B2B sales teams face a lot of challenges, and it can be disheartening when a sales deal worth thousands of dollars falls through due to a simple mistake. Mistakes happen. That’s life. But some of them can be avoided in your B2B sales process if you know what to look out for. Here are four common mistakes B2B sales reps make in their sales process:
Not targeting the right people.
Forgetting the importance of building relationships.
Ignoring current customers.
Lack of follow up.
Identifying your target audience can make or break your sales process. Successful sales processes start with targeting the right people.
For a quick refresher, a target audience is a specific group of people who are most likely to benefit from your product or service and the most likely to become customers if you reach out to them. In other words, they’re the leads with the highest chance of conversion. It's essential to understand this so you can build a strategy to find your target audience.
If you don’t target the right people, you could lose valuable time, money, and other resources you could otherwise use to nurture higher quality leads. To avoid this mistake, it’s important for your B2B sales team to create a comprehensive buyer persona of your ideal customer. This should include more than just basic demographic information. Make sure you consider their goals, their pain points, and what obstacles they want to overcome.
Unlike the quick sales turnaround common in B2C, the B2B sales cycle is long. B2B customers usually require more information and more time to weigh their options before making a purchase. And since sales volume for B2B products and services is typically lower than for B2C, your B2B sales team really needs to build and nurture relationships with their clients.
If you build a relationship with your sales leads, they'll be more likely to convert into new customers. And if you maintain a good relationship with your current customers, they'll come back to you time and time again.
We touched on this in the previous section, but we can’t stress enough how important relationships are to the success of your sales process, especially for B2B sales. One of the biggest mistakes a sales team can make is getting so wrapped up in getting new customers that their current customers start feeling ignored.
It’s an easy trap to fall into. In fact, one study found that 44% of companies focus more on acquiring new customers versus only 18% of companies who focus more on retaining existing customers. The same study also found that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than it does to keep a current customer.
If you focus too much on acquiring new customers, that takes away resources you need to retain your current customers. And if you ignore your current customers, you could lose them.
It's not uncommon for sales reps to avoid doing follow-ups. Sometimes they avoid it because they don't want to be seen as pushy or intrusive toward their customers. Other times they avoid it because they might not believe it's worth their time and resources. Or sometimes, it's because sales reps expect the customer to say "no."
But here's something to think about: According to Invesp, "60% of customers say no four times before saying yes." The same organization also says it takes about five follow-up calls to close 80% of sales deals.
Following up makes a difference. If you’re not following up, even on prospective customers who’ve already said “no,” you could be missing out on a lot of sales opportunities.
Avoiding these mistakes can be easier with the right sales enablement tools. With Perenso Sales Enablement Tool, you get access to real-time reporting and analytics to help you target the right customers, planning tools to help you build client relationships and follow up with customers, and content management to help you stay organized, all in a single platform.