Behind every fruitful B2B eCommerce sales strategy is powerful communication.
And embracing the right technology, like cloud telephony, can make a significant, positive impact on your business operations—especially sales.
Unifying all communication channels (voice, chat, email) in one single platform not only makes internal collaboration easier but it makes selling easier, too.
Read on to learn how to empower your B2B sales strategy with cloud telephony.
The B2B Buyer Persona
First, let’s turn to the typical B2B buyer persona to understand how cloud telephony can positively impact your organization.
In the B2B space, there’s more emphasis on building business relationships than your contact center agents purely selling products through sales calls.
Often, there are numerous stakeholders involved in the decision-making process—making B2B sales a challenge when multiple roles (even those currently on a workation) must sign off before you land the sale.
The following roles could be part of the B2B sales process:
- The person who will use your product or service.
- The person who will coordinate the other decision-makers.
- The ultimate decision-maker.
- Anyone that could delay the sale (IT, attorneys, or similar roles).
- Strong objectors.
- Advisors or consultants.
The B2B Sales Process
Typically, the B2B sales process consists of eight key steps:
- Attaining sales-qualified leads (prospects who need or are interested in your product or service).
- Analyzing prospects’ needs by researching the companies and potential pain points to present a customized solution.
- Deciding whether prospects are the right fit for your business.
- Delivering the pitch with your customized solutions to their problems.
- Replying to questions and alleviating prospective buyers’ concerns.
- Closing the deal and covering pricing.
- Composing and sending a follow-up email with next-step reminders.
- Checking in with clients later to request feedback about the product or service.
Your B2B Sales Strategy
Because the B2B sales process can be lengthy, keeping in constant communication is key.
Your B2B sales strategy must prove why you’re the business that should win sales—and to do that, you need a consistent, repeatable, and foolproof system.
The current B2B landscape is challenging. With increased buyer apprehensions, more risk awareness, and better access to reviews, your company must stand out from the crowd to succeed (in a good way).
So, if you want to develop your B2B sales strategy, let’s look at how cloud telephony can improve it.
After all, since your customer service agents spend most of their time using the phone, the right cloud telephony system forms the foundation of your sales strategy.
1. Generating leads with automation
Optimizing your sales funnel has never been easier with cloud telephony automation features.
Features such as auto-dialing are common in cloud telephony systems. Automatically dialing a list of prospects is a far simpler process than doing it manually—saving time and increasing efficiency. This can help your sales teams to reach a larger number of leads in a shorter amount of time, thus increasing the chances of generating qualified leads.
You can also explore lead scoring. Cloud telephony and contact center solutions can automatically score leads based on their behavior, such as the number of times they have called or the length of their calls.
Moreover, the facility to automate follow-up calls and emails to ensure that leads receive timely and relevant information is a huge time-saver.
This can help sales teams focus on the most promising leads and generate enhanced customer engagement.
2. Knowing the numbers
Do you know how long your prospects spend in each phase of the sales funnel?
When you integrate your CRM (customer relationship management) system with a cloud telephony system, you get your hands on valuable customer data for advanced analytics.
For instance, sales teams can access customer data analytics in one dashboard, including buying histories, preferences, and patterns. This helps your teams to customize their approach to each prospect, which means—you guessed it—better sales outcomes.
Each time your agents take a phone call, they are armed with data-driven information to streamline the sales process and meet potential customer expectations.
CRM integration can help manage the entire lead generation and nurturing process, allowing sales agents to manage leads from initial contact to closing the deal (helping to reduce the chance of a compliance testing inquiry just before closing).
By tracking leads through each stage of the sales process, sales teams can focus their efforts on the most promising leads and ensure that they follow up on each one promptly and effectively.
This real-time contact center technology ensures higher productivity levels and more efficient customer interactions.
3. Aligning sales with marketing
Cloud telephony can provide detailed call tracking information, such as call duration, call outcomes, and call sources.
