by Tom Shackleton
In the last part of this series, we talked about what you’ll need to consider when formulating your new B2B selling strategy, the problems you could face, and how having an ‘Active Website’ could be a solution to these problems.
At Statement, we’ve implemented our own Active Website with great success. We provide valuable and useful content to our visitors to attract high quality leads and encourage them to engage with us and then monitor them through the sales cycle.
Here’s how implementing an Active Website has enabled us to transform our sales process:
Attracting Visitors
We use content to help drive high quality traffic to our website. By formulating a strong content strategy and focusing on the needs of our target customers, we can provide them with informative and engaging content that adds real value to their research process.
This content also helps to optimise our site for search, and increases our visibility in search rankings for relevant terms.
We also reach potential customers on social media channels, contacting them where they’ll be most receptive and directing them to useful content. Through social media, we are also able to build our brand image and form a community around our business, perfect for modern B2B buyers who are looking for social proof and customer testimonials.
Finally, we use precisely targeted social advertising to reach a wider range of potential leads, targeting specific segments to only reach those in our target market.
Identifying Leads
Once we’ve attracted a good volume of relevant and high quality traffic, we can begin to identify potential leads.
We’ve done this by building our Active Website in a way that encourages visitors to engage and identify themselves by sharing information. We encourage website visitors to share their name, company and email address in exchange for access to useful content that would add value to their business or B2B research.
The key here is that our visitors are happy to do this regularly because we’re providing high quality information that solves their problems and helps them to advance their businesses. Visitors will only share their contact information if you’re providing genuinely useful advice. 'The New Rules of Selling' (see our eBook at the bottom of the page!) does not work for businesses who produce masses of low quality generic content.
Identifying leads through these methods can be incredibly powerful and insightful. It allows us to identify leads earlier in the sales cycle, where traditional sales methods would not be able to identify the prospective buyer until much further on.
Monitoring Interest
Once we’ve built profiles of our leads, we are able to monitor their interactions with our business across multiple platforms. Remember how buyers are now interacting with multiple touch points? Having an Active Website allows us to monitor engagement through all of them and feed it back into one system.
We can see where a lead first made contact, track each subsequent action and then give them a lead score based on these interactions.
As a prospect interacts more and more, their lead score increases, eventually flagging up their interest to our sales team. This means much of our monitoring is automated and sellers can be more efficient, not wasting time manually tracking potential customers.
This also helps us decide the appropriate point to reach out to leads. We’re less at risk of making contact too early and turning them away. Equally, we don’t react too late and miss the opportunity. It means we can respond at the right time for the prospect. If we reach out too early, buyers will rightfully turn away.
However, if we don’t reach out at all, then buyers - who are all too often overwhelmed with masses of information each day, may overlook us. An Active Website allows us to strike the perfect balance.
Personalising Interaction
So we have a good profile of a lead that’s showing real willingness to interact with our site. When we decide to act and make contact with this prospect, we can personalise our interaction thanks to the data we’ve collected.
Thanks to our Active Website, the lead is probably on our mailing list, so we can be sure to send them content appropriate to their business and the content they’ve interacted with. We can start the conversation in a natural and organic way that pays attention to the prospect’s needs and concerns.
Remember, it’s all about doing what the traditional B2B seller doesn’t do too well; listening to customers.
Converting Prospects
Once we’ve built a good relationship with a lead, shown them useful content, addressed their concerns and built a positive, authoritative image of our brand, we’re in a much better position to convert them into a fantastic customer and help them to grow their business.
Once their lead score reaches a certain point, we can trigger an action. We may invite them to a webinar, meetup or other event and continue the interaction.
One thing is for sure, when the prospect is ready to buy, we’ll be front of mind and ready to meet their needs. At a time when buyers are increasingly overwhelmed by information overload, receiving the right message at the right time is crucial.
In Summary…
From our own experiences, you can see how having an Active Website, adopting modern B2B selling techniques and paying attention to the changing needs of the buyer helps us to sell better.
We are able to be more efficient, targeted, personal and build a strong brand image. Having an Active Website prepares us for the changing B2B selling environment and helps us attract fantastic clients who we can help grow in a digital world.
We believe it’s vital that we ‘practice what we preach’. We’ve outlined how an Active Website helps us to reach our ideal customers and have meaningful conversations which convert into new business opportunities.
What’s Next?
We hope this blog series has providing you with some valuable insights to help you to better understand the new buyer reality and how your organisation may need to evolve. However, the critical question is this - what will you do next?
In truth, 95% of business will do nothing. They may make a note to review and put it on their ‘one day’ list. However, with every day that passes, the competitive advantage you could benefit from will decrease.
The best day to start the evolution of your sales strategy and to incorporate the New Rules of Selling isn’t next week, next month or next quarter. It’s today. We’re fortunate to work with clients across the UK who recognise this opportunity and we’re partnering with them right now to unlock these opportunities.
If your business is in top 5% - and is one of the innovators - then we’d be delighted to speak with you to discuss how incorporating an Active Website into your business could help to transform your sales process and unlock new business opportunities to help you grow further.
Register your interest for our upcoming eBook - 'The New Rules of Selling'
We are going to be releasing a comprehensive eBook over the next few weeks dedicated to the transformed B2B buyer and what both SMEs and enterprises need to do to make sure their sales team are well-equipped, well-trained and well-informed to meet the needs of this buyer.
To register your interest and to be notified when the eBook is available, let us know using the form below.
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