B2B Strategy – Holiday Style

Graphic: b2b holiday season

Here comes the Santa Clause of your business sector with goodies for your prospects, customers and business associates. While reaching out to your business prospects during this holiday season, there is more than just sending a Merry Christmas card. In fact, this holiday season, your team should utilize a B2B marketing campaign which cuts across multiple channels.

Rejuvenate Social Media

The canvas of social media platforms is flooded this holiday season but there is always a way to be innovative. Bring out all the raving reviews and video testimonials from your customers and business associates and share them proudly. Over the past year, whatever you have accumulated, splurge on your social media pages of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. Remember that B2B marketing strategies have faired well with prospects trusting recommendations from peers and other businesses.

Tradition Wins

During the holiday, there is always an underlying current of traditions; your team must play along. In your holiday marketing strategy, make sure to have a theme associated with your business sector and stress the application of traditional values in the festive environment. In all your physical and virtual decorations, engagements and reach-outs, local, geographical and social traditions help reach out to fellow businesses.

Reinvent Traditional Ways

In addition to reaching out through the internet, traditional methods are essential in a B2B marketing strategy as well. Your team needs to have a list of business prospects and current contact persons ready and should reach out in a traditional way such as, calling, visiting (although harder in our current times), or even just sending a postcard. Remember, a miss can cost you money in the coming year through unhappy clients who feel as though you don’t value them.

Personalize Your Approach

There is nothing better than developing personal relations over the festive season. Including business prospects while cementing the already made bonds with customers and business associates. It is a proven fact that there develops an emotional and familiar undercurrent of recognition which subconsciously affects your business deals and business relations.

Dive Into Communities

This festive season your team should break the barriers and share on all relevant platforms. Check out all virtual world sites where you can tap into a wide audience of relevant prospects. With your high values content and a commanding leadership tone, your experts can attract all the prospects who frequent such B2B information hubs, which serve their industry and provide solutions to their problem.

Wishes With Gifts

Your Festive Wishes, when sugarcoated with an offer or two will hit the mark. Your team can churn out different goodies you have been offering over the year and repackage them. Offer them as this limited time offer. Anything like an e-book, an expert advise time slot, a free sample or just an upgrade – all work wonders – depending on your business sector. If your business sector is facing a particular crisis or a hiccup, and you have a product or solution to offer, a very limited time offer of it can do wonders to spread the word.

Activate CRM & Funnel

With a year behind you, the time is right to top the funnel and activate a CRM tool (provided free with an Infofree.com subscription). The CRM will definitely play a major role as you move forward and utilize optimized details from your curated prospect lists. Need more prospects to get your CRM and sales funnel started? Check out FreeSalesLeads (free to use) or Salesflower.com (cheap monthly subscription), where business databases have 95% accuracy.

From Foes to Friends

Overall, just relax and take everything in a holiday spirit. If there was any misunderstanding with any customer this is the time of the year to rebuild a stronger relationship. During this festive season, all is forgotten and forgiven, so take advantage and mend any broken bridges.

Understanding What Customers Want

Three Tips to Understand Your Customers

If we could understand what every customer is thinking, we’d be selling left and right. Of course, it’s very rare that a customer tells us how they’re feeling. With the constant bombardment of advertising and everyone wanting them to buy, customers are a lot less trusting and require more time and effort to convince to buy.

customer service image

Understanding what drives an individual to want to buy is a key factor in selling today. If you don’t get lucky with that customer who willingly tells you their wants, needs, and concerns for your product/service, it means you must figure it out on your own. Knowing how to figure out a client’s wants, needs, and concerns and use it to your advantage is something every good salesperson understands how to do.

Here are three ways to understand what potential customers are thinking.

Be the guinea pig

Go through the customer experience process. Follow the paths they would take on the route to buying from you. Act as though this is your first time coming across the product and note what value you receive. What key information do you take in, is there something not mentioned that you can note in your sales pitch or a key factor you can build off of? It’s important to understand the process and information the customer is taking in before they reach you. This way more value is being added to your product instead of just highlighting what the customer already knows. The more value you can add, the more likely a customer is to buy.

