Monthly Archives: December 2020

B2B Sales has changed for the better in spite of the fact that 2020 was a challenging year in several ways. The change has mostly come through some mighty lessons that 2020 has left for all of us to learn and grow from there. Some of the adjustments which had to be done has actually elevated sales results and helped organizations generate revenue. Communication with customers has now become more personalized and sales can now be done from anywhere, anytime crossing all the boundaries and limitations of time zones, regions and even in the absence of face to face events.

Sales- Anywhere, anytime:

In the absence of face to face events, in person meetings, setting up in person appointments etc. there was a lot of apprehension and marketers were doubtful whether going totally virtual would really work for b2b sales.

After adopting virtual meetings, conferences and even work from home model, marketers feared that this set up may hamper sales. Organizations faced huge dilemmas and doubts about how to find leads, how to find best ways to nurture them without face to face interaction and that it would impact revenue to a great extent.

But in reality the picture turned out to be entirely different. Several organizations embraced technology, tools and went digital instantly with sales teams assimilating change and quickly finding out virtual ways to connect with customers.

This made sales more customer-centric with readiness to spend more time nurturing leads than direct selling. Sales could now happen from anywhere, anytime.  None of the conditions or situation was a hindrance anymore. Inbound sales obviously gained more importance than ever before and sales and marketing teams spent more time in attracting and delighting the customer rather than running behind leads.

Reaching out:

One of the significant lessons learned during 2020 was the change in approach in sales. Selling mode changed to helping or listening and wanting to reach out more. This made more sales than actual selling.

Customers going through a major transformation too expected the sales and marketing people to understand their challenges and problems and present solutions accordingly. Enhanced buying experiences, empathetic communication with more human connection to help them navigate through change and help them make quick buying decisions is what customers expected the most from sales teams. These are some of the best lessons that sales teams learned; experiences that can be very well continued into the year 2021.

Importance of data re-established:

Data has always been important in b2b sales and marketing. But in 2020 one of the most important lessons learned were that data can give more leverage than just creating contact lists. Not that it want a known fact before but this year, data was also sought in the form of valuable customer information.  Digital footprints of customers across social media proved critically important to understand buyers and their buyer journeys too. Data gave the much needed extra boost to b2b sales and in fact, cleansed data helped to shorten the sales cycle considerably.

Conclusion:

Nothing is impossible and at times when we are forced to adopt things we can get it right. Apart from the above technical changes some other changes such as resilience, innovative strategies aligned with the goals of the new changes and much more made sales more agile.

2021 can certainly be a promising year in terms of b2b sales and marketing if certain strategies and techniques are deployed for better customer engagement. Email marketing is one such technique that can be quite effective in 2021. It is all about being innovative and creative when it comes to strategizing plans and adopting equally innovative methods to implement them for best results.

Here are 3 key email marketing techniques that can bring great results in the coming year.

Spend more on email marketing:

If a company wants to increase revenue or wants to add new leads that have huge potential to get converted, then investing in email marketing will make perfect sense.  In fact, email marketing has gained great importance today and research says that email is 40% more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined and that is a startling percentage.

• 86% of professionals prefer email marketing as one of the most effective communication channels
• 60% marketers believe that email marketing produces higher ROI
• Almost 90% consumers check their emails daily
• Segmented emails are known to generate 58% of company revenue

Email marketing works best with segmentation. It narrows down the focus and gives the right thing to the right person in the email list. Gone are the days when people sent bulk emails that didn’t get any returns because today is the time and age of personalization.

Each customer wants to feel special and cared for and what better way than understanding their needs and reaching out to them. 2021 will not only be a fresh start for marketers but much of the time of 2021 will be in invested in making up for the loss of revenue in 2020. Hence email marketing techniques can come to the rescue and with segmentation tactics this investment in email marketing will be the most lucrative investment with best ROI.

Other than segmentation, email marketing can also be used for retargeting the customers and potential prospects that had shown interest earlier but did not engage in the year 2020. In fact re-engagement can be one of the most powerful sales and marketing techniques of 2021. Sending personalized emails with customized messaging to re-engage these prospects could prove to be one of the most successful techniques in the coming year.

