B2B sales used to get by on post-its, spreadsheets and cold calls. While these tools can still be useful, buying behavior has changed. Most buyers are doing the bulk of their research online and narrowing their options to a few contenders before reaching out to speak with a sales person.
This new customer lifecycle means that the majority of the education process is now on the marketing side. Salespeople have to work more efficiently to close deals at the bottom of the funnel, rather than establishing top-of-the-funnel relationships - and process is key to success.
A solid B2B sales process maintains and grows relationships to win more business, but it can be tough to implement without the right tools.
Here are three must-have tools you need to close the gaps in your B2B sales process::
#1 - Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A Customer Relationship Management system is core to your B2B sales process. With a CRM, you can collect customer data and make it easily accessible to everyone on your team - from marketing to sales to customer support.
CRM software has come a long way since the digital databases of the 1980s. Accurate, centralized real-time data can help your business forecast, budget, scale profitably, and tap into the right audience. CRM data from current and prospective customers provides:
- Insight into your business’s most profitable services and products
- Attentive and timely customer service
- Access to customers’ purchase history for up-sell and cross-sell opportunities
- Insight into customer retention points
- Data to help identify potential customers in your database
This means that when your sales team accesses a contact record, they have the full history of communication, issues, and wins, giving them richer context for more productive conversations.
To get the most out of your CRM, sales and marketing leaders should work together to:
- Identify what information you want to archive.
- Establish procedures for capturing data online and manually.
- Confirm the reports needed and the distribution system.
- Train users on use and outcomes.
As your CRM database grows, sales people can obtain rich customer histories and profiles. At the same time, centralized notes and tasks take manual, administrative work off the plate. Instead of updating spreadsheets or hunting down old business cards, your sales team can use small data to relate to each customer individually and personally. Their time can be dedicated to building important relationships.
In addition to building on existing relationships, your CRM can help your sales team identify new opportunities. As your CRM learns about existing customers, sales people have better information on the kind of prospects that could mean new business. Based on what it knows about current customer behavior, it effectively describes the target market.
And, with CRM data all in one place, stakeholders in sales and marketing can all see the current sales picture and make informed predictions about the future.
#2 - Marketing Automation (MA)
Your CRM is bursting with important information about your prospects and customers, giving your sales team valuable data when they connect with a customer or new lead.
However, not every qualified lead in your CRM is ready for a sales pitch. If you never contact these leads, they’re left on the sidelines - and you could be leaving money on the table. However, if you nurture these leads over time by sending relevant content, your business stays top-of-mind and you earn their trust.
That’s where marketing automation comes in.
Marketing automation software can use the data in your CRM to automatically nurture cold leads, lost deals and current customers, squeezing more sales out of your pipeline. Marketing automation lets you send personalized quality email messages that feed the prospects’ interests based on individual user experience.
An infographic in Entrepreneur suggests, “By 2020, customers (in B2B sales) will manage 85% of their relationships without talking to a human.”
It may seem counter-intuitive to leave relationships to automation, but as your business grows, it gets harder to keep those individual salesperson-customer relationships going well.
Without automation, salespeople juggle too much, wasting people, talent, and time on the necessary but tedious tasks of alerting the right people to new product announcements, staying top-of-mind with blog material, and following-up with interested prospects to close the sale.
Tied to your CRM, marketing automation can automate, measure, and streamline tasks and processes to accelerate sales. It segments customers, pulls in new customer data automatically and management sales campaigns. In replacing manual, inaccurate, and unreliable processes, salespeople are free to focus their time and talents on building relationships and converting the most lucrative deals.
Like CRM software, you need to put the correct processes and resources in place to realize the full benefits of marketing automation software. It’s a bit like an engine - and content is the fuel.
Prepare to build out:
- Contact statuses and deal stages that help to track the customer journey
- Strategic email nurturing campaigns
- Blog content and resources specific to target buyers at various stages of the sales process
- Automated tasks and reminders for sales team members
- Email auto-responders
- Segments of contacts you want to break out and communicate with
When businesses put effort into marketing automation, it pays off. According to VB Insight, 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase.
Once you set the groundwork, marketing automation can run on its own, warming up cold leads and alerting the sales team when a hot prospect is ready to buy. As you track your sales process, you can adjust your strategy and find ways to squeeze even more revenue from your sales pipeline.
#3 - Email Marketing
Emails can build trust with your audience, grow relationships, and close deals. At the same time, B2B buyers are savvier than ever. A one-size-fits-all email blast isn’t enough to get their attention.
Email marketing software, when integrated with a CRM and marketing automation, allow businesses to send relevant, timely and personalized emails, warming up cold leads over time.
Simple text-based emails often feel more personal and work well for one-to-one sales conversations. Design-rich HTML emails perform well on the marketing side when it comes to larger broadcasts like big product announcements or monthly newsletters. Email marketing software can help businesses build both types of emails, and pull in personalized merge fields.
A/B testing and campaign metrics paired with real-time accessibility to email opens and link clinks can help salespeople predict which emails and which email campaigns are most useful in achieving conversions.
Adam Needles, writing for the IBM Marketing Cloud, defines automated email marketing, “This is the part of automation that enables us to better manage middle-of-the-funnel dynamics and to focus on educating the buyer as the appropriate way to nurture relationships and deliver sales-ready opportunities in the modern era.”
Automated email marketing also helps salespeople manage one-on-one conversations with multiple contacts at the same time so they never drop the ball. Email autoresponders and campaigns move conversations forward until prospects raise their hand during the sales process. Sales team members can focus on meaningful conversations at the bottom of the funnel while email marketing does the rest.
Three Tools, One Solution
A solid B2B sales process rests on the foundation of a good CRM. Data collected accurately and efficiently fuels the rest of the automation process - from identifying target audiences to segmenting groups of contacts.
Marketing automation software then streamlines communication and task management, feeding warm leads to the sales team so they can concentrate on closing more deals.
Finally, email marketing tools supplement marketing automation with email content that caters to personalized interest, develops relationships, and makes sales.
You can patch together these three tools, but prepare for a lengthy, costly implementation. The best approach is to find an all-in-one sales and marketing software that integrates the three functions in one platform. Seamless integration between these three tools means that your sales team can get to work even faster to connect with hot prospects and close more deals in your sales pipeline.