Want to really grow in B2B? You need to embrace digital sales.

The best thing about 2020 was that we stopped wasting time and money on always insisting on doing in-person sales meetings. However, this led to most bringing in much fewer leads.

In this article, we will cover the following:

• What are digital sales?
• What do you need to do before initiating digital sales?
• How to make digital sales work?

2021 is the year your B2B business needs to embrace digital sales.

Last year, we experienced a significant change across all fields. The top one was that we had to stop all business travelling and redefine our approach to getting new clients. Leading companies to finally accept the need to brush up their online presence.

By now, even manufacturing companies have realised that digital marketing transformation is no longer optional. According to Thomas Industrial Survey, there’s been an enormous growth in understanding the value of digital avenues for attracting new customers.

Compared to before COVID-19 started:

• 57% more manufacturers believe in webinars’ importance;
• 31% more understand social media use-value;
• 84% agree that it makes sense to have a trustworthy website;
• And 73% believe in email marketing.

We experienced the same at Springrise.

Not only did we see a surge in new clients who wanted to update their websites. We received demands to set up LinkedIn and other social media business pages, plus create content for their blogs and email newsletters.

Simultaneously, recent McKinsey research also notes that there has been a change in the B2B customers’ expectations. Although in-person meetings are a no-go at the moment, most B2B customers want both human and digital interactions on their buying journey.

And for that, sales leaders need to implement digital sales processes.

B2B sales leaders using digital sales effectively seem to enjoy five times the growth of their peers. Meanwhile, sales reps using social media have 3.6 times more chance of meeting a decision-maker, which means that sales leaders need to learn how to use social media as a sales channel, not merely a branding platform.

It’s evident that B2B digital sales are critical, yet how does your business begin the process? First, let’s examine what digital sales are.

What are digital sales?

Digital sales are a 1-on-1 marketing activity involving virtual channels to reach out to prospects, provide education and offer a solution that meets their needs precisely.

As per digital marketing, digital sales leaders’ primary virtual channels become experts are email and social media platforms, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit and Twitter.

That said, digital sales are still all about building relationships with prospects. First, you need to get them to trust you and then introduce them to your offering.

What do you need to do before initiating digital sales?

Based on our experience, vendors’ top mistake regarding marketing and sales is not analysing their clients’ enough. Instead, they attempt to convince prospects to buy something they might not need via channels they do not trust.

The easy fix to this is to start by defining your target customer segment and their real needs.

One of the tools that might help you with this is Value Proposition Canvas. Completing it forces you to think about your customer’s Jobs, Needs and Wants, based on which you can then frame the story for your product or service.

However, the analysis needed does not stop here.

Thanks to FocusVision’s report, we know that B2B decision-makers typically consume 13 pieces of content during the buying cycle.

Meaning that any vendor looking to grow significantly needs to invest in content production so that digital sales leaders could use it for leading buyers through the cycle.

The same report states that the vendor website is the most crucial source for any B2B buyer across all four stages. When trying to understand the problem, putting together the list of possible vendors, short-listing the suitable ones, or selecting the most suitable one — showing us why we need to populate our websites with a lot of useful and relevant content.

No, it is not enough to simply describe your services on the website. Instead, companies should have a minimum of 10 pieces of content per every sub-service.

Furthermore, that amount of quality content helps search engines find the website and rank it higher across search results, thus increasing the vendor’s findability by the possible buyers.

But what type of content should be created?

The content’s focus should vary between company news, educational materials, product comparisons and success stories.

Simultaneously, this content should be in various formats, including blogs, infographics, videos and whitepapers, to engage different people.

To better understand what your target clients already look for, seek out forums and social media groups in which they ask questions that touch your industry. Also, use keyword research tools provided by Ahrefs, Google, Moz and many others.

Plus, check your competitor’s websites to see which topics they mostly cover to understand what works for them and what they do not cover that well.

Provided you have analysed your target customer segment and revamped your website with enough quality content, you will be almost ready to start with digital sales. The final step is to examine which channels make the most sense for your company and set up the necessary accounts on them.

In general, when starting with scarce resources, it is best to focus on just one or two, maximum of three channels. Each channel demands a significant portion of your time to get going and do it right.

Simultaneously, since all of them work slightly differently, you cannot rely on merely cross-posting across them without any message changes. That said, over time, you ought to test others as well.

When choosing which ones to focus on initially, you would ideally start with those you already have earlier exposure to. However, suppose your experience is limited to only individual customer-facing channels like Instagram and Snapchat. In that case, you might want to look into other options before making the final decision.

As mentioned before, email and social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit and Twitter, are the primary virtual channels for digital sales in 2021.

Email is the easiest one to get going, and indeed a must-use in digital sales. Simply generate a message and send it out to prospects, hoping they respond so you could start a thread. Even so, do not expect emails to work without the support of other channels.

Of course, when new sales reps join the team and choose to share their email lists with warm contacts, it might work by itself. Nevertheless, once you start pursuing cold leads without planning to spam them, social media platforms (along with forums) become your relationship-building go-to sites.

Social media platforms already take somewhat more effort to become useful. On the one hand, they have even more rigorous processes to stop you from spamming random people.

Alternatively, it is essential to determine which platform your prospects use the most before jumping head-first into any.

You could do the latter by looking for various communities, groups or threads across the platforms on similar topics and study how active they are and who the primary users are there.

