Before the pandemic, the entire B2B sales funnel typically took place in person or over the phone. Lockdowns necessitated a different approach, one that moved a traditionally face-to-face business into the digital space. It turned out that B2B buyers preferred the fully online approach, with “65% of customers prefer[ing] remote human interactions or digital self-service over traditional interactions,” according to a 2021 McKinsey survey. Even as pandemic restrictions ended, buyers continued to seek out the ease and convenience of digital self-service.
The story of B2B’s digital transition is already old news. On top of shifts accelerated by the pandemic, there has been a generational shift in the workplace. Today, 90% of B2B buyers and decision-makers are Millennials or Gen Z. The question now is, where are B2B sales trends going next? Now that everybody is doing business online, how do we do it better? The pandemic era was a time of transition in which new technologies were deployed within an outdated framework. Now, the challenge for B2B organizations is to update their entire marketing and sales structure to better function in this new landscape.
Omnichannel Comes to B2B
B2B organizations have responded to this new preference for digital interactions by offering self-service and credit card payment options to their websites. Everyone is doing at least that much now, so businesses that want to stand out have to take additional steps to make their customer experience more customer-centered.
It’s not just that B2B buyers want to buy online; they want to discover, research, and purchase their way, on their time. Rather than sit through a presentation, they engage in their own research. Think of all the ways in which a potential customer might come in contact with your business: social media, phone calls, email, trade shows, a website, online forms, case studies, online catalogs, customer reviews, webinars, blog posts. To win these customers over, you need to provide a consistent brand experience across all of these channels.
Under the old model, marketing teams shoveled up a wheelbarrow of leads and dumped them at the door of the sales department. In this omnichannel environment, marketing, sales, and product development teams all have to work together to create an inbound marketing strategy that works on all channels and at all stages of the customer journey.
Integrated Marketing and Sales
The best way to integrate marketing and sales is to understand how today’s B2B buyer operates. They don’t immediately turn to a sales rep for information, preferring instead to research on their own. They’ll do this for multiple suppliers at once, going back and forth across channels as they gather information and discuss their options with the rest of their team.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) isn’t exactly a new idea, but it is finding new life in digital B2B sales and marketing. It’s easy to see why, with ABM’s emphasis on bringing together sales, marketing, and operations to set actionable targets, create ideal customer profiles and customer journeys, and get the right kinds of content in front of potential leads at the right time. As B2B sales trends toward a fully online sales funnel, ABM looks more and more like the future of sales.
Using the Right Technology
Moving to a digital sales model means integrating new sales technology into your processes, but just as you don’t have to use every single social media platform in order to have a social media presence, you don’t have to bloat your tech stack with tons of complicated tools to effectively integrate sales and marketing.
The backbone of your integrated approach is customer relationship management (CRM). CRM software helps you manage leads, streamline customer service, gain insights for targeted campaigns and customer segmentation. Perhaps most importantly, CRM lets you share information across teams for more efficient and informed collaboration.
Investing in Your Business
The economy is in an uncertain moment in the middle of 2024. The default reaction in such times for many businesses is to cut costs, and the first budgets to be cut are often marketing budgets. It’s important to remember that employees aren’t costs but assets, and strong marketing and sales teams are the key to sustaining growth through difficult economic times. You want to keep the customers you have and stay top-of-mind for those who will be looking for new suppliers when interest rates drop or other growth conditions improve. In the meantime, getting the most out of B2B sales technology like CRM and philosophies like ABM will help your teams target the right customers more efficiently.
The Future of B2B is Digital
Many of these tips amount to doing what you’ve likely been doing since the pandemic: pivoting to digital sales and centering the customer in your user experience. Today and in the future, it will take something more to get an edge. You can do all that, but smarter, with the right sales and marketing strategy.
