In the latest episode of LIG TV, Michael shows us four ways your business can grow its B2B sales opportunities in the coming year.
If you’re looking to drive B2B sales for your startup or SME, here are 4 tried & tested methods you can start using now to do this:
- create and sharing content
- form strategic partnerships
- build social proof
- host high touch events
To understand what these methods entail, check out my new LIG TV Episode: 4 Ways to Grow B2B Sales
Transcription
Hi, I’m Michael Haynes, and welcome to Listen Innovate Grow TV. In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about 4 ways in which you can drive your B2B sales for your startup or your SME.
1. Create and share content
Now the first way in which you can help drive sales and your overall business growth is by creating and sharing content. Now, this is about providing your business customers and your prospects with information, advice and tools to help them meet their key problems that they’re trying to solve, meet their key priorities and objectives.
Now it’s very important when you’re creating content for your business customers and your prospects that you’re providing them with the right kind of content in the format in which they want to receive that content. Now in terms of forms of content, you want to be thinking nowadays is VIP – videos, infographics and podcasts, as those are 3 mediums that are that are gaining lots of momentum amongst business buyers in terms of how they’re looking at the different kinds of information to help them meet their priorities and make their business decisions.
Now, it’s not just about creating that content, which is going to help them make those decisions and meeting their objectives, but it’s also about sharing that content. By sharing that content, it’s making sure that your business prospects and customers are seeing that content where they look for information, so making sure that you’re getting it on the right kinds of blogs, podcasts, you’re getting it in the relevant industry and professional associations magazines websites that you’re at the events they’re going to, so it’s making sure that you’re getting out and promoting that content where your business buyers are looking for information.
2. Form strategic partnerships
The second way that you can help drive your B2B sales and overall business growth is by forming strategic partnerships. Strategic partnerships is a great way in which you can meet your business customer’s holistic needs, priorities and objectives. Now in terms of potential strategic partners, this could be current suppliers that you’re working with, other service providers that are also targeting the same audiences that you are, you could be working with industry influencers as well.
Now how are some of the ways in which you can work with strategic partners are a number of ways. One could be co-marketing your various products and services, you might also want to consider also potentially bundling the offerings of your own SME or startup with that of your strategic partner so that you can provide a holistic solution that’s meeting a broader set of your business customer’s needs.
You may also want to be looking at undertaking some strategic research, so looking at what are some of the trends and challenges and developments within your industry, undertaking of that piece of research, which you can then use as a means to market to your target customers, hosting events and as a way to generate leads and revenues.
When looking at forming strategic partners, you want to make sure of a couple of things. One, that you’re both in alignment in terms of the types of audiences that you’re going after, also that you have similar goals in mind, and thirdly in terms of having similar values and ways of working.
3. Build social proof
The third way in which you can drive B2B sales and business growth is by building social proof. In business to business, building that trust amongst your business decision-makers and business buyers is very important, because products and services that you’re providing to them are going to have a fundamental impact on performance of their businesses and also potentially their own careers as well.
Business buyers want to ensure that you have the credibility, the expertise and capabilities to solve those business challenges and problems that they’re looking to have met. Ways in which you can provide social proof can be a number of ways depending on what your business buyers are seeking. This can include testimonials, case studies, customer references, whereby your business customers are able to contact some of your current clients and customers, to understand how they work with them and benefits that they got from them.
Customer advocates can also be a way of getting social proof. By customer advocates we’re talking about getting your raving fans your customers and clients that really like the work you’ve done and getting them to speak on your behalf at industry events, getting them to do interviews for you that you can post on social media, whereby they can demonstrate and really articulate an authentic, first hand way, benefits that they’ve received from working with your startup or SME.
4. Host high touch events
And the fourth way of building your B2B sales and driving business growth is hosting high touch events. So these can be events such as holding a breakfast, holding a lunch, a decision-makers summit whereby you’re bringing together your clients and customers and they’re getting an opportunity to learn more about industry insights, getting information and advice to help them meet their objectives and their key challenges, providing them a form and a means for them to interact with their other peers. Potentially also you could invite industry experts and influencers, where they can get their perspectives and points of view as well.
And again, hosting high touch events, that’s another opportunity where you might want to use research that you’re SME has conducted as a basis, as a key theme or topic for that event, and you also may want to consider as well partnering with another service provider as a means of hosting an event.
So these are 4 ways: creating and sharing content, forming strategic partnerships, building that social proof and hosting events, all with the means and aims of providing value to business customers, this is how business growth through your startup or SME.
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