Four Useful and Practical Tips For B2B Software Marketers

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If you are selling software for B2B, this post is for you.

Here, you will find four excellent tips and lessons to maximise the B2B selling. Let’s start the first lesson with:

1. Forget About the Sales Funnel

If you don’t know, there are better ways to sell your products. There are four main behavioral actions associated with better customer management:

  • See: largest addressable qualified audience.
  • Think: largest addressable qualified audience with weak commercial intent.
  • Do: largest addressable qualified audience with strong commercial intent.
  • Care: current customers.

You should be tailoring your ad campaigns, content promotion, and all other marketing efforts to each level of intent. “Qualified audience” is a target group of buyers that have the potential to be a customer, not every single person who has ever been on the Internet. From there, you can narrow the audience further by classifying if they have weak or strong intentions to actually purchase your product, as your marketing strategy should differ based on the prospect’s intent.

When putting together your Intent Cluster strategy, start with creating the content for each intent level, so you have something to actually promote and serve to your target audiences. You should start with Do first, then Think, then See, since your Do intent prospects are the most valuable and are the ones closest to the final purchase.

2. The Importance of the User Experience

User experience is very important, especially the way how people use and interact with your website. It is crucial to give your users an optimal website experience. Don’t make your customers cry. If they can’t figure out how to navigate your website and find exactly what they’re looking for without getting frustrated, how can you expect them to make any kind of purchase

High-performing landing pages, which included a discussion on design best practices, are essential. Even if it’s the biggest trend in software website design, don’t apply a new feature to your site if it hurts your user experience and drives potential customers away.

How software marketers can improve their user experience? The answer is simple: focus on becoming more user-centric in 2016. Find out which types of design positively affect your success metrics, such as return visits or conversion rate, depending on the goal of your campaigns. How can you do this? Testing of course! Does a bolder button color increase clicks and conversions? How does a new website design affect bounce rates? The best way to figure out what type of user experience works best is with help from your actual users.

3. Maintain a Healthy Relationship Between Sales and Marketing

Tension between the sales and marketing teams isn’t a new issue for the B2B industry. Still, almost every session at this conference continued to drive home the fact that more than ever Sales and Marketing need to work together.

What’s the most common barrier to closing a sale and how can Marketing decrease that resistance? What are prospects asking about the most and what can Marketing do to answer any common concern? Try sitting in on a sales call. What better way to truly understand the prospect than to actually hear how they talk to your sales team?

How software marketers can improve their relationship with sales: It’s hard to believe you if you say your sales and marketing alignment is perfect. One way or another, there’s always something you can do to improve that relationship. Other than listening to their phone pitches, having a regular meeting between Sales and Marketing department is equally important. It doesn’t have to be weekly, but no less than quarterly would be an ideal meeting schedule to improve the efforts and strategies of both the Sales and Marketing teams.

4. What About the Customer?

Congratulations! You’ve just closed a sale and have a new customer! Now what happens to them? You certainly don’t ignore them and just get in touch during renewal time!

This is where the Care intent plays its role: the relationship building between you and the customer doesn’t end when the invoice goes through. What other benefits can you provide to the people who are already sold on your product? Promote a secondary line of products, with specific cases pointing to the benefits of each for your current customers. Provide educational content that can help to improve their use of your product and services. The possibilities truly are endless once you’ve overcome the challenge of actually acquiring a customer.

How software marketers can focus on the customer: Most of your new customers are probably using your type of software for the first time. Take advantage of that lack of knowledge and provide them with all the answers they need. Do you sell marketing automation software? Offer them a one-on-one call to explain the importance of lead scoring and how to set it up. Are you an LMS vendor? Send all your new customers a how-to video on creating their first set of courses. Focus on providing an excellent level of customer service so when the time comes to renew their contract, they can’t imagine a life without the expertise your company provides.