Phew, what a year 2024 was!
We’ve seen it all: groundbreaking technologies, innovative B2B strategies, complex challenges, and above all, game-changing solutions that even surprised seasoned marketers and sales experts.
So, would 2025 be the same?
The exciting news is the industry will enter a new era! We’d see interactions between buyers and sellers (80%) online. Marketers and sales teams would implement new tactics, integrate cutting-edge technologies, and change the entire approach to closing a deal!
In a few cases, you might see a laissez-faire approach- freedom to explore the best tactics to reach the goal (an optimized sales pipeline). A quote by Jack Canfield, the motivational speaker and founder of a billion-dollar publishing empire, perfectly fits the context:
“If you are not moving closer to what you want in sales (or in life), you probably aren’t doing enough asking.”
Jack Canfield
Businesses sustain due to sales. Sales representatives have to push the envelope and go after the sales pipeline. It starts with qualifying the leads that marketers extract from good B2B data.
In the below image, you can see the current and future adoption of B2B marketing data that helps marketers and further the sales team:
Most of the B2B marketing data used are contacts and demographics (67%), followed by technographics (63%), company data/firmographics (61%), behavioral intent data (54%), and data lakes (51%). These data help to get the right quantity of leads that sales representatives could push through the pipeline.
We have skimmed out some of the strategies that would build a strong sales pipeline in the year 2025. If you’re a sales rep’, it would help you to close sales.
1. B2B Sales Memes
Memes are over all the social platforms. Users love humor, and memes (funny images or videos) connect with the audience seamlessly.
But do sales memes connect with the B2B audience?
The answer is undoubtedly yes! B2B memes reach the audience effortlessly, further leading to useful communication with prospects.
You can find an example of a meme below:
The message on the image says, “The landing page after everyone’s input.” And we can see the dish looks messy, with excessive ingredients stacked on it.
Don’t you think this meme would connect with a B2B audience?
Obviously, yes; landing pages are one of the significant sources for B2B lead generation. Marketers work hard to insert the right target keywords, use the best content, and others in the landing pages. They often take suggestions from many, concurrently adding too many inputs from varied sources. This leads to a disorganized landing page as too many cooks spoil the broth!
So, a disorganized landing page meme would surely grab the attention of the B2B prospects. Now the crucial question? At which stage should you use memes?
It should be at the prospecting stage of the sales pipeline. Videos and images evoke instant emotions. And when you’re focused on starting a fresh conversation apply this approach. According to statistics, sales reps’ find prospecting much more demanding than others. You can see this in the below pie-chart:
Prospecting (42%) is the most challenging part, followed by closing (36%) and qualifying (22%). So, with sales memes, they could effortlessly attract the B2B prospects.
2. Shortening the Sales Cycle
In recent years, converting B2B prospects within a specific period has become challenging. The reasons: Prospects looking out for better options, prospects having less budget, they’re confused whether product or service would meet their requirements or align with the process, and many more.
In the below graphical representation, you can see the time span of the sales cycle or to close a deal:
Here, you can see the sales cycle length between 1 and 3 months is the highest, followed by the sales cycle length between 3 and 5 months. The sales cycle length of less than a week is the lowest. This shows B2B customers are wary of purchasing a new product or service. It could also mean the buyer is doing research before purchasing and for that, they need time (sometimes more than a week).
So, what should a sales representative do here?
In this scenario, they should reach out to every prospect and have a 1:1 conversation to understand their concerns. This would give the sales team better insights into customer’s requirements. The rep’ can provide solutions to prospects before they start looking for it. Isn’t that resourceful?
They would surely win customer’s hearts, as we know “A friend in need is a friend indeed.”
So, at which stage do you need to follow an intense approach? You can refer to the below image:
The representative should follow this intense approach between stage 5 (Make an offer) and stage 7 (Closing the deal). Because these are the critical stages when customers could have second thoughts. At stage 6 (negotiation and finalizing the proposal) the prospect could look out for a competitor’s product at a better price. And this is when you have to be very smart with regular communication and hold on to them. As a matter of fact, the final push or closing the deal is a tough one, you need great convincing skills!
3. Removing Difficult Prospects
Who are these difficult prospects?
When a customer wants a product, they would go for it in weeks, or a few months. Any elongation, you know they are difficult prospects and won’t convert anytime soon.
In this scenario, having them in your pipeline would do no good to you. Remove them early to concentrate on relevant prospects. Before, you’ve to understand why you reached the stagnation stage:
As you can see in this image, sales pipeline stagnation could be due to poor qualification processes, lack of sales and marketing alignment, ineffective sales messaging, and inadequate sales follow-up. In most cases, the leads aren’t qualified. According to HubSpot, only 27% of the leads passed on to the sales team are qualified. The rest are unqualified; there can be many reasons such as they were inquiring out of curiosity or to gain market knowledge and so on.
So, why should sales rep’ chase unqualified leads and waste their time? If they want to build a strong sales pipeline, gauge the prospect’s interest to remove them at an earlier stage of the pipeline.
4. Monitoring every stage of the sales pipeline
No stage in the sales pipeline is less important. The stages could be compared to stairways (Step-by-step), where any misstep you face an accident or lose a prospect!
You should therefore cross each stage leading to conversions.
Find the below image for precise information:
As you can see in pipeline stages, from prospecting to delivering the product, each stage is crucial. Here, you can’t define prospect needs (stage 4) without initial meeting (stage 3). Planning for each stage could make the right difference for your sales pipeline. For example, you need to understand what content you have to share with your prospect at each stage: whitepaper, blogs, and others.
Make every stage of the sales pipeline impactful, therefore leading to conversions.
5. Outreaching on Social Media
B2B sales reps’ are using social media to reach customers and sell their products or services. According to a report, it even emerged as the most effective channel in 2023 to drive revenues; you can see this in the below representation:
In this graphical representation, you can see that social media is the most effective channel (60%) to drive revenues, followed by content marketing (49%), email (45%), display advertising (36%), paid search (32%), organic search (23%), and streaming TV (23%).
With businesses expanding worldwide and connecting with varied audiences, social media presence is a necessity. But sales closure just doesn’t happen with first communication and instant selling. As we know in the B2B market, relationship building initially leads to deal closure at a later stage. Therefore, sales reps’ have to analyze the best social media where they can have initial discussions with targeted prospects.
They need to understand every industry and plan different strategies to attract a targeted audience. LinkedIn is known as the best platform for B2B social media engagement. And you can see many sales reps’ leveraging this platform to increase sales.
6. Win-Win Negotiation
Preparing final proposal to close the deal is every sales rep’ dream. But that isn’t easy. Negotiation requires a hell lot of tactics. The sales rep’ needs to prepare a proposal that not only benefits them but also the customer.
The below image gives precise information about the B2B negotiation process:
As you can see, the first step is preparation to negotiate, then you need to establish the right rapport with the prospect. Active listening and showcasing the value proposition are the next steps. The win-win mindset should be maintained so that both parties feel they are winning the game.
As a sales rep’, you should manage objections skilfully, execute negotiation tactics seamlessly to close the deal. Never ever make the customer feel you’re in a hurry to close the deal.
Conclusion
A strong sales pipeline keeps the sales team motivated. And to build that, you should have good strategy and planning. This blog explores good strategies and tactics, that you could integrate into your process and witness the results – an increase in sales and revenue.
