Building a strong B2B pipeline equals better prospecting and conversions. Here are five tips you can use to add some muscle to your efforts.
Are your digital marketing efforts stagnating? It may have something to do with your B2B pipeline.
Your pipeline speaks of the number of prospective clients waiting to be closed. It tells you what stage these prospects are at and allows you to take strategic actions to move them along.
Then again, B2B sales cycles are long and complex, which means your team should add new prospects to the pipeline continually. Even to nurture existing ones.
It’s the best way to ensure your company doesn’t run empty.
Here are five strategies you can employ to build a strong pipeline for increased revenue.
1) Identify Your Ideal Buyer
A buyer persona embodies the consumer who contributes the most revenue to your business, with minimal resistance over a long period.
The idea behind creating buyer personas is to understand prospective customers’ goals, buying patterns, and pain points.
The information you gather allows you to craft targeted marketing messages.
Where do you start?
Existing customers offer great insight into buyer behavior and personality. Look at the information that interests them and how they prefer communicating. What led them to convert?
Here are some considerations for creating a buyer persona:
What industry are they in and what’s the company location and size?
- Which social platforms do they use and what kinds of conversations interest them?
- What keywords catch their attention and what phrases do they typically use when searching for solutions similar to yours?
- How do they consume information? Ebooks, infographics, or white papers? What’s their preferred communication mode?
- What obstacles keep the buyers from achieving their goals (pain points)?
- How will you solve these problems?
- What roadblocks may keep them from completing the purchase?
Answering these questions will help your teams know how to work with and respond to clients and lead them to convert.
2) Develop Relevant Messages
Having identified your ideal buyers, their challenges, and how your solutions can help them reach their goals, it’s time to target them with relevant messages.
The first thing you want to do is to create free content that triggers awareness.
An awareness of the problem and the solutions you can offer. This content takes the form of video, white papers, checklists, guides and tips, and ebooks.
Once you have caught their attention and they download the free content, ask for their email address in exchange.
The next step involves nurturing the prospects.
Create simple case studies or testimonials from existing customers that match your prospects and highlight how your offerings created value for them.
Go into specifics to ensure your target buyer relates to the existing customer.
Write several blogs that speak directly to the prospect’s needs and focus on the value you provide. It’s one of the best ways to connect with prospects.
Lastly, ensure your team knows these stories and can relay them to prospects when they engage in calls or meetings with the prospects.
3) Cold Calling
Used wisely, cold calls are an effective strategy for building a strong B2B pipeline and a steady flow of customers.
Unlike most digital marketing tactics, feedback is instantaneous.
The person on the other end of the line is interested in what you’re selling or not. This minimizes resource wastage, refines your prospects list, and speeds up the sales process. Here’s how to use cold calling to build your pipeline:
- Qualify your leads before calling: will the prospect benefit from your services? If not, calling them may elicit a negative response. Segment your list so you call leads that are likely to listen to you.
- Dial qualified leads: once you’ve qualified your cold leads, start with those that are more likely to convert then go down from there. This way, you’ll hook the good leads earlier on, and deal with the others later.
- Ask qualifying questions: these questions should revolve around the challenges they face and what solutions they have tried. It will help you qualify them further and analyze what features will be of most use to them.
- Plan the next step: figure out how to move your positively engaged lead to the stage. If they need time to think, offer to send more material or schedule another call. Just don’t end the call without agreeing on the next step towards closure.
- Follow them up: sometimes positively engaged leads ghost you but it doesn’t mean there is no potential for a deal to come through. Re-engage them to make and make it easier for them to move forward.
4) Test Multiple Lead Generation Tactics
Testing multiple inbound and outbound lead generation tactics can help pack your pipeline, but we would caution you from stretching your resources thin.
Here are some tactics you can try:
- Optimize your website for your target audience’s needs and wants. Make it easy for visitors to contact you.
- Consider paid advertising for top keywords used by people looking for solutions like yours. It will boost brand awareness and generate traffic.
- Syndicate content to ensure it reaches your target audience across multiple websites, who are then directed to your site as leads.
- Host webinars with influencers, persons of interest in your industry, and your own team. Let the topics revolve around industry-related challenges and how they can be solved.
- Consider email marketing automation to send a sequence of personalized email messages to prospects.
Trying a variety of strategies allows you to identify those that effectively led qualified leads to your pipeline.
Revisit Lost Opportunities
Whether it’s through negligence, unfortunate circumstances, misinformation, or other reasons, some prospects fall through. It happens in all businesses.
Revisiting lost opportunities is worth undertaking, as you never know what has changed over time.
You may have improved your services, or they are now in a better financial position or are looking for a new partner.
Do you get where this is going?
Here are some ways to get lost leads back on board:
- Connect with them on social media. Follow them and invite them to follow you back. Follow them and invite them to follow you back. Viewing your activities may help regenerate interest.
- Share testimonials with them and on your platforms. It will serve as social proof of your credibility and ability to meet customer needs.
- Schedule a call. Use the opportunity to find out why they did not proceed with you. Don’t sell anything, rather listen carefully to what they say. Their feedback can help you improve your services.
