Welcome to the 2020s!
B2B sales have gone through a lot in the past decade. It started with telemarketing, then moved to cold emails. Now it involves elaborate outreach account-based marketing campaigns. When you think about it, the growth is overwhelming. A lot of B2B marketing trends came and went in the 10's.
So, what do we have to say about the B2B trends in the new year? Or the new decade, even?
Well, nobody can predict what will happen in the next ten years. But I have some ideas about the B2B sales trends that are going to rule 2020. So, if you want to know how to prioritize your sales campaigns, get ready for our forecast.
Customer experience will remain your lifeline
Let’s face it, as time goes by, your target audience grows more tired of the brands that surround it. Yes, we’re talking about B2B audiences.
The research by Cisco suggests that consumers don’t pay attention to the brands they buy from. In fact, even if over 70% of brands suddenly vanish, your potential customers won't even bat an eyelash.
Since many B2B companies rely on upsales, this information sounds almost apocalyptic. However, there is a way. My suggestion is to put your current customers first. Focus on their experience and see how you can make it as positive as possible.
- Add more flexibility to your refund policy;
- Create pleasant, free bonuses for your loyal customers;
- Develop new programs for your new customers;
- Be quick to address any of your customers’ complaints;
The impression you make on your existing customers impacts new connections better than expensive marketing campaigns. Paying attention to your customer experience is not really one of the new trends. But I assure you, its influence will cover more and more aspects of your B2B sales.
Creativity and personalization will remain relevant
By 2020, we all know how intrusive digital marketing can be. It intrudes into the YouTube videos we watch. It pops up in our social media feed. It attacks us with clickable ads. It turns every business inbox into a chore.
We have mentioned that your potential buyers can delete your B2B email just because it doesn’t look interesting. Even more, your recipients will delete business emails without reading them if they don’t like the subject line.
“Why would they do it?” you may ask “Don’t they want to explore better ways of doing business?”.
Of course, they do. However, they don’t have the time to go through every message they receive. If they’re currently working with the vendor that manages to cover their needs more or less, they won’t be dedicated to combing through the inbox. After all, it’s the sender who needs them. Therefore, it’s up to the sender to make their offer worth the recipients’ while.
That means that personalization is still your biggest ally. Do note, that I don’t mean the “How do they know all of this? Are they spying on me?” kind of personalization. Doing personalization right makes your prospects think “These guys speak my language! I guess I should give them a try”.
It requires proper research and understanding of how to write a customized B2B sales template.
B2B marketing trends are going social
To continue with the topic of creativity, I don’t recommend ignoring social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram, or even TikTok. While they cannot be used for B2B sales lead generation, they can still help you. Creativity and personalization go hand in hand. You can craft powerful storytelling campaigns that will engage your prospects. In the United States alone, around 223 million users spend their time on social media. It’s quite likely that your prospects or your existing customers are among them. Therefore, it’s your opportunity to build comfortable familiarity.
As B2B marketing trends keep changing, you’re given a big window of opportunity. Pretty much, social media is the only place where you can experiment with the content freely. Your options include but are not limited to: explainer videos, infographics, links to podcasts, news and updates, AMAs, and informative posts.
The secret to building a good social media campaign? Organizing your content and knowing what you should be writing about.
The digital revolution will affect the latest B2B trends
No longer do digital solutions cater to individuals only. Nowadays, there is a huge range of tools for corporate use. Therefore, it’s important to understand how these tools impact your prospects’ business — and how they can transform your workflow.
Ask yourself, whether your plan for 2020 includes implementing any of those solutions?
- CRM software will continue to play a major role in organizing your sales pipelines as well as monitoring your leads and followups. CRM solutions are also important for gathering lead data and using it for calculating the length of your sales cycle. The modern market offers a wide choice of CRM tools that match your specific needs and work rhythm. For example, we at Belkins use Streak to swiftly process and organize all our inbox data.
- Cloud-based platforms will remain essential for managing and organizing your work within the company. Keep that in mind if you specialize in that kind of product.
- Mobile use is still among the latest trends. Adjusting your online sources and making them compatible with smartphones concerns both B2C and B2B areas. Cisco research has shown that around 60% of users cannot imagine going anywhere without their smartphone. It remains their main tool for work-related communication and, in many cases, a way of managing their workflow while out of office. That means that if you haven’t utilized the wonders of adaptive design, you’re missing a major lead generation opportunity.
- A.I. is going to help email marketing a lot. The market keeps introducing a wide range of free A.I.-based tools for gathering intelligence about the new, relevant trends. Additionally, it enables you to explore the strategies employed by the industry titans. This trend is particularly important for small companies — it allows gleaning more data without straining the budget.
- After a decade of introductions and tentative first steps, blockchain is becoming more mature. Moreover, it’s getting real. New blockchain products are going to focus on being more usable and finding a proper market fit. Those efforts are quite likely to be successful. Blockchain will attract prospects with safe transactions, protection from a third party and better control over the client’s data. The insurance industry and the finance industry are expected to benefit the most from these benefits.
- The ways of instructing new sales reps and clarifying objectives are going digital as well. Sales playbooks are expected to shift to CRM completely. It will let companies navigate new employees comfortably across their tasks and help them reach their objectives.
Digital technologies define which of the new trends will prevail in the industry.
So make sure to try and explore any solutions that can improve your data-driven approach to sales development. Also, you must pay close attention to any software that your potential prospects might be interested in. For example, if you use a program no longer be supported by the developer, your potential buyers will be reluctant to trust you with their data.
Conclusion
Of course, I cannot make an accurate forecast for each industry. Refusing to paint all verticals with a wide brush allowed me to notice the new trends at the moment of their emergence. So, if you want to enter 2020 and stay confident about your resources and strategy, I have timeless advice for you — research and adapt.
My predictions for 2020 come from My personal insights as well as numerous reports and customer studies. However, the biggest industry trends can be born before your very eyes if you know where to look.