The end of the year is a great time to take stock of what’s working with your B2B sales process. For any organization thinking about gearing up for an even better 2017, here are four B2B sales trends worth keeping an eye on:
Trend #1: Social selling
“Social selling” has become a big B2B sales buzzword, so much so that even the Harvard Business Review has written about it. At its core, social selling means using the different social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram – in ways to interact with potential buyers. It implies much more of a one-to-one focus, not just blasting out tweets every few hours. The idea is to find the types of questions and concerns that people are talking about on social media, and then entering those conversations with a potential solution.
Trend #2: Predictive analytics
If big data was the big buzzword in 2015 and 2016, then predictive analytics is the new buzzword heading into 2017. Every organization is drowning in data, and now the focus is on making sense of it all. In the best-case scenario, of course, all that data can be used to gain a real competitive advantage over the competition. If you can predict how your prospects are going to react to certain messages, or what types of actions they are going to take at each step of the sales process, you have a chance to convert more customers than ever before.
In some cases, companies will look for artificial intelligence (AI) solutions like Nudge, a sales platform that uses AI to find actionable insights on your target accounts.
Trend #3: Content marketing
B2B organizations have been producing whitepapers, product videos and downloadable fact sheets for years. But now the focus is on producing the next wave of content – such as podcasts and e-books – that will engage key prospects. The goal is for the sales team to leverage all of that content during each step of the customer journey. For example, videos and podcasts might be used to generate brand awareness at the early stage of the selling cycle, while e-books and more in-depth content could be used to guide a prospect during the evaluation part of the journey.
Trend #4: New mobile offerings
It’s almost a cliché that mobile usage is skyrocketing off the charts. In response, companies need to do more than just create mobile-optimized websites – they must create the type of mobile content (such as video) that people are consuming on their mobile devices. And they must make it easier than ever before for leads to reach them via mobile platforms. That’s why responsive design is such a big concept with within the marketing world – it means that your content is just as easy to read on a big desktop screen as it is on a tiny mobile screen.
Recognizing these four trends and how they impact the B2B sales funnel could go a long way toward giving your company a big boost in sales in the coming year. While many of these trends may have started out in the B2C world, they are now making their way into the B2B world faster than anyone expected.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.