6 Fatal B2B Sales Mistakes You Must Avoid

Image credit: Patrick Foto | Getty Images

Say yes to face-to-face meetings with the power players.

Marc Wayshak

GUEST WRITER

Sales Strategist and Author

B2B sales can be incredibly rewarding and lucrative -- if you know what you’re doing. Unfortunately, most salespeople in this field make the same few mistakes again and again. When everyone around you is making the same missteps and blunders with B2B selling, it can be extremely difficult to know how to fix your approach.

If you’re looking to overhaul your strategy for B2B sales so you can start to crush your competition, it’s time to start actively avoiding the most common B2B sales mistakes out there today. Here are the six fatal B2B sales mistakes you’re probably making:

1. Selling to low-level buyers.

It may be easier to get in front of buyers and purchasing managers than C-suite prospects, since you never have to deal with a gatekeeper in order to reach them. But those low-level buyers don’t have the power -- or the budget -- to tell you “yes.” In fact, they’re only really good at telling salespeople “no.” You won’t make money selling to low-level buyers in B2B sales, so make a commitment to seek out high-level decision makers who can actually say “yes” to what you have to offer their businesses.

2. Highlighting your product’s features and benefits.

There was a time when prospects cared about the features and benefits of your product. But they simply don’t anymore. Prospects today only care about the results and outcomes you can create in their world. More specifically, they want to know how you can solve their key challenges and deepest frustrations. Instead of highlighting your product’s features and benefits when selling to businesses, focus on specific outcomes your product or service can help your prospects achieve.

3. Giving proposals with only one option.

One of the biggest mistakes salespeople make in B2B sales is putting together single-option proposals. There are two major problems with these proposals. First, they don’t provide any context, which compels prospects to shop around to determine the value of your solution. Second, customers who really want to invest in a premium option will be limited to a lower-tier solution. Instead, provide a three-option proposal -- ranging from the lowest end option that will still solve their problem to a higher end option with the most value -- to boost your average sale size and the number of deals you close.

4. Relying solely on the phone and internet.

There’s been a big movement in B2B sales towards selling online and on the phone. In some cases, this can be efficient and helpful, but if you’re selling an expensive, high-end product or service that requires a serious investment, you simply can’t skip out on meeting face to face. Hop on a plane if that’s what it takes to sit across from a valuable prospect. You’ll increase your close rate many times over, and being able to close big deals at huge companies is well worth the cost of travel.

5. Failing to clarify your value proposition.

Every time a B2B prospect asks what exactly it is that you do, you should have a quick and rehearsed response that succinctly describes the value you create. Clarify, script out, and memorize your value proposition. This is the only part of your sales presentation you have to memorize, so there’s really no excuse for hazy, rambling answers to this question.

6. Rushing to offer deals and discounts.

Low prices only attract bad prospects in B2B sales. Your ideal customer cares about value, not price, so quit offering deals and discounts. It only lowers your value in the eyes of your prospects. Instead, focus on the value you create, and be proud to offer the premium solution on the market. This attitude will attract the type of customer who values you for years to come.

Which of these mistakes have you been making in B2B sales? How will you correct your mistakes and start crushing your sales goals? Check out this free Ultimate 3-Step Prospecting Call Template for more powerful sales advice.

https://bit.ly/2yFbqAh

The Rules to increase market share

The Rules to Increase Market Share and Mistakes to Avoid

Every successful company or organization must be driven in a constant quest to increase market share. And there are rules to increasing market share. However, most companies fall far short of all the projections and annual planning.

When the chips are finally counted and the level of success is finally evaluated on a spreadsheet, expectations rarely meet reality. Even if the expectations are met, the real measure of success is not just in the percentage of growth in your market share. But in your measure of growth compared to competitors in your category.

Who Wins?

The REAL winner is the one whose growth comes at the expense of another competitor in the market. When individual revenues increase but lags the category, you are losing. You must win at someone else’s expense because, whether you want to admit it or not, most categories are mature. The only way to grow is to steal market share from the competition.

Here are some basic rules to grow market share and steal customers from your competitors — and some marketing mistakes to avoid.

Rules to increase market share. Rule number 1 — Never Believe Everything You Hear.

Don’t believe the internal hype surrounding your brand’s importance to the customer. This view is myopic because our own brands are never as important to our customers as it is to us. Being successful at increasing market share is hard earned — and you earn it by knowing more about your customer then anyone else in the category. Only then can you align your strategic brand and tactical marketing messages to reflect that knowledge.

