Best B2B Sales Tools

In the majority of B2B organizations, the marketing department generates marketing qualified leads through inbound marketing and all kinds of automated processes. To be successful in Sales, these leads are only half the story; the other 50% of the pipeline needs to be created by sales execs (or SDRs, BDRs, account managers…). In the end, you as a salesperson are responsible for the health of your pipeline. Best selling author Mike Weinberg can tell you all about it, read his blog post on the topic here. In order to succeed in Sales, there are a lot of automation tools available. In this blog, we’ll cover them based on the B2B sales process. Because if there’s one thing you need to have in order to be successful, it’s a process!

Gartner even says the Marketing-to-sales handoff should no longer exist.

In B2B the sales cycles are longer and decision-making units are bigger. This means that the process also is more complex and B2B needs different tools than, say, e-commerce or B2C sales. We have defined the following steps in the sales process:

  1. Prospecting & preparation: the first stage in the sales cycle. Hardly any sales professional likes this and on the other hand, every sales professional knows they’ll need to do it to be successful. There are tons of tools available that help you prepare that prospecting email, call, or visit.
  2. Make contact: once you’re talking to a prospect, you need to connect to them and make impactful contact.
  3. Qualifying: this is an important, and often overlooked step. Now that you’re communicating with your prospect, you’ll need to find out if they actually qualify as a valid lead.
  4. Nurturing & pipeline management: not only marketing nurtures leads, but sales professionals also need to make sure they nurture their leads in the pipeline.
  5. Presentation: once the sales executive actually has his or her moment of glory and can do a presentation at a prospective customer, this absolutely needs to be spot on.
  6. Closing the deal: the moment of truth: closing the deal. Some B2B sales tools will actually help you to have a customer sign faster.

Prospecting is a process on its own. There are some B2B sales software solutions that can help you automate your prospecting:

Once you’ve identified your prospect and know how, and why to approach them, you need to contact them. Some tools can be of help in this stage:

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Within the sales process, it’s important to qualify your lead in an early stage. This, in order to avoid spending your precious time on leads that are not ready to buy, don’t have a fit or simply don’t have the budget to buy your product or service. B2B Sales Tools that might help you in qualifying:

A B2B sales cycle tends to be 6 to 9 months on average.  Some say the typical salesperson spends an average of 150% of their time on deals that are eventually lost. Opportunities that fall through after long periods of time actually cost businesses money, due to time and effort expended on what eventually just becomes a dead lead. The true cost of these long ‘fail’ cycles is misallocated resources, inaccurate sales forecasts, and missed opportunities for sales to move on more promising leads. Successful lead management can help give direction on where these commodities could be better spent. Tools that might help you in this step of the process:

This step is about delivering the right message to the right prospect at the right time. When you’re working at a larger B2B organization with a large offering of products and services, technically advanced products, and are selling these across many industries, it can be challenging to find the right case-study, reference, or sales deck. Sales enablement software, like Highspot or Outreach, helps you in setting up the right sales playbook in every case.Sales enablement is the strategic, ongoing process of equipping sales teams with the content, guidance, and training they need to effectively engage buyers. Sales enablement analytics provide marketing and sales teams with data-driven insights to optimize their business and drive revenue.

There are lots of sales enablement solutions:

Placing a focus on sales enablement makes sales teams more effective by:

Highspot gives businesses a powerful advantage by bringing together content management, sales guidance, and buyer engagement capabilities so they can win more deals.

I’m surprised to see how a lot of sales professionals still send out proposals in a PDF format. It can be done so much easier, using quotation software that supports electronic signatures. This software has tons of other advantages:

This really is something you can’t live without in B2B sales! Software solutions in this space include Docusign, Pandadoc, and some CRMs even come with integrated solutions.

We at Marketing Guys are there to help you automate your sales and marketing efforts in order to generate more leads and revenue. Want to know more, or discuss your possibilities? We serve customers all around the globe! Call us at +31(0)337370250 or schedule a call below.

Discover how technology can accelerate your growth.

Have questions about marketing automation, CRM, or integrations? Together, we’ll find the best solution for your organization.