Small Business B2B Marketing Blog

Do you think that there is a reason why your head hurts after reading all the sales pitches about B2B marketing? Do you really need to know let alone understand every new buzzword that litters the B2B marketing ether?

Will all the studying and you will need to study, or hire an army of consultants to help you understand and distill let alone implement the marketing solution alphabet of…

• Account-based marketing (ABM)
• Engagement marketing
• Growth Hacking
• Inbound acceleration

…and the list goes on forever.

B2B marketing is not that complicated and does not take an army of people and a FORTUNE 100 marketing budget to get the results you want. Nor is it necessary to give up your valuable not “free contact information” to get marketing information on marketing solutions that will help you grow your business.

The Best Way to Get Actionable B2B Sales Leads

I do not know why but we all seem to ignore everything we know about successful B2B marketing every time someone announces a new technology tool that will, they claim instantly deliver all the new customers you want all you have to do is…

Why does everybody continue to seek the holy grail of B2B marketing from a technology solution? We already know the solution to creating great B2B customers. Sure there are some technology tools you can employ to assist your B2B marketing efforts but do not get fooled into thinking it will do it for you.

Generate Business Relations Not Just Sales Leads

By reviewing what we already know about successful B2B marketing, we may be able to make better decisions about how we spend our time and resources in generating the sales relationships necessary to have a successful business. Here is what we know.

• B2B Sales Prospecting Goal

Give your target sales prospects a reason to contact you. The only real sales leads and the ones you want are the ready to buy ones or at least those willing to contact you to find out if you can help them.

1. Best B2B Sales Prospecting Actions
   
   
   1. Create content that your prospective customers want like high quality, relevant content on the problems your customers are seeking to solve. This will entice the customers you want to contact you because you have given them solutions to helping them solve their specific business problem. 
      
      
   2. Do not advertise to your B2B sales prospects they do not want ads or other hard sell ad copy. Stop telling your prospects what the need. See number 1 above. 
      
      
   3. Be sure your content is customer-centric. This means you are writing from the point of view of your customer not yours, no selling. Tell a story about how other customers you have helped were able to solve a specific business problem and only mention your company’s involvement at the end of the story. Below is an outline we would recommend for telling your story.  
      
      Executive Brief
      Problem Summary
      People are Saying
      Getting Started
      Is It For You?
      Solution Brief
      Looking Closer
      Unique Benefits 
      
      
   4. Besides posting, your content on your website seek out a B2B neutral website that will showcase your solutions without surrounding your content with annoying ads. Neutral B2B websites also allow your sales prospect perceive your content as unbiased, while discovering your solutions and your firm in a non-threating environment that they prefer. Just let your quality content do the work for you. 
      
      Here is an interesting statistic we came across we think supports finding neutral websites to post your content. B2B customers conduct 12 searches on average before checking a specific brand’s website. (Kapost) We are going to go out on a limb and say that the reason for this is B2B buyers are looking for confirmation of a possible solution, and sellers they can trust and respect their need to become informed before engaging a seller. Otherwise instead of 12 searches they would only need to do 2 or 3 searches. 
      
      
   5. Avoid offering “free” content behind forms just to get email addresses to fill your email harassment campaign. This person does not want ten more robo emails. If you have great content, your prospective buyers will contact you. Become known as a company that respects B2B buyers.

• Best B2B Sales Engagement Actions
  
  
  1. Ask probing questions to uncover and understand the real problems of your sales prospect. 
     
     
  2. Seek to gain insight into all the concerns of your potential customer, explicit and implied.
     
     
  3. Focus your interaction solely on building a well-satisfied customer and a mutually beneficial relationship will follow.
     
     
  4. Never ask for the order. Successful selling is the natural result of a relationship built on listening, caring and problem solving. Prospects will actually ask you to help them. 
     
     
  5. Don’t fixate on overcoming objections; the key is to avoid objections in the first place. Trying to overcome objections often leads to arguments & lost sales opportunities. 
     
     
  6. Customer acquisition begins with building rapport and ends with a lasting business relationship.

Bottom Line
By using customer-centric, marketing principals and high quality content marketing you can help serious sales prospects find you without disrespecting them with hard sell and annoying marketing antics. You can also save money and time by not falling prey to every new, so-called “can’t lose marketing solution.”