Monthly Archives: May 2021

The results of lead generation campaigns are hugely influenced by the lead nurturing strategies used by b2b marketers. Today lead generation is more about conversations, understanding the client requirements and reaching out with solid solutions that solve business challenges.

It’s more about how you foster or nurture a client relationship so that the lead converts! Hence lead nurturing is instrumental in b2b lead generation.

As B2B decision-makers rely more on independent research, nurturing and guiding the customers has become the need of the hour for B2B vendors.

This blog talks about various aspects of lead nurturing in B2B and how you can leverage it to improve lead conversion. 

Basics of Lead Nurturing-

Lead nurturing is all about building meaningful relationships with potential buyers at all stages of the sales funnel.

It focuses on understanding the requirements of the customers and communicating them with valuable content and content insights too. If done correctly, lead nurturing can help businesses in the following ways:

• Increase brand awareness
• Build trust
• Foster meaningful connections
• Convert leads

Impact of Lead Nurturing in B2B

The pandemic has influenced the B2B sector in many ways. The biggest impact has been the transition to independent decision-making. Research from Gartner shows that B2B buyers now spend only 17% of their time meeting with potential suppliers. Here’s how they spend the rest of their decision-making time:

Clearly, 45% of the decision-making time goes into researching independently. This transformation in buying behavior has changed the way B2B sellers approach their B2B vendors and organizations have not only taken a note of it, they have prioritized lead nurturing now. 

Since direct selling is becoming obsolete, sellers need to focus on building authority and be seen as trusted advisors. The best lead nurturing practices can help B2B sellers establish thought leadership and enhance the relationship with their prospects. Thus, it enables you to generate more sales and revenue. 

How Lead Nurturing Can Help Enhance Lead Conversion?

Let’s look at how lead nurturing tactics can help you accelerate lead conversion. 

Multi-Channel Marketing

Lead nurturing goes beyond setting up drip email campaigns to engage your list of prospects. You can now leverage lead nurturing tactics across multiple channels, such as social media, paid advertising, direct sales, and more. Hence, you can reach a broader audience and generate more marketing-qualified leads. 

Targeted Content

You can’t target everyone. It’s essential to segment your potential customers and identify your unique buyer personas.

Nurturing your leads using targeted content creation can help you identify, segment, and target your ideal customers. This helps you reduce marketing costs and increase lead conversion. 

Lead Follow-Up

Research shows that almost 78% of sales require five or more follow-up calls; however, 42% of sales agents give up after one follow-up call. Following up with leads is an effective lead nurturing tactic that can skyrocket your sales. When you follow up with your leads in a timely manner, your odds of securing a sale increase. 

Conclusion:

Adopting lead nurturing tactics can boost your sales and marketing efforts. B2B decision-makers are looking for providers they can trust and work with for years to come. Lead nurturing helps you increase awareness and build authority. This not only shortens and streamlines the buyer journey; it also paves way for loyalty and retention. 

Read more blogs from us on lead nurturing right here:

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https://bit.ly/3oBWi0r 

Over the last decade or so data has been instrumental for b2b sales and marketing. Data- driven marketing has been an upward trend and today data has changed the way marketers do business.

There’s no doubt that data plays a huge role in effective lead generation or demand generation, right from the strategy level to execution.

So how does one leverage data for b2b sales and marketing? This blog discusses the facts and figures around the importance of data and how to leverage it for best business outcomes.

Why Data?

Data can be an enabler when it comes to contacting the right prospects from the designated target audience.

Data-driven marketing can enhance your customer interaction and thus the engagement.

Research shows the following statistics about data driven marketing-

• Businesses that adopt data-driven personalization delivered 5 to 8 times the ROI on marketing spend
• Marketers that exceeded their revenue goals were using personalization techniques 83% of the times

Below are some more statistics that show the importance of data driven marketing-

So what are some of the biggest challenges of data driven marketing?

• Irrelevant or insufficient technology
• Lack of team experience in data handling
• Lack of first-party and third party data
• Lack of data tools
• Poor data culture in organization
• Unclear data ownership and policies
• Lack of resources or competent resources
• Failure in testing and measuring data driven success

There could be many more factors but the above are most significant and can affect your overall data functioning and marketing results too.