Personalize campaigns:

We have already discussed investing in email marketing and how personalization can be done better with segmentation to get good results. Now, if the campaigns are curated in a way that they are customized as per the needs with personalized offers it can be really effective. Conversational marketing and personalization can be one of the most effective trends in 2021 b2b sales and marketing as it can give marketers the opportunity to reconnect with their customers in a more effective manner.

Almost 20% leads are already qualified; the ones that are sent directly to sales! This means the need of nurturing these leads with great content to get them converted is high.

By means of great content and segmentation you can create hyper-personalized emails targeting specific audience depending upon the segmented email lists. This combination of various strategies to optimize email marketing can give good returns and it will become easier to delight and engage prospects.

Use Omni channel marketing:

Lead generation by itself cannot function well based on a single strategy. It does not work on one-size-fits-all kind of thing and hence email marketing done through just one channel may not work in favor of lead gen.

Customers are all over the place, all over the internet; hence capturing their interests takes a lot more than just sending those emails. One needs to follow their social media activity to know their likes and dislikes and their changing preferences with time.

This isn’t a one-time activity; in fact, Omni channel targeting is an ongoing process and can get some interesting leads that can convert. Needs of the customers can be better met through cross channel activity and engagement can rise to a much promising number.

Conclusion:

As we gear up to start 2021, fresh, innovative and workable strategies can come to every marketer’s rescue as it is the need of the time. Instead of repeating methodologies that are already deployed; it’s best to seek out new approaches and new techniques in 2021 to make it a more fruitful and successful year for b2b sales and marketing.

The holiday season can get particularly tough for the sales teams for delays in closing certain deals or for not being able to communicate with some key decision makers because of their unavailability or due to other challenges that they might be facing. In such a scenario if the sales and marketing teams have already anticipated challenges way ahead of time it can help a lot to come up with solutions.

Being prepared for the future with some key marketing strategies that are not dependent on any one particular time or quarter of the year should necessarily be integrated into the core sales and marketing plans of the organization. Here are 3 key marketing strategies that you can easily implement in 2021 making you smarter and to keep you one step ahead of your competitors.

Optimization:

Transformation is an on-going process, there’s no timeline to it. So instead of focusing only on what could change or how to invest in accommodating change alone, marketers should think in terms of investing time in making the most out of what they already have and optimize the existing processes or strategies.

Optimizing marketing strategies or processes by reviewing the present tools and processes or re-defining the existing plans, approach and analyzing the results or metrics can be a good exercise to strengthen what you have and be more prepared for transformation.

Analysis can give you a clear picture of what’s working and what is not. For example, you can analyze the type of leads, the number of leads and the reasons why you are getting certain types of leads and that can answer a lot of questions. You can also analyze what are the reasons for decreased website visitors or those who landed on your landing page but didn’t move forward toward conversion and what can you do to avoid a similar situation. Analyzing can not only help with rectifying the negative impact, but also help elevate those things that are working in your favor, so that you can work recreating those strategies.

While investing too much in automated tools and other technological solutions may be necessary at times, none of these tools will work at their best if the basic strategies aren’t aligned with the tools. A clear-eyed picture can reveal much more about optimizing the existing plans before you run after new and transformative ways of doing business.

Investing in developing personas:

Accuracy of personas can determine the success or failure of your lead generation campaigns. A persona that was created at the beginning of the campaign many not be relevant after a certain period of time, hence what needs to be monitored is the need to make changes or fine-tune the personas that are to be incorporated in the plan. Following your customers’ social media journey consistently is key to knowing the shift in their preferences or likes and dislikes. This can help you to make the necessary modifications in the buyer personas that you wish to do.

Data driven decision making:

We all know how crucial data is in b2b sales and marketing! It plays a vital role in not only acquiring quality leads, but also in analyzing the overall results. Based on data we need to ask a few questions such as why did some leads qualify, why did some leads fail to convert, why a particular decision maker did not respond or why did a particular decision maker decide to do business with us. Answers to these questions can be revealed from data alone.

It’s important to have certain yardsticks to make things measurable, accountable and also to simplify things in b2b. Data is one of those important yardsticks that can give a direction to the sales and marketing teams. They can go back to the drawing board and fix certain things so that the future strategies don’t fail or so that they can simply repeat some of the successes and strategies based on data. Data can also help in studying the MQLs and SQLs and also in setting the future targets.

