5 Powerful Ways to Drive B2B Revenues

Ameeta Soni, innovative marketing executive and business consultant, shares her tips on how to drive B2B revenues.

It is well known that B2B sales involve multiple individuals in the buying company. Working extensively with B2B technology and digital health companies, I have seen first-hand that these individuals are now continually bombarded with irrelevant messages and are getting increasingly unresponsive to sales outreach, prompting me to seek fixes. To readily drive revenues, consider adding one or more of the following solutions. Instead of wasting your time and money on outdated and ineffective tactics, you will engage more prospects and close more sales.

1. Buyer Intent Data

While companies now focus on understanding the buyer personas, buying journey, and go-to-market strategies, it makes a huge difference when they can also identify who is actively seeking the solutions they provide.

Buyer intent data looks at the business web users’ content consumption, providing insights into topics of interest to them and their potential intent to take some action.

Bombora’s continually updated Company Surge Score incorporates intent data and behavioral signals to help personalize sales and marketing messages at the account level. This approach is used for highly-focused marketing campaigns, social advertising, content syndication, lead generation, sales prioritization, and deal intelligence to make the sales process a lot more efficient and drive revenues faster.

2. Native Ads

The number of online ads has increased sharply, creating problems with the user experience, slowing down devices, and prompting the use of ad blockers. Ad blockers exist today for most desktop web browsers, but they’re also beginning to impact mobile web browsing.

In response, marketers are turning to native ads. According to eMarketer, native ads will account for over 60% of total digital display ad spending in the US in 2019. Native ads are social media ads set up like organic posts, matching the form and function of the platform on which they appear, e.g., LinkedIn sponsored updates and promoted tweets. They tell stories more naturally than the paid ads, resulting in higher engagement, conversions, and click-throughs.

For B2B companies, native LinkedIn ads are particularly useful for connecting with the right prospects, sharing product news, adding value, and staying top of mind.

3. Voice Search

Voice-recognition systems are getting more accurate and digital assistants like Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri are making voice search easier. Fueled by these trends, voice searches are growing and soon may represent the most significant component of searches.

Voice search is not limited to consumers alone. One-third of smartphone owners use their voice-activated personal assistants regularly. 90 percent of executives do research from their mobile devices before making purchase decisions. It is reasonable to assume that a growing amount of B2B research is being conducted through voice search.

Given these trends, B2B marketers should incorporate voice search as part of their SEO strategy. An important consideration is to continue to use more natural language in marketing content, rather than to focus on keywords.

4. Sales-Specific Videos

Video usage in marketing continues to evolve. What worked in the past may no longer be relevant to today’s customer. For instance, social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined, while native videos on Facebook get twice the views and as much as 7x the engagement as YouTube embeds.

Future growth in video will come from expanding its use beyond explainer videos to sales applications. Not only will they boost response rates, but they will be engaging and effective enough to accelerate the sales pipeline from lead to close.

More sales and marketing teams are now embedding videos into their persuasive emails. When sales professionals send short videos that they create themselves using tools like Vidyard, they make instant connections with their prospects and readily convert leads into customers.

5. Sales Engagement Platforms

Sales engagement is the measurable interaction between a buyer and a seller. It includes outreach strategies as well as the quality of that outreach. It isn’t confined exclusively to the number of people a sales rep contacts but instead focuses on optimizing the communications between sales reps and prospects, as well as the efficiency of prospecting and conversion.

Sales engagement platforms such as Outreach and Salesloft help facilitate:

• Personalization of rep communications with prospects, using content that matches their progress in the buyer’s journey
• Standardization of the sales process through sales cadence automation, ensuring multiple touch points from the lead to the sale
• Freeing up of rep time to make more calls to prospects
• Driving more meetings with prospects

These platforms enable the reps to engage with prospects faster and more effectively, increasing their productivity and accelerating sales.

If you haven’t already incorporated these solutions into your revenue acceleration strategy, now is the perfect time. Focusing on implementing them will ensure you meet or exceed your revenue goals in 2019.

Ameeta Soni is a growth-focused executive with a proven ability to drive revenues and profits. Ameeta’s background includes marketing, business development, consulting, and board experience for technology and digital health companies. Her expertise includes strategy, new product introduction, strategic partnerships, building the sales pipeline, and growing market share. She co-founded Sports Tech company FitTrace and is a mentor at Techstars. Ameeta is a Springboard alum and past chair of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge.