What does the term "sales innovation" mean to you? That sounds like a question you’d hear a lot in today’s increasingly rapidly evolving environment. However, it’s hard to define what qualifies as sales innovation, especially in today's environment.
Innovation doesn’t always have to move mountains — at times it can just mean changing your sales approach and how your business operates.
B2B Sales Innovation
The notion of "b2b sales innovation" has a broad range of application usage. It can come in several forms to different degrees. It could be a new strategy that your business is planning to implement. Or, it could be a way to revamp how you currently approach a familiar medium.
Though the concept’s definition varies from person to person and situation to situation, there’s always a consistent thread through every understanding of it — progress. Innovation means moving forward. It means trying something different to do something better.
Innovation doesn’t have to mean thinking a thought that no one else has ever had before. It doesn’t have to be some bold new invention, unveiled in an auditorium and live-streamed to thousands of people. It doesn’t have to occur on a massive scale with equally massive implications. Innovation can always be impactful — no matter the form it takes.
B2B Sales innovation ideas worth trying in today’s environment.
Sales Innovation Ideas
- Utilize the power of social media to build and nurture relationships.
- Motivate your sales teams to attend local community events.
- Expand participation through customer loyalty programs
- Adapt sales techniques keeping your customer in mind.
- Employ a sales liaison service.
1. Utilize the power of social media to build and nurture relationships.
Today, advising a business to leverage social media is surely old news. That being said, there are a good lot of businesses that haven’t or don’t approach social media with the effort and enthusiasm necessary to do it right.
You have to take the time and allocate the resources necessary to maintain an active social media presence. Engage with your prospects. Use forums like FaceBook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter to answer questions they might have about topics relevant to your industry. To enable you to establish yourself as a thought leader and a helpful presence in your space.
Don’t treat social media as a medium for brand promotion exclusively. It’s a powerful tool for building individual relationships and trust with your prospects. Maintaining an active, engaged, in-touch social media presence is a great way to garner interest from potential customers and translate that interest into hard sales.
2. Motivate your sales teams to organize and attend local digital community events.
Given the current environment, in-person networking opportunities are limited and it’s only viable to encourage your sales team to organize, encourage & participate in local digital community events. Seek them out and see how you can get involved. Sponsor local events potential leads may be interested in — that could be anything from a Zoom charity auction to some kind of professional mixer or a guest lecture.
If there’s a conference shortly that’s relevant to your industry, try to attend it; of course virtually. Ideally, you'd be able to spend as much face time as possible with potential leads, however, in the current environment, virtual meetings are the way to go. Including an interpersonal element in your lead generation can help you better gauge your prospects’ interest and keep you on their minds.
Ultimately, your goal here is the same as the one you're pursuing with your social media efforts: building trust and relationships with prospects. Show you have a stake in their interests and them as people — not just as sources of potential revenue.
On a fundamental level, selling is a personal process. You, as a salesperson, are convincing an individual prospect to make an important financial decision — either for themselves or on behalf of the company they work for.
There can be a lot at stake for a customer in an individual sale — money, a piece of their professional reputation, the success of whatever it is your product or service is designed to help with. It can only help your case to have them know you personally and trust you on that basis.
3. Expand participation through customer loyalty programs
Customer loyalty programs are a great way to drive more customers and referrals — which are essentially free leads. Word of mouth is the single most trusted method of advertising. A customer loyalty program gets your customers talking, and if you do it right, they’ll only have good things to say.
A well-constructed customer loyalty program will bring in high-quality leads. Those potential customers will come in with a kind of openness and intrigue toward your product or service that can only come from referrals from friends and family. Trust has been a recurring theme throughout this list, and this particular case is no exception.
If you can create a successful customer loyalty program — whether it be something as small as a punch card system or as significant as a full-scale partnership with a complementary business — you’re putting yourself in a great position to retain the customers you have and consistently acquire new ones.
For more on how to develop an effective customer loyalty program, check out this article.
4. Adapt b2b sales techniques keeping your customer first.
The concept of customer-centric sales rests on prioritizing empathy for the customer above all else. That means understanding where they’re coming from and the specific situations they might be dealing with. It’s about listening, getting a feel for the problems they’re facing, working out a potential solution, and showing how your product or service fits that solution.
Don’t sell your product or service by focusing on its features. It’s easy to tout its bells and whistles without demonstrating how it specifically suits your prospect’s needs.
When employing this methodology in the context of B2B sales, you’ll want to target decision-makers at companies as opposed to individual users. Their problems tend to have the most substantial implications. Therefore, they’re more likely to be more receptive to the personal, demonstrative component of this brand of sales.
Ultimately, customer-centric selling revolves around the idea that empowering customers is more important than convincing them. This type of sales can be frustrating. It happens on your customers’ terms.
You’re going to be operating according to their needs, intimately involved in their problems, and working on their timeline. Still, customer-centric selling is an innovative brand of sales that can have substantial pay-offs if done right.
5. Employ a sales liaison service
Sales and marketing are inherently connected. Salespeople rely on their marketing departments to feed them qualified leads, and marketers need to know what their sales teams expect in terms of the personas they’re appealing to and the channels through which they’re reaching prospects and customers.
Despite that, many marketing and sales departments are siloed — operating on their own with minimal communication between one another. A sales liaison is an intermediary who relays information on a sales team’s efforts, preferences and needs to its marketing department.
B2B Sales liaisons can help foster cohesion within a company and ensure that its sales and marketing efforts complement each other as effectively as possible. The role lends itself to seamless understanding throughout a business and better-constructed sales and marketing initiatives.
"B2B Sales innovation" is a term without a perfectly defined meaning or a concrete list of tips and tricks specific to the idea. That being said, every definition of it entails taking new steps to move forward — either within your current sales framework or well beyond it. The advice on this list is designed to help with both.
