5 Ways To Improve B2B Sales Productivity

The B2B sales industry is packed with challenges. With increasing competition and buyer’s instant access to information, your customers are able to readily assess all aspects of your business from the amount of value you offer, to customer service, to delivery, and more. Your customers, being business owners themselves, don’t have time for inefficiencies. That means, if you can’t stay on top of everything, you lose--big time. That’s why B2B sales productivity is becoming more and more critical everyday.

Taking advantage of the various sales tools and strategies out there will enable you to accomplish all of your tasks swiftly and easily. This way, you don’t have to waste time focusing on minute, intricate details and can instead zero in on meeting your sales goals in a manner that’s both timely and considerate of your customers’ best interests. So what's available and how can it help you?

5 Ways to Improve B2B Sales Productivity

1. Social Media

Social media provides many different tools that help your sales team not only research potential clients, but also offers them a different forum in which to interact with them. Whereas the old method of cold calling can still serve its purpose, it is limited to say the least. With the help of social media, you have the option to gain insight into the interests and habits of the clients (whether it be from the company’s social media accounts or from the personal accounts of high-ranking employees), thus making it easier to engage them in conversation and target their specific needs. Further, social media offers a new platform in which you can follow up on leads. If a client isn’t responsive to emails, tweeting to them or sending a Facebook message could be a better route to take.

2. Automate Activity

Freeing up time on menial tasks means that there is more time to focus on sales. Automation can make your marketing efforts more efficient and better suited to the goals that the marketing and sales teams both desire. Look for tools that offer personalized plans and help you focus on generating and maintaining quality leads. Sales automation is a great investment in terms of time, as the more time you have, the more time can be spent on cultivating your leads.

3. Keep the sales staff motivated

It’s hard to be productive when your staff lacks motivation--and when they do the same thing every single day for hours on end, it's normal for their motivation to deteriorate. To increase enthusiasm, healthy competition isn’t always a bad thing. Spice things up by offering  contests for whoever sells the most, gets the most repeat customers, or comes up with a better way to approach their projects and initiatives. Doing this not only keeps things interesting, but it also helps employees gain increased interest in their own performance.

4. Pay attention to buyer behavior

As you already know, your clients vary in terms of their wants, needs, and interests. Therefore, trying to appeal to all of them through the same old tired and generic approaches simply doesn’t cut it nowadays. So try to get into your buyer’s mind. Understand the various segments that encompass your audience and try to get a feel for their experiences through surveys, questions, and other means. Do they respond to email newsletters, read your latest blog posts or write back to you on social media? All of this may indicate the platform in which they prefer to be contacted. By determining this, you won’t waste time with campaigns that don’t work and can instead work to optimize the strategies that do.

5. Utilize the most effective content

Your sales department is highly dependent upon the content that they have at their disposal. Each client responds differently, so it is important that the sales team has access to a variety of marketing content. It should also be stated that this content should be relevant in addition to helpful - if the content only seems related, it has potential to kill your leads.

In any job, being your most productive self is probably one of the toughest and most common problems a person can encounter. In B2B sales, where the stress is high and the need for productivity is dire, being inefficient will have tremendous repercussions in terms of your success. By employing these useful strategies however, you combat your inefficiencies in order to meet your sales goals swiftly and easily. This way, you can sit back and watch your business thrive for years to come.