Head of B2B & Partnerships at Headway EdTech startup, a provider of corporate learning, and Strategic Management Expert.
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Selling your product or service to other businesses could represent a turning point in growth for any company which may have begun as B2C only. But launching a B2B department is a tricky challenge, as it requires a strategically different approach.
In this article, I want to share five lessons for leaders. These all draw from my own experiences in boosting B2B revenue at Headway EdTech startup. Here are five crucial points you shouldn’t ignore when drafting your own B2B launch strategy.
1. Retention: Tailor your solution to each customer.
Integration of any new practice or software involves the complex process of habit-building. An additional key challenge from the B2B perspective is the customer’s focus on the purchase ROI. The aim is to encourage people to try your product, gradually make it a part of their routine and finally embrace the benefits that may not always be immediate.
In B2B, success is measured by your ability to gather accurate feedback and analyze and react to behavioral patterns of specific users, teams or companies in order to lay a foundation for cooperation that will last for years to come. Analytics will be one of your best friends when it comes to communicating the value of your product. Make sure also that you provide the tools to track engagement levels so that usage trends can become a decisive factor for the prolongation of a contract, which is the primary retention metric in B2B.
2. Revenue: Find your own leads ratio.
For every business, the ratio of inbound to outbound leads is unique. In the early stages, you must focus on outreach enhancements and brand awareness efforts to boost inbound sales.
The main components for the outbound sales boost are research, automation and personalization. Companies should invest in a profound market analysis, paying attention to the cultural peculiarities of each geography, and continuously upgrade their ICP. Building well-targeted mail sequences and keeping abreast of analytics can help you see conversions over time.
Inbound leads won’t make a considerable input first, but you should start creating the basis for those from the very start. Blog posts or media publications with business use cases, brand awareness campaigns and account-based marketing will eventually play a critical role in both inbound and outbound sales. Once those steps begin to show significant revenue growth, you should see expansion in your share of inbound leads as well.
3. Team: Hire A-players, but don’t neglect automation.
Depending on the product you are introducing and the size of your target business, you may focus on sales-led growth, product-led growth, or arrive at some customized combination of those.
For small businesses, full automation can be beneficial, as they have little overhead. But in most cases, when it comes to enterprises with over 300 employees, the proper support of a salesperson is essential. You will need to accurately tailor your value proposition and the additional product features or services to each business, launch tests and work on specific solutions for integration with other corporate systems.
When assembling the sales team, here are three strategies I advise.
• Automate when possible.
• Look for A-players who are bold enough to make immediate decisions when necessary.
• Clarify all the core processes to ensure both flexibility and consistency.
4. Experience: Empathy is key.
You must always have your client’s perspective in mind and be available to react quickly to their requests, which might be flexible in the fast-paced modern world. Challenges will inevitably arise, as you will likely have several stakeholders by this point, each carrying their own priorities, final goals and risks. Moreover, the people making decisions are often not themselves encountered on every employee or customer’s journey.
Excellent onboarding is essential to assist both final users and decision-makers. My own company addresses this by employing a success manager who helps each user enhance their interaction with the product at all stages, introduces useful features and new updates, navigates through analytics and works out the engagement activities.
5. Network: Learn to benefit from any feedback.
A focus on long-term benefits should come first. Any communication with a potential lead brings dozens of insights that may eventually turn highly beneficial to their business or result in a future deal. Even if a purchase does not follow an interaction, there is always opportunity to focus on the value of the feedback accompanying a refusal and transform it into a product or service enhancement.
Consistency may also be decisive. Several of our deals eventually turned successful after months of unproductive discussions when we were able to explain business value to an entire team through the demonstration of analytics and corporate use cases and provide them all with trial access to the app.
Planning is crucial to launching an effective B2B strategy.
To succeed in business sales, you must remember to focus on long-term outcomes. Every component of successful B2B growth mentioned above has its unique combination of persistence and flexibility at the core. Use this guide to define your own strategic pillars and stick to them, but be flexible and ready to adapt to the changing needs of your clients.
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