Enduring long sales cycles and lack of time to perform actual selling are some of the many challenges B2B sales teams face.
If you’re in the same boat, these challenges are not dead ends but opportunities to upgrade your sales strategies and refine age-old processes.
This guide covers the 11 best strategies to improve B2B sales performance with practical examples.
Importance of adopting effective sales strategies to improve outcomes
Careful curation of effective sales strategies gives your sales professionals clarity, direction, and, most importantly, confidence to efficiently carry out their activities.
They help your reps understand which goals and tasks to prioritize for making the right move at each stage of prospect interaction. For example, identifying high-potential leads through data research and using the right tools to refine their sales performance.
A great sales strategy brings your salespeople up to speed on common goals, helps them pinpoint risks throughout a deal’s progress, and trains them to improve daily.
11 strategies to improve B2B sales performance
Here are the best strategies to get acquainted with if your 2024 goal is to improve overall sales performance:
1. Leveraging data analytics
Data sheds light on customer behaviors, buying patterns, and market trends. And leveraging data analytics based on such real-time data helps sales professionals focus on making important business decisions without needing SME help.
For example, with data analytics, a sales rep can anticipate a customer’s change in buying behavior and contact them at the perfect time to ensure they continue doing business with you.
Similarly, more data foresight enables salespeople to focus their efforts on high-potential, promising leads and know how to identify and drop disinterested leads to cap wasted efforts.
2. Enhancing customer relationships
It takes trust to close a sale. When salespeople are great at building trust with their customers, they are likely to return the favor by listening to and trusting the salespeople’s proposed solutions.
Although most salespeople understand this, enhancing customer relationships is more than on-time responses and maintaining a friendly tone.
A healthy customer relationship can also be nonverbal. For example, introduce a strategy where customer engagement is less about the offering and more about acknowledging the customer’s needs and providing a tailored solution.
3. Technological advancements
Salespeople are often overburdened by manual administrative tasks. And it’s natural to lose direction when they have a lot on their plate.
That’s when tapping into recent technological advancements in your sales processes can do wonders for productivity. Technologies like AI and Machine Learning have remodeled the sales landscape for all the right reasons.
For example, AI-powered digital assistance tools like Docket are designed to help your sales and GTM teams get answers to a wide range of complex queries across the sales pipeline. With 95%+ accuracy, Docket helps sales reps rapidly move prospects to the successive sales funnel stage.
Further, you can monitor each conversation to assess your team’s sales performance and improve customer support.
4. Implementing CRM solutions
A CRM is one of the most critical sales tools in a sales rep’s arsenal. It eliminates menial work and streamlines sales activities.
Your sales reps can access up-to-date data about client interactions, customer profiles, and prospecting.
For example, when real-time data is organized and managed well using a CRM, your sales teams can have more time to understand their customers and prospects instead of spending hours collecting their information, ultimately achieving more aligned messaging.
A fully integrated CRM makes collaboration between sales, marketing, and other departments seamless.
5. Content marketing integration
Despite being surrounded by content, about 95% of sales reps feel they lack quality sales content.
This could be due to a lack of collaboration between sales and marketing teams.
Salespeople are often on the front lines, talking to prospects and customers daily to understand their pain points and noting specifics. The marketing team works behind the scenes on SEO and curating a content marketing strategy to communicate the brand’s value and attract leads.
If both teams collaborate to integrate their content strategies, they can be on the same page and align activities better. For example, sales teams can share the customers’ perspectives, while the marketing folks can produce content around these insights to generate more engagement.
6. Social selling techniques
Almost 75% of internet users use social media to research brands before purchasing. It’s safe to say a big chunk of your target audience is also on social media.
LinkedIn is a great place for B2B sales teams to conduct social selling. Sales reps can gather prospects’ data, such as their interests, experiences, and mutual connections, to build a solid rapport.
Social media is also perfect for sales reps to publish authoritative, helpful content and strengthen social selling efforts.
7. Refining sales pitch and presentation
Sales reps often have some time to spare from the initial point of contact to the sales pitch or presentation. They can be trained to use this time to explore the potential buyer’s intent signals, online behaviors, and activities.
For example, sales reps can use online forums like G2, Capterra, or Quora to run a simple search with the prospect’s name and their previously used solution (could be your competitor) to understand their expectations. Similarly, popular B2B social media sites like LinkedIn help filter specific posts via keywords to understand what tools a target audience may use.
Later, sales reps can use this information to tweak their sales pitch and presentations for more personalization that prospects feel comfortable interacting with.
8. Fostering team collaboration
Building a supportive work culture is as vital as other structural sales strategies. Teamwork and collaboration will help every team work towards common goals via healthy communication.
For example, you can set up brainstorming sessions to give each team member a stage to express their opinions and validate their new ideas. You can also use collaboration tools like Slack or Google Workspace to set up groups and encourage better coordination.
9. Training and development
Foster an environment of continuous training and development so your sales reps don’t feel left behind.
Continuous training ensures sales reps:
Are familiar with the latest advancements in technologies and tools, such as sales enablement tools, to enhance their sales performance.
Keep up sales performance metrics.
Focus on customer retention.
Build lasting customer relationships by communicating consistently and creating personalized experiences across touchpoints.
Pay attention to feedback and identify gaps.
10. Streamlining sales processes
As you execute your sales strategies, your sales team will get busy selling and moving leads from warm prospects to hot leads. During this time, you may experience some disruption due to sudden shifts.
Therefore, it’s essential to monitor your sales pipeline and streamline your sales processes by improving and not putting things to a standstill.
For instance, explore the role of efficient project management and its principles to streamline sales processes.
11. Customer feedback loop
Use real-time data to track, measure, and optimize sales performance. And what better way to gather data than through customer feedback loops?
Run customer feedback loops and surveys to track your sales team’s performance and highlight potential knowledge gaps. Customer feedback is the best evidence to identify where your sales reps excel and celebrate their new milestones.
Wrapping up
Improving B2B sales performance is not the end goal but a continuous process.
As key decision-makers, you should emphasize the need for continuous skill development and encourage your sales team not to shy away from changes, be it technological or strategic.
Introduce your sales and GTM teams to a simple virtual sales assistant like Docket. Help them improve sales performance via around-the-clock personal support for complex client queries.
