The statistics say that sales teams are now using predictive analytics in order to increase their performance by 200 percent. It demonstrates that businesses are looking for absolutely any edge in order to achieve success. But there are many companies lagging behind in B2B sales.
I spoke to Bant.io to find out how businesses can go about increasing their performance in the B2B sales arena.
Could you explain exactly what the Bant.io service is?
Bant.io: Certainly. Bant.io is a company dedicated to providing businesses with all the B2B leads they need. We provide a variety of pricing packages in order to suit companies of all sizes. We only push genuine leads, so companies can guarantee reliability from us.
What is the biggest mistake made by businesses when they try to market to other businesses?
Bant.io: The biggest mistake is easily treating a business customer in the same way as an ordinary member of the general public. We roll our eyes when we see it because the chances are we wrote a similar pitch ourselves. You are not showing us anything new.
One great way of marketing to businesses is to become relevant. The way you do this is by signing up to your lead’s newsletters and looking at their website to see how they market. Companies tend to come up with sales pitches they react to themselves.
Learn what your target lead wants to see from you. Monitoring a company blog is another good way of finding out about how they move and what they want.
Is there something to be said about the timing of your pitch?
Bant.io: Timing is everything in the B2B world. There’s a reason why you only see certain leads with our packages. This is because we know when a business is most likely to buy, and that’s when we recommend leads to our subscribers.
The best time to market to a business is when it happens to have a lot of cash. You can find this out yourself through Google Alerts, but we’re a big fan of taking much of the work out of this. It’s why our lead generation subscription service has become so popular.
What’s the main difference between B2B and B2C, would you say?
Bant.io: Going back to what we said earlier, the two beasts are entirely different. You must keep in mind that a B2B sales process can take months to complete. A lot of businesses that are new to the game give up after a few weeks because they believe their lead isn’t serious.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. B2B sales tend to be much higher in value and require a more concrete commitment.
You have to be willing to be in this for the long haul.
Is there a danger of losing track of what you’re doing if you are constantly speaking to your leads before closing the sale?
Bant.io: Absolutely, and that’s the nature of B2B sales. This is why you have to be extremely organized. It’s good practice to get the hard questions out of the way for two reasons. First of all, you can make sure you aren’t blindsided later on. Secondly, you always know that you have got the tricky part out of the way.
By following roughly, the same process for each lead, you are never confused as to what you need to answer and what you need to ask.
Gathering leads is often the first big challenge facing businesses. How do you address this problem?
Bant.io: With B2B sales, we recognized the same issue. This is exactly why our lead generation service came into being. The main problem we noticed was prospecting. It’s difficult to find new leads while managing current leads.
Precisely, most of a business’s resources go towards current leads. But they abandon prospecting and their supply lines dry up. While a business thinks about whether to make a purchase, you are left with nothing to do because you weren’t spending enough time searching for new leads.
This is why every B2B company should be making time for prospecting.
It doesn’t have to be a significant length of time. You can spend just an hour or so per day and that will be more than enough.