12 Tips on How To Close More B2B Tech Sales Faster Than Ever

President Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote “If I had nine hours to cut down a tree, I would spend six hours sharpening my axe” is great advice for SaaS marketers looking to answer exactly ‘how to close B2B sales faster in tech industry?’ 

Developing sound strategies to close your B2B sales quickly is an essential ingredient to survive in an industry where purchases decisions can take months while involving multiple decision makers.

Marketers employ various techniques to close more B2B sales allowing them to understand the behaviors, preferences, and values of different customer segments, through different channels.

Let’s look over twelve interesting tips to successfully close B2B sales and enhance time efficiency of the process.

What are B2B Sales?

Business to Business or B2B sales is a transaction conducted between two organizations. The simplest example of a B2B sale is that a software development firm selling its software to a marketing agency to help them improve their business operations.

Gartner establishes that B2B sales are defined by certain characteristics including

• High value transactions
• More educated buyers
• Multiple decision makers
• Longer approval process
• Longer sales cycle

In the SaaS industry, B2B sales entail businesses selling cloud based or hybrid solutions to other businesses to deliver growth, enhance operational value, and elevate end user satisfaction.

Why it’s Important for Tech Companies to Increase Their B2B Sales?

SaaS businesses should consistently look to increase their B2B conversions while employing a strategic customer retention plan. The B2B tech sector is growing partially due to the pandemic, and majorly due to the convenience these tech solutions bring to other organizations.

There is a significant growth in the demand for SaaS solutions with several researches, identifying an increase in the number of tech solutions.

12 Tips To Close Maximum Number of B2B Sales Deals Faster

Here are 12 great tips to close the maximum number of sale deals faster:

1. Use Data to Improve your Sales Process
2. Define your Buyer’s Journey
3. Comprehend the Prospect’s Decision Process
4. Use Case Studies in Proposals to Create Value
5. Keep Two or Three Options in Your B2B Sales Proposals
6. Add Social Proof in Your Proposal
7. Sell to Them in Person
8. Address Your Concerns on the Initial Stage
9. Team Driven Sales Strategies
10. Make Your Closing Understandable
11. Take Follow-Ups on Email

If your sales cycles are taking longer it is because the strategy was not entirely designed for a SaaS venture. To be able to increase sales conversions and do it in a speedy manner requires SaaS businesses to take a proactive approach for their buyer journey.

1 – Use Data to Improve your Sales Process

Data analytics are being actively used across the world by B2B companies to extract more value from their sales processes while delivering better customer experiences. Data driven sales processes have proven to help grow B2B tech sales in seven ways:

1. Enables better sales forecasting
2. Personalizing the customer experience
3. Product Customization
4. Better market segmentation
5. Customer-focused email marketing
6. Mapping out popular sources of leads & website traffic
7. Using historical data to predict future developments

Content marketing is the most popular way that B2B buyers engage with SaaS providers, with email marketing being preferred by almost 81% of marketers. Data driven content development is an essential in this industry with 52% of surveyed buyers responding that they engage with brands who develop their own content.

While data collection is much easier in modern times, the analysis of business intelligence data remains a core function to close B2B sales quickly. Identifying the existing customer journey and improving it to be more value driven and convenient becomes easier by simply analyzing varying conversions.

2 – Define your Buyer’s Journey

Our second tip continues from the first. Now that you have data related to various conversions, it’s time to map out the first interaction and the final interaction of the customer before they purchased from your brand.

Clearly defining and later improving your buyer’s journey allows marketing & sales to identify the stage of the funnel that the lead is in. This enables teams to create relevant content, solve the right pain points, and ask leads the right questions. 

Data driven buyer journeys offer more consistent customer experiences, while allowing sales teams to quickly identify the stage of the journey that the customer is currently in.

Using the basic AIDA model (Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action), SaaS marketers can develop a basic buyer journey that can be improved through real time data insights from sales processes over time.

3 – Comprehend the Prospect’s Decision Process

In the B2B tech industry understand the buyer decision making process is extremely important to maximize sales and speed the sales process.

Identifying the decision making process within different industries, customer segments, and size of organizations is crucial to closing SaaS sales faster.

For simplicity the prospect decision making process can be broken down into five stages.

4 – Use Case Studies in Proposals to Create Value

Developing success stories from your existing customers is an excellent way to demonstrate the excellence of your tech product, delighting your existing customers, and possibly speeding up the sales process.

