While every business is different, they all have the same goal: to get sales. The best businesses don’t stop there, though. They are interested in drastically increasing sales so that they can scale their business. And if you want your company to still be around in 10-20 years, this should be your goal too: to scale your company.
There are several B2B sales strategies that can help you achieve the progress you want, including research, personalization, and customer nurturing.
Researching customer behavior and preferences allows your sales and marketing teams to have a greater awareness of how to generate new leads and satisfy customers. Personalizing content to suit those customers’ needs proves your commitment and eagerness to serve. And developing ridiculously strong relationships with existing customers makes space for referrals to become one of your biggest sources of lead generation.
With the right approach, you can increase sales and grow your business without having to expend intense amounts of effort.
Today we are going to be talking about how to increase your sales, and more specifically, how to use free sales promotion opportunities, like referrals, to scale your B2B sales.
How to Increase Your Sales In 3 Simple Steps
Increasing sales can be a tricky business and there are a lot of ideas out there on best practices but the most important thing to do to effectively increase your sales is to put the customer first.
If you are serving your customers to the best of your abilities, sales will come.
This does not mean just being nice and hoping that your brilliant personality will naturally attract millions of customers. But it does mean creating systems and strategies that will allow you to boost customer engagement, satisfaction, and retention will do wonders for your company in the long run.
Here are 3 simple steps to help you expand your B2B sales growth.
Understand Your Audience
In order to have a successful sales process, all sales need to understand your company’s audience:
- What are the customer’s needs or problems they are trying to solve?
- What is their budget for this purchase?
- Who will be involved in the decision-making process?
- What features do they need in a product or service?
- How did they find out about your brand/business?
- What are their goals for this purchase?
- Are there any limitations that could affect their ability to buy from you?
All of these questions and more will help you paint a detailed picture of who each of your B2B customers is and how you can serve each of them.
Every business will have its own unique pain points and priorities, and the more you are aware of the intricacies of those priorities, the better you will be able to personalize your product or service to them.
This will also help optimize your top-of-the-sales-funnel efforts significantly.
Create Customized Content
Segueing perfectly into the next course of action, another thing you can do to further serve your B2B buyers and increase your sales is to create customized content for them.
A study by LinkedIn Sales Solutions showed that 73% of B2B executives agree that customers expect more personalization than they did a few years ago.
People want to feel valued. They want to feel special. And personalization is how you achieve that.
Personalizing the sales process through customized digital sales rooms for each stage of the sales process or even self-service options for customers can be incredibly effective not just at meeting your customers’ expectations, but also in solidifying their trust in your commitment to service.
Leverage Free Promotion
The final way to increase your B2B sales growth and scale your business is by leveraging free promotion.
Think about all of the money you are spending, or planning to spend, on advertising and promotion. Think about how much time your marketing and sales teams are spending on lead generation. What if you could cut back those costs to virtually zero and save your team hours of time? Wouldn’t you want to do that?
By taking the time to build a strong relationship with prospects from the very beginning of their sales journey, you ensure that by the time they are paying customers, their loyalty is deeply rooted.
This loyalty can then be used to generate leads through word-of-mouth marketing with little to no extra costs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_KQ0TmSd_U
Below we will talk more about referrals, along with other free promotion opportunities like collaborating with influencers or creating incentives for people to advertise your products or services.
How Winning Free Promotion Allows You to Scale
As a B2B SaaS company, utilizing free promotional opportunities is an incredibly effective B2B sales growth strategy to increase brand awareness, generate leads, and ultimately scale your company.
Free promotional opportunities such as social media marketing, influencer partnerships, and referral programs can help to reach more potential customers than ever before and build trust with existing ones.
Why is this important?
According to research, it can cost you close to 5 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. So, if you could, why wouldn’t you try to invest in keeping your customers happy?
Utilizing free promotional opportunities for B2B SaaS sales can be extremely beneficial in terms of scaling your business while spending little to no money on advertising or other costly methods of promotion.
Referrals
We talked about this a little before, but referral programs are an excellent way to boost awareness about your business and generate leads.
Whether it is rewarding your B2B buyer through discounts every time they give you a new lead or simply providing such quality customer service that they cannot help but spread your name around, leveraging referrals is a very cost-effective means of promoting your business.
If you have a large customer base full of loyal customers, consider building a simple and easy-to-use program that compels those customers to refer a friend. If you have already built long-standing relationships and trust, your customers will not feel burdened, but will instead be eager to partake in the referral program.
Influencer Partnerships
Another way to boost awareness about your B2B company is by partnering with influencers or popular individuals in your community.
This allows you to tap into a much larger audience than previously.
When looking for an influencer, it’s important to find someone who aligns with your brand values and has a genuine interest in what you do. This will ensure that the partnership is relevant to both audience bases.
Good partnership negotiations include offering the influencer discounts or exclusive access to new products for promotion on their channels.
One example of a company that leveraged celebrities during its marketing and campaigning is a cereal company called Surreal. Because partnering with world-famous influencers or celebrities can be pricy, Surreal decided to pay normal people with famous names for their permission to use their names in their campaigns (shown below).
The humor, creativity, and celebrity status helped bring around significant brand awareness while still saving Surreal a lot of money.
Social Post Incentives
The third way to leverage cheaper promotion alternatives and to boost your B2B sales growth is to create incentives for your customers. Below is an example of how IKEA used a $10 incentive to boost its visibility substantially.
Several years ago, a client of ours sent us this photo and we fell in love with the idea of utilizing customer incentives to get new customers and reach new audiences. In the image above, IKEA offered a promotion for their customers: if you tweet from their store, you get $10 to spend.
Not only does this tactic get people to the store, but because IKEA gives the people who tweet a small amount of money, they are much more likely to make purchases that exceed the price of that coupon.
By encouraging customers to share the fact that they are at the store, IKEA also gets promotions to thousands of people most likely local to the store as well. Plus, the message is from a trusted resource–a friend or follower.
For your B2B company, this could look like asking your customers to mention your product or services on LinkedIn during some later stage of the sales cycle for a discount during the closing phase.
In summary, each of these promotion opportunities helps you tap into new networks and generate new leads and customers. In turn, because your sales teams don’t have to spend as much time and money trying to find new leads, you can focus on closing more deals, effectively scaling your company in the process. This will also allow marketing teams more space to come up with creative ideas around branding, positioning, and messaging resulting in a higher-quality company.
Key Takeaways
If you’re looking for ways to increase your sales, there are a few simple steps you can take. First, it’s important to understand your audience and what resonates with them. This will allow you to create an experience that will resonate with them and drive engagement.
Second, creating personalized content that speaks directly to your target audience is key to success. Look for ways to engage with customers on a personal level and provide them with meaningful experiences. Leveraging free promotion is the third simple step to scaling your company.
Free promotion can include referrals, influencer partnerships, and social media incentives. Each of these options is a great way to reach more potential customers without spending much money. These promotion options also allow you to scale quickly and reach an even larger customer base than before.
If you are interested in learning more about how to scale the buying journey and accelerate B2B sales growth, reach out to us today!