It is 2013 at last, and finally the economy is starting to show steady signs of improvement and increased momentum. Your sales plan should use this momentum to increase your sales performance in the coming year. here are our b2b marketing strategies and sales tips you may want to take into account in 2013 to increase sales.
10 B2B Marketing Strategies and Sales Tips for 2013:
- Evaluate your sales process. In order to improve your process in the future, you need to have a clear understanding of your process as it is now. Work to ascertain what worked for your top performers in 2012, and share their techniques and processes with your entire company. In our work as a sales and marketing outsourcing company, we have found much success in improving efficiency by replicating what works for top sales producers.
- Measure your sales pipe velocity. Putting the metrics in place to analyze your sales pipe velocity is a part of evaluating your sales process. These metrics will help you understand what specific message or piece of content causes someone to move from one stage of the sales process to the next.
- Nurture your sales pipe. Our data at Gabriel sales, along with other research, suggests that over 50% of closed deals come from leads educated a year ago. This means you should not ignore past prospects, especially for complex sales.
- Align your sales and marketing. The last thing you want to do in 2013 is measure what marketing puts into the pipe and what sales closes separately. You need to give your marketing team a “sales quota” and foster a team environment. You should also create shared success metrics in order to make sure everyone is focused on closing business with customers ready to buy and at the same time nurturing prospects that are not quite ready. In other words, you want to create content that supports the sale across its lifecycle.
- Sell money. If you have a complex sales process or multi-dimensional product or service, you need to make sure your buyer can clearly understand and measure their return. You need to somehow be able to prove the ROI you can deliver with your product or service.
- Build an ideal customer profile. Analyze the demographics of your current group of customers. Use this information to determine what companies give you the biggest profit, are the least demanding and quickest to scale.
- Improve your lead targeting quality. Once you understand your ideal customer profile, you can immediately use this information to improve the quality of your leads. The first step in creating a successful pipe is improving the quality of what you put into it.
- Use Social Media. In 2013, every B2B company needs to be plugged into the social media world. This means that (depending on your specific products or services), you need to have active profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. You may also want to start a company blog that works in concert with the rest of your digital marketing strategies.
- Consider marketing automation software. Now that it is 2013, marketing automation is becoming a standard for B2B sales. In our experience as a sales outsourcing organization, the insights and efficiency gains are critical for us to compete in the new sales engagement model.
- Join forces with others. With the increasing use of social media, digital content, marketing automation, webcasting and SEO tools in B2B sales, it might make sense to look at how a top sales outsourcing and marketing outsourcing company can help you augment capability and increase capacity, to increase your sales in the 2013.
In B2B sales and marketing, there are numerous strategies and tactics that have potential to drive sales growth, which correlate to what stage you are at in terms of sales and marketing alignment. Our experience has shown that a tactic is most effective when anchored in an overarching b2b marketing strategy based on real numbers and has the objective of targeting specific sales goals. A sales and marketing outsourcing company can help you create these types of strategies and tactics by working to create a unique plan to improve what is not working and build what is working based on hard sales targets.
If you would like to know more B2B Sales & Marketing Tips for 2013, please contact us.
