In 2022, the world of business is going to be shifting. The way that sales are done is going to be changing, and you need to be prepared for the new era. 

This year is the perfect time to up your game when it comes to sales outreach. Technology is constantly evolving, and the way that people are using it is changing all the time. This means that you need to be on top of the latest trends in order to succeed.

In this post, I am going to share with you five powerful tips that will help you step up your game and reach your target market.

What Has Changed About B2B Sales Over Time?

The B2B sales process used to be fairly straightforward. A business would be aware of the need, find a solution through word-of-mouth, and get in touch with one or more suppliers. The deal would be reached after a few meetings.

However, with globalization crashing through the big door in recent years and competition widening, the providers were left perplexed about which strategy to employ to grab a bigger share of the market cake. 

Numerous new opportunities emerged, making life more difficult for both clients and service providers alike. These opportunities included the importance of the company’s content, review websites, social media, and paid advertisements.

78% of B2B purchasers invest as much time or more in their own product or service research. This is a major issue for businesses because it implies that these people won’t just base their decision on what you have to offer them—instead, they’ll also think about things like price and quality!

Customers were so overwhelmed and skeptical of the legitimacy of the services that they decided to conduct their own research. This ultimately reduced SDR’s ability to sway the client’s choice.

What are the outcome and changes that have occurred?

As a result, the company’s greatest sales strategy became the idea of sales and marketing combining and working together.

The importance of remote communication itself, which globalization and the 2020 events brought to the table, resulted in a huge increase in the use of online meeting software like Zoom or Google Meet. Clients could now meet with service providers more quickly as a result.

However, while providers eventually had an opportunity to enhance their conversion tracking, the sales team was faced with a new challenge: enhancing presentation abilities for online meetings with time constraints so that prospects could feel comfortable and knowledgeable while listening to their problems and seeing benefits that were unique to them.

Here are five tips to help you step up your game in 2022 when it comes to sales outreach.

1. The New Normal for B2B Sales Outreach: Social Selling

In the past, face-to-face meetings were the norm for sales prospects. However, as globalization has increased and more people work remotely, this is no longer the case. Today, social selling is a big part of B2B sales outreach. When you're using social selling, you use social media to build relationships with your potential customers. You can do this by following them on Twitter, liking their Facebook page, or subscribing to their newsletters. Once you've built a relationship with them, you can then start selling to them directly.  Sales teams had a difficult time understanding the delicate nature of social selling. As time went on, it continued to show promise, so in 2022 social selling will be essential if you want your sales strategy to succeed.  

2. Knowing the Source of Your Leads

It's time to up your lead game. CRM is useful in this situation. You can later classify the leads based on their source by placing all of their information in one location. Why? You should interact with them differently depending on where they are from in order to personalize their shopping experience. Although there are no universal categories, the following are the ones we found to be helpful: 

• Hand raisers from cold calls, email campaigns, and social media. If you know, for example, that the majority of your leads are coming from social media, you can tailor your messaging to be more interactive and engaging. You can also explore new channels such as Reddit and Quora to see if there is a community of potential customers there who might be interested in what you have to offer. 

• An SDR found and manually entered custom leads into the system. These leads may come from LinkedIn connections, Sales Navigator Search, or online data scraping. You can further refine this categorization based on industry, pain points, and other factors to make your cold outreach more specialized.

• Prospects who downloaded educational content from your website or registered for a webinar and provided their contact information are known as educatees. Since not all of them are leads for your niche, extra care must be taken to segment them.

• Warmth is one of the simplest ways to group your leads. Some might be further along in the buying process than others, and some might not be as interested.
  
  Cold leads are potential customers who are just entering the sales process or who show little to no interest in speaking with SDRs.
  
  Warm leads are those who have shown some interest in contacting or needing your business by, for example, chatting with customer service or contacting you through social media. Unfortunately, they are not prepared to speak with an SDR. To advance further down the funnel, this lead will typically require a nurturing campaign or direct assistance.
  
  Hot leads have explicitly stated that they are prepared to speak with your business or have a high volume of questions to back up this assertion.

The advantage of categorization is that you can use one system or a combination of systems to further customize your strategy. Overall, lead categorization and labeling will enable you to better track your KPIs, lead conversion, and type of lead effectiveness to identify what strategies are most effective and where they should be modified. 

3. Utilize Video Format

Video is a powerful medium that can be used to engage customers, as well as create brand advocates. With the increasing use of smartphones and other mobile devices, it is no surprise that video marketing is becoming more popular. 84% of people have been convinced to buy something after watching a brand's promotional clip, and there are plenty more examples of where that came from! Video can be used to introduce your company and what you offer, to sell your product or service, and to engage with your potential customers. Some tips for effective video marketing include using a pre-recorded message (rather than live) to save time, scripting your videos so that they are shorter but more engaging, and using professional visuals that will look good on social media.  Videos can help the B2B prospect to draw their own conclusions about whether your product is a good fit for them. This builds trust and encourages further education on your product. 

4. Create Trust by Educating

The best way to gain trust is by educating your prospects about what you offer. This can be done in a variety of ways, such as through blog articles, white papers, eBooks or webinars. These resources should be tailored to the specific needs of your target market and should be updated regularly.  By providing valuable information and showing that you are credible, you will build trust and encourage your customers to learn more about your product. 

5. B2B Sales Outreach Process should be updated regularly

The B2B sales process should be updated regularly in order to keep up with the latest trends and customer needs. This will help you to stay ahead of your competition, and build a rapport with your potential customers. By being responsive, you can create a sense of loyalty and trust. Working smarter, not harder was one of the most well-known business maxims in recent years. Finding different approaches to make the process simpler while maximizing its effectiveness and facilitating easy scaling up meant doing this. The B2B sales process was to be included in the application of this formula. But how did they manage to do it? What sales strategy do they employ? They put sales engagement tools into practice. As LinkedIn became the most efficient way to find B2B leads, a number of tools to aid in LinkedIn outreach emerged, freeing up your time to focus on more crucial tasks like nurturing your leads toward conversion. It frees up your sales creativity and transfers routine tasks to the software. How can you effectively use it for sales outreach?

• Through a Multichannel Approach. Utilizing a multichannel strategy is possible with some sales engagement tools. This implies that various channels are synchronizing their efforts to boost sales effectiveness. Consequently, you have a variety of channels to reach your prospects, including email and LinkedIn. As a matter of fact, the multichannel strategy yields the best outcomes.

• Through Sequences. Sequences can be the tool you use to implement the Multichannel approach if that is your goal. Smart sequences, which allow you to combine various actions into a single campaign and specify the interval between them before sending it to a prospect, are the way of the future for lead generation. You need not be concerned if some steps were missed because the tool will follow the instructions and send the outreach you’ve prepared.

• Through a Personalization at Scale. Personalization became another trend in the B2B sales process. Get as personal as you can with your leads by mentioning their name, area of interest, or employer in order to build a rapport, convey your concern for them, and express your desire to help them. Naturally, using sales engagement tools to tailor your cold outreach at scale became wiser and simpler.

Conclusion

The landscape of B2B sales has changed dramatically over the last decade, and it’s important that your outreach process keeps up. If you want to stay ahead of the curve in 2022, make sure to implement the following changes:  social selling, lead sourcing intelligence, video format, trust-building education, and regularly updating your outreach process.

Luckily for you, we have a team of experts who can help with all of that! At Demand.Cloud, we believe in helping businesses achieve their goals through effective sales outreach. Let us know how we can help improve your B2B Sales Outreach so you can succeed in this ever-changing market. Contact us today!