It is not enough to know the demographics and usage habits of your customers or prospects. You must find what drives trial and incites loyalty beyond traditional product features and attributes. Product features and benefits provide the keys to opening the gate for entry in a competitive category.

The attributes that provide marketers with so much pride are rarely why a customer prefers one brand to another. If choice were always about product features and benefits, all market leading (winning) brands would have the best features and pricing. Are you the market leader? Does no one in your category have equal (or superior) service or product? Enough said. It is possible to live and die by features and attributes alone.

Get everyone on board

You are most likely the market leader if your R&D department keeps you miles ahead of the competition and your advertising budget is so large that you are always in the face of your prospects and customers touting your NEW AND IMPROVED.

To increase market share and win, you must up the ante onbeing smarter than the competition rather than focusing on simply being better. Your prospect/customer believes the purchase decisions that they make to be germinal to their own sense-of-self.

This sense-of-self is a more important factor in the mechanism of choosing than any product feature you can possibly imagine.

This is an emotional (right brain) value that R&D has no part in. The left-brain part of the purchase decision is reflected in the CATEGORY choice.

The logical part of all this

This is the cognitive part of the equation. This means that, when a customer seeks a solution, they evaluate product benefits to decide which category of offering they will choose. For example, if someone is purchasing an oven for their home, they will first choose a category of solutions — microwave, conventional, or convection oven.

Once they decide which of these category choices is the right decision, they will then seek out those players in that category. But how do they decide whether they want a VULCAN, Amana, GE, KitchenAid, or Jenn-Air?

That decision is not based on cognitive thinking. They will all cook food well. No, the final leg in the decision tree is an emotional evaluation and choice. It is a choice based on what the brand means to them rather than what the product does or does not do.

If you understand your customer better than the competition does, you will be in a position ensure that your brand promises more of “THAT” whatever “THAT” turns out to be. What we can promise is that “THAT” will not be about the benefits and features of your product or service. (Although features may fulfill the brand. But features alone are unemotional and unpersuasive.) Instead, “THAT” will be about who the prospect believes they are at the moment of purchase and how much your brand reflects their own beliefs about whom they aspire to be.

Rule to increase market share. Rule number 2 — Don’t’ Believe Your Own Hype

It is easy to get caught up in the self-serving belief that your product, people, and expertise are better than the competition.

You know the story — “We have better people!” Banks(i.e. Bank of America, Chase, and Wells Fargo), pharmacies (i.e. Walgreen’s CVS, and Rite Aid), and automobile dealerships (i.e. Ford, GM, Chrysler, KIA, Honda, and Volkswagen) are fond of building their marketing messages around this self-serving and foolish idea.

Let’s face facts — we all draw our employees from the same pool of workers. It is not only foolish to assume “our folks are better than your folks,” it is a ticket to certain disaster.

Being dispassionate must be your goal in developing a strategy. Factor out these category table stakes (the minimum requirements to gain permission to play in the category). Then create your marketing messages. At the same time, do everything you can to ensure that your work force is the best trained and best in the industry.

Think how many banks tout their table stakes (i.e. online banking, friendly people, and competitive rates). How many beer brands tout their table stakes (great taste, quality ingredients and a caring brew master)?

Destinations and Tourism brands want to increase market share too

Many destinations tout their table stakes (exotic locations, endearing natives and authentic cultures). Think how many automobile manufactures tout their table stakes (sexy design, great road handling and top-shelf engineering and attention to detail).

If all of these generic benefits were all that important, we would expect that there would be no Toyota, Budweiser, Apple, Walgreen’s, and Bahamas as market leaders. We would have a much more diverse market space with many main players.

So… forget all of those obvious and generic features and benefits. Look closer for real differences. Factor them out. What is left?

Then work as hard as you can to have the best tasting beer, best online banking site and friendliest employees. Just don’t expect your competition’s customers to choose your brand because of them. Do it because it is a best business practice not a marketing advantage

Rule to increase market share. Rule number 3 — Don’t Be Like the Market Leader

Copying the market leader is a major marketing mistake. When you copy the marketing message and style of the market leader, you are absolutely their very best friend. As long as Target and Kmart copy Walmart, they can expect Walmart to remain the runaway winner. Your strategy must be to be different.

Being a market leader has two distinct advantages.