Conclusion:

Other than the above key prerequisites, there are others too such as breaking down the complex processes into smaller steps, attribution of revenue, performance analysis, market research, monitoring competitor activity and much more. Making the most out of what you have by optimizing it or with the help of data and persona building one can truly bring great results. Each business is unique and if the strategies are aligned with the organizational business goals it will most likely bring more sales and thus more revenue.

There are many lead generation techniques that are being used to generate leads. Optimizing a website is one such technique that has huge potential to generate leads consistently. A website is a central hub for B2B marketing and for accelerating many B2B sales activities too. Try the right techniques to bring leads through your website and you will never be disappointed.

A B2B marketer’s goal is to attract a lead, nurture it, and eventually convert it. Your website can act as a lead-magnet if you can get people on to your website using social media or other channels and get the visitors interested in using your services. Your website can act as an important tool for not just attracting leads, but attracting quality leads and quickly converting those leads, eventually bringing in more business.

So how do you make your website work for you to generate leads? Let’s discuss some excellent techniques that are also easy to adopt:

Landing Page:

A landing page has the capacity to bring in business through lead generation. Not having a landing page can now mean a serious flaw or gap in the sales and marketing strategy. A perfect landing page with a form to be filled-in and an appropriate call-to-action is a must-have if you want to make lead- generation work for you through your website.

Optimizing forms:

Forms have always been popular amid B2B marketers and there isn’t a doubt that they are commonly used by most B2B companies. However; the catch is that most users are not a fan of forms. Some see it as a ‘slow-downer’ and also as an annoying obstacle while navigating the website. Forms can be a pain to fill in, so if a form is not designed to be user-friendly, it can actually work against your goals of conversion.

So how do you turn around this technique into an actual lead-magnet? You can redesign the forms making them more user-friendly! Keeping the forms short and concise can create more conversions. Another way of optimizing your forms is by making them mobile-friendly. This way you will not lose out on opportunities and make the most of each user who visits your website through a mobile device.

The seamless website experience is definitely at the top of the list if you want your users to get engaged and eventually convert. Good user experience can be created through appealing and simple website design and also making the navigation as simple as possible. A website can generate leads if the users like to spend time on it and most importantly they get what they are looking for without having to spend a lot of their valuable time searching for things they want.

The challenges in B2B marketing can be reduced by innovative ideas and techniques that lead to better customer experience. Using smart techniques with your existing marketing assets and strategies can definitely make B2B lead generation an interesting experience for both marketers as well as the customers.

Let’s face it; B2B Lead Generation isn’t a cakewalk and it entails a lot of challenges! However, given the technological disruption and social media proliferation into our lives, it certainly is helping everyone to simplify the B2B journey!

If you look at options and techniques that might be slightly different from the ones that are more obvious; lead generation can still become a happy-experience for marketers.

To begin with, it can be a challenge to understand where and how a lead was generated. Was it an outcome of a single activity or was it a result of a combination or series of activities that are difficult to judge at times. Though it might be possible to track the lead, on an average, B2B leads can be quite unquantifiable. But that doesn’t stop anyone from generating leads and here are some proven techniques that can guarantee B2B lead generation for your business.

Social Media:

Being omnipresent on Social Media does help to bring in more leads. Though it may not be the primary source of lead generation, it is an effective channel to establish your brand’s presence online. Besides, Social media can help direct visitors to your website. Ideally, if you help visitors navigate to your landing page or website through multiple links it can certainly be a useful strategy towards creating leads.

You can create new opportunities for B2B lead generation by letting your users sign up for your company newsletters. By using either Facebook or LinkedIn, or both, the newsletter can be a good source for accelerating B2B lead generation.

It is also essential to rightly position call-to-action on your social media posts or on your landing page. This is another way of engaging your audiences for better business outcomes.

Giving Away:

The ‘give-away’ marketing technique may work for you if you want to engage audiences and also build long term relationships. Building relationships is crucial to successful B2B marketing and sales and hence this technique can work to attract and engage a prospect.

