Each company should have a strategy developed to effectively acquire B2B customers. It seems natural that the responsibility for these activities rests with the marketing department. However, in modern B2B companies, many channels are used, and some of them involve the Pre-Sales team. Pre-Sales department is responsible for acquiring customers using so-called Outbound methods. It aims at permanent customer acquisition by building relationships and reaching new target groups.
However, these methods are not easy to implement. Many companies make a lot of mistakes, which often results in a lack of appropriate sales results.
Below I present 5 common mistakes made by sales professionals in attracting B2B customers.
1. Quantity, not quality
Outbound Sales
Outbound Sales, i.e. acquiring outbound B2B customers, involves non-automated methods like Cold Calling or Social Selling. Non-automated means they are based on manual selection of customers, and thus require a lot of time. On the other hand, Cold emailing can be automated, but—in order to be really effective—it must be based on a manually selected group of potential customers and very thoroughly prepared customized content. Unfortunately, many companies easily succumb to temptation and choose wrong actions: they aim at quantity, not quality.
Ready-made company databases
It is not difficult to come across companies that offer databases composed of millions of contact details. These are, allegedly, up-to-date, perfectly customized lists of companies and customers together with contact information. It is of course impossible to have an up-to-date database of companies because every day something changes.
Buying such a database is tantamount to:
- a lot of outdated data;
- a large amount of general data, not related to the ideal customer profile;
- a large amount of data to process, which costs a lot of time;
- risk of SPAM and a blocked domain.
LinkedIn is the only fairly up-to-date base on the web today.
Allocating a lot of money on SEO/Adwords without data analysis
Many companies spend huge amounts of money on advertising, rather than investing in Google and SEO analytics to adjust the promotion and get more value from it. Therefore, it is good to have people among your employees who are familiar with Google Adwords and experienced in optimizing these channels. An external agency, such as Senuto, may prove useful.
Mass email sending
Mass actions, such as sending hundreds of thousands of emails, will never produce the effect that personalised actions can yield. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine that by sending emails to thousands of recipients acquired from purchased databases, your messages will not be discarded as SPAM and damage your domain reputation. We strongly warn against making such decisions.
Paid link building
A large number of companies decide to purchase link building services. In terms of numbers, such a solution may seem interesting, but companies that specialise in this area too rarely inform customers about the consequences of such actions. There are many different sources of links, and companies declare quantity, not quality, which means that traffic obtained using this method may have a very dubious origin. In the case of brand building, this is a particularly dangerous solution. In addition, it also has a bad impact on Google’s assessment of your website.
2. Lead Generation by Cold Calling
Over the last 5 years, Cold Calling—that is calling companies directly to get valuable contact—has been receiving many negative feedback. In fact, this method has clearly lost its effectiveness over the past few decades and can now be replaced by other activities. Of course, this does not mean that Cold Calling does not work entirely.
The most common reasons why the Cold Calling method is ineffective:
– mismatched database of a target group,
– poor commercial skills of the calling team,
– lack of data selection, if the team has access to the entire database, people are not motivated to look for more appropriate contact details,
– lack of an appropriate procedure for the conversion of leads from the database.
Many companies decide to cooperate with Call Center companies. In our opinion, this model is dangerous for high-tech industries or sectors that require product specialization. Companies that employ specialists in a given field count on them to be a source of advice and to help with the sells. However, by employing a Call Center they harm themselves. They do not take into account the fact that the first contact with the customer is done by an employee of the Call Center and not an experienced consultant. Therefore, it is the Call Center that builds in the customer’s mind opinions about your brand, and the conversation they have had has an impact on whether there will be another contact. Unfortunately, very often the quality of these conversations is terrible. No wonder, because it is difficult to require an external company to have the same staff and experience as the company commissioning the service.
If a company already chooses to use Call Calling method, it is important that:
– The activities are based on a well-selected database with the possibility of pre-selection and based on information that will allow for easier building of relations with customers.
– The person responsible for holding the conversations has product and industry knowledge and knows the customer well. Without an understanding of the customer’s daily work and problems, there is no chance to build relationships.
3. Cold emailing without experience
An alternative to Cold Calling is a method of customer acquisition called Cold emailing. This model assumes conducting a tailor-made lead generation campaign, the created content of which is delivered to the private email addresses of employees of given companies in order to build positive relationships. The content of such emails is selected on an individual basis, does not contain a commercial offer, and is not a mass mailing.
The method became popular when the first mobile phones with a large screen and QWERTY keyboard were introduced to the market. Thanks to this, the sales representatives were increasingly using these devices for mailing. It has become a daily business communication platform.
However, successful Cold email customer acquisition requires some experience and understanding of legal aspects in Europe and beyond. Key in such activities are the tools implemented and solutions developed to reach specific people with the right message.
If you should wish to learn more about Cold Mailing, please refer to our Guide to Effective Practices in Cold Mailing.
4. Social Selling using bots
Currently, social media-based customer acquisition methods are very popular. This is not about marketing activities such as advertising or posts, but about building direct relations through platforms such as LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter, and Facebook.
There are companies on the market that offer to look for a certain phrase in social media. This allows you to search for important threads in different places on the web that your sales professionals may join. They can engage in an ongoing conversation and build personal brand awareness, thus gaining potential clients.
This method is extremely effective on LinkedIn. Unfortunately, many companies misunderstand this customer acquisition method and regard it as a mass marketing channel. Companies use bots that send messages on a mass scale without pre-selecting contact details. The messages are therefore meaningless and irrelevant. This spoils the value of the platforms on which these activities are carried out and undermines the sense of the activities resulting from a pure desire to build relationships in business. I strongly recommend that you stick to personal communication or cooperation with a partner who carries out such activities manually, where target and content selection, process supervision, and certain quality standards are possible. As I mentioned before, it is not about quantity, but about quality.
Likewise on platforms like Quora. It is also there that companies start marketing promotion campaigns instead of building relationships.
5. Chaotic marketing activities
The last element where very often quantity is regarded as more important than quality are the marketing activities. Many companies do not pay attention to the fact that there is currently an oversupply of content in the media.
This means that the amount of content appearing on the web is so overwhelming that we stop paying attention to it. Our experience shows that it is sometimes worthwhile to write less frequently, but more substantially.
Many companies blindly believe that marketing activities include, for example, regular posting of links and interesting materials on Facebook so that the profile of the company looks up to date and the customer can get the impression that the company is ‘alive’. This is a misconception. Brands harm themselves by doing so. Instead of engaging key customers, they deter them from their website because it does not offer any value. The marketing activities must be perfectly planned and tailored to the target group.
