6 Strategies for Optimizing B2B Sales

Finnegan Pierson

Optimizing your sales is a crucial aspect of doing business and there are several different ways you can do that. Here are six strategies for optimizing B2B sales.

1. Choose Software That Is Compatible With Your Needs

There are many programs and software solutions that you can leverage to assist with your B2B sales processes, including EDI software, CRM software and data analytics tools. To make decisions regarding your software options, consider what programs you're already using and whether they meet your needs appropriately. If they don't you can switch to another, similar program. You may also need to add new programs or get rid of extraneous software. EDI software is a vital tool for any B2B sales process, but you may find you don't gain enough benefits from a CRM program to make it work retaining, for example.

2. Maintain Your Pipeline's Quality

You should conduct regular reviews and maintenance of your B2B sales pipeline, process and procedures. If you aren't seeing the kinds of results you expect from your B2B sales, your pipeline, process or procedures, or all three may have some issues that need to be worked on. If you're reviewing regularly, for example, once annually, you're more likely to find these issues before they cause large problems. Regular review also ensures you remain abreast of changes and advancements in B2B and in your industry, and can adjust your processes accordingly to keep up.

3. Practice Granular Prospecting and Targeting

If you utilize practices and concepts such as lead nurturing, sales funnels, marketing content testing, marget segmentation and targeted marketing, you'll be better prepared to turn prospects into active customers. PrYospect targeting is generally performed at the beginning of your B2B sales process. Nurturing, testing and segmentation can be incorporated across your whole B2B sales pipeline or into specific procedures within the pipeline. The more granular you can get following leads and nurturing them, the more you'll understand about prospective customers needs and the better you'll be able to respond to those needs and appeal to prospects and customers alike.

4. Personalize Marketing and Customer Communications

Personalization is a key factor for success in all aspectes of sales, including B2B. Customers respond much more positively to personalized communications and content than they do to generic advertising and notices. This strategy helps you show your customers that you're interested in them as individuals or as organizations, rather than just as faceless consumers. You can personalize all sorts of marketing tools, including emails, phone calls, web and landing page design, packaging and rewards programs.

5. Leverage Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing isn't only useful for individual customers. You just need to target it more specifically. Instead of using as many platforms to reach as many prospects as possible, focus on the social media platforms customers in your target market use. LinkedIn is the most commonly used professional social media platform, but if the companies in your target market also used something like Instagram, then you should leverage your social media marketing to work on both LinkedIn and Instagram.

6. Create Customer Personas

B2B sales are rarely made to an individual. Instead, they're made to an entire organization or to an entire department within an organization. Customer personas are particularly useful in B2B sales for this reason. You can use personas to determine which individuals at any given organization will be collaborating to make a B2B purchase and create content that appeals to those individuals and answers any questions or concerns they have. Generally, you can create basic personas for each product you can sell B2B and make adjustments for each new organization that is a potential customer. Creating individual personas for each B2B client may defeat the purpose of the personas.

You can use any of these or other B2B sales optimization strategies alone or in conjunction with each other. Look at your current sales processes and determine what new strategies would be the best options for you to implement, then come up with a plan to integrate them smoothly into your processes.