Technologies never stand still: today the B2B sector is smoothly moving into the digital plane, and deals are closed online.
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In this regard, the activities of many enterprises aimed at implementing B2B transactions are tied to the promotion and optimization of the sites that represent their business. We would like to tell you how you can speed up the closing of a deal and push your B2B leads towards making a purchase more efficiently.
If you are interested in the most fruitful customer acquisition, feel free to contact Belkins – one of the top lead generation companies out there providing first-class B2B website development services.
How Long Does it Take to Close a Deal?
Not so long ago, when the business was mostly conducted offline, it took about 7 months to complete a deal. Now, these terms have been reduced significantly, and some companies manage to prepare the client for the conclusion of the contract in just a couple of days. However, this requires a well-designed website. We will tell you how to unobtrusively guide a client through the sales funnel in our tips.
Expedite Your Sales Process With These Acceleration Tips
Here’s a shortlist of actions that will help your business increase sales by attracting new leads:
- establish your benchmark;
- identify the weak spots;
- find your strongest points;
- facilitate your workflow and refine your data.
Steps to Accelerate Your Sales Process
Let’s go through each point individually.
Establish your benchmark
Do you have information on how long it takes your sales specialists to close the deal? Typically, the sales process lasts depending on the type of company and the type of services or goods it provides. In particular, the B2B sales experience is influenced by many factors, ranging from the location of the company, the type of products, to the industries in which the firm’s products or services are used. It only means that you have no reason to compare your company to your competitors.
Instead, you need to determine the average time it takes to close a deal with a client in your company.
Thus, the duration of your sales cycles can be easily monitored through the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. Such systems record incoming leads that go through your sales funnel, transforming them into real customers. This means that to establish a lead generation process, you need a CRM that is compatible with the rest of the software used by your company.
Identify the weak spots
Considering the fact that customers often need a fair amount of time to move through all transaction stages, there are also external factors that can further extend your sales cycle. Your task is to identify all the weaknesses and immediately eliminate them.
Commonly, the average B2B sales cycle consists of the following stages:
- intel gathering. You should describe your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) in detail. To do this, you need to analyze potential customers who may be interested in your products or services;
- outreach activities. At this point, you should start sending cold emails to your leads, in which you introduce your firm and entice recipients to start a conversation;
- offer creation. You must offer each of your potential customers a unique, valuable service. Our team can adapt each of your commercial proposals to new potential clients so that it meets exact business needs;
- Service quality feedback. This stage is optional. However, it is a good idea to listen to your potential customers and learn their objections to your product or prices. Negotiation provides an opportunity for sales reps to connect with potential customers and bring more trust to the relationship. By discussing all possible questions and issues with your leads, you strengthen the collaborative bond. And this, in the end, will help to successfully close the deal;
- deal closing. In this phase, your job is to convert the prospect into a buying customer. Plus, you should keep your customers’ attention even after the deal is closed. Customer support and consultation would be a good method to expand your loyal (established) customer base.
You also have to find out what is the maximum time period required for potential customers to move from stage to stage of the sales funnel and which of these stages takes the most time and effort. Once you identify a weak point, you will need to analyze the pace of the sales negotiations, the behavior of the potential customers, and choose the best tactics that your sales representatives will then use.
Once you figure out which stage is slowing down the sales process, you will need to follow the steps described below.
Find out which employees can hinder negotiations
Check with your sales reps to find out if any of your employees are having trouble outlining your business. If so, the specialists may need additional training to avoid inappropriate company service delivery in the future.
In case your potential customers are responding for a long time or have a conversation without enthusiasm, you will definitely need to edit the scripts and the rhythm of the negotiations until they are as attractive as possible to your customers.
Set the terms
Another factor that slows down negotiations can be the lack of a well-defined deadline for leads to carry out targeted actions. Give your sales reps an instruction to motivate potential customers to pick a date for the next call and stick to it.
Keeping your conversations scheduled and clearly timed will help your prospects be more inclined to dialogue.
Make sure you assign tasks rationally
All your employees have strengths, and your job is to learn how to apply them correctly. In case your sales rep is fluent in French, it would be advisable to put him/her in work with potential clients from France, Belgium, or Canada.
Work on your B2B leads targeting
It so happens that at the beginning of the progression along the sales funnel, the site, which is your main sales representative and is designed to attract leads, brings in a large number of visitors, but only a few reach the stage of the transaction.
In this case, you are probably having a targeting problem, that is, problems associated with choosing the right target audience. Based on this, you need to understand who your end consumer is, draw up the most accurate portrait of the client, and set up advertising with this updated data in mind.
After some thorough research and necessary measures, analyze the results obtained by key performance indicators:
- response time. How long do your sales reps take to provide customers with a response to their request? How quickly do customers respond to offers?
- smallest lead sources. Which sales channel leads to the fastest sales and which brings in the smallest number of leads?
- activity. How many emails do your sales reps send per one lead?
- scheduling. How many meetings are scheduled thanks to the efforts of your sales representatives?
Present the strongest points to your B2B leads
Sometimes, it is inbound sales that attract the maximum number of customers while the highest conversion is achieved through outbound activity (cold calls, letters, etc.). However, relying on these methods alone to keep your business afloat is not advisable. Since the market is constantly evolving, you shouldn’t expect the same customer acquisition methods to work every time.
For instance, you can experiment with choosing your sales channels. This will help you increase the percentage of leads that came in during the early stages of the sales funnel and maximize them towards the end of the same funnel. To do this, you need to select several different types of sites: for example, social networks and web resources for placing guest posts, and monitor which channels will bring the largest number of potential buyers.
This way, you will be able to maximize the percentage of leads who made a deal with you.
Facilitate your workflow and refine your data
In the event that your sales reps perform repetitive tasks on a daily basis, you should consider automating the workflow. All operations carried out with customer data can take up a lot of employees’ time, which, in turn, can lead to the departure of leads to faster-operating companies.
Replacing your current CRM with a more versatile automation system will enable your sales reps to devote time to less mundane tasks and focus on maximizing personalized lead interactions.
On top of the rest of the steps, you should also take care of prioritizing the customer groups that your target audience includes. If you don’t properly structure your target audience, you risk losing the vast majority of customers, since it is obvious that different customer portraits have completely different shopping intentions. This means that for each of them it is necessary to work out their own individual scenario of attraction.
How to Create the Best Lead Generator?
Some B2B companies are waiting for clients and deals for months while others can get a profit immediately after setting up the targeting correctly. So how do you keep all the effort to create the perfect lead generator to a minimum? The answer is simple: entrust all this to professionals.
Our company provides B2B lead generation services managed by the top industry professionals. Feel free to contact us if you are interested in a fruitful collaboration. We will develop an action plan that suits your budget and help you create the perfect sales website.