Four Ways to Improve Sales Conversion on a B2B Site

B2B sales have been redefined by the internet age. Nearly 90% of all B2B buyers make their purchase decisions based on internet searches and results, and as a B2B company, working on increasing the sales conversion rate on your website is a top priority for achieving growth. You want to grow the number of quality leads you have and use them to generate additional ways to bring in revenue, while remaining as cost-effective as possible. Selling to a business isn’t necessarily much different from selling to a consumer, but there is one distinction; businesses will be much more critical of any product or service they are planning to buy and you’ll need to adjust your strategy accordingly.

A report published by Forrester noted that the majority of surveyed B2B buyers preferred doing their own research online instead of talking directly to a sales rep. This means that by spreading out your web presence onto multiple platforms, you have a direct impact on the perception people build up about your business and increase the likeliness of making sales. The most commonly recommended strategy to kick your sales conversions up a notch is to make fast iterations based on analytics and data gained from your leads. 

These are some of the best ways to improve sales conversion on a B2B site out there today:

Make Use of Lead Scoring

One of the most important parts of establishing your sales conversion process is lead scoring, or the practice of ranking your audience by their likelihood of sales-readiness. 

Lead scoring enables you to categorize high-quality leads into separate groups - those that are ready to purchase, those that are close to purchasing, and those that are unlikely to purchase. 

The biggest benefit of implementing lead scoring is that it allows you to improve the connection between your marketing and sales, and increase your closing rates. Categorizing your leads will allow you to target your marketing toward the portion of your audience that is most likely to convert into a customer, and spare you the effort of pursuing leads that are unlikely to convert to successful sales.

A recent study conducted by the company Eloqua found that businesses making use of lead scoring heightened their previous closing rates by at least 30%. B2B conversion rates are typically lower than those of B2C companies, so an increase of this scale is significant.

Leads can be scored based on a variety of factors, including how they’ve previously engaged with your content on your website and social media platforms, their age demographic, the location they are based in and more. By effectively narrowing down how your leads interact with your business, your marketing and sales teams can more accurately respond to them and appropriately nurture them into becoming sales conversions. Different companies will have different methods of lead scoring, but the one method that is common across them all is using data gained from evaluating past successful leads.

Marketing automation software can be used to help you identify this data and target the leads with the greatest conversion potential only, allowing you to focus only on the ones that are most likely to respond positively to your messaging and offer. This creates a more efficient sales process as a whole, and therefore drives a much higher conversion rate. Many of the marketing automation software options available in the B2B space enable you to attribute scores to leads based directly on their interactions with your marketing emails and website.

When setting up lead scoring for your own business, you can identify leads to score through your top conversion channels, such as organic traffic, your social media platforms or even engagements with your marketing emails. Using analytics when covering these channels will get you the data you need to further determine at which point you are most likely to lose potential customers in your conversion process and improve it. 

If your sales conversion rates are falling or are stagnant, you’ll want to take a few steps back and consider all the angles from initial contact to the final step of the closing process. Look at your traffic channels and try to determine where the drop off started to happen, including stepping through the whole process as if you were a sales lead yourself. 

Data-Driven Decision-Making

Cold, hard data should be the foundation of all your decision-making and dictate the improvements that need to be made to your conversion process. A/B tests can take you further when it comes to refining your marketing funnel and getting more sales. Recent statistics show that only around 20% of businesses are currently satisfied with their conversion rates, and this highlights why A/B testing is so important.

Only 44% of companies reported using A/B testing as part of their marketing strategy right now, but by optimizing your marketing strategies and capitalizing on what is working can be the differentiating factor when it comes to actually closing the deal - not something to be underestimated.

We’ve already mentioned that you should be flexible and iterate on the aspects of the process that are working and do away with the parts that aren’t -  A/B testing will help you take this step to the next level. The reality is that experimentation is a large part of keeping conversions coming in on an ongoing basis, and paired with your site analytics, as well as for analytics of any social media platforms you have, will let you know what will strengthen your B2B marketing strategy. Then it’s as easy as refining and replicating.

Predictive analytic solutions helps both marketing and sales departments to get a more in detail understanding of their total addressable market, quickly becoming a popular option with businesses.  Analyzing leads is becoming more of a science nowadays, and making use of all the data you gather effectively is a differentiator. 

Sweeten the Deal

Take a step back and take a more objective look at what you are offering. Have you highlighted the best parts of the deal, and is there anything else you can say or do that will be an additional incentive? Can you upsell in some way? If you’ve introduced an offering that a lead is already warming up to, adding on a complimentary service will make the deal seem more valuable. Remember that settling for a small decrease in initial pricing could lead to higher profits later down the line and win you customer loyalty. Upselling as a sales strategycan come in the form of providing coaching, exclusive content or additional customizations.

The most cost-effective way to add more value to your offer is to provide onboarding calls or dedicated support. This gives you the benefit of taking a more personal approach with your leads and allows you to get direct feedback that can align both your sales and marketing efforts.

Engage and Re-Engage With Marketing

You can make use of both email and content marketing strategies to nurture leads into becoming sales conversions. This is key, as your website alone is unlikely to get a B2B sale in a single visit but certain content types can help you turn marketing leads into qualified sales leads given some time. To turn your site into a sales machine, you should try and cover blog posts, infographics, bylined articles at minimum in order to highlight your business and address any potential objections your customers could have. 

In-depth, long-form content, in particular, is also good to gain leads - if they are willing to read the content piece all the way through the chances are good they are closer to becoming a paying customer. If you look at the average length of content that is at the top of search engine results, the top 10 positions will be taken up by pieces that are 2000 words minimum, and content heavy pages get more links as a whole. Not only will longer content get you better search engine rankings, but it will also give you a real opportunity to answer B2B questions in detail.

Email marketing campaigns is another great option for increasing sales conversions, and for B2B offerings across various industries it resulted in a nearly 50% higher click-through-rates than in B2C email marketing campaigns. The biggest benefit of email marketing in the B2B space is that you can use it to drive engagement with your content and site with subscribed leads that are most likely to convert into sales and re-engage them automatically if they start to slip away. Email marketing software like MailChimp, GetResponse, ActiveCampaign and more have email segmenting capabilities that will have better long-term results.

The power of email marketing cannot be underestimated - it remains the best-performing channels with a great ROI and it accounts for as much as 23% of sales.

Your email campaigns can create a real sense of urgency with your leads, help you establish trust with your leads and give you quick-time results. Part of your marketing plan should make consideration for intelligent re-engagement. The chances are good that you will need to engage your leads several times before they come to a decision to purchase.

To increase the sales conversion rates of a B2B site, you’ll need to test different strategies and adapt your process based on what works and what doesn’t. This may be easier said than done, but you can rely on your past leads to give you insights that will help you improve and gain more conversions in the future.

Wrapping Up

Earning higher conversion rates comes down to using data to drive your marketing decision-making, and think about how you can make your offer more desirable in alternative ways. What is most important is knowing your audience, and being aware that B2B clients prefer their own online research over a sales call. If you take this all to heart you can capitalize on it.