In today’s 6 Tips for Selling to Businesses post, I’m going to share some important points to consider if you’re contemplating business to business (B2B) marketing. The thought of selling to other businesses can be a bit overwhelming for some people.
The consumer market seems like a more familiar marketplace as this involves dealing with everyday people. However, don’t discount B2B marketing as it can provide a very lucrative additional income stream.
Think about it, all businesses are just a mixture of people. They include people working in all types of roles such as decision makers, executives, multi-level managers and so on. They’re just people and in fact selling to businesses is no different from selling to consumers. What does a business owner or manager need or want? Do they have issues they’re struggling to find solutions for? What things will make their lives easier, and more importantly, the running of their business? The key to selling to other businesses is answering these questions.
6 Tips for Selling to Businesses
1. Identify Your VIP
This is a crucial factor when approaching businesses. You must find the right person within the organisation to contact when you’re creating a strong pitch for your product or service. It’s important to know who you’re selling to and then evaluate how your offer can benefit them. Are you dealing with a buyer, a manager, or the business owner? It’s essential you show them the advantage of implementing your product or service and how it would make their lives easier, in addition to benefitting their bottom line.
2. Avoid Just Selling
The VIP you’re dealing with will probably get an influx of pitches daily for similar products or services. In these competitive times a simple letter or email with your sales pitch is not going to be enough to persuade people to engage with you. To draw people in you want to attach your sales pitch to something that they’ll find useful.
Now many companies have a strategy for doing this. They offer white papers which are informational reports. These white papers can be presented as guides on relevant industry topics and trends. They may even highlight the current problems the industry is facing. With these guides you can insert a pitch demonstrating how your product or service offers a solution to these problems. The advantage of delivering white papers to your potential customer is that they’re free and contain useful information, so people are more likely to read them.
3. Begin with Value Over Price
When you’re introducing your product or service to any business you could find yourself in the middle of a bidding war! It’s tempting to focus on your price as the best feature of your product or service. Too many entrepreneurs do this and in turn jeopardize their sales.
While pricing is important, it’s more advantageous to highlight the benefits, and the value your product or service has to offer. What makes your product or service stand out from the rest? Is it going to save the company time or money way beyond its cost? What can your product or service do that similar products can’t? Can it make life simpler for managers? Will it help advance company productivity and improve employee morale?
Make sure you don’t push your product as a cheap alternative as this will raise a red flag from a perceived value perspective.
4. Focus on the Benefits
Never highlight only the features of what you’re offering. This is a mistake made by professionals across the board.
Benefits are the exciting aspects of a product or service. To your potential customer the features can be boring and something they don’t necessarily want to hear about. They want to know how the product or service you’re offering is going to solve a common problem, e.g., don’t say to them, “Our latest laptops have extensive RAM” but alternatively say, “Are you fed up wasting valuable company time and money waiting for your laptops to load? Your upload, download and processing speeds will skyrocket with our high RAM spec. Not only will you save time and money, but your business will also be moving at lightning speed when processing your data!”
Benefits are absolutely everything. You simply must turn the spotlight on them. Remember your potential customer is not interested in what you do. They’re only interested in what you can do for them.
5. Make Your Call to Action (CTA) Easy
The most important section of your pitch is the Call to Action (CTA). This is where your potential customers make the decision to buy or not to buy. It must be clear, concise and must persuade them to take action. If you’re sending emails, then your links should be prominent. Make sure you test everything out first. You do not want your potential customer clicking on a link which takes them to a missing page! All contact info should be noticeable, precise, and extremely visible. If your CTA is hard to act upon, or indeed your potential customers find it challenging to contact you, then you risk losing a potential sale to a more switched-on competitor.
6. Collect Leads
In the first instance you need to collect solid prospective leads to sell to. You could have the greatest product on the planet and a super-duper sales pitch to back it up. However, if you don’t have any potential customers to promote it to then you’re in deep trouble. Your sales will be zero!
Working out the best methods for gathering leads can be complicated and can take time to master. However, there are programs out there that can help make the whole process a lot easier. Powerful systems like Macroleads assist you in organising, streamlining, and automating everything so that you can focus on other important tasks within your business.
I hope you found my 6 Tips for Selling to Businesses post of value. If you haven’t branched into the B2B market yet give it a try. The more income streams you can add to your business the better.
To Your Success!
