According to Forrester, total B2B ecommerce sales in the US will reach $3 trillion by 2027, up from $1.7 trillion at the end of 2021.
These statistics alone show how valuable it is to cover all the bases with your B2B sales strategy today. While business to business sales have been quite straightforward for decades — identify a vendor, talk to a sales representative, consult with stakeholders, agree on a deal — the B2B process and sales tactics now are much more complex.
In this article, we’ll uncover core B2B sales strategies, define how they differ from B2C, and suggest effective business to business sales tactics to implement in your company.
The Evolution of B2B Sales Strategies
When most people think of sales, whether at physical retail locations or online, they tend to think B2C, or selling to consumers. B2B sales, on the other hand, is about selling products or services directly to other companies.
There are three traditional types of B2B sales: supply, distribution and service.
Supply sales relate to the purchase of something essential to business operations, often in great quantities. For example, buying 20 office chairs or building an in-house server out of components.
Distribution sales means buying something at wholesale price either to resell to consumers at a markup or use as inputs for new products.
Service sales is about providing a specific service instead of a product. Legal services would be one of the examples used by all companies. More recently, software known as SaaS (software as a service) has entered this B2B category, where rather than the software product itself, companies sell access to that product on a monthly or annual basis.
You can imagine that sales strategies B2B industries support have evolved radically over decades.
Traditional sales were done over the phone via cold-calling, through sending direct mail to businesses, attending trade shows, and developing relationships.
Then, Clayton Christensen popularized the idea of jobs to be done, which meant selling solutions instead of products and developing value propositions that resonated with the target audience.
In the digital era, websites became the strategic center of B2B sales. SEO (search engine optimization) and content marketing took the lead by elevating company websites in search engines like Google. In addition, email marketing helped nurture leads and develop customer relationships over time.
ABM (account-based marketing) was another popular approach that meant targeting specific business accounts over time and developing marketing campaigns around their needs.
With AI sales intelligence, there has been a rapid rise in automation (e.g. conversational chatbots), predictive analytics, sales enablement tools, buyer intent solutions, and more.
All these stages in the B2B sales history built on top of each other and influenced how sales teams approach the B2B space today.
Core Strategies for Modern B2B Sales
Emphasizing Personalization
Effective B2B sales teams leverage technology to create personalized approaches for every market segment they want to go after. They not only have detailed buyer personas but also respond to particular behaviors that reveal often anonymous website visitors as high-value leads.
Lift AI, for example, uses its powerful machine-learning model to detect the buyer intent of every visitor on your website based solely on their real-time behavior, even those who’ve never visited it before and are otherwise anonymous to other tools.
As a result, Lift AI can determine which visitors have high buyer intent and immediately connect them with your BDRs, thus increasing sales conversions with no extra work from your team. Lift AI’s output is a “Website Buyer Intent Score” for each and every visitor, which can be integrated into your existing or new tools to unlock new revenue opportunities.
Mastering Digital and Remote Selling
There’s no need for your team and even your customers to be at the same geographical location to close business deals anymore. B2B sales teams have lots of digital tools at their disposal to successfully attract prospective customers.
All B2B sales teams start with a CRM (e.g. Salesforce, HubSpot) that centralizes customer data, records sales activities, and tracks the sales pipeline. Video conferencing tools like Zoom help meet potential leads remotely. Marketing automation tools like Marketo ensure all leads go through nurturing stages. Power BI identifies pain points and provides other actionable insights into your current customers.
Advancing with Account-Based Selling
Imagine your sales team, marketing team, and even customer service team working together to focus on reaching high-value accounts through a multi-channel approach. That’s what account-based selling gives you.
Using your ICP (ideal customer profile), you can proactively reach out to potential customers and help them define their problem and suggest the perfect solution before they have the chance to research any competitive offerings.
For the ABS (account based sales) approach to work, all the latest information about your ideal customers should be recorded in your CRM and easily accessed throughout your organization.
Additionally, sales and marketing should work closely to produce personalized materials for specific companies such as intro videos, presentations, case studies, ebooks, targeted ads, etc.
As a result, you’d be able to foster trust by investing in long-term relationships and helping your B2B customers achieve their goals.
However, there’s a challenge once you have thousands of website visitors and hundreds of target accounts. How do your sales reps prioritize their outreach?
You need buyer intent signals to drive your targeting and engagement strategy. By combining Lift AI with your ABM and ID reveal tools, you can see which of your target accounts are demonstrating strong buyer behavior on your website right now.
Lift AI’s buyer intent scores can be integrated directly into your ABM, CRM, SEP, and other tools so you can see the most recent buyer intent of each account, and follow-up with them within seconds or minutes of them leaving your website.
