Success in B2B sales comes from continually fine-tuning your sales approach, seeing what works, what doesn’t, and then adjusting on the fly to changing market conditions. But there are three core questions that you should always be asking if you want to become better at B2B sales:
#1: How does your customer make money?
This is easily the most important question you need to ask. If you’re going to convince people that you can help them save money or make them more money, you have to understand how they make money in the first place. This may sound obvious – but it’s not. Knowing how a company makes money requires more than just knowing what products or services a company offers, or how many different product lines it has.
It goes deeper than that – you have to know which divisions are profit centers and which are loss centers. You have to know the profit margins on products – and why those margins are either getting bigger or smaller over time. And you have to understand why a business is gaining or losing market share to rivals. This requires both a macro-level overview of the company’s business, and a micro-level analysis of specific products.
#2: What are the real needs of your customer?
Once you have a firm grasp on how the company actually makes money – and why – it’s time to address a more difficult problem: What are the company’s real pain points? In short, what does the business really need?
That’s where your B2B solution comes into play. You need to sell what the customer really needs, not what you think the customer needs or what the customer tells you he or she needs. Your goal should be to craft your B2B selling proposition very closely to what the customer needs. It should be about the customer, not you. When there’s a match, it’s much easier to make a sale.
#3: How can you quantify the advantages of your solution to your customer?
You need to go deeper than just offering, “my solution can improve Company X’s business processes” or “my solution can help sell more copies of Products Y.” You need to actually quantify everything you’re telling the prospect. Will you boost sales by 10%? Will you reduce expenses by 15%? Can you reduce the time to market of a product by 20%? In short, you need to quantify your solution.
In doing so, it’s better to under-promise and over-deliver than to over-promise and under-deliver. So keep your numbers realistic. But there’s no harm in putting together a variety of scenarios (e.g. “best case” and “base case”) to help customers see the range of possible outcomes. Putting numbers behind your offer helps you to stand out from your competitors. It also helps a potential customer do a cost-benefit analysis of what you’re offering, simplifying the buying decision for them.
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By asking these 3 questions, you’ll constantly anchor yourself on what you need to accomplish every day. You’ll be focused on your clients and customers, and that will help you to become the best B2B salesperson possible.
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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.