This information can help your marketing team understand which marketing campaigns drive the most leads and adjust their strategies accordingly.
CRM integration provides sales and marketing teams with a unified view of customer interactions. This can help ensure that both your sales and marketing teams are aligned on customer needs and priorities, and can work together more effectively to drive revenue.
Many cloud-based communications solutions integrate with social media platforms to provide a more comprehensive communication experience. These social media integrations allow your business to track and respond to social media messages directly from the telephone system—providing a centralized communication hub for all customer interactions.
In addition, VoIP systems can provide unified communication capabilities, allowing you to manage all communication channels, including voice, email, instant messaging, and social media, from a single interface. This boosts efficiency and responsiveness and ensures prospective customer issues are addressed quickly.
These omnichannel offerings enable your sales and marketing team members to align and create the most effective sales strategies across your entire organization.
Cloud telephony can enable sales and marketing teams to collaborate on sales workflows, like call scripts and email templates. This ensures a flow of consistent messaging across all customer touchpoints.
4. Streamlining the qualifying leads process
Embracing cloud telephony gives your business instant access to the most valuable call features, which will streamline and automate many aspects of your operations.
One example is IVR (interactive voice response)—a speech recognition feature with roots in conversational AI.
This self-service approach to telephony routes inbound callers to the right agent to increase first-call resolution rates and enhance potential customer satisfaction (not to mention reducing wait times during high call volume periods).
Connecting inbound callers to the agent handling their inquiries at exactly the right touchpoint in their sales journeys alleviates concerns, aids retention, and delivers personalized experiences.
IVR can also be used to qualify leads by using natural language processing to ask targeted questions and gather relevant information about callers’ needs.
Another cloud telephony feature worth exploiting in your B2B sales strategy is automatic call recording. This feature, unsurprisingly, automatically records calls, which you can use to evaluate lead quality and provide feedback to sales teams as part of sales outreach training.
This can help improve the qualification process and ensure that your sales teams are doing their best at qualifying leads.
5. Reducing costs
Cloud telephony systems are subscription based.
This means that your business only pays for what it uses and nothing else. You have minimal hardware expenses or maintenance costs as well.
Scaling your business operations up or down is simple and cost-effective. Cloud telephony systems can flexibly adapt depending on business needs, saving the costs associated with over-provisioning or under-utilizing hardware.
A cloud telephony solution facilitates internet calls—eliminating the long-distance charges you typically get hit with using traditional phone systems.
Use your own tools and devices with a cloud-based VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) system, and you’re on your way.
Your sales teams have features at their disposal like call routing, voicemail, and call recording to reduce the time they spend on manual tasks. This frees them to focus on higher-value activities, such as lead generation and follow-up tasks.
Choosing The Right Cloud Telephony System
Empowering your B2B sales strategy with cloud telephony involves choosing the right solution for your business.
To maximize sales and optimize the system you choose, look for:
- A robust set of call features that makes your call center agents’ lives easier. Think call routing, Microsoft Teams direct routing self-service options, bots, visual voicemail, SMS, omnichannel support, social media interactions, and video chat).
- The option to scale effectively as your business grows.
- Interoperability with your CRM to analyze center metrics and your existing call center software.
- The flexibility to meet the needs of your sales teams, managers, and customers.
- Reliable provider uptime (at least 99%), maintenance service and customer support.
- Cloud technology advancements with regular new technologies and features.
- The minimum security standards for cloud-based applications to protect your business data and recordings.
- An app marketplace offering.
By considering these factors, you can choose the right cloud telephony system that meets the needs of your contact center or business while delivering an exceptional omnichannel customer experience.
A cloud-based telephony solution is the ideal partner to boost your B2B sales strategy. It helps your organization focus on prospective customers by automating manual processes and giving your sales teams the best tools to drive sales and increase revenue.
And if you’re looking to outsource your call center services, we have you covered with our directory of top-rated call center service providers.