Case studies create a sense of trust with the brand and social proof. Customers get to experience a kind of pilot test with a similar organization that successfully harnessed the featured of the tech solution.

Featuring case studies within presentations, proposals, and portfolio’s is a noteworthy way to convince your prospects to convert. Historical research has identified that a large number of B2B buyers in the awareness and consideration stages cite case studies as the most influential content.

In her research, Rachel Foster explains five important tips to use case studies to close B2B sales faster:

• Develop the case study from the customer’s perspective, not of your brand
• Include personal statement and quotes from the customer
• Tell a compelling story around your products
• Limit the information you provide about your products, make it about the customer
• Develop an attractive design and copy

5 – Keep Two or Three Options in Your B2B Sales Proposals

A/B testing is a common technique that can pinpoint massive opportunities and immense mistakes in the sales process. Having variations of B2B sales proposals created for different customer segments is a great idea to simplify the process.

The sales proposal serves a unique purpose and is designed to move the process to the next stage of the buyer journey. Based on data insights the sales proposal assists in:

• Educating prospects about their problem and providing your brand’s solution
• Offering the benefits of using the B2B tech
• Offer personalization through informed & educated product recommendations
• Demonstrating ROI estimates through case studies
• Delivering value through experience and brand differentiation

Developing a variety of sales proposals allows sales teams to engage relevant audiences faster, educating them about the specific solutions and benefits that the tech product offers. Using different sales proposals also identifies what appeals to customers, and their feedback can allow B2B tech providers to develop more engaging copies.

6 – Add Social Proof in Your Proposal

Personalized social testimonials are an excellent way to provide leads the proof of the success of your tech product. Like we mentioned above, demonstrating a real life case can be paramount to building trust with prospects, hurrying them along the sales process.

Publishing testimonials on websites and in sales proposals is a very popular way B2B tech providers engage leads. In certain cases, B2B businesses have dedicated landing pages that offer real time customer reviews & feedback for visitors to research through.

Some popular ways B2B marketers embed social proof include:

• Customer ratings and reviews
• Testimonials
• Social Plugins
• Case Studies
• Certifications & Achievements

7 – Sell to Them in Person

Adobe mention in their blog that face to face vendor meetings were the second most popular channels for both Millennials and Baby Boomers when purchasing B2B products. Sales teams must continually identify the top decision makers of organizations, and later engage them in face to face meetings.

While the trend for in person meetings has declined over the last two years with video conferencing becoming one of the top channels for meetings. In fact McKinsey research identified that 77% of Millennials now prefer video conferencing with sales personnel rather than meeting in person.

8 – Address Your Concerns on the Initial Stage

There is no better tip than to prepare and strategize to remove any problems that may arise during the sales process. Using historical consumer behavior and conversion insights, B2B tech providers must develop functional contingency plans to manage deviations.

There must be clear two way communication with leads, ensuring they are aware and well informed about the sales process, the product, the organizations, and the team. Any concerns regarding liabilities, upgrades, and budgets should be discussed with prospects to ensure clarity.

9 – Team Driven Sales Strategies

The SaaS sector is highly influenced by a team drive approach to sales, making it a collaborative effort that also resonates with customers. This collaborative sales process demands that an organization wide effort be made to facilitate and speed up the conversions process where necessary.

10 – Make Your Closing Understandable

One of the simplest tips to close sales in the B2B tech sector is to make your closing so understandable that you are maybe explaining it to a five year old. By relating customer pain points directly with your tech product, demonstrate the benefits and social proof through real life applications.

The closing of any sale should be persuasive while offering immense value to prospects, encouraging them to consider conversion.

11 – Take Follow-Ups on Email

Building rapport, consistently offering value, and taking feedback is essential to maximize the opportunity to close a sale. Email is not only one of the most preferred methods of interaction for B2B buyers, but a high ROI conversion method in the B2B sector.

Sales & marketing teams should regularly take feedback from prospects, while offering them value through content, free trials, demonstrations, and sales proposal meetings. Regular follow up over email is an excellent way to develop lasting partnerships while slowly nurturing the leads towards conversion.

Conclusion

Optimizing the sales process to maximize sales while speeding up conversions times can be a highly complex process to handle. From data drive decision making to more customer focus sales strategies, several factors have to be tweaked to make effective changes to the cycle.

At Chasm we deliver research backed sales growth strategies for B2B tech providers. Our professional data insights and customer focused strategies allow SaaS tech startups to understand their audiences, map their buyer journey, optimize their sales process, and develop valuable marketing collateral for sharing.

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