6 common mistakes in B2B sales and how Meetsales can help you do it better
Sales work is often complicated and difficult. Building genuine, long-lasting relationships with customers, helping them solve their problems, and making them come back to buy more is an advanced game with many traps. One mistake can cause the client to drop out without closing the deal. There are also external factors that can matter here, for example, competitive prices or more personalized offers. However, we want to focus on your team’s performance and how they can improve their work to win more transactions with higher order values. Today, we are talking about sales reps’ mistakes that should be avoided at all costs.
Why does a well-curated sales process matter?
We live in a world dominated by sales. Consumerism is higher than ever in humankind's history, and brands take advantage of it to constantly introduce new products and services. They try to catch the client’s attention with incredible features, technological improvements, and personalized experiences. No matter if it’s B2B or B2C, we are constantly buying. That’s probably not too good for the environment, but it’s impossible to function nowadays without purchasing.
We’re not here to teach you how to sell enormous amounts of goods that are not necessarily desired by your potential customers. We want you to sell smarter and better by solving their problems, helping them out with their pains, and improving their lives. To do that, your sales team needs to know the most popular mistakes from their professional niche and learn how to do things differently.
A deliberate, tailor-made process is client-centered and focused on genuine relations, rather than numbers. People are increasingly more aware of traditional sales techniques and are not fond of them. We change channels on TV when there are commercials, install plugins that remove ads from websites we browse, and don’t pick up our phones when salespeople call with another “once in a lifetime” offer. In B2B, it’s quite similar.
Business clients want the best deal and exquisite service as fast as possible. They don’t have time to meet in person and spend hours discussing their needs over lunch. Post-COVID-19 research shows that up to 80% of B2B customers prefer online meetings. They got used to remote work and learned how time-saving and easy such transactions can be. As a result, they could gain more time to grow other areas of their business. However, it’s not enough to schedule a video meeting and improvise to close a deal. Salespeople have to prepare themselves and follow particular guidelines to successfully convert their prospects into buyers. Read on to learn how your team can outrun their competitors by replacing popular sales errors with concrete actions.
6 common mistakes in B2B sales and how to solve them
Here is an overview of the mistakes salespeople often make. Usually, they want to achieve their goals no matter what. It’s understandable, but doesn’t provide the effects they would hope for. Fulfilling KPIs and helping the company to grow its revenue can be done even better when the team focuses on customer satisfaction instead of statistics. Let’s take a closer look.
Sales over relationships
The common goal of a sales rep is to close the deal, but if they focus only on that, they will fail miserably. Customers want to feel like the company is there for them. They want to feel cared for. That’s why for several years now, sales strategies in B2B companies are based on relations. Trends like account-based sales and the rise of assisted shopping outside the B2C sector prove that business clients expect individual treatment and a personalized purchasing experience.
Too often salespeople have their eyes on the prize, and they forget that a customer is still a human being. They have specific needs that need to be addressed, and you have to show them that what you sell has the value they are searching for. Treating clients seriously and with respect, not like another number in a CRM, also helps to build loyalty and long-term business partnerships.
Solution:
Make sure to target the right prospects first. If your sales team pitches the product or service to anyone, they will get rejected multiple times. After finding promising potential leads, make sure to build genuine connections with them. Create professional, but friendly emails, begin video calls with small talk, listen to their doubts, and propose remedies to their pains. Listen actively and answer questions in detail because they see you as an expert that is there to support them. Also, remember that the relationship should be nurtured even after purchase, which can lead to another transaction in the future.
Not solving a problem
Your employees have to realize one thing: clients come to a particular company with the hope that it can offer a resolution to their problem. Usually, your product or service is supposed to make their lives easier, better, more optimized, and less resource-consuming. Focus on the value your brand can provide instead of talking about features and technicalities all the time.
Listen actively to your prospect and provide answers to their questions, taking their business goals into account. Adjust the presented products individually to each customer and their stories, so they know you are aware of their needs and pains. If something is not clear, you should ask for details. Don’t assume that you know the client’s problem already, give them your time and attention to make the meeting about them and not about praising your company’s offer.
Solution:
Instead of sharing well-known facts and obvious statistics, your sales reps should bet more on storytelling and real-life examples. Case studies can be great to present how your company’s service or product solved several problems for different types of businesses. Use Meetsales to host a personalized video meeting where a salesperson will have a chance to pick the items from the catalog that are adjusted to what the client wants.
No preparations before the presentation
The worst thing that can happen during a presentation is an awkward silence or a series of sounds that suggest the sales rep doesn’t know what to say. To avoid that, employees should never come to the meeting unprepared. They have to know every part of the sales deck by heart but also do their research on the client, their industry, common difficulties, and best practices. It will help the salesperson to relate their offer to the customer’s reality.
Another problem when it comes to presentations is that they can become boring or, even worse, confusing and incomprehensible for the viewer. To not fall into that trap, your team should be composed of professionals that mastered the art of sales. Their soft skills should be on point, so they know how to explain complex concepts, adjust their presentation to the customer, and pick the right products suited to their requirements.
