B2B Sales in 2024: Finding The Right Person
All professional salespeople will tell you that you have to connect with the key decision-makers. Always. This allows you to get your offer in front of the right eyes. Otherwise, even the most attractive offer will fall flat. Pitching it to a person with no decision-making power in their company makes little to no sense.
Ignore this rule, and your business will definitely struggle with sales. You don’t want to waste your sales team’s time and resources, right? So what should you do instead?
In this article, we provide tips on how to find, connect with, and approach actual decision-makers within a company. This ensures that you reach out to the right person the first time instead of wasting your precious time on gatekeepers.
What is B2B Sales? B2B sales is the process when one business sells services/products to another. They usually come with longer sales cycles and larger deal sizes. These sales require building a strong relationship. They are not made emotionally. The decision-making process is not always fast and straightforward.
Defining the “Right Person” in B2B Sales
Want to close more deals? The first step is you need to identify the companies you want to do business with, and the second step is to connect with the right people. At the end of the day, you want to build up relationships with those who have decision-making power. How do you do this?
- Connect with the right job titles and roles, such as C-level executives or those who have a greater impact on making decisions, such as managers or team leaders.
- Focus on their pain points and needs. Uncover their issues and offer them real solutions to their problems.
- Take advantage of your existing network and contacts. Ask your current connections or clients to make an intro to others if they have such an opportunity.
- Understand the entirety of the B2B decision-making process. It can take a while for your pitch to get approved. In many cases, you’ll need to get a “yes” from 3 or more people in the organization to make a sale.
Strategies for Engaging with the Right Person
Personalized Outreach
Generic messages and mass cold emails won’t get the job done. Take the time to do in-depth research about your prospects. Check their website, social media, company mentions in the press, etc. Dig deeper into their needs.
What content do they consume? What channels do they use? What are their biggest challenges today? With all of this data at hand, create a personalized message for your cold outreach.
Multi-Channel Engagement
Direct outreach is a fundamental aspect of the B2B sales approach. The idea behind it is to start meaningful conversations with key stakeholders to build connections. To make it more efficient, many professional salespeople take a multichannel approach.
- Email. Develop personalized and engaging emails to drive the interest of key decision-makers. Customize your communication to target their issues specifically and position your offer as a great solution.
- Sales Calls. Use phone calls to connect with key decision-makers, build rapport, and address their specific requirements. Get ready with discussion topics and a concise statement of worth to leave an impactful impression. To make sales calls more effective, use contact data tools like People Search or a Phone Number Finder API to quickly locate accurate phone numbers of decision-makers. These tools save time by providing verified contact details, ensuring you’re reaching the right person. With accurate data in hand, you can focus on building rapport and addressing their specific needs during the call.
- Outreach on LinkedIn. Utilize LinkedIn’s messaging function to communicate directly with C-level people in companies that you’d like to target. Tailor your messages to each prospect and show you comprehend their obstacles and objectives.
To get the max out of it, develop a cadence for your multi-channel strategy that will last 2-4 weeks. Be sure to use various points of contact across different communication platforms.
How to Find the Right Decision-Makers for B2B Sales
1. Start with Buyer Personas
They are your go-to reference in everyday B2B sales activities. Buyer personas allow you to focus on decision-makers who are the key contacts for making sales. It means you’ll quickly exclude all other individuals at a company and save your time.
Instead, you’ll be able to pick the best ways to sell to decision-makers. When you select which companies to focus on, you consider specific qualifications, such as:
- Industry
- Revenue
- Number of employees
You need to have the same qualifiers for your decision-maker personas as well. You need to know things like:
- Job titles and responsibilities of decision-makers
- Their experience at the organization
- Decision maker type. Are they the ones who authorize the paperwork and ultimately determine the outcome? Or do they do the research and pass all the info to another person?
- Which specific pages on your website do they visit? What do they do? How long do they stay there?
Analyze your current clients and leads at the latest stages to find answers to these questions.
Search for the shared characteristics and create an image of the usual decision maker to find similar individuals at different companies easily.The more thorough and robust your profile of perfect customers and decision-makers is, the more successful you will be in locating and contacting them. This way, you can focus on connecting with individuals who will move the needle for you in terms of sales.
Why Are Buyer Personas Important?
In B2B sales, you’ll likely need to have more than one buyer persona. This is related to the complexity of the decision-making process described above. Job roles differ among companies, and a company’s size has a significant impact as well.
Would you like to pitch a startup that has 5-10 employees? Connect with the CEO. Want to target large corporations? Build up relationships with lower-level managers. That’s why, in most cases, it is important to create multiple personas to represent all the key stakeholders of your target companies.
2. Identify People Involved in the Decision-Making Process
The decisions are not only made by the CEO. Unlike purchasing a birthday present for your friend, which is typically a solo decision, B2B sales frequently require the input of multiple individuals. What is the reason behind it? That’s because B2B processes are not always simple, straightforward, or even standardized.
Here’s a quick overview of potential participants:
- The Initiator. The individual who first identifies an issue (“Our current software slows down our progress!”).
- The Influencer. An experienced expert who helps evaluate current choices (“Our IT department suggests transitioning to cloud services.”).
- The User. People who will use the purchase. (“Our sales team will appreciate software that is easily integrated with our CRM.”).
- The Buyer. The individual who manages negotiation and paperwork.
- The Decision-Maker. The individual who has the final say with a “yes” or “no.”
These insights about their organization and their unique problems will definitely help you find the right person (or persons) with whom to communicate and connect.
3. Use CRM and Lead Intelligence Tools in B2B Sales
With a CRM and the right stack of lead intelligence tools, you can be more efficient in your sales processes. It’s a good practice to move all the leads to your CRM.Take it one step further and utilize automation by combining your CRM with other tools. For example, Snow.io. This is a great B2B email finder tool that allows you to quickly find and validate emails based on domain, name, or location. This makes your outreach more efficient and simplifies the process of locating suitable prospects.
4. Company Research
Don’t skip this important point. Yes, it’s time-consuming, but in the long run, it’s well worth it. In-depth company research allows your sales team to align your offer with your potential clients’ specific needs and pain points. This leads to more effective solutions and more sales. A win-win.
Equip your sales team with the knowledge of your prospects’ background, structure, and pain points. This will result in more meaningful conversations, stronger relationships, trust, and more sales.
5. Market Segmentation
Market segmentation is a great strategy that you should use in your B2B sales. Why? It allows your sales team to focus their efforts on the most promising leads. And guess what? This improves conversion rates and shortens the sales cycle.
Also, take the time to segment your markets properly. This will help you differentiate from your competitors and position your products and services to meet your client’s unique needs.
With specific segments, your businesses will have more relevant marketing messages and campaigns. This will result in better engagement and conversion rates.
The Role of Data and Analytics in 2024 Sales
Data analytics helps you make your sales processes better and more efficient. It gives you a lot of insights into bottlenecks and workflows.
This way, you’ll have a clear understanding of what you need to improve and automate. It brings you and your sales team many benefits, such as saving time and resources. Your sales team is also able to focus on more high-value activities (such as closing deals and building up relationships).
Final Thoughts
There you have it. We hope these tips provide insight into how to connect with the right people to make more B2B sales in 2024 and beyond. Let’s quickly recap them here.
Don’t forget to create buyer personas for all the decision-makers; do personalized outreach; use multiple channels to connect with your prospects; understand the decision-making matrix in the organization you target; use CRM and lead intelligence tools to make your processes more efficient; do company research and market segmentation; and lastly, always use data and analytics to measure your sales progress and improve the processes accordingly.
