How to meet the pressing needs in B2B sales
Ximena Hernández Buffa
Stop going to the doctor to have her give you a pill for pains. Start preventing them.
When I joined a technology partner, my boss at the time asked me to generate leads “for yesterday”. I began to contact a list of companies, begging myself for them to answer the phone and almost apologizing for the interruption. The effectiveness reached 5% in the best cases. We needed more business, and more people were hired to “go out on the street” to sell. I felt like we were throwing time overboard.
In over 9 years working with B2B companies in Latin America, I have seen that this form of sales work is the most common, especially in medium- and small-sized businesses.
This situation is very familiar to me regarding the management of our health in Latin America. If we have a spine deviation, we go to the doctor when my back hurts to have her give me a pill or put me into a device to make the pain go away. It works momentarily, but it does not solve the problem. This makes health systems very expensive, as healing involves more technology, resources and more working hours for doctors than preventive medicine.
A company operates in a similar way. Paying for services and hiring professionals to generate business through their contact networks and sell is the most expensive, inefficient and stressful usual strategy I can follow.
Just as I can do physiotherapy to prevent the pain of spinal deviation, in a company you can also design a more preventive and more efficient strategy, which will give you better results than being in a rush contacting decision makers one to one.
In MTI Selling we design a 4-phase sales maturity model
- The pain-relieving pill: Power the 1:1. If my spine hurts, I need an immediate solution so that the pain is relieved, because I am not able to think about anything else. This is equivalent to systematizing one-to-one prospecting in a process, with habits and good practices. For this process, I suggest incorporating the use of LinkedIn to reach decision makers.
- Basic preventive treatment: Offline scaling. Let’s start scaling up the actions, planning instances of conversation 1:15 or 1:20, such as business breakfasts, technical sessions, stands in very segmented exhibitions, business talks. This way, you can show relevant content, statistics, trends and success stories so that the customer can see how they can solve their business problem and validate your experience.
- More intensive preventive treatment: Scale up online. Use corporate digital media to reach a wider audience. Create quality content to position yourself as an expert, use several formats and follow an omnichannel strategy based on your customer’s buying journey. This action is scalable (it has an exponential multiplier effect, the personal network of contacts works, but it has a human limit, it is linear). Let’s use technology to create constant contact networks that cross the limits of what is known and your country. Aim to have thousands of contacts, not hundreds.
- The constant routine for treatment: Business automation. For your health to be good and to keep your spine from getting worse, treatment exercises should be part of your weekly routine. Then, design a process where online activity brings traction to offline activity, with KPIs. This is because B2B sales continue to be achieved face to face and one or more conversations are needed. The website functions as the connecting heart of the strategy, that is, every online or offline activity has to generate a click on the site. CRM works as the manager and measurement brain. If I make good use of CRM, I can get reports of business efficiency and measure what is working better and what is not, in order to make a smart investment next year.
As happens with any preventive treatment, in addition to perseverance, it is essential to perform quality exercises with good equipment, measure progress; and, if I work with a professional who supports me and gives me feedback, the outcomes will be much more favorable. Start with the pill, but if you want to have a sustainable business strategy over time and with increasing outcomes, you must work on a preventive treatment progressively.
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