The amount of material online instructing entrepreneurs on how to sell to consumers is enormous. There must be millions of blogs on this topic by now. However, effectively reaching out to companies is more challenging: these customers are a different animal. Fortunately, our guide is here to help. It looks at some effective techniques you can use to sell to companies and encourage them to buy your products. Here’s what you need to know.
Understand Your Target Customers
Start by understanding your target customers and what they want. Knowing how the industry you want to sell to operates is essential if you want to effectively flog your products and services. Start by researching your clients, including the size of their businesses and their pain points. Try to work out what they don’t like and their decision-making structure.
Where possible, look to include multiple stakeholders across the board. Try to find links between people in organizations who can work together to convince senior management of the value of your products or services. Understanding businesses is less a matter of profiling (as it is for private consumers) and more about networking and learning. Once B2B brands understand their target clients, it becomes substantially more straightforward to sell to them.
Tailor Your Value Proposition
Once you have this information, the next step is to tailor your value proposition to the client (especially if it is a big one). Solving their business problems and offering bespoke solutions is often the only way to win their business. Start this process by calculating an estimate of the return on investment the firm will achieve if they start using you. Express this as a percentage so that senior management can understand it (and use it for benchmarking).
Also, speak their language and look for ways to adapt your approach to the tone and style of the business. Use data and statistics they understand, like productivity or customer lifetime value to convince them to work with you. If possible, send a portfolio of case studies and reviews from similar companies in the industry you worked with previously. These act as a kind of “social proof” in the corporate space and demonstrate you have the capacity to deliver.
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Be Consultative In Your Sales Process
Another strategy is to be consultative in your sales process. Talking to your customers in-depth about what they want can be an excellent way to convince them that they should work with you. If you can be educational, that’s helpful. Explaining how your service works often provides the impetus senior management requires to use you.
Try to avoid the temptation to go for the hard sell. This tactic rarely works in the business environment because decision-makers tend to be less amenable to psychological manipulation. Rather, think along the lines of cost-benefit and what you can do to prove the business case for leveraging your services.
Be prepared for a longer sales process than in the consumer market. It can take months or years before a brand decides to switch to you. This process can feel slow and drawn out, but it is often worth it in the end. All you need to do is nurture and follow up, and eventually, clients will come around and start paying you consistently. It just takes time.
Offer A Demo
Related to this last point, it’s often a good idea to offer your clients a demo or pilot of your product/service. Showing them how they can benefit on an operational level makes the value proposition clearer, encouraging them to sign up.
Demos are usually inexpensive to implement, and they can increase the conversion rate considerably. Whereas conventional marketing might have a conversion rate in the region of 1 to 2%, demos may convert 10 to 30% of the business customers who use them.
Be Scalable
When approaching a business client, ensure your proposition is scalable. Prove that you can meet large orders with the right B2B fulfillment and production processes. Many boutique B2B companies offer exceptional services on a small scale, but not on larger ones. Consequently, big brands are skeptical of many brands’ capacity to deliver and, therefore, won’t use them.
Because of this, it is essential to outline why your business is scalable and how you operate. Even if you are small now, it pays to explain how you could expand and get much bigger if you wanted to.
The best approach is to offer so-called “enterprise solutions.” These grow with the business, allowing corporate customers to indulge themselves in your products/services, without feeling like they’re in a straightjacket.
Of course, you can also offer enterprise pricing to back this up. Quotes should reflect the costs of meeting the client’s needs and the value of their custom to your business.
Focus On Decision-Making
It also pays to focus on decision-making through a corporate entity. Learning which stakeholders matter in any firm helps you get through to the people who matter. If you can’t reach these individuals directly, you can do what many B2B firms do and find internal champions to promote your cause. These individuals advocate for your product among their peers, encouraging them to take you more seriously.
Most large companies, unfortunately, have procurement rules, which means they won’t automatically choose to work with any firm, even if they like them. However, if you can get a copy of these or understand them, then it helps you position your pitch. You can tailor your business to companies’ requirements, helping you stand out in any bidding war. Following the regulations to the letter can build trust and rapport, encouraging repeat business.
Use Digital Marketing
Lastly, you can sell to companies, not just individual consumers, through proper use of digital marketing tools. For example, you could invest in content that businesses find useful or you could run seminars to establish yourself as a thought leader in the space. The more you can do to bring other companies into the fold, the more likely it is that you will thrive.
