Welcome to “The Killer 3 in B2B.” It’s a two-minute short, three-part series that delves into what every B2B sales consultant needs to know about winning work.

Businesses are made up of relationships, and given that B2B sales consultants are at the company’s front lines, they play a very important role in engaging and establishing these relationships with clients. This leads us to ask, How often should we be interacting with a client? What are the best practices in engaging with them? And when’s the best time to engage?

In Part 1 of the Killer 3 in B2B, Jeff Cooper reveals why sales consultants should look at the number of interactions they have with their clients and the number of stakeholders they are engaging with.

View the other parts of this series:

The text that follows is a transcript of the video.

Frequency

Most B2B sales processes have three, four, or five touchpoints. At Step Change, we have up to 20. With marketing automation, retargeting, and good systems around our proposals, we can refocus our time in high-value, high-engagement touchpoints with our clients as well as get our frequency right up. Frequency breeds familiarity, which breeds trust. And trust is the number 1 driver in B2B sales, and it’s most likely to help you protect, preserve, and maximize margin.

So here’s the thing. Rather than thinking about the proposal presentation or the quote presentation as the key touchpoint and then bombarding them with an hour of stuff, ask yourself, “How can I split down that presentation journey across the whole journey?” So deliver a case study here, check them after the scoping meeting, and put a few sales messages in there. See them at another time outside the presentation to show them a cool piece of work that might interest them in another area.

You see, if we bring someone into a sales meeting and hit them with an ounce-worth of stuff, it’s really hard for them to remember. In fact, the average attention span is less than 20 minutes. So you want to break it up across. And with the wonders of marketing automation and retargeting, it’s really easy to get these done these days, and it doesn’t mean hiring more salespeople or taking more time.

Depth of Relationship

We meet a key stakeholder, and we think they’re making the decision, but the reality is that the average business decision has three stakeholders or at least that many influencers. So we have to know them too because if we’ve been told the problem is A, we need to make sure that all the other stakeholders have an agreement on that issue.

When we’re working on B2B sales, we need to make sure we understand the decision-making landscape — what person A needs, what person B needs, what person C needs — and frame our presentation, our touchpoints, and our levels of frequency to get coverage across all three.

Increase your sales efficiency by having a top-down view of your service offerings and realigning your business’s strategy. Having the right strategy in place gets you ahead of the game and wins you customers. We can help you. 

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