Get B2B leads using chat with our online prospecting tips

In the UK, we’re now in 2 months of lockdown! The government is only just now announcing ways to relieve lockdown measures so that people and businesses can begin to resume normal day-to-day life. That doesn’t mean all is hunky-dory though. Here’s a few things which you can expect in regards to B2B sales:

• Less face to face sales meetings for the foreseeable future
• Different methods of lead generation like B2B leads using chat
• Challenges in reaching customers via just one channel like phone or email
• Delays to decision making as companies only ‘focus on the essentials’
• Limited budgets for anything that costs money

Long story short, you’ll likely need to make tweaks to how you reach out to prospects and close sales. It’s not all doom and gloom. There’s a lot of opportunity out there and companies are still buying!

To help you with this, we’ve created a few tips below which will help you change your B2B sales process to find leads and sales during this time.

Think long term as well as short term

Yes, most companies have lost a segment of their customer base due to COVID-19. And yes, a lot of companies aren’t going to hit their Q2 sales quotas. Whilst getting new business is a top priority for many companies, you should be wary of short term thinking when it comes to value-adding sales campaigns.

For example, don’t burn bridges by sending a 10,000 cold-email shot with a vague message just because you’re low on leads or sales. Make sure that whatever you’re doing continues to showcase your value and is super-relevant to the recipients.

To that end, if a deal is experiencing delays in closing, don’t lose patience with them. Think of it from their end if they are having a budget crisis or had to lay off half their workforce. It’s so refreshing to be speaking to a salesperson who cares about what’s happening in your life right now, so be that person.

That being said, make sure you explore every avenue in the context of helping them solve the problems they’re facing. You can follow up without being annoying. You can find out more about how to do that here, in fact!

Another top tip would be to focus on inbound lead generation as much as possible. You can find out how to generate B2B leads using chat.

Closing sales tips – Following up without being annoying

Offer stuff genuinely of value

You want your Prospect’s attention? Be useful to them! If the actual decision maker isn’t currently furloughed, your Prospect’s probably got their attention stretched thin at the moment. As such, follow this simple process to make sure you’re going to add to their day:

• Offer something that’s genuinely useful to them right now and explain why you think this will be useful
• Be REALLY concise. How concise? Write out something you think is concise and then try to half the word-count
• Personalise based on relevance to them right now and the value of that. Make sure that you’re a source of value, not stress!

If you find prospecting difficult at the moment, making a relevance & value focused tweak will have the world of difference. Done right, the leads will come flooding in.

You can check out some more tips on how to be relevant and genuinely useful right here.

If you can’t say it in 3 sentences, then it’s not concise enough

Take it step by step

It may have been that 3 month’s ago, you could have a phone call and then go straight to the quoting stage. A lot has changed since then. Companies have less staff and things generally are less efficient. As such, respect that your Prospect company isn’t working at 100% efficiency.

How do you do this? Ask them how they’d like to proceed;

“Thanks for your time [name]. Normally at this stage we’d ask for a 30 minute meeting where we go through some questions to provide a quote. How does that sound? Or do you have any suggestions on where we go from here?”

A simple question like this will not only make the sale go through easier, but will be welcomed by the Prospect!

A good earlier stage example would be to simply encourage someone to visit your site. For time-poor decision makers, it’s lower commitment then a phone call and you can still capture any B2B leads using chat.

Top sales prospecting tips from Salesforce

Salesforce have this great blog on different B2B prospecting methods which you might find useful. A big takeaway from their blog is the value of using different channels over time. You can find out more by checking out the blog link.

Get 33% more B2B leads using chat and only pay for results

I hope you found this B2B prospecting tip blog useful! Another way that you can generate more leads is through your website on a 100% results focused basis.

We generate 33% more leads for our clients on average and you only pay for the results that we get you. Check out our page to find out more.