The 8 challenges of B2B salespeople

[tonmoypramanik]

1. Find qualified leads
Before being a marketer, I was a salesperson.

Very few people know this, but I started out by calling and going door to door to sell banking products.

It was this experience that convinced me that I was not cut out to be a salesperson and that my future would be in marketing or it would not exist.

It was the mid-2000s.

At the time, I already found that prospecting was not an easy thing. What would I have said today? Anxiety!

Decision-makers admit it. They never respond to a sales prospecting call and prefer to conduct their purchasing considerations alone, on the internet.

A decision-maker only agrees to speak to a salesperson after having fully understood his problem malaysia email list and having a precise idea of ​​the solution he needs.

Sébastien, my partner and long-time salesperson, explains it very well in his feedback on the evolution of commercial prospecting .

How to prospect well in these circumstances?

It is essential to implement an Inbound Marketing strategy that will allow you to attract qualified visitors on the Internet to convert them into qualified and mature leads that will be passed on to sales representatives.

Download our Guide to Switching to Inbound Marketing in 120 Days
2. Get a response from prospects
As we have just seen, 90% of decision-makers admit to never responding to a sales prospecting call. The same goes for prospecting emails.

The problem is that too many salespeople don't approach prospects in the right way.

The way the B2B decision maker buys has changed. It is imperative to review your messages.

Prospecting well is not about explaining how great your business is and how wonderful your solutions are.

Prospecting well means helping.

Prospecting well in B2B means providing added value to your prospects by providing them with key information that will enable them to answer the questions they ask themselves during their purchasing journey.

In this approach, an email or a phone call is no longer enough. You must work on message sequences that will truly fuel your prospects' thinking.

3. Ask prospects the right questions
Listening is probably the greatest quality of a salesperson.

The decision-maker expects a salesperson to make them an offer that is perfectly personalized and contextualized to their situation.

To meet this challenge, the salesperson must obtain all the information that will allow him to understand the needs, expectations and pain points of his prospects.

Too many B2B salespeople give in to the temptation to present their offers in the first exchange.

Which is ultimately natural given the difficulties they encounter in finding prospects.

Don't give in to this temptation!

Skipping steps will not guarantee you a faster signing, quite the contrary. Asking the right questions, taking the time to do so, is an investment that you will definitely appreciate the returns on.

In addition, marketing can help salespeople by providing them with information about the historical behavior of prospects on the website or regarding the emails they may have received.

Which naturally brings us to the next point.

4. Collaborate with marketing
Prospecting is no longer just a salesperson's business. Marketing now plays a central role.

Since the buyer wants to conduct their purchasing decisions alone and at their own pace, marketing must implement an Inbound Marketing strategy that will allow them to do so.

Since the salesperson must take the time to personalize and contextualize his approach, marketing must send him qualified and mature leads so that he can allocate to this approach the time he would save by not prospecting.

But for this to work, it is essential that marketing and commerce work hand in hand.

And you know, the two services are not really wired to work together.

To help you, I present here the 4 concrete actions to put in place to align marketing and sales .

5. Find time
According to Forbes, the average salesperson spends only 36% of their time selling.

The rest of the time, he is forced to carry out administrative tasks such as maintenance reports or performance reports. He must also organize himself and follow up on his prospects.

The key here is automation.

A Marketing Automation tool like Hubspot allows you to automate all non-value-added tasks.

One of the features allows salespeople to automate appointment scheduling by offering prospects a direct link to their calendar synchronized in real time.

Another offers automated email sequences to nurture prospects' purchasing thinking.

Download our B2B Marketing Automation Guide
6. Stay motivated
Motivation is the key to successful B2B prospecting. Unfortunately, motivation comes and goes.

It's not easy to take winds all day, to wait for feedback from prospects and to face lost deals.

But the most difficult thing for a salesperson today is to admit that he has to review his way of prospecting.

For years, he excelled. Now he must accept that changing buyer behavior has made his approach obsolete.

The solution to ensure the motivation of your salespeople is to invest in training around sales digitalization.

We offer our clients a top Inbound Workshop for this . Salespeople love it and it's a good way to integrate them into a more global digital transformation.

7. Maintain customer relationship after the sale
There are only 24 hours in a day, for everyone.

The salesperson already spends all his days prospecting and doing administrative work. Customer loyalty often falls by the wayside.

However, we know that retaining a customer in B2B costs much less than gaining a new one.

The problem in B2B is that the decision maker does not sign for a company but for a person. He signs for a person he considers the best to solve his problem and help him achieve his goals.

I have a client where the sales people only handle pre-sales and sales. After-sales is ideally handled by the technical department.

I say ideally because in reality, customers call the salesperson and not the technical department. For customers who comply with the rules, satisfaction is often lower.

Another client told me that the only communication his clients received was an invoice. It's a caricature, but we all understand what he means.

Here too, Marketing Automation is a solution.

Marketing Automation allows you to send automatic communications to your customers based on their offer and behavior.

For our clients, Marketing Automation generally allows us to increase the lifespan of a customer by 30%!

8. Stand out from competitors
The Internet has profoundly increased the competitive threat. The buyer is just one click away from a potentially better deal.

The salesperson must therefore do everything possible to stand out from the competition. Ok, but how to do it?

As we have just seen, the B2B buyer does not sign with a company but with a person. The salesperson must therefore establish strong relationships with his prospects and customers.