Thus, giving away some of your valuable resources such as an e-book, a step-by-step guide, free or limited free access to some tools, thought leadership advice, etc. can go a long way in getting leads and also converting them.

These techniques can surely get you started off if you want to generate more leads, but if you want to delve deeper into knowing how to attract more leads by using other techniques as well, stay tuned!

Many companies have transitioned to work from home mode due to the overwhelming lock-down situation in the face of COVID-19. The good news is that if you adopt certain prevailing marketing strategies with a new approach and an innovative edge added to them, your business can thrive in this challenging environment.

While these unprecedented times are bringing some challenges on to the surface; there are many B2B companies with established sales and marketing practices that are thriving and providing relentless business support to their clients.

B2B companies that provide demand generation services with integrated email marketing services have the capacity to bring maximum results to their clients in these challenging times.

Statistics show a realistic and optimistic picture of how email marketing can be an effective tool to drive revenue:

Research that 59% of B2B professionals say that email marketing is their most successful revenue-generating tool. Research also says that companies that share useful content via email receive a 44% return on investment.

Given the advantage of big data and intent data; email marketing can target specific customers or prospects and the information of services or products can be delivered straight to the inbox of a company’s best prospects.

There are many advantages to email marketing that can help businesses drive revenue.

Attracting the Right Prospects:

If you want to attract customers from a specific target audience; email marketing is one of the most effective tools to do just that. You can reach them anywhere, anytime email marketing campaigns.

Cost-Effective:

Email marketing when done with the help of the right experts can give you the highest ROI. Targeting of the best prospects is key and will achieve the best results.

Measurable:

Measuring the impact of any marketing activity is important, to determine the success of the campaign. With email marketing, a measurement can be done by tracking conversions and/or conversion rates.

Focused Target Audience:

Email marketing will achieve the best results by targeting the best prospects in the campaign. Targeting can be done by company size, job title, industry, geography, intent, installed technology and many other targeting criteria.

Conclusion:

Email marketing is proven to be one of the most effective ways to reach your best prospects and achieve maximum ROI. Email marketing can be an excellent combination with demand generation, b2b lead generation and content syndication.  Email marketing continues to be a successful marketing tool for many companies worldwide.

Have you been waiting to reach out to your target audiences through email marketing and have been looking for an experienced expert to do so? Get in touch with us now to witness how we can help you!

If there was a title for the most transformative year of the decade, 2020 would have been the undisputed contender of the title. A year of change and adoption of new-normal; 2020 has shown the world one of the worst faces of human debacle and at the same time it has also revealed the spirit of human courage, resilience, survival amid uncertainties at its peak. The business world was shaken to its core and while many survived, some thrived after the initial setback settled in.

While the most predominant theme of the year was change and adoption of the new normal, there’s a lot that has changed in the B2B market and several trends have shaped the new normal. This blog is all about the most significant trends of the b2b market in the year 2020.

The Survival-fix- Go Digital

While the whole world was going digital, the year 2020 accelerated it further. The best way to stay connected with customers was to go online and communicate virtually. Social media became the main stage for b2b and other marketers to connect with their potential prospects and maintain a dialogue with them for business.

Nearly 96% of b2b sales teams shifted either partially or fully to remote selling.

65% of B2B decision makers now say that the remote model is more effective than it was before the Pandemic.

Optimizing speed, accuracy and efficiency through personalized communication with customers has been one of the dominant trends of 2020 for b2b sales and marketing organizations.

Virtual events:

Face-to-face events- one of the potential opportunities for the sales teams to get leads and convert leads came to a sudden halt making ‘virtual’ the new normal. Webinars, virtual meet-ups and conferences, video marketing through social media became the hottest trends of 2020.

Virtual contact with customers enabled companies to keep their businesses going on and also provided customers with solutions for their challenges in business.

Customer-centric marketing:

The entire focus shifted from selling to identifying the new needs of the customer, addressing those needs and also creating a focused strategy to meet those needs became imperative. Some of the significant trends are as follows:

• Quick response to customer needs
• Agile sales practices
• Personalized offers
• Relevant content
• Empathetic communication

Email Marketing:

While email marketing has remained one of the popular channels for b2b sales and marketing it gained more leverage in 2020 due to the digital shift and online interactions with potential customers. Email marketing started becoming more and more popular amid both marketers as well as customers.