Our insight demonstrates that they are all great within the English-speaking world but might not work well elsewhere. For example, Quora’s official policy is that it is English-only.

Once you have decided which platforms to focus on, it is crucial to set or clean up both business and personal accounts.

Business accounts are great for generating your company’s overall image, while prospects go there to get so-called official information. In contrast, personal accounts are the predominant way to build relationships with the target clients — more on that in the next segment.

As for how to set or clean up the profiles, the best practices vary between different platforms. The main suggestion is to update your profile photo to a recent, professional image. Revamp your description or summary and make sure your contact information is accurate.

Finally, it is time to become active on the chosen channels.

How to make digital sales work?

For simplicity, we divide the following ideas into five customer buying cycle stages:

• awareness
• education
• consideration
• purchase
• repurchase

The first two stages will get most of the focus in this article.

Awareness

Every relationship starts with the initial meeting — even in digital sales. Before interacting on a one-to-one level with anyone, they must acknowledge your existence.

Concerning digital sales, there are three ways how to get any prospect that far:

1. Share cool and useful snippets under your personal account;
2. Genuinely help people within various communities, groups and threads;
3. Interact with posts shared by prospects’ key people under their personal accounts.

Share cool and useful snippets under your personal account.

When it comes to sharing content under personal accounts, it is easiest to simply start commenting and sharing content posted by the marketing team under the company’s business account — enabling you and other sales leaders’ to accelerate your personal brand-building efforts while showing the connection to the company to your followers.

As everyone gets the hang of sharing existing stuff, it makes sense to start creating innovative offerings. The primary purpose is to show oneself as a specialist in the field whilst creating discussions under the threads to reach more people.

Genuinely help people within various communities, groups and threads.

The best way to tackle this is to create a list of suitable communities, groups or threads within the platform. You can start by having everyone in the sales organisations search for suitable ones while using any industry keywords that feel right and then examine the discussions inside.

Once you have the initial five to ten, you are good to go. Next up, everyone should try to check those every few days or so, hoping to find some questions or other types of posts underneath which you can genuinely help people.

Interact with posts shared by prospects’ key people under their personal accounts.

For this, the sales organisation needs to start by creating a list of target prospects with key people in those companies that might be the right contacts to get the conversations going.

Ideally, by now, you know some specific indicators that show whether a company is in the right stage to use your product. If not, then it is time to return to filling the Value Proposition Canvas.

Regardless, there is no specific number of target prospects nor key people you ought to list. But roughly five to ten under both should be enough.

From there, it is time to start keeping an eye on everything those people share, looking for ways to interact with them. Again, trying to be genuinely helpful for them, even if it never leads to a sale.

The point of all this is to get the key people at prospects companies to interact with you, either underneath your posts or with your comments, so that they would essentially give you the right to approach them directly.

Meaning that if they do respond to you, keep the conversation going and at some point contact them via a personal message.

Still holding the conversation very genuine, not trying to sell them anything right away. Instead, try to learn more about the prospect and qualify whether it makes sense to go further.

That said, if they did interact with you but did not respond to the personal message, then do not keep spamming them. Yes, one should still send a follow-up or two, but not ten.

Education

Once the prospects’ key people have interacted with you for the first time but have not yet gotten hooked, they consider them to be in the education stage.

By now, they might already know of your existence, but they need more information. That is where sending emails as a channel enters into play.

There are two main ways to use emails here:

1. Send emails consisting of useful information to prospects’ key people;
2. Collaborate with the email marketing team and add leads to the newsletter list.

Send emails consisting of useful information to prospects’ key people.

If the people who interacted with your posts or comments did not join you in an active conversation after the few first messages, try to contact them via email.

There is a high likelihood that they simply do not rely on the messaging built into the platform. But since you have already been in a conversation with them, it is fair to try another way to contact them.

That said, again, do not start spamming them with tens of emails. Instead, send out one or two and see if they work. If not, go after some other people at the prospects’ companies.

Also, it is essential to note that you can automate this process. For example, using Pipedrive as your CRM and Outfunnel as your email platform, you can create email sequences that follow a script you write once.

Add the new contact into CRM, add a specific tag, and Outfunnel does the rest for you. Only take over from it once the response by the lead needs you to.

Collaborate with the email marketing team and add leads to the newsletter list.

Occasionally, some people start the conversation with you but let you know that it is not the right time for them to use your product. It is essential not to forget about them as well. However, as they need nurturing, you want to keep in touch with them.

One way to do this is by collaborating with the email marketing team and adding those leads to the newsletter list. But not into the anonymous info@company.com list.

Again, you can use the combination of Pipedrive and Outfunnel to send personalised newsletters while also updating the phase of the leads in the CRM.

Consideration, Purchase and Repurchase

Once the conversation is already happening, keep the conversation going where it started unless they ask to move it elsewhere.

Simply keep building the relationship, and if needed, educate via more materials. And when the time is right, then offer a solution that precisely meets their needs.

Once they make a purchase, keep them updated on all relevant news via personal messages via social media platforms or email.

All this takes a considerable amount of work, and based on our experience, most sales reps will try to skip a step or two.

However, by taking the short route, you will not close most of the deals. In fact, you will not even reach the consciousness of your potential customers due to the massive amount of noise around us all.

So do the work, or involve outside parties that help you do that, and start growing with the help of digital sales.