The art of traditional B2B sales are changing, are you aware of it? Are you as a sales manager aware of it? Or are you still just paying attention to old metrics like; booked sales meetings, performed sales meetings and number of new sales orders? Today Internet helps salespeople be at the right place at the right time on a scale that never has been possible before, and at a cost close to zero. If you don’t leverage this you are losing business right now. Period! So let’s build new strong business muscles 2012.
Savvy Buyers Now Have Control
If you are trying to understand how to embrace the opportunity of improving B2B sales by implementing social media marketing to your sales process you have ended up on the right place because this is what I will focus more on in the coming posts. Why? Because we must learn and adapting fast to this game at the sales arena 2012, savvy buyers now have control of your sales process and you can’t just wine and dine your customers to new orders, we are living in a new era today. Regardless of the product or services you are selling buyers will very likely check online at some point to see what others are saying about you and your products.
The Activity Fuels Your Business
In a traditional sales process we are always talking about the ratio in the different stages of the process. For an example different stages could be leads, phone calls, sales meetings and new orders. You get your ratio by measuring how many phone calls you need to make before you have a meeting with a potential customer, how many meetings do we need to do before we have a new order. So with other words your activity fuels your business, and this is why many people in the game is familiar with the expression; sales is a numbers game.
Improving The Sales Process With Social Media
If we are putting this into practice it will look something like this. If you have ten potential customers on list, you might be able book seven meetings depending of your skills, out of these seven meetings you will maybe get business with two new clients, and the sales cycle will of course differentiate depending of the product or service you are selling. The point I want to make here is that you are losing approximately 80 percent of potential business which shows it room for improving the sales process with social media marketing. Let’s together see how we can reduce the loss and increase sales.
It’s Your Turn
What is your take on this?
If you want to understand how I think regarding the sales process when you integrate the online world with the offline, check out this infographic.
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About Mattias Gronborg
