6 Sales Strategies to Increase Revenue

What is the biggest challenge your B2B company faces with maintaining growth?

Is it high customer churn rates? New competitors on the prowl? Or maybe it’s bottlenecked lead generation strategies?

Whatever your issue may be, there’s one thing for sure — you need to find the best sales strategies to boost your revenue.

‍So we put together a list of tactics you can use to increase sales (despite your growth woes). There’s no time to waste, so let’s dive right in.

Sales Strategy #1: Increase Sales by Focusing On Your Top Accounts

It’s easy to forget about your biggest supporters when you’re always on the lookout for hot, fresh leads. But this single mistake could prove detrimental to your overall sales growth.

This is especially true when roughly 70% of B2B revenue stems from existing customers. Yet, a whopping 77% of B2B marketers aren’t taking advantage of existing customer relationships.

Don’t be a part of this statistic.

‍Here’s what you can do:

• Make a list of accounts and the products/services they use.
• Look for cross-selling opportunities.
• Identify the accounts that aren’t using all of your products/services and list which products they may be interested in.
• Send an offer detailing the relevant products/services that’ll benefit them.
• Keep in touch by sending newsletters, cards, gifts, or email reminders.
• Send updates about new launches and promotions via email or mailers.
• Use referral programs to help drive new leads.

The key is building long-lasting relationships with your accounts.

Improve your customer relationships

Customer experience (CX) isn’t just the talk of the B2C community. Buyers are people, no matter what industry you look in. Research shows that you’ll find 86% of buyers will spend more with brands that offer great customer experiences. And they tend to spend an average of 13% more for added features when you have high-quality CX.

‍This also holds true for B2B markets:

• B2B companies earning $1 billion annually can increase revenue by $700 million within three years by investing in CX.
• B2B companies prioritizing CX outperformed others by 80%. Plus, their customers are 7x more likely to return, 8x more likely to buy other products, and 15x more likely to refer others.
• 2020 is the year CX will matter more than price and product when comparing brands.
• It’s predicted for B2B companies with e-commerce personalization to outsell competitors by 30%.

So with that said — it’s critical to invest in building strong relationships with your existing customers. You can do this a number of ways:

‍1. Answering questions better and faster (i.e., via a knowledgebase or chatbot — B2B buyers rank self-service tools 4.41 out of 5).

2. Offering convenient customer support (online chat, text, email, etc.)

3. Being a consultant (offer solutions and ideas to their problems)

4. Staying a step ahead (help customers prepare for changes they may not see coming)

5. Staying in touch (send personalized emails, texts, and other forms of communication regularly)

6. Looking for opportunities to upsell and cross-sell (when it makes sense for the customer)

‍It’s all about going over and beyond for your top accounts, so they’ll continue to be loyal customers for the long-term.

Sales Strategy #2: Perform a Product Pricing Cost-Benefit Analysis

Putting together a strategy to increase your sales revenue can be challenging—especially when you have to identify the cost-benefit of the change. The most obvious method to boost your sales incomes is by simply raising the prices of your products and services.But this can potentially backfire in two ways:

‍1. It can cause your current customers to leave2. It can push leads to choose a more affordable option

‍However, it can also potentially work in your favor and lead to instant growth in revenue.

To ensure the latter, you have to analyze whether your product or service is priced to match its perceived value by customers. If your prospects and accounts don’t see the value, then they won’t invest in it.

One way to determine the value of your product or service is to compare it to your competitors. If they’re selling at cheaper rates than you, then you’re forced to determine whether you should lower your rates. But this can turn into a race to the bottom pricing model, which can lead to more revenue loss.Another option is to make your product or service better.

Remember, if your customers see your product as higher value, they won’t mind paying more.So these are your three options when deciding your pricing:

‍1. Offer a lower price: This only works if you can offer your product or service in bulk. Otherwise, you’ll undercut yourself.

2. Sell at a higher price: This is ideal if your product or service offers more features and value than the competition.

3. Match competitor’s price: If your product or service is similar to competitors, but has higher quality, then this is safe to do. Consumers tend to choose the better quality product.

‍So the theme here is improving the value or quality of your product or service. You can achieve this by doing things like adding more features to a product, including add-on services for free or discounted rates, or offering a better customer experience.

Now, before you decide, you need to do a cost-benefit analysis for whatever product pricing you choose. You can do this by analyzing five key areas:

‍1. Direct costs (expenses for product/service)

2. Indirect costs (overhead of a department, i.e., IT or customer service)

3. Tangible costs (payroll, tools, rent)4. Intangible costs (customer satisfaction, productivity levels)5. Real costs (labor costs, raw materials)

‍So let’s say you’re considering improving the customer experience. You may need to train and/or hire customer service reps, create AI tools (chatbots), and/or build a knowledge base (with the help of freelancers).

You’ll need to calculate how much this will cost and compare it to the benefit — how much you’re generating in revenue.This will determine if you should continue using the strategy or not.

Sales Strategy #3: Introduce New Products (or Services) to the Market

Expanding your business operations is an excellent sales strategy because it presents opportunities to attract and retain customers.

This especially works if you can offer a new product or service your competitors aren’t. In fact, you can analyze the offerings of your competition to see what they’re lacking. Finding a new solution to introduce to the marketplace can position your B2B company as a top choice.

For example, let’s say you’re a SaaS agency with a CRM designed specifically for construction firms. Then to sweeten your software package, you decide to include another product for project management.

This way, your accounts can keep track of customers, teams, and projects all in one place.

‍Quick Tip: Use R&D and marketing/sales cooperation. This is shown to boost sales by 12% to 18%.

Sales Strategy #4: Give Incentives to Customers to Make them Stick Around

You don’t build a list of loyal customers overnight. If you learn anything from brands with high retention rates, it’s that they’re very giving. These companies send free gifts to long-term customers and create programs to promote customers to stick around.

But how well does this work?

‍Well, let’s take a look at a few stats:

• 75% of consumers say they’ll purchase again after getting an incentive
• 45% of customers bought one to three items because of incentives (within the last year)
• 18% of consumers say incentives always persuade them to buy

Then there are multiple benefits you can reap from using incentives as well. For example, it can help to:

• Build brand awareness
• Increase account retention rates
• Boost the lifetime value of accounts
• Build trust and strong relationships with accounts
• Motivate accounts to leave feedback or take a survey
• Drive engagement on social media
• Stimulate impulse buying
• Apologize to a customer after a negative experience
• Reward accounts for their loyalty

Let’s take a look at several strategies you can use to increase sales.

Offer Promotions and Rebates

This is a popular choice among B2B companies with email campaigns. Offering promotions and rebates to customers will keep them coming back for more.

But how do you send promotions to them? If you’re relying solely on ads, then you’re ignoring your existing (and easily accessible) accounts. This is why growing your email list is critical.

With this, you can regularly send promotional emails (alongside tips, guides, and other helpful content). Now, why this works is because your customers gave you permission to solicit them with deals.

You can grow your list by adding a pop-up signup form to your blog, product page, and other landing pages. Be sure to let visitors know what to expect from your newsletter (what you’ll send and how often).

What makes this effective is it creates FOMO (fear of missing out). Whether B2B or B2C, consumers are inclined to jump on opportunities to spend less for a product or service they need.

This can work exceptionally well by bundling together items that complement your customers’ goals. For instance, you can personalize packages for different customer groups.

Using the SaaS CRM example for construction firms, you could bundle together the project management tool for project managers responsible for both customers and project teams.

Then for the finance department, you can bundle together the CRM and an invoicing tool you offer. Personalizing your offers is vital to convincing accounts to take advantage of your promotions.

