grow b2b sales

There’s No Silver Bullet Tactic to Grow B2B Sales

Over the last couple months I have been teaching Marketing and Sales for Entrepreneurs at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Again, this session I have a great class. The class exposes them to a number of sales and marketing strategies and tactics. The students are always asking and probing about the one sales and marketing tactic they should employ to make their revenue number. There isn’t one tactic that will guarantee sales and marketing success. Here are a few tips on finding the right tactics (plural), that could be a fit for you.

Understand Your Persona

How do your ideal customers make decisions? Create buyer personas so you can understand where they are getting information to make decisions. As an example you may not find your ideal customer using Facebook to educate themselves on software for industrial applications, but they may be at industry trade shows. Conversely Facebook ads may be an excellent tactic to find users for your Small Medium Business app.
 

What Resources Do You Have?

When you are at early stages you have two big resource issues, the time your team has and the money to spend. As an example Freshbooks shoe stringed their business for years using less expensive marketing tactics. It was not until the last couple years that they used TV commercials as a tactic as it was very expensive. Conversely you need to keep in mind the time that your team has available to sell and market your solution.
 

Track Time and Results

It is important to measure your efforts and the results that you are able to drive. There are lots of easy ways to measure website traffic, leads, and sales using simple tools like Google Analytics and a CRM. You can then review the performance of your sales and marketing activities.
 

Changing Tactics

The sales and marketing tactics should change over time for several reasons. The tactics you use at the start of your business may not be scalable as you build the business, but are needed to close your first few customers. You may also see tactics that have been successful in the past, return a smaller ROI. As an example at VA Partners for our business we have seen Twitter decrease in importance and LinkedIn increase in generating ROI. This has led us to change the amount of time we spend on Twitter and increase on LinkedIn. There are also new platforms and tools being used today that were not available even a few years ago. Tweak your plan and experiment with new tactics.
 
If you are interested in discussing how VA Partners can help your B2B company with sales and marketing tactics, don’t be afraid to contact me.
 

There’s No Silver Bullet Tactic to Grow B2B Sales