Solution:
Using modern tools like Meetsales to make attractive digital sales pitches is the first step towards better conversions. They are interactive, allow sellers to maintain a human connection in a remote environment, and provide a high level of personalization. The salesperson simply picks products or services from the internal company catalog and displays them on the screen with technical data, price, and other details. Items can be added or deleted at any moment to curate a personalized offer. Everything is clearly visible, and the presentation is attractive to the customer.
Miscalculated follow-ups
There can be several mistakes when it comes to follow-ups. They can be sent too late, too many times, or not sent at all. Determining the right timing for such messages and the number of times salespeople should reach out to their prospects can be difficult and is usually a matter of trial and error. Sometimes the follow-ups are not sent or sent too late because the team is too invested in other tasks like adding data to a CRM or reaching out the new leads. They simply forget to do it because of work overload.
The process has to be designed in such a way that enables employees to meet their KPIs and goals. They need enough time for all duties, including sending follow-ups. If they don’t do that, even though their calendars are not completely full, maybe they don’t know when to approach their potential customers or how to do it successfully.
Solution:
A sales enablement tool that reminds sales reps about follow-ups is a great place to start conquering this problem. For example, Meetsales sends automated notifications when it’s time to schedule another meeting with the client. The salesperson can set up follow-ups right after meetings, so they don’t forget about putting it in their calendar when the video call is over. Also, our platform motivates them to elevate their sales game as it analyzes their performance and showcases their success rate to their superiors. With a system like that, the follow-ups will always be sent, and the clients will get them at the right time.
Complicated sales process
We live in a global village that is flooding us with information daily. Consumers experience all sorts of fatigue, from doing research to making decisions. They are looking for simplification in every area of life, including commerce. Study shows that clients are more likely to make a purchase when they have fewer options to choose from. The same goes for minimalist websites and UIs. B2B sales teams have to create a process that is easy to navigate and requires fewer steps to be finished if they want to see their conversion rate grow.
The process of making your customer’s journey less complicated starts already when building a strategy. From picking the right communication channels and not being present in every corner of the internet, to providing facilitations that will allow customers to quickly pay for their order, there are many ways to support a client when they need to buy something for their company. Using the right tools and methods will help your employees master the skill of actively assisting the buyer during every step of the transaction.
Solution:
Meetsales offers one of the best platforms for simplified B2B commerce. It enables salespeople and their customers to finish the whole purchasing process during one video call. The client can schedule an online meeting via a convenient website widget that shows them available dates and times they can pick according to their preferences. They connect with the sales rep from the comfort of their own home, without a need to drive anywhere. When the order is ready to be placed, the payment can be done with a few clicks. We’ve created our solution with sellers and buyers in mind. All functionalities were designed to help your employees make their prospects’ lives easier.
No data analysis
Running a business without collecting and analyzing data is counter-productive nowadays. It’s crucial to make the right decisions if you want your company to progress. Without numbers on the sales team’s performance, customer behaviors, drop rate, and many more areas of the selling process, you won’t be able to improve it and predict future tendencies when it comes to revenue. That’s why industry specialists underline how essential is data analysis.
All about that can be found in our article about the types of data you should collect to grow your business. It really underlines the importance of this activity in every part of your company, especially in the sales department. With the reports in hand, you will know exactly what are the strong points of your process, which team member converts the most leads, and where you should introduce changes to improve the funnel.
Solution:
Most tools used in established B2B enterprises have an internal data analytics module that collects information in real-time and creates detailed reports. It’s probably the best way to handle this matter because you don’t need to integrate additional apps and try to synchronize them with other platforms from your stack. Every activity is measured, and the results are displayed in the right section of your dashboard. Meetsales works the same. It enhances salespeople’s lives and analyzes their work at all times to let managers know about the next steps they should take.
Meetsales - a remedy to most sales mistakes
We know that avoiding the errors we’ve described above is not that easy. You probably noticed that most of the solutions had one thing in common - the usage of the right tools, like Meetsales. Taking advantage of digital platforms to help your sales team be better at what they do is one of the best decisions you can make. The main benefits they provide are automation, reminders, built-in features for data analysis, and a plethora of functionalities that make the sales process more convenient for all involved parties. Everything in such apps is designed to take the burden off your employee’s shoulders and let them do what really matters. They can focus on building meaningful long-term relationships with their customers instead of spending hours sending emails, preparing offers, and filling in information into the system.
Do we have your attention? We encourage you to try Meetsales for 14-days. It’s completely free! These two weeks will be a perfect opportunity to test our solution’s basic features and find out how productive and efficient online sales meetings can be. We are certain that remote teams will appreciate our product. The full version has even more to offer and can significantly boost your sellers’ work. Check out our pricing page to find out more and pick the plan adjusted to your company’s needs. We are certain that Meetsales can be your next sales command center that will become the one and only source of truth for your team.
Sell more and better with Meetsales today!