Give Complimentary Product/Service Add-Ons

You want to reward your accounts for being good customers. So after reaching a milestone (i.e., being a customer for X months), you should schedule an offer for a complimentary product or service add-on.

For instance, you can send an email with a special offer at the six-month mark that caters to their specific needs.

Now, there are a couple of ways you can build revenue from this strategy:

‍1. Offer the add-on at no cost for X months (so they can try before they commit to buying)

2. Offer the add-on at a discounted rate for X years

3. Offer a free upgrade with a purchase

4. Provide free samples or trials with a purchase

5. Give discounts for bundling products/services

‍Again, personalization is key. Be sure your complimentary offer resonates with the needs of the customer, or it’ll lead to inaction.

‍Schedule a Demo

Sales Strategy #5: Cross-Sell Relevant Products/Services to Accounts

There’s a lot you can learn about your leads and accounts by analyzing the data you gather. Use purchase behavior, past communications, and other intel to figure out the needs of your customers.

Then your sales teams can cross-sell relevant items to each account.

It’s a lot easier to cross-sell a product or service to an existing customer because they already see the value you provide.

You can use email campaigns and phone calls to cross-sell to accounts on an individual basis. Or you can focus on key groups (i.e., by profession or industry) and cross-sell products, and promote bundles via a webinar or workshop. Promote the webinar in your email campaign to ensure you include your existing accounts.

Sales Strategy #6: Use Influencer Marketing to Build Trust & Awareness

When you think of an influencer, what likely comes to mind are social-media-savvy millennials promoting consumer goods. But if you’ve ever watched a TedTalk or followed an expert on LinkedIn, then you’re already familiar with B2B influencers.

Influencer marketing is still new in the B2B field, but this doesn’t mean it’s any less effective.

Already, we have nearly half of B2B businesses experimenting with using influencers. Influencer marketing offers 11x the ROI than traditional digital marketing. And businesses that use it generate $6.50 per $1 invested.

The best influencers to use for an organization is the CEO. Yet, 60% of CEOs lack a social media presence. So your next best option are experts who head specific departments (IT, sales, marketing, etc.).

With influencers, you can drive visibility, credibility, and conversions for your business.Here are several examples of B2B companies doing it right:

‍SAP, a leader in enterprise application software, regularly invites top corporate execs and industry experts to events. And in doing so, they increase social engagement and brand awareness. For example, influencers who attended a two-day event in Germany generated 50% of all social media mentions. Then for a Florida event, influencers reached 80K to 100K people online via live video streaming.

‍TopRank Marketing, a digital marketing agency, used influencers to promote its Content Marketing World conference. The influencers shared advice to aspiring content marketers via ebooks and slides, which generated 217K views (ebook) and 145K views (SlideShare).

‍American Express invested in influencers for its “Love My Store” campaign aimed at small business owners. The goal was to build awareness about small businesses that accept credit cards (including Amex). The results were outstanding, with a distribution of 400K Amex decals and 5 million impressions.What makes influencer campaigns a success is finding experts with excellent insights mixed with powerful storytelling. So keep this in mind when building your future campaigns.

How Sendoso Can Enhance Your Sales Strategies

Having the right tools at your disposal is vital to building effective strategies to increase sales. One platform you should consider using is Sendoso. B2B companies are already using it to improve customer experiences (and loyalty) and close more target accounts (with a over 200% ROI!).But how can Sendoso help you with increasing your sales revenue?

‍Sendoso is a tool that streamlines the process of sending corporate gifts to your customers. You can do this to:

• Impress new customers with a branded swag bag
• Personalize gifts sent to customers to encourage plan renewals (better than an email reminder)
• Diffuse negative experiences by sending a gift card to apologize
• Convert leads faster with a personalized gift

Of course, all handwritten notes, product sourcing, packaging, and mailing are handled for you. Just watch your Analytics Dashboard to see when it’s delivered and the results gained from your corporate gifting campaigns.

Ready to see how it all works? Then schedule a demo today!