For over two years, your sales team has been put to the test. Overnight, the established methods that worked relatively well before suddenly became irrelevant. Many businesses faced a serious ultimatum: go virtual or go bust. The sales cycle grew in complexity, buyers’ expectations changed, and so did their budgets and purchasing processes. More stakeholder involvement and a higher level of scrutiny is now applied to each transaction. So how do you find opportunities for growth in this climate?
The good news is that 2023 holds a lot of potential for businesses that are ready to shift into a new inbound mindset, equip themselves with the necessary tools and technologies, and apply the right strategies to capture the attention, engagement, and loyalty of their B2B customers.
If you’re keen to make 2023 a profitable and successful year for your B2B sales team, keep reading.
Whether you’ve had no CRM or the wrong CRM, don’t delay in addressing this issue and onboarding your sales team onto the most suitable CRM platform for your business. Without it, you can’t leverage the key customer data you need to grow your business. As you learn more about customers’ habits and preferences, you can tailor your services and the deals you offer, ensuring you’re closing sales and retaining clients. With a powerful CRM tool like HubSpot, you can build more meaningful relationships with your clients, ensuring you’re answering their questions, addressing their challenges, and connecting with them at an optimal time in the buyers' journey.
For B2Bs in 2023, data will really become the critical component in everything you do. Using an intelligent CRM tool will help you to not only process information from customers, but will also enable you to automate interactions and make your business far more responsive. This ensures you’re guiding prospects through your sales funnel more effectively and shortening the sales cycle by becoming more action-oriented. The B2B sales process is dynamic, and the only way to manage this is through data and analysis so that each piece of content you send a customer’s way, each conversation you have, is valuable and positions you as a trustworthy expert.
Engage your sales team in valuable interactions
It’s safe to say that most of us are suffering from a little Zoom fatigue. While touching base with members of your sales team helps to keep everyone connected and productive, holding meetings that lack a strong agenda can eat into your salespeople’s time and, quite frankly, kill their mojo.
Meetings should be short, focused, and have clear objectives that everyone understands. If your meetings lack direction and they become repetitive or too informal, people will fail to prepare for them. Eventually, accountability will be lost, and very few things will get actioned. Use the time in meetings to agree on impactful decisions and facilitate collaboration that focuses on improvement.
2023 should be all about getting intentional. Intentional with your goals, your actions, and your communication. When you steer the conversation with purpose and objective, your team will feel more engaged and motivated to participate and contribute ideas.
Empower your sales team with new skills
Many businesses nervously rode out 2020 and 2021, waiting for better news and holding back from major investments. This isn’t a sustainable approach, unfortunately. Your competitors are stepping up their game and finding ways to plug the holes in the market that you can’t service. Their sales teams are becoming more tech-savvy, their decisions are increasingly more data-driven, and they’re selling faster and more efficiently. They’re doing this by making a conscious effort to upskill and retool their teams.
It’s time to review your sales team’s knowledge gaps and find the best way to sharpen their axes. When your team is confident with new tools and methodologies, they’ll be far more motivated to execute the strategies you know you should be implementing.
It’s no secret that we are in the throes of change, spurred by a global pandemic and shifting consumer expectations. Yes, business as usual has been disrupted, but if you’re open to innovation, adaptation, and improvement, you can leverage these changes to your advantage and build a more flexible and resilient business in 2023. Get in touch to learn more about our Sales Enablement Service.
