B2B sales is a highly competitive industry. To do well, you need to understand the most effective sales techniques. You also have to take your theoretical B2B sales knowledge and leverage it to win real clients.
If you need some guidance in this department, we’ve got you covered. Read on for nine of the most essential B2B sales techniques to master for 2021.
Understand Your Leads Better With The SPIN Technique
The SPIN sales technique has been around for a while, but it’s experiencing a resurgence in popularity this year. It’s an acronym that helps organize the types of questions you ask new sales prospects and the order you ask them in.
SPIN stands for:
- Situation questions — What situation brought the prospect to you? Why are they interested in what you have to offer?
- Problem questions — What problem is the lead experiencing? How will your product or service address that problem?
- Implication questions — What happens if the prospect doesn’t buy from you? How will they be negatively impacted?
- Need questions — Now put it all together. Why does a prospect need what you have to offer them?
Asking yourself these questions will help you organize your pitch and sales process to address the unique needs of each prospect you encounter.
Be A Challenger
“Challenger” is a term coined by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. It’s one of six types of sales personalities they wrote about in their book, “The Challenger Sale.”
According to research conducted by Dixon and Adamson, 50% of the highest-performing salespeople at nearly 100 companies had Challenger personalities. Individuals with this personality type far outperformed sales agents with the other five personality types discussed in the book.
As the name implies, a challenger is someone who challenges their prospects’ current situation. They are expert debaters who perform in-depth research and use it to their advantage. A Challenger’s goal is to convince a B2B lead that their current processes doesn’t work and that their solution will.
Read What Your Prospects Write
The better you understand your leads, the likelier you are to pitch them in a way that maximizes your chances of making a sale. And what better way to understand what your prospects care about than reading what they write?
Blog posts, articles, and social media posts offer powerful insight into what your buyers care about and how you might address those concerns.
Additionally, try referencing a blog post or an article written by a lead the next time you speak with them. They’ll be impressed that you went above and beyond to understand them.
Sell Solutions, Not Products
B2B products can get pretty complicated. Of course, your buyers will have some understanding of what might differentiate two similar services from one another. But with things like enterprise software, it can be difficult to fully understand how much added value a small improvement can make.
Imagine you sell enterprise-level accounting software. And perhaps the only meaningful difference between your product and the competition’s is that yours can automate the data entry process.
Instead of explaining what this feature does, talk about it in the context of a problem the client is having.
In this scenario, you might talk about reducing the number of hours it takes an employee to complete a report. You could reference how much money the prospect would save in a month or a year by choosing your product instead of a competitor’s.
Take Advantage Of Social Media
91% of B2B IT buyers are on social media, and 75% say social media is likely to significantly influence a future purchasing decision. With statistics like these, it’s clear that leveraging social media needs to be one of your techniques.
For B2B buyers, the best platform for this is LinkedIn. There are a few ways to use LinkedIn to your advantage.
You can create valuable posts that get people in your industry talking. And you can join groups that put you in touch with potential leads. The key here is using LinkedIn to form relationships — not to push for sales away.
Be A Source Of Value For Your B2B Sales Prospects
People remember when you do something nice for them without asking for anything in return. They keep a mental tab and will be inclined to return the favor at some point.
Be a source of value for your prospects — even when you’re not convinced they’re close to buying from you. This will help you build a strong relationship with the lead. Then, when they decide they’re ready to buy your product, you’re going to be their first call.
Some strategies to consider are sending over materials like blog posts, studies, webinars, and video content you know the lead will care about seeing.
Focus On B2B Decision-Makers
Your goal as a sales representative is to close deals. But you can only do that if you talk to employees within an organization with enough power to make purchasing decisions.
That means one of the most important B2B sales techniques is finding decision-makers and forming relationships with them.
A traditional job title-based approach is rarely the best bet for finding a company’s decision-makers. A better strategy is to define general personas for decision-makers that you can apply across multiple organizations.
For example, you might use qualifiers like:
- How decision-makers have interacted with your website in the past
- What types of duties do decision-makers in your targetted industry typically have?
- What are a few different job titles a decision-maker might have?
You can pull this data from your existing clientele. Look for shared characteristics among the decision-makers you’ve already sold to. Then, you can search for employees that share those characteristics on platforms like LinkedIn.
Once you’ve found a decision-maker, your next job is to establish a connection with them. This article from Entrepreneur provides nine strategies to help you get past gatekeepers and in front of a company’s decision-makers
Don’t Give Up Too Soon
B2B sales rarely occur after the first contact. Instead, marketers need to make an average of seven contacts with a lead before they turn into a paying customer.
This statistic reinforces the idea that persistency is a major key to a successful B2B sales strategy.
You shouldn’t be pushy with your leads because that may turn them away from you. But you should stay in contact with your prospects until they give you a concrete reason not to anymore.
For example, if you know that a prospect bought a similar product from one of your competitors, that could be a sign that it’s time to let them go.
Get Help From The Right Tools
A successful B2B sales strategy involves lots of data and analytics. You need tools that help you gather information about prospects, stay in touch with them, and analyze your performance over time so that you can make changes where they’re needed.
That’s why it’s so important for B2B sales agents to take advantage of the many different types of tools that simplify this process. If you aren’t already, you should consider using things like:
- CRM software
- Sales acceleration software
- Account-based marketing software
- Lead generation support
- Website analytics tools
LeadLander helps you make the most of your B2B sales techniques
If you’re serious about leveling up your B2B sales prowess, you have to check out LeadLander. Our platform provides a wealth of website analytics information that can help you get more out of each contact you have with a prospect.
With LeadLander, you will be able to:
- Find new leads
- See the types of content that new and existing leads are looking at on your website
- Validate interest from cold calls and emails
- Receive real-time alerts when a lead visits your website
- And much more
Not only that, but we organize the data we provide in a simple but information-dense platform that anyone in your company can access. This makes it incredibly easy to get the information you need to take full advantage of the techniques covered in this article.
So why not give LeadLander a chance? You can sign up for a free 14-day trial today to see exactly what our platform can do for you. We look forward to hearing from you.
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