B2B sales strategies in a nutshell
Telemarketing is one of the best B2B sales strategies to win new customers by. Yet despite being so effective it’s one of the most disliked. We’re used to using all senses to communicate, when reduced to just two, we find the activity unnerving, and frankly, most of us would far rather avoid it as a way of reaching new potential buyers.
Yet speaking with friends and family by phone is a normal, natural and enjoyable experience that most of us are more than happy to engage in at length. So what can be done to help make the act of telemarketing more enjoyable? Here are the 5 P’s we use to keep our calling abundant, joyful, and productive.
Positivity
At Blue Donkey we think it’s all about maintaining the right mindset. If you dread telemarketing and expect to achieve little, that’s probably what you’ll get. On the other hand, if your mind is genuinely infused with positive feelings about your product, service, and what you can do to help customers reach their goals, guess what happens, we are naturally compelled to want to share those positive feelings.
Hence B2B sales strategies to win new customers should absolutely include telemarketing, provided it’s supported by the right attitudes.
Picture
As you speak with your potential customer on the phone, try to imagine a person in your mind’s eye. For most of us, this means we will be looking upwards, as we need to look up in order to access the creative parts of the brain. Try and imagine eye contact and speak from the heart as you would do face to face.
High performing B2B sales strategies to win new customers do so by getting close to what the customer needs and wants. You’re more likely to achieve that close connection if you can ‘see’ a person in your mind and speak directly to them.
You’ll find this gives you a naturally flowing conversation that you’ll enjoy more because it’s closer to what we as humans are used to doing. If you feel better, chances are you’ll come across in a way that makes your calls nicer to receive.
Product knowledge
Being knowledgeable about your subject is one of the keys to successful telemarketing. Knowing how your product or service fits into the rich tapestry of your competition, and how you excel compared with others in the market is critical. Even the best B2B sales strategies to win new customers will fail if your understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your product compared to others is below par.
Always ask open questions about what your potential customer wants from you. This does three great things, it gets them talking, takes the attention off you for a moment, and it delivers vital information for you to start working with. Knowing what makes your offering special is an important confidence builder, coupled with insight about what the customer needs, makes for a great call outcome.
The combination of good open questions and strong product knowledge is dynamite for building B2B sales strategies to win new customers for your brand.
Persistence
At Blue Donkey we don’t buy into the narrative that telemarketing is a numbers game, if anything, it’s about a small number of high quality interactions rather than a surge of formulaic mass calling. Even the best B2B sales strategies to win new customers will only perform if they reach potential customers in a way that resonates with each individual, on their own terms.
Calls need to sound like the only call. Any hint of a script will have prospects running for the hills and taking their consent with them, which by the way, means you can never ring them again. The overriding success factor will always be the quality of the calls that gets results.
However, there’s no getting away from it, the numbers do matter. If you currently make 2 good quality calls a day, so maybe you dial 20 numbers to reach 2 target decision makers (not an unusual ratio in B2B) with which you have a good two-way conversation, you are probably getting some decent outcomes. What would happen if you ramped that up to double? Double the results, or more even, as momentum builds success.
Having the discipline to manage metrics carefully, to keep on keeping on, could make a world of difference to the results.
Purpose
Being purposeful and positive in our endeavors makes all the difference, not just to our calls but also to our state of mind. Most of us are pack-animals, we enjoy communicating with other people but only when we feel the communication is meaningful and helpful to the other person.
After all, who wants to be making pointless dial after dial. Instead, the main B2B sales strategies to win new customers require us to make an investment with our emotions, and give our attention fully. By doing so we create interactions that really matter, not just to the results we attain, but to the people we touch with our calls.
Crucially, our own wellbeing and purpose are positively affected too, because finding meaning and satisfaction in our work makes us happy people.
