How does B2B get new customers? (Free strategy)

Business to business (B2B) selling has shifted significantly in recent years. 

Buyers are no longer reliant upon the sales team for all their information; they now do their own research and gain important insights. 

Getting new customers now involves attracting your audience and selling your value proposition through superior marketing strategy that demonstrates great benefit to the potential customer.

Companies successfully gain new B2B customers by communicating their value proposition to a well-defined target market. Additionally, once the prospective customer has entered your sales and marketing pipeline, immediate, trustworthy and high value email, direct mail and telephone marketing communications are necessary in order to gain new customers.

Another challenge of B2B marketing in order to target new customers is that oftentimes you have to appeal to more than one decision-maker. 

Often, and for larger orders, the entire management team may need to sign off before a big purchase.

With these complexities in mind, how do you attract new customers and move your sales upward?

How To Improve B2B Business?

The key to long-term success in the B2B industry is to constantly differentiate yourself from the competition. As a B2B company, you have to define your unique value proposition – something only you can offer your customers. Your unique value proposition should resonate with your target audience and define what makes you different.

Improving your B2B business is the same as improving for B2C. Start with the basics and constantly strive to improve. Humans make buying decisions, so improve your sales conversions by improving the mobile experience, increase your website and online advertising systems, deliver great content, send regular email and SMS text communications and regularly improve your data management systems so you can steer the organization in the right direction. 

Here’s another thing, personalization is an important trend in the B2B market. Creating a more versatile yet personalized user experience will significantly increase conversions. It's important to remember that while you're focusing on solving organizational challenges, you're still marketing to humans. Customized marketing experiences will help you address the needs of your customers.

On this note, don’t write off social media engagement. Business executives use social media as a top research tool when making a purchase decision.

Above all else, think about building your relationship in the long term. So many companies focus on closing the sale right now. While sales figures are crucial to your success, B2B companies live or die based on the number of customers who stick with them to the end. Optimizing your processes and excellent customer care will ensure companies keep renewing their contracts. Ultimately, that's what convinces other people to approach and work with you.

How Do I Generate More B2B Sales?

Your B2B sales campaign is all about attracting prospects and keeping them satisfied by at least meeting their expectations. So, stop cold calling and start researching. A significant problem faced by B2B sales professionals is getting their prospects to engage with them. The reality is that cold-calling is no longer the best use of your time. You might have the perfect solution to your prospects' pain points and still fail to gain their attention.

The strategies that will help you generate more sales are:

1. Align your sales and marketing efforts

Integrating sales and marketing teams is potentially one of the largest opportunities to improve business performance. It leads to shorter sales cycles, improves conversion rates, and, perhaps most importantly it increases top-line sales revenue growth.

With today's complex buying cycle, working in silos won't help your sales figures much. Buyer behavior is ever-changing, so much so that marketing must support sales at every stage of the sales funnel to nurture leads effectively.

2. Leverage the power of personalization

Drawing customers to you is easier said than done. That’s precisely why you need to define your ideal customer profile and buyer persona. If your sales personnel can’t seem to close the deal, odds are they’re reaching out to the wrong person. All B2B customers are focused on ROI, efficiency, and expertise. And possibly, most of all, the person that actually makes the buying decision doesn’t want to look like they made the wrong choice in buying your product or service -- this is a universal psychological buying factor in all B2B sales. What differentiates them are the industry they work in and their individual pain points.

Who are the key decision-makers, and what are they looking for? Research their job position, industry, company's revenue, key business challenges, and the goals they're trying to achieve. Then you can tailor your marketing accordingly, thereby making it easier to increase the number of sales deals.

3. Systematize the power of your referral marketing program

Build trust and let your existing customers help you attract new ones. Business leaders are more likely to trust other peoples' opinions about your business rather than your own. Feature testimonials on your websites and showcase how your products or services solved a customer's problem.

Another way to build trust is to demonstrate thought leadership. Content marketing helps establish your brand name in the market while capturing leads in the process. Hubspot and Your Strategic Marketing Partner, for example, has become an industry leader by churning out content that helps companies grow and improve their bottom line. Let your content demonstrate your value and draw customers to you.

4. Use data-driven marketing and AI to make better decisions

Data-driven marketing provides concrete insights into your customers, helping you reach the right people precisely when they're looking for you. It tells you where your customers are and the information they're looking for so you can tailor your content marketing.