Learn as much as you can about your client’s job and life

It’s important to focus specifically on those who will be using your product/service. Learning about your customer’s job or life often helps bring to light key factors your customer wouldn’t think of if asked what they wanted from the product. The more you know about a customer, the better you can pick out key things the customer would enjoy. This tactic takes more time and empathy from the salesperson, but the more personal you can get, the more likely a customer is to buy from you specifically.

Understand what customers want

Personalized service, consistent answers, and optimized user experience.

Personalized service. Customers don’t want to be treated like a case number. As you want to learn as much as you can about your client, you also want to create an experience that’s personalized to them. Work with the client to figure out the best package for them, making sure to pay attention to their needs and wants. Giving them an experience different than the usual sales pitch will get them much closer to buying.

Consistent Answers. Seventy-six percent of customers receive conflicting answers from different support agents when asking the same questions. Make sure your sales team is on the same page. Consistent answers throughout the buying process will increase the likelihood of completing a purchase more so than receiving different answers to the same question. It shows you have your stuff together and that a customer can rely on each representative to give a good deal.

Optimized user experience. User experience is a huge factor in choosing to buy. Non-responsive and hard-to-use websites turn people away. Make sure your website is user-friendly through the navigation, homepage, and cart checkout. You want to make it a fun, easy experience. Aside from online experience, you also want to make sure customer support services are optimized. Using quality sales skills, salespeople can make for a troublesome user experience, one that will keep customers coming back.

Three key steps to improving your Lead Generation

Image: Man on computer

Lead generation is one of the best ways to grow your business and get quality sales. Sales leads provide opportunities to not only reach sales goals but to exceed them. Having a dynamic lead generation strategy will boost you to the customer goals you’re trying to reach.

Start using these key lead generation strategies to help your business get quality customers.

  1. Clearly define your goals

    While this sounds like a mundane step, it’s very important. You need to know what you want and what you think you can achieve. Being able to work towards something and reach it in the set amount of time gives you more motivation to achieve it.

    Your goal must be clear and precise. Goal setting is a common practice but while lots of people take the time to set goals, very few actually reach them. That’s why it’s important that we take time to really think over and set an achievable goal.

    In setting your goal you must start broad and then break it down even further. What is your yearly goal, monthly, weekly, daily? Having a goal broken down and implemented into to your daily routine will help you reach it.

    What is your lead generation goal?

  2. Make your company stand out

    What value do you bring? Let customers know the value they get out of using your product or service. You must explain what makes your company so special. Maybe it’s the added features of the products no one else has or maybe it’s just what your company stands for and how they benefit the community. Lots of companies stand out to consumers because of their social responsibility. Is your company helping others? Show your customers how.

    Another way to stand out is a comparison to your competition. Explain how you’re different and better. Why would the customer want to choose you over another company who makes the same product?

    Features, benefits, value, use these to make yourself stand out. A feature is an attribute or fact about your product, service, or company. A benefit is how that feature helps your prospect. Value extends beyond what your product or service can do for your prospect and aligns your benefits with the prospect’s larger goals and objectives.

    Position your company in a way that makes you stand out. Just because you know the benefits and value of your product/service and company doesn’t mean consumers know.

  3. Create Lead Magnets

    Lead magnets are the things that attract the target audience and convinces them to engage further. These are crucial to generating leads online.

    Lead magnets include:

    • Company’s homepage
    • Landing pages
    • Blogsite
    • Call to actions throughout the website
    • Contact us form
    • Get more information form
    • Newsletter signup form
    • Social media sites
    • Valuable content suited for your target audience for your website and social media accounts

    Lead magnets need to be very convincing. You must know your target audience and understand what they would find to be a tempting deal. There are lots of ways to capture leads through lead magnets, you just need to get creative in your approach.

Lead generation requires a lot of patience and new ideas. Even the simplest of ideas can match up to the most thought out ideas. It’s all dependent on how you utilize the information you have to create effective strategies that consumers would find irresistible.

