It is not uncommon to find blog posts that talk about going viral. Many times, they center on internet marketing, network effects, digital marketing, referral tactics, sending out automated cold emails and switching your orange button to a green button. Unfortunately, however, none of these suggestions work in B2B. When selling to smart, educated people, scalable tactics do not yield impressive results. Instead, unscalable tactics work better when closing high-dollar B2B accounts. However, the problem with these methods is that they appear to require considerable time and energy.
Why one-to-one unscalable B2B activities lead to sales faster
Positioning matters if you are looking to makes B2B sales. Whether you are a partner or a vendor, a hack or an expert, your ability is on the line. In fact, your ability distinguishes thin margins from fat ones as well as cost-plus from value pricing.
No doubt internet marketing and social media marketing yields positive results, but experts and consultants do not always have to send emails to customers instead customers go to them. For this reason, you must pay attention to your approach. While fancy growth hacks may work on the mass market, they are not effective when tens of thousands are on the line and certainly not when highly intelligent C-suite execs with years’ experience can detect crap from a mile away.
Instead of buying on impulse, B2B companies often conduct searches before visiting the website of any brand. These companies only consider you personally after most of the purchasing process has taken place. Yes, they are quite informed, and many different people influence the purchasing decision of the company.
This implies that the average sale is going to be complex and will take a longer period. It will require many conversations over several weeks with different people. You can choose to automate some parts of it or scale some of it, but when the chip falls, when it is most crucial, unscalable activities win.
How to Scale Unsalable Activities With People, Tools, and Processes
Start From the Scratch With Your Target Accounts
How can you do this? The best way is to engage in account-based marketing. This will involve investing more time and energy throwing out the junk to enable you to direct your marketing efforts towards fewer potential customers. This method is a mix of inbound + outbound. While it is true that inbound is excellent, it takes time, and the results do not always come as expected at least not in competitive industries permeated with low-volume, long-tail queries.
Once you can define your ideal customer profile, every other thing will fall in place. LinkedIn offers helpful ways for you to pre-qualify prospects at scale. One of the most effective tool you can use is the LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You can choose firmographic criteria like company size, job titles, geography and many other options to have them draft a prospecting list for you. The companies can be saved as new accounts to allow you get access to the individuals inside.
You will be provided with updates every time your key people visit the site, and before long you will be social selling. But you need to get on their radar by reaching out and discussing. It is necessary for you to build relationships with your target audience. You can choose to run a content promotion to these target accounts to create brand awareness. You should also take advantage of LinkedIn’s new Matched Audiences feature.
Finally, you need to select a process that will make the unscalable scalable, giving you access to more paying customers. You can write mails and send it by hand to an individual working in an account company’s headquarters. The mail should state precisely what you’re looking for. It should contain details on how to compile a prospecting list, how to search for key accounts on LinkedIn, and much more. You can be sure that within a short time you will have a long list of names.