The amount of material online instructing entrepreneurs on how to sell to consumers is enormous. There must be millions of blogs on this topic by now. However, effectively reaching out to companies is more challenging: these customers are a different animal. Fortunately, our guide is here to help. It looks at some effective techniques you can use to sell to companies and encourage them to buy your products. Here’s what you need to know.
Understand Your Target Customers
Start by understanding your target customers and what they want. Knowing how the industry you want to sell to operates is essential if you want to effectively flog your products and services. Start by researching your clients, including the size of their businesses and their pain points. Try to work out what they don’t like and their decision-making structure.
Where possible, look to include multiple stakeholders across the board. Try to find links between people in organizations who can work together to convince senior management of the value of your products or services. Understanding businesses is less a matter of profiling (as it is for private consumers) and more about networking and learning. Once B2B brands understand their target clients, it becomes substantially more straightforward to sell to them.
Tailor Your Value Proposition
Once you have this information, the next step is to tailor your value proposition to the client (especially if it is a big one). Solving their business problems and offering bespoke solutions is often the only way to win their business. Start this process by calculating an estimate of the return on investment the firm will achieve if they start using you. Express this as a percentage so that senior management can understand it (and use it for benchmarking).
Also, speak their language and look for ways to adapt your approach to the tone and style of the business. Use data and statistics they understand, like productivity or customer lifetime value to convince them to work with you. If possible, send a portfolio of case studies and reviews from similar companies in the industry you worked with previously. These act as a kind of “social proof” in the corporate space and demonstrate you have the capacity to deliver.
Be Consultative In Your Sales Process
Another strategy is to be consultative in your sales process. Talking to your customers in-depth about what they want can be an excellent way to convince them that they should work with you. If you can be educational, that’s helpful. Explaining how your service works often provides the impetus senior management requires to use you.
Try to avoid the temptation to go for the hard sell. This tactic rarely works in the business environment because decision-makers tend to be less amenable to psychological manipulation. Rather, think along the lines of cost-benefit and what you can do to prove the business case for leveraging your services.
Be prepared for a longer sales process than in the consumer market. It can take months or years before a brand decides to switch to you. This process can feel slow and drawn out, but it is often worth it in the end. All you need to do is nurture and follow up, and eventually, clients will come around and start paying you consistently. It just takes time.
Offer A Demo
Related to this last point, it’s often a good idea to offer your clients a demo or pilot of your product/service. Showing them how they can benefit on an operational level makes the value proposition clearer, encouraging them to sign up.
Demos are usually inexpensive to implement, and they can increase the conversion rate considerably. Whereas conventional marketing might have a conversion rate in the region of 1 to 2%, demos may convert 10 to 30% of the business customers who use them.
Be Scalable
When approaching a business client, ensure your proposition is scalable. Prove that you can meet large orders with the right B2B fulfillment and production processes. Many boutique B2B companies offer exceptional services on a small scale, but not on larger ones. Consequently, big brands are skeptical of many brands’ capacity to deliver and, therefore, won’t use them.
Because of this, it is essential to outline why your business is scalable and how you operate. Even if you are small now, it pays to explain how you could expand and get much bigger if you wanted to.
The best approach is to offer so-called “enterprise solutions.” These grow with the business, allowing corporate customers to indulge themselves in your products/services, without feeling like they’re in a straightjacket.
Of course, you can also offer enterprise pricing to back this up. Quotes should reflect the costs of meeting the client’s needs and the value of their custom to your business.
Focus On Decision-Making
It also pays to focus on decision-making through a corporate entity. Learning which stakeholders matter in any firm helps you get through to the people who matter. If you can’t reach these individuals directly, you can do what many B2B firms do and find internal champions to promote your cause. These individuals advocate for your product among their peers, encouraging them to take you more seriously.
Most large companies, unfortunately, have procurement rules, which means they won’t automatically choose to work with any firm, even if they like them. However, if you can get a copy of these or understand them, then it helps you position your pitch. You can tailor your business to companies’ requirements, helping you stand out in any bidding war. Following the regulations to the letter can build trust and rapport, encouraging repeat business.
Use Digital Marketing
Lastly, you can sell to companies, not just individual consumers, through proper use of digital marketing tools. For example, you could invest in content that businesses find useful or you could run seminars to establish yourself as a thought leader in the space. The more you can do to bring other companies into the fold, the more likely it is that you will thrive.
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