Marketing Ideas for Your Holiday Sales

Image with holiday items and title

When it comes to the holidays, we are all looking for that special offer or bonus to go along with our shopping. As a business this is the best time to pull out all the stops. To reap the benefits of the holiday season, businesses have to pull out all their best offer saving discounts and go total marketing on them.

As a business you’re going to want to take advantage of the holidays. Here are several ways in which you can rock the holiday season and boost your company’s sales.

Once November 1st hits let the holiday marketing begin. We suggest not going full blown Christmas quite yet though. Start out with thanksgiving themed marketing, leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales before heading into Christmas.

  1. Offer and Discount Ideas

    • Offer Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and promotions. Black Friday is huge and for online only businesses and services so is Cyber Monday. Capitalize on this opportunity.
    • Give out holiday-specific discounts or coupon codes such as entering code TURKEY30 to receive 30% off the order.
    • Offer time-limited sales to convey a sense of urgency. Example: Save 40% on Cyber Monday.
    • Offer free or low-cost shipping. Many people are turned away with the added cost of shipping. Close more deals by shipping for free or giving a discounted shipping price.
    • Create holiday gift packages – packages you can’t get any other time. Put together a package that includes items customers usually buy together or different items you offer that customers could then try out.
    • Offer a free holiday themed gift with a purchase. This will give buyers an extra incentive to buy and entice hesitant buyers.
    • Offer 2-for-1 products. The buyer gets to keep one for her/himself and give the other one as a gift.
    • Send out discounts on future purchases for all items bought during the holidays. Set yourself up for post-holiday success.
    • Team up with another business to create Christmas gift bundles. Combine your product and their product into a gift package.
    • FSL + Infofree offer

    • Send small gifts to your loyal customers. An inexpensive gift like a box of chocolates or a bottle of wine can show you care and puts your business at the top of their minds.
    • Offer flash deals and expedited shipping for last-minute shoppers.
    • Run a 12 Days of Christmas holiday promotion. Offer a different sale or discount or promote a different product each day leading up to Christmas.
    • Hold an advent calendar campaign. Offer a discount on one product per day throughout the entire Christmas season.

  1. Promote your holiday offers repeatedly. Don’t be afraid to share your sales and deals more than once. You want to make sure your promotions reach your potential customers.
  1. Content Marketing

    • Provide holiday-themed information to your target market. Direct social media posts and blog posts to holiday-themed information.
    • Create a holiday landing page where you can display gift ideas or discounts.
    • Update your social media covers to show some holiday cheer.
    • Thanksgiving FSL Header

    • Capture the holiday related search engine traffic by publishing content optimized for the season on your website.
    • Make your email template holiday themed.
    • Send holiday promotion emails with all your discounts. Send one right before Christmas too with last-minute gift ideas.
    • Send emails with your holiday offers including one promotion per email. Space these out accordingly.
    • Find gift guides in your industry and ask for your products to be included.
    • Include a holiday countdown ticker on your site. This will let visitors know exactly what day they need to order by to receive their products in time for Christmas.
    • Send your customers Christmas or New Year cards via mail or email.

Start planning and implementing your holiday marketing now! With your extra holiday efforts you’ll be selling like crazy.

Need more inspiration on how you can stand out to customers during the holiday season? Check out Make your business stand out to consumers during the holiday season for ideas!

Thanks to Kim Garst for the holiday themed ideas!

Email Follow-Up Tactics

Graphic Computer with email

Email follow-ups are a great way for more information to be given in detail and to allow the prospect more time to think through the information displayed. When using email to follow up, you must give the client enough information to be considered helpful but not too much as to where you pull out all the stops in the first follow-up. You want to drive the conversation and get them to buy early.

Follow-up emails can be frustrating. Many people assume if a prospect doesn’t respond the first time that they aren’t interested, however, there are many reasons as to why, besides not wanting your service, a prospect hasn’t responded to your email.