Better reach and personalized offers for getting more leads has proved to be a winning formula in today. Almost 73% marketers think email marketing as an important tool for success in marketing and 83% use email marketing as their most preferred mode of communication.

Hyper-Personalization:

Another popular trend of 2020 has been hyper-personalization. Customer centric strategies and hyper personalization now meant understanding the finer nuances of customer needs and requirements.

Personalization in communicating with customers and providing customized solutions to them has been one of the most dominant features of 2020. Marketing communication too became more empathetic in order to make it more about reaching out and less about selling.

Listening more and understanding the customers has benefited marketers a lot this year. Therefore, conversational marketing also became more popular this year with all the change and adoption of technology.

Technology:

Technology has always played an important role in b2b. Whether it is automated email marketing campaigns, or gathering data or reaching out through chatbots, technology has been a strong pillar of b2b sales and marketing.

This year’s virtual and online shift was enabled only due to technology. In fact, this forced adoption of virtual communication made many organizations realize that technology support could actually fuel sales and marketing to a great extent. Remote work model was possible only due to collaborative features enabled through technology.

Conclusion:

Several other dominating trends of 2020 include ABM (Account Based Marketing) which has now become a main-stream activity for b2b sales and marketing companies. It has enabled the sales team to further narrow down their focus and concentrate on account based activities for better results.

Remote work model, wherein work from home became a norm was another new-normal of 2020. Several trends from 2020 will continue into the year 2021 as they have proved to be not only beneficial but also better than the traditional marketing and sales approach.  

As a B2B marketer has it ever happened to you that you reached out to your prospects for selling your services but couldn’t get them interested in your company further or into initiating a conversation? Or did a prospect visit your website, spend some time on it but strayed away somewhere else when you were hoping for a solid engagement. If this is happening frequently then you can turn around the situation with the help of retargeting!

Several B2B organizations have huge number of followers through their social media pages but the same followers never engage further or simply never click on the CTA or do not download a content asset that was customized for them.

In the B2B landscape, this is not very uncommon. But what marketers often forget is that, the prospect could have become a promising customer at one point of time and could have got converted easily with retargeting. They forget about that prospect who had registered for the webinar or the followers who liked their posts on social media frequently. Maybe all they needed was a little more nudge to start a conversation. This is exactly where the need for retargeting gets amplified in B2B.

Retargeting is often converting these silent followers or curious observers into your loyal customers. One of the biggest advantages of retargeting is that you do not have to start from scratch or you do not have to do the ground work because it’s already done and they have shown some kind of interest in your services already.

Several factors affect these dynamics. B2B is more complex than B2C and most of the times a lot of decision makers at various levels slow down the process of buying decision. There are other factors such as tough competition or relevant nurturing from competitors or even budget considerations that stop things from moving ahead quickly.

In such scenarios there are few aspects that can help retargeting enhance the conversion rates:

Sales funnel:

If the duration of sales cycle is at least of 6 months then then it’s easier for the sales team to take full advantage of it. Most prospects are lost over an extended period of time and as the market trends change quickly, prospects can also quickly loose interest in your offers. Therefore it’s very important to monitor and analyse prospects in each stage of the sales cycle and keep offering them customized solutions through personalized communication and carry out nurturing consistently.

Content Assets:

Creating content assets is one of the effective ways of retargeting. Webinars that give away valuable insights or a free E-book download, whitepapers, e-mailers that communicate on a one on one level with customized offers are some of the examples of how content assets play a pivotal role in retargeting your b2b prospects.

Landing Page:

Landing page is a crucial opportunity for getting in touch or engaging with your most potential customers. A landing page could be your potential gold-mine where your chances of converting the prospect into a customer are very high. Those who have landed on the landing page can be sent emails with lucrative offers or content assets that not just remind them of you but also help them make a quick buying decision.

Conclusion:

Relevancy and timing play an important role in retargeting the prospects or even with past customers who would want to reinvest in you. It’s therefore important to be watchful, be aware and take quick action. Proper planning and a smart strategy that is in line with the current market trends and with customer behaviour can help convert prospects into customers.