 :: The key to selling successfully within a business-to-business environment is to constantly progress your prospects through the different life-stages into becoming a loyal long-term client.
Recognising all the different stages in this process can help you to ensure that your business is not only gaining new leads, but actually converting them into real business.
Knowing your way round the b2b sales process can also help you to organise your internal activities more logically and effectively around the different life- stages that your leads and customers will pass through.
There are usually four different stages in the b2b sales process:
1. Prospect
A prospect is a company which could, in theory, buy your product or service, but with which you've had no previous contact or history. This does not mean that every other business in the country is a prospect - unless you sell something so universal it could, in theory, be bought by every business. Instead, prospects are usually the businesses which have the current or future need for your product or service, the financial resources to pay for it, and which can realistically be served by your business, due to size or location for example.
Prospects can be identified and gathered from research or purchased in the form of a mailing list or database. Prospects should be the target of your direct marketing and field sales activities. A company can remain a prospect for some time before they are converted into being a sales lead.
2. Lead
A lead is often confused with a prospect, but is in fact a prospect that you have had some form of contact with - either by virtue of them making an enquiry in response to your advertising, or because you have approached them directly, using tools like field sales, telemarketing, or direct mail.
Leads are often managed by the sales team, whose job it is to try to convert the lead into a customer as soon as possible, before they lose interest or go elsewhere. But even if you lose a lead, there can still be the opportunity of quoting again in the future.
3. Customer
The most important form of conversion is from a lead into a customer - when a company actually buys from your business for the first time. It may only be a small one-off or sample order, but they are still a customer now and your relationship with them has changed forever. The key principle here is not to rest on your laurels. Now you can focus on building a good relationship, through your customer service team and through regular communication, using tools such as direct marketing, service calls and newsletters.
You should also aim to get the valuable second and third repeat orders which will prove that your product or service is a success and which are the signs of growing customer loyalty. In fact, your next aim is to push the customer up to being a client.
4. Client
Your clients are those customers who buy your product or service exclusively from your business - and not from anywhere else. In other words, your relationship is so close that you have become the sole supplier of whatever it is that you sell.
For some businesses, such as accountants, banks and lawyers, it is relatively normal for customers to become clients automatically and only have one supplier for these services. For other types of business, converting a customer into a client can take much longer and sometimes may only happen when your competitors make a mistake or even go out of business.
But it can be worth the wait. Clients will usually buy more of your product and order more frequently. Clients can also prove to be a good source of recommendations, referrals and testimonials, which you can use to help target prospects - and so the whole process begins again. :: |