1. Share of voice and top-of-mind awareness is often just enough. Woody Allen once said, “Half of success is just showing up.” As far as the market leader is concerned, he was mostly right.
2. Market also-rans are prone to copy the market leader’s successful messaging, which is a sure-fire way to help the market leader to keep on winning and remaining the king of the hill.

Think about this. Why should a customer choose AMD over Intel? The messaging and marketing looks the same and speaks to the same benefits. In a tie, who do you think wins? Why should a United Airlines customer choose to fly Delta Airlines if the messaging looks and feels the same?

Why should a computer purchaser choose Dell over HP? In each of these cases, the marketers believe they are communicating a benefit that matters to prospects. Mostly, they are preaching to the choir and helping the market leader lap the field.

Rule to increase market share. Rule number 4 — Be Consistent

Your greatest enemy is in confusing your brand strategy with your marketing tactics. Strategy always drives the tactics and ALWAYS remains consistent. Too many throw out their brand strategy because immediate results are not as successful as they initially hope. They panic. In most cases, there was nothing wrong with the strategy but the tactic used to deliver the message was flawed.

Napoleon once said that an Army that marches in the wrong direction and then turns around and goes back has made two mistakes instead of one. Toyota did not gain its market leadership by changing its brand marketing strategy on a whim.

Brand strategy is a long-term commitment and your own lack of commitment spells its doom.

When challenging a market leader, you need to be compelling. Be consistent so that the target market begins to see your brand as you have communicated it. Apple has changed tactics many times over the years. But its brand promise of the customer thinking differently and seeking simplicity has never waned.

Result — Be a Brand

Increasing market share at your competitors’ expense takes more than a catchy commercial and tagline. If your goal is to be smarter and better than your competition, you need to remain focused and disciplined. You need to have clarity in your brand space so that your potential customers can find you in the sea of choices that they are bombarded with everyday.

In such a competitive din of noise, with each demanding hatchling screaming, “Feed me,” your prospects will inevitable seek a means to simplify their decision process. Brand does that and nothing else does. Let your brand make it easier for them by reflecting the precepts and values that define their lives.

10 Landing Page Mistakes That Are Killing Your Chances At Conversion

It can happen to the best of us, you’re spending lots of money buying ads, you’ve designed and optimised your ads so the get lots of clicks, but there are no conversions. You double checked again to make sure the links are not dead in the ad, and they are coming to your site.

So why aren’t they converting?

According to research done by MarketingSherpa, 44% of B2B clicks are directed to a home page, instead of a dedicated landing page. So where are you sending your traffic? Sending ad traffic to a dedicated landing page helps to improve your page relevance (which is an essential ingredient of your Quality Score, the single biggest factor in determining your ad results and costs).

Sending (paid) traffic to unoptimized landing pages is a big waste of time.

A landing page is a standalone page designed for one specific objective. Or at least it should be. In reality, even if you sent your traffic to a dedicated landing page, they ask their visitors for too many different things. Everything is shouting for attention. And with all these things screaming for attention, visitors tend to leave.

For you as a small business owner or a startup, every dollar wasted is a dollar you can’t spend growing your company. So what are the most common mistakes made on landing pages and what can you do to make sure you don’t make them?

In this article, we go through the ten most made mistakes and show you what you can about them.

Landing Page Mistake #1. Slow Page Speed

We can start talking about all the things that might be wrong with your landing page, like point two, too many distractions, etc. But that would mean that people first need to see your landing page.

If your landing page doesn’t load with five seconds, 74% of your visitors are already dropping off before they could even get distracted by all of the other points.

For eCommerce sites, this is even worse. Having a three-second load time? Half your traffic is already gone. That is the reason why the best brand in the world first focuses on reducing their load time. Their load time is below one second and so should yours be.

So how can you check and improve your loading speed? First off you need to check your current speed. Tools like Pingdom or Google’s PageSpeed Insights will give you a quick idea how you’re currently doing and what specific items could be optimised.

Most of the times there are a couple of things slowing down the loading speed of your website, which is easily fixable:

• Cleaning up your code, removing extra’s that you don’t need. Minifying your JavaScript and CSS files etc.
• Minimising redirects where possible
• Just like your the previous two steps, a lot of people forget to optimise their visuals and run them through tools like TinyPNG, etc. to reduce the file size
• If all of the above three items still don’t make a dent in the universe, it might be time to upgrade your hosting as well

Landing Page Mistake #2. Too Many Distractions

A lot of people are in the belief that a user should have a choice. That more choice is better, however in the case of a landing page where there is only one specific objective, having a choice is bad.

