Optimize your b2b sales process for corporations

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- Are you ready for the truth about B2B sales? I know you are and we've got it for you today on this episode of The Dave Lorenzo Daily. (upbeat music) Hi I'm Dave Lorenzo, welcome to another edition of The Dave Lorenzo Daily. Today we're talking about business to business sales and most people think business to business sales is a cerebral process. They think it's rational, they think you lay out the features and the benefits of your products and people will buy from you in a business to business environment. That's just not true. We're gonna give you the truth about business to business sales today but first if you're just joining us I wanna say welcome and I invite you to subscribe here to The Dave Lorenzo Daily. When you subscribe you will get notifications about when we go online live and do interviews. We do that every Thursday and you can participate by texting in your questions. Also if you subscribe, you will be notified when we upload a new video and we do that every single day. I don't want you to miss a day so hit that button and ring that bell to subscribe. All right, in business to business sales, you're really dealing with people. You're not selling to an institution. You don't walk up to the building and go "Hello Mr. Building, I'd like to do "business with you", you absolutely don't do that. You go to meetings and you meet with people. Even if you respond to requests for proposals, you're still going to have to deliver a presentation to another person. So when you think about selling in a business to business environment, you have to appeal to emotions just like if you were appealing to the emotions of a consumer. Here's the difference, when you're appealing to emotions in a B2B setting, you're thinking about minimizing the risk for the person with whom you're connecting. You're thinking about delivering personal benefit to that individual. Are they gonna get promoted as a result of working with you? Are they going to look good in front of their peers? Are they going to look good in front of their boss? These are things that people think about in a business to business setting. The third thing you're thinking about is the return on investment to the company and how that return on investment plays with the individual in their role. Let's take each of those three aspects and they're emotional in nature and let's talk about how you can appeal to them. First and foremost, minimizing risk. You want to be the person that everybody thinks of when they think about the least risk involved when it comes to your relationship with the buyer, with the person who has economic authority. So how can you be the least risk? Any type of testimonial or case study that you can share with that person will help them feel, there's emotions again, will help them feel better about the risk they're taking. So sharing case studies, of course delivering references, people they can speak to in person to help them feel that they're not taking that much of a risk. Any type of similar or comparable other company that you've dealt with particularly in their industry will help them feel better about hiring you. If you're the industry leader in your field, that will make them feel better. The second thing you can do to minimize risk is educate them on the market. Educate them on what's going on in the industry. Educate them on things that are happening, current trends and how your product or service can keep them at the forefront of the industry. That will help them believe that you have vast industry knowledge, that you're a thought leader in your industry and you are less risky. So education, case studies, testimonials, references, all help to make the economic authority, the person who's the buyer feel like you're the least risky alternative that they can choose in the buying process. Now the second thing is personal benefit. You have to ask the person who you're sitting across the table from, the person with economic authority, or are multiple people if it's a committee that's doing the purchasing, you have to ask them what's in it for you personally? How will the outcome of this project affect you personally? How will this purchase affect you personally? Of course they're gonna say well if it goes badly, I'm gonna get fired or if it goes badly, it's not gonna look good on my performance review. But what happens if it goes well? How do you benefit from us knocking our goals out of the park, from us beating the budget, from us achieving everything that we set out to achieve, how does it benefit you? If you're working with the owner of a company, it's an entrepreneurial setting or you're working with a senior decision maker, this purchase may have an impact on their legacy and you need to know that, that's important for you to understand. So how it affects the buyer or buyers personally is important and you wanna appeal to that because again this is an emotional process. The third and final component is return on investment. Now you may think of return on investment as being rational, it's a hard numbers game and you're gonna show them comparable return on investment from other people in the industry, from people who are in a similar status to them as far as revenue or production. Everybody has a way of demonstrating a positive return on investment. However the return on investment becomes emotional when their performance bonus is tided to any type of financial incentives. So you need to find out how return on investment impacts them personally as well. When you propose return on investment, make sure you always do the numbers in a way that they can easily calculate their compensation if their compensation is tied to ROI. Okay, those are the three ways you can hit home from an emotional perspective in a business to business setting. I want you to make sure that you think about emotion as strongly in a B2B setting as you would if this was a business to consumer setting. Even if it is a rigorous process that procurement is running with a checklist, people who make this decision will have feelings and you have to appeal to those feelings as strongly as you would in any other environment. I'm Dave Lorenzo and this is The Dave Lorenzo Daily. We'll see you right back here tomorrow. Until then, I hope you do this and sell more. (upbeat music)