3 Tactics to Help Close More B2B Sales

The quarter is about to end, and you’re scrambling to close deals. You’re so close to goal, you can taste it. Sound familiar? 

As most B2B sellers can attest, this can be an exciting and stressful time. Blanketing your potential prospects with emails, calls, and texts, you’re doing everything in your power to finish strong. But this approach may be doing more harm than good.

Now’s not the time to reach out to anyone and everyone. Sure, you may have established a solid rapport with some of those folks, but is this potential sale in their best interest at this specific time? Even though it may feel like productive activity, “spray and pray“ tends not to be a magic bullet for increasing close rates or attaining quota. Last-minute sales tactics can come off as desperate, even aggressive — and your customers and prospects notice. 

To achieve your quarterly sales quota more efficiently and consistently, B2B sellers need to leverage real-time buyer insights to determine who to call, what time to call, and what to talk about. Not only can this lead to better conversations, but it can put you in a better position to help accelerate pipeline and uncover new cross-sell opportunities.

A Stronger Ending to the Quarter

Prioritizing sales efforts and adding value quickly for your top accounts have always been important. Today, technology and data can be game changers, which can make your interactions even more effective by connecting them with relevant context and buying signals. Together, they can help boost your close rates, quota attainment, and overall sales performance.

This quarter, use these tips to help ensure your access to buying signals and customer insights for more successful account outreach.

Tip 1: Streamline and improve your account research

With more detailed buyer information at your disposal, you can allocate more of your time to revenue-focused activities that can help close deals instead of trying to find out who moved where and when. Floor & Décor can offer a compelling example of how better data and tools can help sales teams more effectively focus their outreach efforts and improve performance. 

Tip 2: Prioritize adding contact data that you can trust

As people move from one company to another, their email addresses and phone numbers change, meaning the accuracy of business records degrades, opening the door to some really awkward sales conversations. Especially when trying to accelerate a sale, it’s vital to have data that is organized, structured, and integrated across the enterprise, so the information driving your key business decisions is more accurate and fresher. 

The contact data should also be sourced from multiple places — from first-party data that’s generated through your company’s website or customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to third-party data that can enrich and help complete the information you have in house. Finding the right sales and marketing data provider helps you build the foundation for engaging buyers effectively and efficiently. For tips on evaluating B2B data vendors, check out The Forrester Wave™: Marketing And Sales Data Providers For B2B, Q1 2024.  

Tip 3: Find the right opportunities at the right time 

Whether it’s managed through an internal or external analytics team or delivered as-a-service in your CRM platforms, contact data should be turned into insight that can help you pinpoint low-hanging fruit and guide you to a successful conversation starter. For example, you can tie unique sales data points together and use derived insights to set off triggers telling you to contact a buyer at the right moment with the right context to help progress the deal.  

Say you notice that your prospect is creating some buzz with investment news and also that they’re increasing hiring and looking to grow. You encounter a stream of editorial coverage and PR announcements around this, and concurrently you see them looking at certain products on your website. These are often some of the best signals that the timing is optimal to connect with a customer, especially when that data is coupled with your first- and third-party real-time data.

Your integrated first- and third-party data (structured and unstructured) is your secret to being at the right place at the right time — with the strongest recommendations. This data and its actual usability can create a competitive advantage that can help you close more sales more quickly.

Align, Agree, and Act

Once you know how to use the firmographic data to your advantage, it’s important to be able to easily access it to put it to good use as part of your routine. This is where alignment with marketing and other departments can be crucial. 

Today’s forward-thinking B2B organizations are being more prescriptive about highlighting opportunities and stressing what data has changed, the accounts that should be prioritized, and most importantly, how to engage an account across multiple channels. The goal is to have access to the right data and insights within your daily workflows and systems, such as your CRM and marketing automation tools, so you can more easily and promptly act on the information. 

When B2B sellers avoid acting as aggressive pitchmen and instead position themselves as trusted advisors, they’re more likely to close deals and achieve quota at quarter-end. With the right customer intelligence, you may even find opportunities for cross-selling or upselling that result in a greater lifetime customer value for the business. Conversely, without the right data and information, your conversations may fall on deaf ears and keep your sales goals out of reach.

This may sound like a lot to tackle, but you don’t have to go it alone. Sales tools like D&B Hoovers^® can help surface the data you need to help identify the most strategic accounts to prioritize each quarter.