Increase high-quality B2B leads with guided selling

B2B buyers foresee a personal relationship

Just as the B2C market, the online B2B market continues to grow year-over-year and is expected to grow for the coming years. This gives B2B companies another reason why they have to make sure their online customer journey is fluent. A challenge B2B companies face is that B2B buyers expect that product catalogs, pricing and item selection are arranged according to their specific needs (Mckinsey.com). In other words, B2B buyers expect a unique and personalized experience. Because B2B buyers expect a personalized experience you want to be more personal, but did you know that conversion rates and average order values also increases when being more personal? This means that it directly impacts sales and profitability. 

Some questions you might ask are: 

1. How to keep B2B relationships personalized and unique at scale in an online environment? 
2. How do you identify and increase high-quality leads in an online environment?

Use a CRM tool to store B2B buyers details

Well, to be personal and to identify high-quality leads, you need to know your customer. To get to know your customer, you need information about your customer, like a name, e-mail address, which products he or she is interested in, how many products, what business sector and country he or she is operating in, the challenges, etc. The more information you have about your customer, the better. Literally. 

These details, which we call data points, can be stored in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. With a CRM tool, such as Salesforce or HubSpot, you can manage interactions with B2B buyers, streamline processes, see where a B2B buyer is in his customer journey and build customer relationships to, eventually, increase sales and profitability. 

Sounds great! The main question is: how do you get this detailed and personalized information about your B2B buyers such that you can be personal and identify high-quality leads in the first place? 

Challenge: how to gain detailed and personalized B2B buyer information and identify high-quality leads? 

That we have to be personal with our B2B shoppers is quite clear, but why would you want to determine the quality of a lead in the first place? Well for starters, it helps you predict future revenues, profits and gives you a sense about how much attention a lead needs. It could also give you an idea in an early phase whether you are generating the right leads. 

Generate more high-quality leads with online channels 

Besides, when you have classified a lead in a certain quality-bucket, you can reward the online channels (e.g. Google Ads, Social, Google Organic) which contributed to generate the lead by allocating an attributed conversion value to the channels. This means that you can optimize your channels to generate even more qualified leads. For paid marketing channels, like Google Ads, this means that the system is more rewarded for generating high quality leads than low quality leads, and thus Google Ads optimizes towards higher quality leads, based on these customer data points. 

Why a default contact form is not desirable 

Sure, a default contact form gives you a sense about a buyer's name, email and, if you’re lucky, a question about a product in the description field. But based on these default forms, it’s quite hard to determine the quality of a new lead. Moreover, the description fields are often empty or missing relevant information about the needs of a B2B shopper, making it hard to determine the quality of the lead. You often miss relevant information like the product a client is interested in, the quantity, the size of the organization etc. 

Besides, a default contact form doesn't really give the B2B buyers a personal experience, which he is expecting according to McKinzey.com. As mentioned, you are also missing a lot of data points when you’re making use of default contact forms. Less data points means less information about your customer, which means that you can be less personal. Moreover, it’s harder to classify the quality of a lead. In other words, your missing information that you could use to meet the needs of your customers.

B2B buyers need to find more complex products just as easily.

Online B2B buyers expect easy website navigation and suggested and personalized product content. This is similar to what B2C shoppers expect when shopping online. In-person sales meetings and paper catalogs are becoming less popular among modern buyers (Bigcommerce.com).

Solution: Identify high-quality leads and increase personalization with a selling guide

I hope it’s clear why you want more information about your B2B shoppers. To gain more detailed and personalized B2B buyer information you have to know your potential customer better. In an offline world this often happens by simply talking to each other. During a conversation you can ask specific questions and based on the provided answers, you can ask relevant follow-up questions to identify the customer needs and identify the quality of a potential B2B buyer. It can’t be more personal than a face-to-face conversation. 

In an online world, you can engage in a conversation with a selling guide such as Qonfi. Qonfi is an online tool to help you easily create and implement a selling guide on your B2B website yourself. With this tool you can engage in a conversation with your potential B2B leads. You can ask questions and based on the answers (=data points) provided, you can ask relevant follow-up questions. 

Add Qonfi data to your CRM or E-mail marketing platoform

A selling guide gives your users an unique and personalized experience given the follow-up questions. A big advantage is that these data points (answers and questions) can be used to enrich your CRM data automatically by connecting Qonfi to your CRM or E-mail software as seen in the example below where Qonfi lead data is automatically exported to Mailchimp. 

Moreover, with a selling guide, you gain a lot of unique data points from your lead (answers on the questions you provided), which you can use to identify the quality of a lead, be more personal and which can be used to further optimize your online channels.