We live in an attention economy, and too many choices kill the ability to make a decision.

Every extra element you add to your page decreases the importance of everything else on your page. By minimising distractions, you increase the attention towards the most important items. This means the navigation bar should be gone, links in the footer should not be there, etc., etc.

For example, in 2009 the landing page of Twitter was asking for seven different actions:

And even though they could point to all these things on their homepage to try people to convince to use Twitter. The purpose of that page should only be two things. Either you sign-up or you sign-in. All the rest, like links to their USP’s, etc. were taking people away from those two goals.

If you compare that to what their homepage looks like right now, you can see the difference.

The Twitter homepage in 2017, focusing on the two most important items: sign-in or sign-up.

They’ve removed every extra element that could be distraction their visitors. Focusing on the two most important things. Think of it like this. When you arrive at a page like this, most people’s reaction would be “What am I supposed to look at here?”.

You need to get rid of any visual distraction that would prevent someone from taking the action you want them to take on your landing page if you want it to be successful.

Landing Page Mistake #3. No Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or Value Proposition

When all distractions are removed your landing page, the first thing a visitor should see is the most important sales point you have. Why would someone want to buy your product or sign-up for your product or mailing list?

Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), or Value Proposition should communicate in a clear and firm voice what makes you so special. Depending on the goal of the landing page, this could be the product you’re pushing, the promotion you’re offering or some statistics that make your business so unique that the visitors can’t help themselves to sign-up.

People sometimes make the mistake of confusing their USP with their Call-To-Actions (CTA). To make it easy to remember, your USP is your primary and unique selling point, while your CTA turns the interest generated from this USP into the action you want them to take.

Some examples you can use on your landing page:

• The easiest way to [product or business purpose]
• The #1 provider of [service]
• [Well-known-brand] gives you [thing], we give you [better thing]
• Get [your service] Free for [length of trial]!

Landing Page Mistake #4. Copy That Doesn’t Match Your Offer

Everything you write on your landing page from the Value Proposition to the body copy needs to be in line with the offering your giving and the ad copy that led people to your landing page in the first place.

When someone sees an ad for something and the landing page they land on is talking about something completely different they are gone before you know it. The copy of both USP and the body copy on the page needs to be relevant to the user because that is the only way you can keep their attention and make them complete the action.

Look at the above picture, for example, the copy on the left is better than the copy on the right, because of the copy on the right repeats that “top rated Bluetooth earbuds” again, compared to just some generic product title on the right. Where are the earbuds that I just saw in the ad?

Landing Page Mistake #5. Not Having a Preview of the Item and Other Visual Mistakes

We’re living in a visual society, so why don’t you take full advantages of them on your landing page? There’s a lot of reasons why the visuals on your landing pages are hurting your conversions; let’s have a look at them:

• Irrelevant images – Almost a bit the same as your copy not matching your offering. The same problem can happen when using a wrong hero shot, a visual representation of your offer that demonstrates how your product or service works so your prospects can picture themselves using it. If you’ve created an ebook and have a landing page set-up for that, use a picture of the ebook to give people an idea of what they are getting. Any other images won’t be bringing any value and will only distract
• No images – Almost as bad as having a wrong image, is having no image at all. An image can help and support the value proposition that you’re trying to communicate. Make sure that the visual you offer stands out on your page and communicates your content clearly though.

Landing Page Mistake #6. Not Optimising Landing Pages for Search

Just like writing and optimising your normal website copy for SEOwriting and optimising your normal website copy for SEO, you should also do this same practice for writing the content for your landing page. Especially if you’re a small company with not a lot of budget to spend on ad campaigns, you need your landing pages to be shown up in organic search results.

Be sure to do keyword research before writing your headlines, sub head lines and product descriptions. Otherwise, you might have a perfectly good converting landing page, but it only converts as long as you keep putting money behind it. If no one search for the content on your landing page it will never rank.

For example, you could make a page by mistake that the title tag, H1 heading and image alt tag information optimised for just the keyword “playbook” when that is too general, and you will never rank for the keyword “Social Media Playbook”.

