Business to business sales (B2B) can be a tough and exhausting process. It often takes a long time to get a potential customer to say yes, and you risk a sea of "no thanks" along the way. But without sales, no business, so there is no way around it. In this article, we show you which five classic mistakes you must avoid, and we give you five tips for a good sales process.
Many B2B sellers make the same mistakes over and over again, and these are the mistakes you must avoid if you want to master good B2B sales. Sales expert and author, Marc Wayshak, writes in The Entrepreneur, what the most common mistakes are:
It's easier to gain access and airtime with them, but they don't necessarily have the power to buy what you're selling. In return, they have the power to say no thanks.
It's simply not interesting anymore. B2B customers would much rather hear about the effect you and your service or product can have on their own business. Many B2B sellers have too little focus on the concrete outcome of their solution.
A classic salesperson mistake is to make offers or proposals with only one option. It causes the buyer to examine alternatives from competitors in order to identify the value of your offer. A "fixed" offer is not as valuable to the customer as an offer divided into several options, from a cheap solution that solves their problem to an expensive solution with the greatest possible value creation.
At the same time, too many sellers limit themselves to only using the telephone and online communication for dialogue with potential customers. These are certainly effective and indispensable tools, but with expensive products and solutions that require a high investment, it is often necessary to meet face to face. The probability of closing a deal is greatest when you meet physically.
Potential B2B customers will often ask what exactly you can contribute. Do you have an answer ready? What value do you create? It is essential that B2B salespeople know their value proposition by heart - short and precise.
In B2B sales, low prices easily attract customers with a low degree of potential. The ideal customer is more concerned with the value and quality your product or service creates than the price. Your own value may risk falling if you set the price too low, e.g. with discounts, hoping to lure the customer into your fold. It usually pays to stick to the real price and take pride in what the customer gets for the money.
Now you know more about what you anyway does not must do. But you can of course make your B2B sales even sharper by also looking at what you must do! Award-winning sales writer and editor at Inc.com, Geoffrey James, here gives his take on five elements that characterize the extra good sales process.
Our sales work is often characterized by the fact that we start from how our salesperson wants to sell. The starting point is that the customer must be persuaded to listen and be convinced to buy.
The process typically looks like this: 1) the customer is contacted, 2) a meeting is arranged, 3) the seller is given a presentation, 4) a contract is drawn up and 5) the sale is closed.
Good sales, however, make it clear how the customer expects and prefers to buy the products or services that you want to sell. The customer has a problem or a need that you can help solve. The customer does not come to buy your product, you come to help the customer.
The process therefore consists of smaller decisions that the customer makes and should look something like this: 1) the customer identifies his needs, 2) the customer allocates a budget, 3) the customer obtains offers, 4) the customer evaluates alternatives and 5) the customer and seller when to agreement.
Traditional sales often squeeze the sales process into the seller's monthly or quarterly sales plan. The result is that the sellers become more and more aggressive about the deadline.
In the good sales process, however, the seller and buyer agree on the most likely milestones for each step in the customer's buying process. In this way, the sellers can always see where and why something goes wrong in the process - if something goes wrong!
Many sales processes involve the salesperson sitting and waiting to hear back from the customer if the latter needs help or more information.
Instead, the good sales process must involve a mutual understanding between buyer and seller about what the seller must deliver so that the customer can make the best decision.
Normally, we use the sales process to convince a particular decision maker to buy, assuming that person has the power to approve the deal and write the check.
But even in smaller companies we will find that several people sit with the power to both buy and to block purchases. Therefore, we must address the concerns of potential stakeholders at each stage of the buying process, so that we can convince them that our product or service is the right solution to their needs.
Many salespeople rely heavily on CRM systems to segment, analyze and update each sale. But is the energy we spend on this work well spent in relation to the gain it brings?
The good sales process is manageable and, as explained above, broken down into appropriate parts. It can be drawn and narrated in a few minutes, and although we still use CRM systems (we have to keep track of our contacts), we only use it in situations where it clearly makes the sales process easier. This means that we use the CRM to enter only the most essential information such as contact information, dates and agreements. The rest is cut off, and we focus our energy on dialogue with the customer.
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