Win More Customers With Proven Buyer Engagement Insights

Engaging buyers is more challenging than ever for B2B sales teams. The traditional methods don’t work well in a digital sales world, so teams need to adjust.  

It’s not easy to know if prospects like your content, or even if they open your emails. Buyer engagement is a problem for many B2B sales teams struggling to make an impact, find quality leads, and close deals.

No matter how well-written your content is or how amazing the proposal sounds, if it doesn’t resonate with your buyer, it won’t be successful. B2B sales teams need to adjust their strategies to be more buyer-centric. 

This shift can make all the difference in your conversion rate. And, it all begins with understanding your buyer better and adapting your sales journey to meet their needs. 

Forward’s Digital Sales Rooms provides teams with the tools they need to boost buyer engagement and deliver a meaningful sales journey. Leverage powerful buyer engagement insights to understand your buyer better. Use those insights to refine your content and sales process to impress your buyer and maximise your chances of conversion.

Buyer Engagement: Key Factors To Consider

Buyer engagement is not a new concept in sales; it generally revolves around three key factors:

• Creating an Outstanding Customer Journey: Crafting a buyer-centric strategy addresses a buyer’s unique pain points, making them feel valued and understood. 
• Build Relationships: Buyer communications should vary and take different forms throughout the process. They should be consistent in messaging as much as they are in timing.
• Personalise Messaging: Delivering personalised messaging is, and always has been, a critical aspect of any buyer engagement strategy. 

It’s easy to see these elements in a traditional sales journey. You could anticipate several face-to-face meetings, presentations, and product demos to close a deal. There may be dinner meetings, sales calls, and appointment schedulers moving the deal forward.

Those same elements exist in the digital environment, but B2B sales teams need new ways to build those relationships. B2B buyers still want a personalised experience that makes them feel heard, understood, and valued. You still have to convince multiple stakeholders that your product is the solution for their company. You just have to do it differently.

Making that transition to a digital sales environment isn’t easy. Delivering a personalised experience is far more challenging, but not impossible. Crafting an entire customer journey and building relationships isn’t as straightforward when you aren’t sitting across a conference room from your prospect. 

6 Effective Strategies for Boosting Buyer Engagement

It’s not as if all B2B sales fell apart with the shift to a digital environment. Some sales reps figured out how to overcome the challenges to succeed, starting with these six strategies.

1. Personalisation

It might feel easier and faster to churn out the same content repeatedly, but it’s highly ineffective for engaging buyers. Generic sales materials fall flat because they feel stiff, boring, and make a buyer feel undervalued. 

Did you know? 66% of customers expect you to understand their individual needs, and over half of them expect you to personalise every offer.

Personalisation is a powerful tool for any B2B sales team, especially when you can deliver in ways your competition cannot. It’s the key to building a strong relationship that translates to long-term sales.

When you take time to tailor all of your content and proposals to fit each individual buyer’s needs, you make them feel understood and valued. Buyers expect you to deliver relevant content at the right time, and the sales teams that comply  will win more conversions.

But, personalisation is time-consuming, right? How much time would it take to customise every piece of content for each prospect? Teams wanting to create personalised content in the digital age are in for a treat. With customisable templates set for each stage of the sales funnel, teams can easily deliver that personalised content with a few keyboard strokes. 

Forward's digital sales room provides teams with powerful personalisation tools to create customised content that resonates with prospects during the buyer journey. Tap into a library of customisable templates for various sales scenarios.

2. Guide the Buyer Through the Sales Journey

How do you know what parts of your sales funnel are effective? Where do prospects most frequently drop out? Having insight into buyer engagement at each stage of your sales funnel can help you tailor the sales journey to meet your buyer’s needs.

You know what your ideal sales journey looks like, but your customer doesn’t. It’s up to your sales team to guide each buyer through the process with the ultimate goal of converting them. To do so, your team needs to understand the buyer and adapt the journey to meet their needs. 

The B2B sales journey is typically more complex since you have to appeal to so many stakeholders. You must understand each persona involved in the decision-making process. Some of them might require a bit more time at certain stages, and you need to prepare for that.

