The B2B sales cycle takes a long time to complete. According to Klipfolio, 75% of B2B sales representatives can close a sale within an average of four months.
It’is best to quicken this process instead of spending time closing a sale. The best way to achieve this is to focus on qualified leads. Don’t take too much time trying to convince leads that don’t convert.
Table of Contents
4 Effective ways to boost B2B Sales Cycle and Capture Higher Quality Leads
Create A Detailed Buyer Persona
Buyer personas help you to plan your marketing tactics accordingly. By creating a fictitious profile, you can identify your ideal target customer. And you can design your marketing strategy accordingly. But, before that, you should know what the buyer persona should be. Study your regular customers and ask them questions about their needs. Data from the industry is also useful in understanding B2B buyers.
Once you’ve learned useful information about customers, start creating a buyer persona to get accurate leads.
There are many things to add to the customer profile, including:
- Name
- Age
- Ethnicity
- Buyer Preferences
- Business Goals and Objectives
- Number of Employees in the Company
- Challenges
- Hobbies
- Tools Used for Business Purposes
You can add so much more to the profile. You can also get detailed information about your buyers with lead capture forms. Customers visit your website and provide the necessary information which you require.
Provide them with exciting rewards such as a two-month free subscription or promotional offers to convince them to enter the details.
Promote Your Business Digitally
Technology is evolving and so are the methods of promoting businesses. To make your marketing efforts effective, use digital mediums to reach customers quickly. Not only marketers but B2B buyers also prefer to use digital channels to communicate with sellers and find them. According to McKinsey & Company, these customers use more than ten digital channels to interact with suppliers. And Gartner expects 80% of these interactions to take place via digital channels by 2025.
Digital mediums are very effective in lead generation such as email marketing. According to OptinMonster, 79% of marketers have found their highest success ratio for content marketing with emails. With good email marketing tools like Mailchimp, you have endless opportunities to create emails with so many email templates. Create engaging marketing content and campaigns in your emails. Keep it precise and relevant. Maximally use call-to-action (CTA) phrases to convince buyers to take immediate action of buying your product. Email marketing delivers a good return on investment which is an estimated 42 dollars per dollar spent, according to Litmus.
Next, we’ll discuss the online B2B marketplaces, which are the fastest-growing online sales mediums as per Digital Commerce 360. It’s because marketplaces have made it easier for buyers and sellers to do business with each other and establish relations. B2B Marketplaces like Amazon Business and SeeBiz facilitate their users by creating an optimized digital footprint. These also assist businesses in growing audiences by promoting them in different places. They can be the website homepage, social media handles, or search engines.
Marketplaces automate your marketing tasks. Each marketplace also provides its own unique benefits. And this all comes at a very low cost. It’s much cheaper than setting up your own website.
Next, we discuss the social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, another popular source of B2B lead generation. Plan and design appealing posts on social media. If you’re using Facebook, there are many ways to promote your products and offers.
Along with running your Facebook page, you can also sell your products in the marketplace option. It lets you share your offerings and negotiate with buyers in different relevant groups. Boost your posts with advertisements by paying very affordable prices. The more you pay the more you can reach maximum audience.
LinkedIn is also extremely popular among B2B marketers. This platform generates 80% of the social media leads for B2B, according to a 2017 research by LinkedIn. It has a more professional outlook and it tends to target professional audiences and users. With over 58 million registered companies, it’s a suitable platform for B2B lead generation. As in Facebook, you create and boost your posts on LinkedIn through your company profile and reach more relevant leads for your business.
B2B mCommerce is also rapidly growing, opening up a new avenue for marketers. While you can’t always keep a laptop, you can easily keep a mobile phone in your pocket wherever you’re going. With a good internet connection, you can use mCommerce to pursue leads and promote your offerings. It’s very common for businesses to use WhatsApp in their marketing efforts. You can either post status or create groups of your relevant leads and contact them.
You can also develop mobile applications to facilitate B2B transactions through mobile phones. Various marketplaces have already taken advantage of it as mobile applications allows users to buy and sell via handsets.
Now we’ll mention webinars, which are virtual conferences, a new alternative to trade shows.
Sellers demonstrate their products and services to buyers to promote and educate them at the same time. It also allows buyers and sellers to engage directly with each other
Leverage Content Distribution
Digital marketing has paved the way for B2B marketers to diversify their marketing efforts by distributing content on various platforms. Content distribution is effective in attracting your prospects. Cold calls or cold emails can frustrate your customers but the content is a precious material that is heavily in demand.
As per FocusVision, buyers consume an average of 13 pieces of content before making a buying decision. Content can be in various forms including social media posts, email newsletters, blogs, and videos.
To reach your target audience, distribute your content according on the right channels to attract the prospects. Content should provide information that is relevant to your customer concerns. Use personalization in your distributed content to let your target audience know that you care for them.
Automate Marketing Tasks
Suppose you have a complete list of potential leads and you’re calling each one of them. This cold calling takes a lot of time. Furthermore, its success rate is only at 2% according to Cognism. It’s better to use marketing tasks that provide quicker and more effective results rather than keep on cold calling.
Whether using inbound or outbound techniques for lead generation, use automated processes to reduce your time and effort. If you’re using emails to reach your leads, automate your marketing with the help of email tools. You can also automate your other tasks. Lead generation tools such as Leadfeeder and LinkedIn Sales Navigator help you to reach target customers and connect with them.
Other tools like customer relationship management (CRM) software such as Salesforce, store information about your prospects. These CRM tools allow you to schedule appointments and your various important marketing tasks.
Conclusion
Gear up and fully use technology if you want to beat out the competition. With good artificial intelligence (AI) powered tools, increase and complete your sales cycle quicker.
