Business to business or B2B marketing seems like a foreign language to many people who are trying it for the first time. The consumer market seems so much plainer and easier, after all, we’re dealing with every day people. It can however be important to know how to sell to other businesses. You may feel you are dealing with some mysterious entity the first time you consider this. Sometimes it is necessary to step out of your comfort zone to grow your business.
What you need to realize is that in reality businesses are just people. They may be decision makers, executives, highly paid company officers, and even mid-grade managers but at the end of the day, they are people, just like you. Selling to other businesses is no different than selling to individual people; you still need to consider the kind of person you’re selling to.
Much of selling involves trying to get into a person’s head. What does a business owner or manager need and/or want? What things will improve their lives, and more importantly, the operations and profitability of their business? Answering these questions is the first key to selling to other businesses.
To sell to other businesses you need the right message to market match something we discuss in detail in the DataJeo for market research article.
1: Identify Your Target
The first step in creating a strong pitch for your product and service is considering who you need to speak to. Depending on the business there may be more than one person to consider depending on the company structure and how the decisions are made. You have to know who you’re selling to and then consider how your business can benefit them personally.
As we discussed, you’re dealing with real people, and they will be taking their own needs and desires into consideration as well as their roles in serving the greater needs of the company. Is your contact a buyer, a manger, or a business owner?
Depending on who you’re speaking to, you’ll want to come with ideas and features about what you have to offer and how it makes their lives easier as well as benefiting the business.
2: Don’t Just Sell, Give Them Something They Can Use
Whoever your prospect is, you can expect that someone else has found them too. They probably get multiple pitches a day for what you have to offer. A simple letter with a sales pitch is no longer enough to draw people in anymore. Because of this, you want to attach your sales pitch to something they can get immediate benefit from.
Many companies do this by offering white papers. White papers may be written as guides on important industry topics and trends, and may even highlight problems the industry is facing. This can be accompanied by a pitch explaining how you offer a solution.
Either way the white papers are free and useful, so they are more likely to be read than a straight forward sales pitch email.. Writing effective white papers will take some work but could pay off in the long term.
3: Start With Value Over Price
When you’re making a pitch to any business, you may find yourselves in the middle of a bidding war. Too many entrepreneurs focus in only on their prices as a way to put their best foot forward. While pricing certainly is important, it’s far more vital to highlight the value your product has to offer. What can your product do that others can’t. Can it save the company time or money even while requiring an investment? Can it make life easier for managers or help improve employee morale and productivity?
When you’re making your bid don’t advertise that you are cheap. If anything this will raise red flags if it’s all you have to offer. In fact you can sometimes make more money by raising your prices.
4: Highlight The Business Benefits
Whether it’s in consumer to consumer or business to business marketing, even professionals have made mistakes in copy-writing. Never just tell someone about the features of what you have to offer. Features are boring and no one wants to hear you list them all day long. They want to know how what you have to offer is going to solve a common problem.
For example if you are selling computers don’t say “My computers have a lot of RAM” but instead consider, “Are you tired of losing valuable company time and money waiting for your computers to load? With our CPUs high RAM capability your upload, download, and processing speeds will be through the roof. You’ll save time, money, and your business will be moving at lightning speed when processing your data!”
Benefits are everything. Nobody wants to know what your products or service can do, everyone wants to know what benefit they will bring to them. The WIIFM or “What’s In It For Me”, mantra holds true. You need to learn to write copy that grabs the attention and lets your prospect visualize a great outcome if they invest in what you are offering.
5: Make it Easy To Act
Your call to action (CTA) is the grand finale of any pitch you write. It needs be dazzling and out of the park, but more importantly, it needs to be easy to act upon. Links in emails should be obvious and easy to click on, and make sure you test them before sending. Broken links will not bring results and will look unprofessional.
Contact info should be prominent, accurate, and very visible. Like it or not, nobody likes a hassle. If your final pitch is hard to act on, even a little, or your lead finds it hard to get in touch you may lose your sale to someone else out of sheer convenience.
6: Gather Leads
This probably should have been the first step, but you need to gather solid prospective leads to sell to. It means nothing if you have the greatest product in the world and killer sales pitch to back it up, and no relevant people to sell it to. Gathering leads can be tricky, but made much easier by programs like Coldreach or Macroleads that help you organize, streamline, and even somewhat automate the process.
