How to activate your B2B sales in 2024
The B2B buyer process has changed. Digitisation has pushed more focus, thought sharing and information gathering online, a trend that has continued apace following the pandemic.
More of the buying process now happens without a sales person. According to a pre-pandemic research by Gartner, customers reported spending just 17% of their total buying time interacting directly with supplier sales teams (source).
This evolution in the B2B buyer process means there’s a greater need for sales and marketing to work more closely together to activate sales in 2024 and beyond. If you’re wondering how you can best make this change, here are 8 steps you can take to improve your sales activation strategies:
Define your Buyer Personas: The company should define ideal customer profiles or buyer personas. Understanding customer needs, challenges, and goals will help you tailor messaging and your sales pitch to them.
Align to your Sales Strategy: Strategies vary by company and depend on your buyer’s journey and whether you are pursuing a product-led growth strategy or sales-led growth strategy. You may choose to sell exclusively via a direct sales force or leverage other channels and partners to reach your ideal customer profile. Companies targeting high value sales in the early stages of scaling up often decide on a land and expand strategy to get into a key enterprise account and grow users and revenues from there. Equally this is often balanced by having an ABM strategy running in parallel to a few key high value accounts which is a medium to long term strategy for sales to grow revenues. Be intentional from the outset – align to your sales strategy and set clear goals for each channel.
Create your Sales Playbook: Developing your sales playbook enables you to introduce and maintain a standardised process for prospecting, qualifying, and closing deals. You can go even more granular and build a playbook that maps onto your buyer’s journey. This consistency of approach is not just good for your brand but your target customers and your own teams will value it too.
Build/Grow your Commercial Team: When you’re ready to scale up, you will need to identify and recruit your sales and marketing teams. Choose people who fit your culture, understand the new B2B landscape, and have a proven track record in ambitious or challenging growth environments.
Adopt Technology Tools: Often referred to as your ‘tech stack’, you will need to work out what tools are core to supporting the scaling of your marketing and sales operations. Every company should have a robust CRM system in place e.g. HubSpot, Salesforce etc. Your CRM will help you manage prospect and customer interactions as well as integrate with your marketing automation, web site and other solutions to deliver end-to-end lead tracking including sales activities, and a complete picture of the customer's journey. You might also consider tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Cognism, Lusha, ZoomInfo to name but a few.
Evaluate your Marketing and Sales Processes: Your sales processes should not remain static as you scale and grow. You should continuously evaluate and refine your sales processes. Why? You will find individual and team efficiency which can increase your closing rates. So this is always a goal for successful sales leaders.
Set Sales Metrics: You will want to set clear sales targets to track your sales metrics and measure both individual and team performance. Setting up sales report templates and then establishing a regular cadence for reporting your figures will help you uncover areas for improvement and provide transparency on team targets and progress for all.
Team Training: Get your teams properly aligned behind consistent product messaging and positioning is imperative. It is a big contributor to building a cohesive team and it will make it easier for your customers to engage with you. Working towards providing solid onboarding sales training and then regularly updating and refine your sales team training. Training should be aimed at improving skills such as negotiation, objection handling and product knowledge.
By taking these steps, a B2B tech scale up company can prepare for the sales activation process, ensure alignment across the whole commercial team as well as gear the sales team up for maximum success. As you scale up your operations you may find you don’t have all the relevant skill sets in your team. If this is the case it can be faster and more cost effective to work with specialist consultants who have the skills, experience and fresh perspective you need to create momentum and results.
Interested in a discussion? Request a call with the NeoMar team here.