So how can one leverage data for enhanced results both in sales and marketing for b2b?

• Gather data from only reliable sources
• Make relevant data a priority
• Get the best credible data for maximum results
• Acquire credible data to set you apart from your competitors
• Focus on data for persona-based marketing
• Invest in data that helps personalized communication
• Gather data that enables highly personalised content targeted at every buying stage
• Focus on data driven approach that helps to eliminate communication gaps with prospects
• Adopt a data-driven approach that can help communicate more effectively with various different decision makers within an organization
• Focus more on data collection, analysis and inventory of data
• Develop a more data focused company culture, where each function is aware of the importance of data
• Look for patterns within the firmographic and demographic data and be able to distinguish between different types of data
• Streamline sales and marketing processes for paving way to success

Data-driven marketing starts with every function and leaders need to communicate this with teams across organisations. Once the need is established, and the importance of data is communicated to all, it’s easier to work around data as a valuable asset with more sense of ownership from teams along with cultivating a result-oriented approach towards data.

Conclusion-

Data driven marketing is all about making data actionable and implementable to be able to drive sales and the ROI. Data-driven marketing is the future and now marketers and industry experts with the help of technology can create innovative methods for making data collection and implementation easier and less challenging.

Selling is critical to the growth of any business! It is the sale that determines ROI, growth and success. 2021 is even more challenging and hence it’s important to tweak and change certain things in your sales strategy.

Today’s customers are smart and are very well aware of the market. They make their decisions early on and with some of their chosen service providers even before you get to talk to them. Hence, they need to be delighted with solution-based selling.

This blog talks about 3 sales tweaks that can change the way you sell and still come out successful.

Sell without making it look like you are selling

Selling that sounds less like selling and more like helping, will win the customers’ hearts this year.

Marketers have weathered some rough storms in 2020.

So instead of selling aggressively, what really needs to be done now is to bridge the gaps in the business through relationship building.

The last thing customers want from the vendors is a desperate attempt to sell. Hence sellers need to take it easy and conversations need to become priority this year.

Patience is the key to getting the right lead or customer. And though it sounds like a good solution, it isn’t a quick-fix thing for b2b sales and marketing professionals.

Selling without actually selling is the biggest challenge of 2021.

But before one tweaks selling methods, one needs to first prep-up before talking to customers.

Here is what you can do to prepare on a more grass-root level before you start to sell without selling-

• Get to know prospects well
• Monitor the changing preferences of the buyers
• Observe the buyers’ journey
• Revisit previous conversations and find the loop-holes and retarget
• Improvise the immediate email conversations that are due
• Invest enough in data to make sure you are talking to the right prospects
• Revamp the website, homepage or landing page if necessary
• Change some CTAs to align it with the new strategies
• Create more and relevant content in 2021
• Be consistent on social media for one-on-one conversations
• Build trust through thought leadership content

Value based selling

There are two aspects that are involved when we talk about value.

One is the existing brand value that you need to optimise through prominent social media presence and benefits and the other one is the value that is generated through meaningful and relevant communication, messaging and conversations with the target audience.

Value is important in the sense that it should make customers believe that you can solve their business challenges.

Value should be in conveying to them that you care and that you want to know them better in order to solve their queries and problems.

Sales through value generation will convert customers into long term, loyal customers who won’t hesitate to choose you over your competitors again and again.

Take the sales pitch off the grid

Pitching sounds like selling to every customer and since you want to sell without selling the whole sales pitch thing needs to be taken off the grid.

Sales pitch has been in practice for years and more so when sales started to become an aggressive technique to get the customer; by hook or by crook.

The sales pitch, if you have to do it, should be so innovative and intelligent that it shouldn’t come across as a sales pitch.

It should be more of a value proposition; an aid to the customers’ problems and a value added solution.

Think of ways you could navigate to crucial decision makers and address their concerns the most. Because it is these decision makers whose decision is going to impact your sales.

Conclusion-

Sales are a great platform to experiment and innovate. It really takes an intelligent strategy to make a sale in a tough market such as the b2b. In fact, the greater the challenge, bigger is the opportunity to improvise and do better each time. And 2021 gives you that opportunity.