Enhancing Sales with Technology
Leveraging Data for Insightful Selling
In the digital world, data is king. If you have accurate, up-to-date, actionable data, your sales team can create a better sales pitch for a particular account, customize the buying process, and close more business customers overall.
To start, your team needs to collect and centralize data from multiple sources, from your CRM to social media, website analytics, email campaigns, and more. Customer data platforms (CDPs) help integrate all data sources together to provide a unified view of your customers.
Once you have all the data in place, you can start analyzing it, trying to detect behavioral insights and predict future actions (e.g. upgrading service or churning).
Using these insights, you can develop potential solutions and come up with unique selling points. Then, start your targeted outreach, approaching target customers with messaging tailored specifically to them.
Streamlining Processes with Automation
As you can see, even with leveraging technology, there’s still a lot of work for your sales managers to do. That’s why you should strive to automate your marketing efforts as much as possible.
That’s where tools like Lift AI become invaluable. Lift AI integrates into the chat platforms you already use (e.g. Drift). Then it leverages its unique machine-scoring model (trained on one billion sales interactions) to not only identify anonymous website visitors but also determine how likely they are to buy what you offer (known as buyer intent).
Lift AI will find the 9% of your website visitors (on average) who have high conversion intent and match them instantly with your BDRs.
By engaging high-value visitors, your sales team will increase your conversion rates. Because they’re spending their time with high intent visitors only, they become more sales efficient and close more pipeline, faster.
At the same time, even low-scoring visitors could be greeted by nurturing bots or self-help guides, which still provide value without taking the time away from your sales team.
Building Sustainable Customer Relationships
Having a sales cycle that supports developing long-term customer relationships should be the cornerstone of any successful sales and marketing strategy.
Customer relationships based on trust help leverage your existing customer base, win repeat business, and engage other businesses through referrals.
Your sales process shouldn’t stop at closing deals. Prolonging the customer journey further allows your team to upsell or cross-sell existing customers at a later date, conduct market research, identify the most effective value proposition, and track customer satisfaction.
Frequent check-ins with multiple decision makers also helps align sales priorities and reduce churn. Coming up with a loyalty program that rewards long-term engagements can increase your customer lifetime value without large investments into additional lead generation.
Implementing social selling is another great strategy for keeping customer relationships strong without tailoring your message to each specific account. Being active on LinkedIn or X (Twitter) helps your customers stay brand aware and attract potential buyers at the same time.
While social selling through social media platforms is considered mainstream in business to consumer industries, it’s not generally done well in the B2B world, as it relies more on traditional corporate marketing strategies, which means lots of low-hanging sales opportunities for you.
Adapting to the Future of B2B Sales
Preparing for Emerging Trends
It’s clear that the future of B2B sales lies in being able to analyze data and derive actionable insights from it. Predictive analytics powered by AI will play an increasingly larger role in this process.
Sales and marketing teams will continue to leverage technology and embrace sales enablement to increase the size and the quality of their conversion funnel.
For example, we’ll see how lightly personalized content (e.g. name variables in email marketing) gets algorithmically tailored to target companies that are consuming it. Modern buyers will expect that all the marketing messages are tailored specifically to them throughout their buyer’s journey.
Getting your sales reps started with AI-powered tools today that encourage customer conversations will position your sales funnel to benefit from aligning sales and technology, and result in more customers over time.
Implementing Actionable Tips
Any sales rep who works with Lift AI can already feel the difference that AI leverage is able to provide.
Sales teams used to rely on “pricing page views” to determine if a visitor had intent. On its own, this signal does not guarantee a buyer. In fact, 88% of high intent visitors are on other pages of your website.
Instead, they can use AI to detect these buyers based on their behavior - no matter what page they’re on.
For example, sales reps that use Lift AI increase their chat conversions anywhere from two to 10 times within the first 90 days, due to Lift AI being able to identify an ideal buyer persona out of thousands of visitors and connect them through a sales call right away.
A few examples include companies like Chronos, which got 85% more leads from its pipeline by using Lift AI. Truckstop increased sales conversions by 300% (9.72% vs. 3.28%). Customers using the conversation platform Drift saw conversions go up 9 times when averaged out across them!
Future-Proof Your Sales Process with Lift AI
The impact that innovative B2B sales strategies will have on your revenue goals over the long term can’t be overstated, whether you choose to equip your sales and marketing teams with the AI analytics, focus your sales efforts on relevant content, or seek sales success in tools that speed up lead qualification.
Adding Lift AI will help the latter and instantly transform your sales process from a primarily manual to highly engaged activity. Find out how you can widen and shorten your sales funnel by including anonymous visitors and processing them with the help of machine learning. Sign up for a free proof of concept today offered to companies with over 20,000 monthly visitors and see how it can change your sales strategy.
