5 Top Tips To Drive Your B2B Sales In 2021

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With multiple decision-makers, bigger-ticket transactions, and longer sales cycles — succeeding in B2B sales requires a whole lot of perseverance.

Generating leads, nurturing them, and closing the deal at just the right time (and in the right way) is essentially how it works — simple? Yes. Easy? Nope.

But as challenging as it is, there’s a lot you can do to drive more and better B2B sales for your brand. And here are five of the top strategies for your B2B sales success in 2021.

1. Create an irresistible lead magnet

Before you can drive more B2B sales, you need more B2B leads.

A lead magnet is essentially an irresistible bribe that promises free value to your prospects in exchange for their contact information, such as email address and phone number. LinkedIn can help you a lot with lead generation. However, the number of followers matters. So you should try to gain LinkedIn followers that are active and real.

Lead magnets — such as ebooks, templates, a free trial, case studies, webinars, whitepapers, industry reports — attract prospects into your sales funnel so you can start nurturing a relationship with them and slowly turn them into clients.

The idea is that while you offer this content for free, you keep it gated behind a short form that asks for their contact details.

A well-crafted lead magnet provides prospects a taste of the value you can offer in your paid products or services. You prove that your company knows its stuff and establish authority. Not to mention prospects will associate your brand with the high-quality content you provide in your lead magnet.

Here are some of the best types of B2B lead magnets:

• Whitepapers: These are detailed reports packed with valuable information meant to convince the reader about a particular subject. They typically include a lot of data, and studies to back up the core message.
• Case studies: These are in-depth reviews of how your company drove success for past clients. With success metrics and pain point resolutions highlighted clearly, these serve as evidence of what you can do for your prospects.
• Webinars: These are live presentations meant to educate your audience about an industry-relevant subject. If a prospect invests the time to attend your webinar, they’re likely a highly qualified lead who might be ready to be sold to.

2. Pick up the phone and call your warm leads

Arguably, cold calling is an ineffective way to go about making sales today. But calling leads whom you’ve been nurturing for a while isn’t a bad idea at all. Warm leads are people who’ve shown a clear interest in your business offerings.

Call a warm lead:

• A few days after a lead magnet download
• At the end of a free trial
• After a webinar

Their last action is your opening line. For example:

• If they downloaded a lead magnet: Ask if the content was useful. In what other ways can you help them?
• If they’re about to finish a free trial: Would they like an extension on the free trial period?
• After a webinar: Are they open to a one-on-one demo online?

The point of calling your warm leads is that they’re more likely to convert as they are interested in your brand. They are a lot closer to a purchase decision and a call might be all that’s needed to nudge them to a final sale.

3. Measure the right metrics

To quote the famous management consultant and author Peter Drucker — “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” This is particularly true for sales.

Metrics help you get a clear understanding of how your sales team (and product) is performing, and whether you’re hitting your B2B sales goals.

Here are a few crucial B2B sales metrics you must track:

• Sales cycle length: If you know your average sales cycle length, you can forecast the number of won deals you’ll have in a defined time period based on the number of leads you have in the pipeline presently. B2B sales cycles are typically much longer than B2C.
• Product usage data: Learn how customers navigate your product, what features they interact with, and which features they miss or ignore. Consider using any of the Pendo competitors to gather your B2B product usage data.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): It can cost five times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one, so driving sales is not just about converting new leads but also keeping customers happy and maximizing their value. CLV also helps you determine which customer segments drive the most revenue in the long term.

4. Ensure you have a functional, feature-rich B2B website

This one’s specific to B2B eCommerce businesses. When it comes to your website, it is crucial to be aware of and incorporate some key features that streamline the online sales process for both you and your clients.

These features include (but aren’t limited to):

• Flexible payment options: You likely already permit several online payment methods, but what about offline modes of payment? Let clients complete a purchase with an order number and allow 30 days of credit. With more payment flexibility, clients would be more loyal and have a long-term relationship that translates to more repeat sales.
• One-click reordering: An option to reorder from order history with a single click can be a great time-saver for your repeat clients, and such convenience naturally leads to more customer loyalty.
• Personalized pricing: You need a feature to quote different prices to different clients. For example, you might need to show lower prices to regulars, a particular price for every combination of SKU and client, or bulk discounts for certain products or client cohorts.
• Sales reps support: Build your website in a way that bolsters the client’s relationship with reps. Allow reps to log in as clients and place orders on their behalf, easily check inventory, and have ready access to product specs and sales collateral.

5. Leverage the power of videos

Stats suggest 96% of B2B companies use video content marketing, and that 73% of B2B marketers say video positively impacts marketing ROI.

And so, video can be a great investment to drive more B2B sales in 2021. Here are a few video formats that work extremely well for different sections of the B2B sales cycle:

• Demo or explainer videos: Such videos precisely showcase how your product or service works and why it’s essential in your prospect’s business goals.
• Client testimonial videos: Provide social proof and improve brand credibility with genuine video testimonials from your past clients.
• Buyer persona-specific videos: Think about the decision maker’s job title. Each decision-maker has different pain points and priorities. A CEO cares about the ROI boost they’ll get, whereas an IT manager is concerned about your product’s specific use cases and integration with the existing setup.

Over to you

So there you have it. Now it’s time to put these strategies into practice and achieve those ambitious sales goals you’ve set for 2021.