In recent years, the digital revolution has changed lead generation practices. The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath have led to an increase in buyer awareness and enabled decision-makers to search for solutions independently without contacting salespeople.
B2B customers now prefer digital communication tools, are open to remote selling methods, and expect to receive maximum value from their purchases. This rapid acceleration in the pace of change revealed that the best practices that governed our industry in 2021 no longer apply. B2B lead generation company Belkins.io wants to offer our top 10 sales trends and predictions for the future of sales in 2022.
B2B lead generation company
With the world changing at a rapid pace, it is of high importance to staying up-to-date with the latest trends in your industry. Let’s get into the trends.
Trend #1. Boost Your Sales with Customer Data Platforms
The Digital Age has made us all hold on to data for dear life. Leads are generated better and deals come through quicker if we are guided by data, the right kind of data. With all automated sales tools for B2B being data-driven, using a handful of B2B sales enablement tools and a CMR isn’t enough. You need a unified database with all customer data from multiple sources and across online platforms, a.k.a. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs).
Once all the departments – marketing, sales, customer success, and finances – get access to a CDP, they can develop a holistic view of a potential customer and, as a result, a personalized customer experience. Those who have used Oracles, Salesforce or Adobe have had CDPs as part of their software. But there are stand-alone CDPs on the market as well.
Trend #2. Increase Conversions Through Intent Data
Data protection law is getting tougher. Now all apps request permission to track and Google intends to ditch its cookies policy by 2023. Customers can rejoice but what about marketers and salespeople? Will we still be able to read customer behavior and use intent data to target the right prospects? Yes. B2B lead generation model(s) built on leads’ purchase intent and the information looked up online remain intact. Professionals are still able to use internal intent data (also known as first-party intent data) from online search histories, surveys, gamification, and more.
These days demographics and psychographics are less helpful in our lead generation efforts. We need intent data to tell us not only who our customers are but what they want. When you know the keywords your ideal customer uses in their Google search, the topics they are most look up, and the sources they trust, you can target them more precisely and effectively.
Trend #3. Diversify Your B2B Marketing Mix with Interactive Content
The share of interactive marketing and video content as lead generation model(s) is steadily growing. Video content is more popular with consumers than text, so creative videos that tap into human psychology are far more effective at engaging, impressing, and converting leads.
According to FlowState Marketing, a US branding agency, you can easily ramp up your CTRs by simply adding a 1-minute video introduction to your email outreach campaign. However, interactive content includes more than just video. Explore surveys, games, quizzes, calculators, interactive infographics, and whatnot to boost your lead generation efforts.
Trend #4. Leverage Conversational Marketing to Boost Customer Engagement
Potential customers now expect answers to their questions within minutes on social media and customer support. Chatbots, live chats, and web bots can help businesses be in immediate contact with their clients. These are forms of conversational marketing enabled by AI set up to interact with clients.
A study conducted by The Lead Response Report found that companies who respond to leads within five minutes receive more than twice as many conversions as those who take longer. However, only 7% of businesses use AI-enabled conversational marketing to reply that fast.
Chatbots can provide assistance with sales, technical support, and customer success. They are a great tool for collecting lead information, such as feedback, contact numbers, names, email addresses, style preferences, etc. and storing it for lead scoring.
Trend #5. Harness the Power of Omnichannel Outreach
We are all online but frequent different virtual spaces. That’s why when salespeople are looking for the right person, they need to put out their message through multiple channels. By putting all your lead generator eggs in one basket of email marketing, you don’t give yourself a chance to pursue the decision-maker who favors phone calls (yup, they do exist) or SMS.
In 2022-2023, the concept of “omnichannel” will become one of the biggest trends in marketing. As more buyers settle on this strategy, marketers are increasingly delivering their messages via multiple channels simultaneously. Outbound channels – cold emails and cold calling – are growing in importance, with successful sales cadences involving all of them to maximize the results of your outreach.
Trend #6. Reduce Time Spent on Lead Generation Activities with Automated Sales Cadence Tools
B2B sales enablement tools allow users to organize and automate outbound efforts. Specifically, sales tools for B2B sales cadence help you manage multiple outbound channels with all their sequences and waves, including cold email campaigns, phone calls, and social platform interactions. They can be used to maximize the results of your outreach efforts by orchestrating your various marketing activities in a coordinated manner.
The correctly chosen tools help a B2B lead generation company get in front of prospects as many times as it is usually needed to qualify a lead and move on. Sales cadence software automates touches across the platforms. If you use email marketing as part of your omnichannel outreach, add an email checker Folderly to boost email deliverability.
Trend #7. Perform Better with Sales Specialization
Having dedicated people for prospecting, growth hacking, email marketing, discovery call, and appointment setting is the norm for a B2B lead generation company. But if you’re minding your own branding business, as FlowState Marketing does, do you also need to have sales specialization? It turns out, yes.
Sales specialization has become a core strategy at most fast-growing companies because it allows employees to become more efficient in their particular areas of expertise. As each employee can perform his or her task more efficiently when not burdened with other responsibilities, sales teams realized that specializing in distinct roles has become a new trend. Your business will perform better if you have an in-house copywriter, researchers, SDRs, BDRs, lead generators, and more.
Trend #8. Make Use of B2B Lead Generation Outsourcing
It can seem counterintuitive, but outsourcing any part of your business operations can be more cost-effective than doing it internally. Hiring and training more people for adding to your in-house team often costs more than outsourcing discovery or growth hacking.
For example, FlowState Marketing outsources lead generation to an outside team of SDRs and has its in-house team focused on full-service branding and delivering innovative solutions. Any company that chooses to follow this trend quickly finds out that you really cut costs and improve the quality of your work.
Trend #9. Hyper-Personalize Your B2B Digital Marketing Strategy with AI
It’s been a few years since hyper-personalization migrated to B2B from B2C. This trend is on the rise. Given a large amount of advertising spam flocking to our inboxes, can non-personalized cold email work? It’s a rhetorical question because the answer is obvious. Without a subject line tailored to your interest you won’t even open an email from an unknown sender, right?
These days people don’t mind sharing their behavioral data if it brings them discounts or an improved sales experience. In fact, people want to share their data and get useful things in return.
Hyper-personalization tailors the user experience to an individual’s preferences, based on their personal data. The result is more relevant clothing recommendations, suggested playlists, movie recommendations, and purchase advice in B2C. And ultra-relevant offers and maximized customer retention in B2B.
Trend #10. Be More Precise With ABM Targeting
In B2B selling, it can be challenging to reach multiple decision-makers within a company using traditional marketing methods. Account-based marketing helps marketers target an entire account instead of approaching each decision-maker separately.
Account-based targeting is not a new trend but companies take their time embracing it. Whereas less than half of businesses chose ABM strategies in 2016, 98 percent of respondents in surveys are in favor of it in 2021.
Account targeting, retargeting, and pre-targeting strategies help you find and reach out to prospects who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) and who have a strong need for your product.
Updating Your Understanding of the Sales Trends
Many trends aren’t new but it’s worth restating them to remind ourselves what to pay attention to. It’s always a good idea to watch the trends in your industry, especially if you’re in a business where you have to keep an eye on what’s going on around you.