How to Read Your B2B Customers & Close Deals
When you are selling to a business, you need to read your customers and prospects to make the most out of a deal. Once you know their habits and buying patterns, it’s a good idea to make notes in your CRM product like Salesforce, FileMaker, Longjump, ACT!, or Zoho. This way you’ll be able to capitalize on a sale in a timely fashion.
These are some great tactics to use as offers and articles when you do your next email marketing campaigns.
1. Excess Budget at Year End – Many departments in larger companies are allocated a specific budget. What happens if they don’t use all of the budget? The mighty CFO could look at spending company-wide and if a specific department doesn’t use it all this year, they might lose some for next year. So these savvy spenders may look to your company to allocate some of this spend to.
2. Looking for End of Quarter Deals – Many companies already know that there is a sprint for you to make your revenue numbers each quarter. These smart people could wait till March 25th to tell you they’re ready to make a purchase. Capitalize on it! Give them a deal and get those sales in the door, you’ll make up for it with your other customers that aren’t looking for those quarter end deals.
3. Looking Good To A Boss – Some of your customers and prospects are looking to look good in front of their bosses if they’re not the business owner or C-level themselves. The obvious fuel to give them is the fact that you can save them money by cutting them a deal. But you might be able to pile some other things onto the sale that make them look even better and won’t take a lot out of your company’s pockets. If you sell software or hardware, why not offer some free support? If your product is a good one, your customers will rarely need to use it anyway.
4. Learn From Others – In some cases your prospects are looking to learn from your other customers so they can set benchmarks. It might be a great idea to get another customer on a webinar, then invite your prospects to it. Outline the problem the customer had and how a solution like yours solved it. Another way to do this would be offering a white paper outlining the same.
So make sure you take note of how your prospects and customers like to purchase then market accordingly. Are you having any luck with these ideas? Please share!
© 2010 – 2012, Contributing Author. All rights reserved.