In 2021, sales managers of companies working in B2B will have to prioritize a digital shopping experience, requiring the minimum of effort on the part of customers, to allow them to meet their expectations, and to stimulate their sales volumes in online commerce.
In today’s volatile, digitally driven environment, it is imperative that B2B brands and sales companies differentiate themselves by delivering customer-centric shopping experiences that reflect new expectations and the journey of business. Purchasing customers.
According to Gartner, the leading tech and digital research and consulting firm, only 6% of sales managers say they are extremely confident in their team’s ability to meet or exceed stated sales targets for this year. To meet this challenge, companies in the B2B sector will therefore have to roll up their sleeves and adopt marketing strategies specific to the B2B sector like bbq charcoal buyers that we will analyze in this article.
Gartner research also shows that the key to driving more sales and increasing revenue growth for B2B sales companies is providing a low-effort digital shopping experience that helps customers feel more confident. In their decisions.
Here are the 4 essential strategies that your company will have to adopt in 2021 to stimulate its sales in the B2B sector.
1- Refine your “Go-to-Market” strategy
A Go-to-Market (GTM), or go-to-market strategy is a step-by-step plan created to successfully bring a product to market. A good GTM strategy usually identifies a target audience, includes a marketing plan, and describes a sales strategy. Although every product and market is different, a GTM strategy must identify a market problem and position the product as a solution.
Here are the four essential parts of a go-to-market strategy:
- Product-market adaptation: what problem (s) does your product solve?
- Target audience: what type of customer / buyer encounters the problem that your product solves? How much are they willing to pay for a solution?
- Competition and demand: who is already offering what you are launching? Is there a demand for the product or is the market saturated?
- Distribution: How will you sell the product or service? A third-party website, app, or distributor?
In 2021, companies that sell B2B will need to adapt their Go-to-Market strategies and offer continuous, parallel, and effective engagements, where sales, marketing, and customer service teams work in unison. To help buyers validate their purchases. For your business, this may mean removing the distinctions between sales, marketing, and customer service department’s altogether, and consolidating all sales resources into a single team that we might call “business operations”.
2- Deploy your sales force
Your company’s general sales manager is going to need to implement coordinated customer engagement, designed with buyer preferences in mind, and without placing particular emphasis on a single type of sales channel. This means that all information and support provided to B2B buyers must be consistent, complete, and connected across all digital and human channels of your brand.
This approach will help lay a solid foundation for what is called “Dynamic Customer Engagement” (DCE), or dynamic customer engagement, which relies on artificial intelligence to deliver the best personalized actions and guide prospects to the channel most likely to have a positive business outcome.
DCE is a strategy that enables organizations to deliver differentiated service experiences.
Deploying DCE will require many different technologies to reach full maturity and maximize the business value of your products.
This technology brings together three key systems:
- Record systems: Data sources from the organization’s applications / databases and third party vendors.
- Intelligence systems: Applications needed to transform data into information with advanced analysis processes to determine an NBA (Next Best Action).
- Engagement Channels – Channels used by customers and employees for responsive and proactive communications processes
3- Bring customer confidence
To overcome organizational complexity – the biggest hurdle B2B buyers face on their buying journey – businesses selling B2B need to focus on creating an effortless buying experience to develop and strengthen customer confidence. Customers in their decisions.
As Robert Blasdell, analyst at Gartner, says, “Confidence in decisions is about customers’ belief and sense of assertion that they are using good judgment when making a purchase.” Research shows that when B2B buyers have a higher level of confidence in decisions, they are 3 times more likely to go for a high-end or premium offering instead of settling for the less ambitious solution.
Based on a survey of over 1,000 B2B customers, a clear lesson emerges from customer management throughout the buying journey:
When customers overcome their skepticism of salespeople and feel more confident in the information they perceive, they are more likely to close the sale that all salespeople aspire to, the one they call across the Atlantic. A high-quality, low-regret deal”, that is to say a good transaction that leaves neither regret nor frustration.
And in many ways, high quality deals today are hard to close, as customers tend to rely more on their feelings – what they think they know – than on what they really know about the product. At stake. In reality, B2B sellers sometimes suffer from what might be called a “skepticism penalty”, just because of their status as a seller.
In addition to doubting the obvious self-interest that each seller has in the transaction, customers may become more and more skeptical when they suspect that the seller is not disclosing certain information, is contradicting statements made by other suppliers, or suggests that the best solution happens to be his. This handicap should definitely be overcome, as B2B customers are 1.5 times less likely to make a high-quality purchase when they doubt the veracity or accuracy of information and advice provided by a seller.
Otherwise, when salespeople are able to instill a sense of confidence in customers about the information about the product in question, they are much more likely to make a high-quality purchase with little regret.
4- Use the power of Artificial Intelligence and analysis tools
As AI plays an increasingly central role within companies, it will be essential for the sales manager of your business to integrate this technological element into all business content, in order to improve the focus of the sellers and the decision making. This is crucial, as AI helps deliver extremely accurate information, better forecast customer needs, and shape the entire sales process of your products or services, from customer engagement across different sales channels to conversion.
Adopting artificial intelligence in B2B marketing can not only help businesses, but also reach customers by empowering them, and giving them more than they can expect. This is where marketers can leverage their smart software and turn data into smart buying decisions for customers.
When predictive analytics intertwine with natural language processing, it becomes easier to predict future choices and purchasing behavior of customers.
Because digital marketers can send AI-assisted marketing messages, customers receive the most relevant buying suggestions and offers that can help them with their buying roadmap.
We could summarize this process like this: machine learning + intelligence + digital marketing = empowered customers
Conclusion
By prioritizing these four areas of growth, B2B sales managers can better differentiate their brand from the competition, delivering a customer-centric experience that more closely matches the evolving preferences of buyers.
