When I joined Fieldproxy fresh out of college and looking to really make it as a great marketer and storyteller, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into.
The world of B2B SaaS is different from college, you see. People don’t just “skip assignments for a party” or sit out of lectures (meetings) thinking they can “get the passing credits anyway”. No, see people in the B2B space do their assignments. They do willingly sit in lectures and webinars. They don’t just want passing grades, they aim for A+
Or atleast that’s what I was told.
Image source
When people think B2B, they think of all these gentlemen and ladies in neat-fitting suits and pants, walking briskly across the board room with little emotion on their faces. They talk facts and figures, numbers…… math. They look intently at monochromatic graphs and charts, draw projections, question pipelines, figure out sales funnels and RevOps, and make meaning out of seemingly irrelevant markers. They mean business.
See, to people outside the space, B2B isn’t a profession for humans – it’s for calculators and computers. You simply cannot imagine otherwise. And the worst part? They’re partly right. And that’s why a lot of salespeople in the B2B marketplace have a hard time selling their product.
B2B does rely a lot on math and charts and metrics and funnels and all the other crazy business terms you can think of, and some. But it’s not for machines. It is very much for humans.
When I walked into the Fieldproxy office at 22, B2B was new to me. I had only written and marketed for D2C brands before, and was fairly young even in that space, but it didn’t take me long to figure out the most important thing that’s keeping a lot of people from increasing their sales numbers is the fact that they think B2B selling is different from other mediums of selling.
Here’s what you need to keep in mind though:
No matter where you are, sales is the same, because people are the same.
Your product may be different, your target audience may be different, your storyline may be different, but the people buying the product are the same – they have the same emotions, the same reactions to pesky cold-callers, and the same craving to jump at a deal too good to miss.
As long as you humanize your sales process and show your prospects that there’s a human on the other side of the phone, you’re going to win. It may take you six months, it may take you six years, but eventually, you’ll get there.
When we at Fieldproxy showed our prospects that we were actual humans working in the B2B field sales and service industry, that we were connecting with them to help them get better at automating their field teams, that we were actual people with an actually useful product, we sold much much better than most robots relying on a sequenced process.
Bottom Line:
Humanize your sales process, craft a good story, build trust, and let the magic unfurl.
And remember: B2B does not have to be boring.