With artificial intelligence, you can better understand customer behavior which will help develop account-based personalized customers.

5. Streamline your sales processes

In other words, make your business easy to work with. If your business processes are riddled with paperwork and multi-step procedures, you’ll lose your customers along the way. If there are 8 steps in your sales process and this is an industry norm, constantly search for ways to improve this ‘sales friction’ and make it faster for your customer. Smooth and easy processes mean your customers will be engaged every step of the way and result in better lead to sales conversions, as well as more repeat customers.

A growing number of B2B purchase decisions are made online. Today, the buyer does not need to meet your charming sales representative. B2B customers now do their own research. Your goal is to make them more likely to engage with you through personalized yet insightful content marketing.

Show, don’t tell. Let your customers find you easily online and create a truly extraordinary experience that meets their most important needs.

A sample sales and marketing strategy to increase B2B sales 

If you did no other sales campaign than the one below, you will see great results.

In fact, you’ll be ahead of your competitors and your customers will love you for this, when it is well done.

For this B2B sales strategy to increase sales, you need to write great sales copy, have an excellent offer, put in careful tracking mechanisms, and provide excellent service to your customers.

This is why the sales team needs to work closely with the marketing team.

With that, here’s what you need.

First, we are going to find a great list of your best customers (or soon to be best customers).  

If you have a list available, segment your customer list how we describe below.

If you don’t have a customer list yet and you need to target brand new customers who have never heard of you, review these two online advertising campaigns and start building your list now: online advertising and LinkedIn.

Ok, here’s what you do:

1. Carve out about 5% of your customers that have spent the most money with you, but have not purchased from you in over 1 year past the end of your normal customer buying cycle. (We often use 5% but you can be flexible with this number.) This is a group of customers who know you, and bought from you at some point, but are no longer buying for some reason. 
2. If you have 1,000 customers, segmenting out 5% leaves you with 50 historically great customers in your list. The purpose of this campaign is to try and reactivate as many of these customers as we can.

50 is an excellent number of customers to start with as it is an easy number to manage, it’s not overwhelming and will help you to get good at this strategy before you start working with larger customer lists.

If you don’t have a plan for this group of customers in your database, you are leaving huge sums of sales revenue and customer goodwill for your competition to scoop up.

Do you think some of these top 50 customers who already know you, trust you and probably like your product have the ability to buy more from you if given a great offer?

Yes!

Let’s start by communicating with this target group. 

Here’s what you need:

1. 50 bags of high end candies that won’t melt. We like Werthers but you can choose what you like.
2. 50 envelopes that are big enough for the candies. A priority mail envelope is a great choice.
3. 50 letters, 1 for each envelope.

Here’s your plan. And let’s get you a 50%, 80% or even 100% open rate using highly targeted direct mail.

The plan is called “The Sweet Deal”, and here’s how it goes:

1. The strategy is to mail a bag of high end candy to these 50 customers.
2. Before you mail, it is highly suggested that you personally call each customer before mailing to confirm the address and tell them you are sending them something fun reserved for customers you haven’t seen in a while. (You might win back customers in this first call.) Additionally, you will update the list and get fresh contact information.
3. Get 50 bags of high end candy as cheaply as you find them at the 99 cent store, Walmart or other bargain retailer.
4. Write a compelling, personalized salesletter with a headline such as this:“Bob, here’s the sweetest deal we have ever made — reserved for our best customers”
5. Reference the bag of candy in the letter.
6. Make a great offer to these customers, with a clear deadline that they must respond before it expires. If you are simply selling more of your existing offer, be sure to offer something extra to this group so it is a unique offer. 
7. Send this priority mail, fedex, ups or at least with a tracking number.
8. The day you mail, send each customer a brief personal email with the tracking number so they can expect it in the mail.
9. For best results: follow up with a phone call 2-3 days after they get the package.
10. Track your results: 1) # of responses, 2) total cost, 3) total sales, 4) total revenue.
11. Have fun!

If you’d like to see a sample breakdown of the costs of a similar campaign, please review: What is direct mail marketing?.

With this one campaign alone you can easily realize up to a 100% direct mail open rate and multiples on ad spend of 2x, 5x, even 10x!

We’ll review more about these awesome return case studies in other tutorials. And if you have done this campaign for yourself, we’d love to hear your responses and share with others to benefit from.

This campaign will absolutely open you up to endless possibilities. And if you need assistance along the way, we are happy to help!