These reasons include missing the email completely, failure of the subject line to catch the prospect’s attention, not a clear enough call to action, not set up to be viewed on mobile, and sent at a bad time/day. The good news is these are all things we can easily fix.

  1. Lost email

    Sometimes emails get buried in our inboxes. Dismissing it the first time doesn’t mean we don’t think they’re important it just means we forgot about them. Sending multiple emails when you haven’t received a response yet is okay. The rule we follow is if we haven’t heard anything within two days, we send another follow-up email. Two days is enough time to where if they did happen to see the email, another follow-up won’t frustrate them. Two days is also a good time for the prospect to contemplate the email and then receive another follow-up with even more valuable information. After the first two-day period, you should extend the waiting period by a few days for each subsequent email.

  2. Subject line

    People are bombarded with thousands of emails from everything imaginable. What would make them recognize you and open your email? You must grab their attention and keep it long enough for them to click-through. From our Follow-Up Success Tips article, ask the client if there is something you can put in the subject line, such as using the word important or marking an email as urgent. These special cues can help you reach the client.

    The number of words in a subject line also matters, especially for mobile users. Subject lines with 6 to 10 words deliver the highest open rate [Retention Science], making 8 words ideal. So, create that catchy, noticeable email in 8 words.

  3. Email on mobile

    As of now, 61.9% of all emails are opened and read on mobile devices [Constant Contact]. That means your email needs to be programmed correctly for mobile; failure to optimize your email for mobile results in an 80% deletion rate [Constant Contact]. Emails that aren’t formatted correctly for mobile viewing often cut off information completely or appear very zoomed in. These kinds of emails frustrate the receiver often enough to cause them to delete the email without even fully viewing it.

    Have you checked if your email is optimized for mobile devices? It could be one of the reasons you’re getting a low response rate.

  4. Time and day to send

    There is no exact time or day we can tell you to send your email that will get you one hundred percent results. The first thing we do suggest is asking the prospect when the best time to follow-up with them is. Getting their insights will prove more helpful than anything in getting a prospect to respond to your follow-up.

    With the help of research though, we can give you a general idea of when most people open their emails. Research shows that the very best times to send emails is on Tuesdays [Get Response], with weekends having the lowest open rates among the days of the week and Mondays following in second.

    For the time frame, it appears it’s best to send emails a little after people get to work, and when they are catching up on emails after lunch. It shows to be around 9-10 a.m. and 1-3 p.m.

    So, when you do send a follow-up email, it’s best to do it on Tuesdays at 9:30 a.m. or 1:30 p.m.

  5. Call to action

    You need to have a loud and clear call to action. Most times, in a follow-up, this will be for the prospect to follow back up with you, whether it’s via email or phone. Let the client know what you want them to do with the information you gave them. Always leave them more curious than before on a sales pitch. Give them the information they need to know to draw closer to a decision but always be able to add more value after they follow through with the call to action.

The subject line of your emails and the sender name and are the most important factors in getting emails opened and read. Be sure to check who the email is coming from. Making the from more personal increases the chances of getting noticed by a prospect. Open rates go up by as much as 35% by just using an email with your name in it [Pinpointe Markeing].

In 2019, the average open rate dropped to 22.1%. This average means that your company is doing well within its email follow-up and email campaigns if it has an open rate of around 22%.

The most important thing you can do in a follow-up is to continue to add more value every time you come in contact with the prospect. Email allows you to explain clearly and in more detail. It also allows for a more creative aspect. Adding in a creative aspect draws the reader in more. A creative follow-up email catches the attention of your prospects. Remember though this isn’t an email campaign so, don’t go overboard. You want a little flare but not too much to draw away from the information you are relaying and the call to action you want them to take in following up.

Sales Trivia Questions

We’ve gathered twelve fun and need to know sales tips and facts. Test out your sales knowledge and that of your peers with these fun trivia questions. Great to use at your next sales meeting, conference, or office bonding party.

How good is your sales trivia knowledge? Test it out and send to a coworker to compete!

Hint: click the button to reveal the answer. To hide the answers, refresh the page.

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FSL Sales Trivia 12

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