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Several marketing trends are worth following in 2021 in the B2B domain.
Midsize B2B firms must address key challenges to be able to compete with larger organizations.
An omnichannel approach is the way of the future and the way of the present in B2B industries.
CEOs can impact sales in B2B settings, but their roles in the sales process must be carefully managed.
While B2B suppliers often feel that they must compete on price alone, they have an ability to extract a higher price from their B2B customers and provide greater customer value by focusing on all of the offerings that they provide.
Channel partners play a critical role in the financial performance of suppliers. One way in which suppliers can provide useful information to their channel partners is through partner relationship management strategies. Aguirre et al. 2018 provide recommendations for how these strategies can generate the most engagement amongst channel partners.
Companies selling to B2B customers face two key issues: managing the salesperson channel and managing the customer-specific discounts often utilized to drive sales. Companies must determine if customers using online channels would benefit from also being served using salesperson channels, or if utilizing salespeople in such a way would be a waste of valuable resources. Lawrence et al. (2019) provide compelling evidence that sellers gain approximately twice as much net profit from customers that have greater contact with salespeople. The interpersonal relationships that salespeople forge with buyers in the B2B context may bring forth positive financial outcomes.
Sales negotiation over email exchanges between sellers and buyers (e-negotiation) is increasingly common in B2B sales. The use of influential tactics as textual cues in emails to manage buyers’ attention significantly affects sales outcomes. To test the effectiveness of influential tactics in e-negotiations, the authors of this study analyze seller-buyer emails over a two-year period part of 40 e-negotiations, along with other data sources and a controlled experiment. In an era where remote working is more prevalent than ever, e-negotiations are more important than ever. It underscores the relevance of this research.
When responding to a Request for Proposal (RFP) in both the public and the private sector, suppliers’ access to buyers is often restricted due to law and informal rules of engagement. The authors term these buyers ‘barricaded buyers’. Despite having limited access to these individuals, suppliers can still increase their competitiveness and selection likelihood when selling to barricaded buyers.
What works for selling in times of economic expansion is not what works for selling in times of crisis. In addition, between 25% and 50% of the sales professionals in US companies never had to sell during an economic downturn… and thus, ready experience on dealing with selling in crisis is not abundant. This Harvard Business Review article on leading sales teams through uncertain times describes three principles that were useful during the 2001 crisis.
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