule them at convenient times for your audience.
With an email automation system in place, you will be able to reach large numbers of contacts in a short period of time, which will increase your audience pool.
4. Get Visual
People on the internet, including your potential sales clients, don’t have much time to read and engage with content. Attention spans are decreasing, and if you want to maintain audience interest, you need to do something a little different.
That is why you should be adopting a visual sales strategy. Imagery of any kind can share a large amount of information quickly—as the saying goes, a picture speaks a thousand words.
Where can you use visuals? Pretty much everywhere.
Include visuals in your blog posts and social media. You can also make your landing pages more engaging with visuals.
You should definitely look at using infographics on social posts, landing pages, and blog posts—infographics are highly engaging and have the potential to hold audience attention longer than other forms of imagery.
Using imagery makes your content, and your message, more attractive, and will boost your ability to make sales.
5. Social Media
Most companies start off by building a social media strategy. After all, everyone is on social media—customers and businesses.
But how do you leverage social media to reach fellow businesses? First off, you need to be on LinkedIn.
Use LinkedIn as a platform to promote your company as a thought leader. Dive into LinkedIn advertising. You can also use LinkedIn videos to engage audiences.
Of course, LinkedIn shouldn’t be the only social platform you use to reach potential clients. You should be optimizing your Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts—here’s a great Instagram software that makes creating and publishing posts very easy.
Like with sales blogs, you need to keep in mind that social media is being used for entertainment and education, even for sales professionals.
Position your social media content as informative—your sales messages should be few and far between. Give your audience a reason to want to collaborate with you.
By leveraging the power of social media as more than just a marketing tool, you can begin to build a solid client list.
Conclusion
With the right sales strategy, you can generate B2B leads that can potentially expand into long-term collaborations.
It is important to understand your audience, and tailor your messaging accordingly, whether it be on sales blogs or social media. Adopt email automation into your process, and use visuals to attract and maintain attention.
Give your sales team time to adopt strategies that most suit your audience and analyze how it is working.
Remember that the strategies you adopt will need time to work—none of these are a quick fix or an overnight success. But with dedication and careful implementation, you will see success in time.
Image credit: Uran
The post 5 B2B Sales Strategies You Can Adopt Today appeared first on ECN | E-Commerce Nation.
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Thibault Herpin, Khareem Sudlow
