Several important new trends – personalization, predictive analytics and social selling – could open up new opportunities for organizations to boost B2B sales. Here’s a brief look at how each of these trends could help to supercharge your B2B sales efforts.
Personalize the sales pitch
The days of one-size-fits-all marketing are coming to a close. The emphasis today is on crafting personalized and customized messages. The more personalized the message, the better the chance that it will resonate with the prospect. Even something as simple as customizing an email message for a specific person with a specific role within a specific organization can go a long way in improving the chances that it will be opened in the first place. Theoretically, every step along the customer’s sales journey can be customized and personalized. When they are evaluating different vendors, or when they are comparing different products, you want to have the most compelling offer possible.
Use predictive analytics to find the best prospects
The Big Data trend means that data is proving to be the new competitive edge for B2B sales. With enough data and a powerful enough analytics package, it’s possible to predict the future behavior of prospects and customers. You can see immediately why this can pay big dividends for sales: if you know which customers are most likely to respond to your message in a positive ways, you can divide up your time more effectively.
Ultimately, predictive analytics enables you to differentiate between the “regular” leads and the “hot” leads. This enables you to spend time going after the prospects that have the greatest chance of converting into sales later. Over time, it’s easy to see how predictive analytics will become more and more sophisticated. Already, some software companies are playing up the opportunities for artificial intelligence (AI) to play a more important role within the sales process. Imagine having an AI-powered assistant that can help you choose which prospects to call, which messages to use, and which meetings to take.
Experiment with social selling
One of the hottest areas within the B2B marketing space is “social selling.” In short, this means that you are able to use social media as a channel to engage prospects and move them toward a potential sale. And it doesn’t have to be a time-consuming effort, either. Just spending five hours a week on different social media platforms – such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram – could provide the necessary edge. And the data tends to back up all the hype around social selling – sales professionals that engage via social perform better than those that do not.
With these three basic steps, it’s possible to improve sales conversion rates and boost the ROI of your different selling techniques. Remember – the gap between a sales hero and a sales superhero may only be the difference of a few percentage points. So embrace the ways that personalization, predictive analytics and social selling can help to move you into the superhero category.
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.