23 Oct How to Help Sales Close More B2B Leads

As a marketer you’re already fully aware how generating high-quality, qualified B2B leads is a tough thing to do. Keeping the sales team happy means handing over only the people who are most receptive in learning more about your product or service.

And when you’ve generated the best leads possible they often don’t get converted into opportunities and sales as effectively as they could be. It’s not that sales aren’t doing their job properly, it’s just that they’re missing some vital tools and support!

To help close this gap, we’ve compiled some of the best ways that marketing can assist sales. These techniques will help to nurture and close B2B leads at all stages of the buyer cycle.

Remember, you can build the resources that help sales close more deals, but it’s important to together and showing them that the resources are there. Let’s dig in:

Create specific content around sales insights

Content marketing is a fantastic channel to generate and nurture leads deeper into the funnel, but what about content that contributes to closing the sale?

Talking to sales and discovering what common objections, pains and challenges their opportunities raise during conversations can give you great ideas for content in the forms of eBooks, blog posts and whitepapers.

Not only will this content help sales nurture their pipeline, but can also generate more B2B leads at the top of the funnel. It positions each sales rep as an expert that are truly willing to serve the people they’re building relationships with. This builds an incredible amount of trust and solidifies relationships quickly, which is great for particularly long sales cycles.

Sit down and listen to suggestions from your salespeople’s perspective. Try and dig as much as possible for the information they gather when speaking to prospects. This can be a goldmine for content at all stages of the buying cycle.

Build tools that represent the value you deliver

Content isn’t the only way you can help sales deliver value. Engineering as marketing and building side projects are becoming popular methods of generating B2B leads at all stages of the funnel, but they can also be used to illustrate the value your offering brings and guide potential customer towards the close.

Many companies are building ROI calculators that show prospects how their offering will save money or generate more revenue and profit for their businesses.

SnapInspect, a SaaS product that helps real estate agents conduct property inspections, has a great ROI calculator to illustrate the number of hours and amount of money their customers can save each year. You can check out their ROI calculator here to gather some inspiration.

This is just one example of how tools can help sales close more deals. Going back to the previous section, you could easily come up with ideas for profitable tools just by talking to your salespeople. Have a brainstorming session with them and see what useful ideas come up.

Enable sales to tap into social media

Social media isn’t just for marketers. Training your sales teams on key social media channels that your ideal customers use can help them nurture B2B leads in a more pro-active fashion.

Let’s say an opportunity is a regular user on Twitter and has tweeted a question regarding a particular challenge. Even if it has nothing to do with your offering, the salesperson dealing with that lead can chime in and assist.

They can link to content on your own website or blog or share relevant content from another publication or platform. It doesn’t really matter because the benefit in doing this is building the relationship further.
Each sales rep should have their own Twitter account. They can then put each opportunity into lists in order to keep an eye on them day-to-day.

Your salespeople should work on a pro-active level as well as a reactive one. Let’s say you find something valuable around your prospects’ challenges or interests (which the rep would have discovered during their conversations with them). It doesn’t hurt to tweet at this person with a shortened link and simply telling them you think it would be of interest.

This works especially well over LinkedIn, too. Training sales on how to keep an eye on their prospects’ activity and how to react accordingly can go a long way. Sharing content in the same way you would on Twitter also works. The difference is in knowing which platform a particular prospect is most active in.

Conclusion

There are some patterns within each of the above techniques that we should highlight before we wrap up. First and most importantly is that delivering value to your B2B leads doesn’t end once they’ve been handed to sales. Nurturing should take place before, during and after the sales process.

Another common trait of aligned marketing and sales departments lies in working together. Marketing doesn’t create sales content in a silo – it’s done in collaboration with the sales teams. Digging deep into these insights will show you what will help push the needle during the sales process.

So where do you start? Get your marketing and sales teams into a room, lay all the cards on the table and start asking sales the right questions. See what possibilities get them excited and figure out what would help contribute to more deals being closed quickly.