If you want to optimise your landing pages for SEO be sure to:

• Use the model numbers of product title in your title tags and H1 headings
• Use brand names in your title tags and H1 headings
• Don’t forget to include an image alt tag information
• Don’t keyword stuff the page, but just repeating it over and over again (never a good idea)
• And never, ever use iframes to showcase the content of your landing page. Make sure that the content on the landing page is there.

Landing Page Mistake #7. No, or uninspiring Social Proof

A lot of marketers make the mistake of creating a landing page without any social proof. Social proof, or endorsements by others, however, can showcase a strong reputation, it shows that your trustworthy and as a result can increase the conversion on your landing pages.

Reviews need to be actual quotes from real, relatable customers, celebrities or influencers that have used your product or service. Showing real people with their name, function and profile picture, makes your page seem friendlier and can help showcase your product in a way that is hard to achieve by just your copy. Of course, the better known a person is, the better the social proof.

Take a look for example at the social proof on our landing page for our social media playbook, why do these testimonials work so well?

• The include the full name, and picture of real people who read and got value from our playbook, as well as the position and company they work for, or any awards they got, proving their credibility
• They are relatable to traffic arriving at that particular landing page because they are well known in the industry

Social proof shows the value of the product or service you’re trying to offer on your landing page and can have a strong influence on your conversion rate. By including them on your landing page, you show credibility making potential leads more at ease into trusting your business.

Landing Page Mistake #8. Poor Mobile Experience

In May 2015, Google mobile searches surpassed desktop searches. This is a trend, and it’s not going away. 80% of Facebook’s Advertising Revenue can be attributed to mobile.

Image Source: Business Insider

There is a high probability that over 50% of the visitors to your landing page are arriving there on some mobile device. If your landing page is not optimised for the mobile experience, your losing money and credibility.

Next, to that mobile visitors have a different intent and high distraction levels and expectations that are not always inline with people viewing your landing page on desktop.

To get the most out of your landing page on mobile ensure that it is not to there is not to much text and that the text that is on your landing page is clearly readable. The average width of an adult thumb is 1 inch, which converts to 72 pixels. Make sure that your Call-To-Actions are big enough for easy click using your thumb.

Landing Page Mistake #9. Your call-to-actions are confusing people

Call To Actions (CTA’s). The lifeblood of any organisation. After all, what good does it do for your company, when someone pays a visit to your landing page and leaves again?

A lot of marketers love CTA’s so much that they try to add multiple of them on a landing page. The logic being, if a visitor doesn’t like your primary CTA, there is always another one right?

But as we already showed in mistake number two, too many distractions can hurt your conversions. The best practice is to only place one single CTA on your landing page.

Try playing with the copy, colours, and urgency on your CTA’s to find the perfect mix for your landing page:

• Use an action verb (get, do, try, start)
• Use “You” instead of “My” (Start your free trial)
• Be specific about what they’ll get (Get your 14-day free trial)

Landing Page Mistake #10. You’re Asking For Too Much

If you a brick and mortar store and a someone walked in, potentially wanting to buy from you. Would you ask where they live, how many family members they have and maybe if you can hold their credit card while they browse through your store? Probably not.

Or maybe when you’re in a bar, and a total stranger walked up to you asking for your phone number? Would that work? Okay there might be a slim change for that one, but you get the point 

Why wouldn’t these examples work though? Because there is no trusting relationship yet, you’ve never met before, and you’re immediately asking for all sorts of private details.

The same thing goes for a lot of forms on landing pages.

You’ve just fixed all of the above and your potential lead is ready to fill in the form, but then… your form is way to complicated.

And of course, for your business, you want to have as much information as possible so you can properly qualify your leads. But for a visitor, they want to get your product, your ebook or whatever other it is that your offering as quickly and easily as possible.

Even one or two extra fields can drastically decrease the conversion rate of your landing page according to research done by Hubspot.

So what to do? Try to find a trade-off; maybe there are some form fields like a location you can already automatically pre-fill. Or maybe ask only a name and email address the first time, and the second time when someone comes back asking for a little bit more details.

A lot of companies are asking way more information on a form than they need. At a basic level, you need an email address and maybe a name. The rest you can obtain later. Before adding any extra field on your form ask yourself this question: is this information necessary to complete the current transaction? If not leave it out.

There you go, the ten biggest mistakes you could be making on your landing pages that are killing your conversions. And now you know, there is no excuse anymore to keep on making them on your landing pages.

Time for you to take a critical look at your current landing pages using the above tips. Time to get those conversions up and improve your business results.

https://goo.gl/cUqeQE