For example, a prospective buyer engages with your content through a certain point but then drops out entirely. Looking back at the buyer engagement life cycle, you can determine what they connected with and when things went off track. It might be that one stakeholder held up the process, and that’s who you need to focus on.

Of course, your lead doesn’t need to experience the entire sales journey from the beginning. Instead, you would re-engage them from the point they dropped out. Perhaps discover what turned them off and clarify things to save the sale. 

Forward provides teams with access to buyer engagement insights so you know when leads engage with your content. With accurate buyer insights, you can tailor your approach, time follow-ups, and focus on those leads with high engagement to boost conversion rates.

3. Created a Unified Experience

Buyers crave consistency and prefer a seamless experience. A unified experience requires consistent messaging with every interaction and a user-friendly experience.

Did you know? 80% of B2B buyers utilise mobile devices to research and purchase products. Your content needs to be mobile-responsive to reach your target audience.

A unified experience begins with mobile responsiveness. Smartphones and tablets are crucial tools for most people. If your content isn’t viewable on a smaller screen, you’re missing the mark. 

Aside from user-friendly functions, a unified experience involves: 

• Consistent messaging across all platforms is necessary. You can’t spout one thing on social media but provide an entirely different message in an email campaign. 
• Embrace a strong buyer-centric approach built around your unique customer profiles and buyer engagement data.
• Consider customer feedback about their experiences and where they would like to see improvement. Use that data to refine your campaigns for future prospects.

Forward supports teams with creating a unified buyer experience, starting with personalised workspaces. Keep content consistent and personalised for each buyer through customised micro-sites.

4. Incorporate Scheduling and Reminder Systems

Scheduling meetings has become increasingly difficult as we all seem busier than ever. It’s easy to get caught up in a back-and-forth without ever nailing down a time and date. 

That’s where scheduling tools come into play. These platforms make it easier to schedule meetings that work for all parties involved. You can create shared calendars and allow prospects to book open slots that work for them to reduce back-and-forth and reschedules.

Additionally, many scheduling platforms allow for automated reminders. Everyone scheduled for a meeting receives a reminder at a set time before the appointment. It keeps everyone on track and reduces the number of no-shows.

Forward’s real-time collaboration makes communication and planning easier for sales teams. Live chat and commenting support a seamless experience while making scheduling and cross-team hand-offs more efficient.

5. Track the Right Metrics

Incorrect and inaccurate data can throw off your entire strategy. You need to know what metrics to track and ensure you’re analysing quality data. 

Key metrics for customer engagement include customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. It often requires contacting paid customers to see what you’re doing well. Surveys are quick, easy ways to determine what customers think of your product, processes, and content.

Beyond customer satisfaction, you need to address buyer intent. Metrics to consider for buyer engagement include:

• Sales numbers, like who is making purchases and how much are they spending?
• Frequency of contact: do they engage with your content every once in a while or every day?
• Repeat visitors: do they keep coming back to the same content or the same product?
• Subscribers: do they like you enough to subscribe to your newsletter or email list?
• Social media engagement: are they following you and Interacting with your posts? 

Sales teams can leverage Forward to track key buyer engagement metrics across multiple platforms. It’s easier to understand an individual buyer’s intent and prioritise follow-ups accordingly to increase your chances of conversion.

6. Refine Your Strategy Regularly 

One of the key things to remember about buyer engagement is that what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. You need to be flexible with your strategies so that you’re ready to adapt to changing needs. 

Successful sales teams find a way to get in front of current trends. It’s a way to establish authority in the field and boost buyer engagement as a leader in your industry. You don’t have to be a trendsetter to capitalise on a changing environment, you simply need to be at the front end of new trends.

How can you lead the way?

Talk with your prospects and customers to see where they are and what they need. Pay attention to what content they engage with, especially if it's a survey or question on social media. You don’t even have to pose the question to learn from it. Monitor what your competition is doing and learn from them.

Consider A/B testing to see what works best between the two concepts. Which attracts more attention from your target audience? Something as simple as wording can have a massive impact on your buyer, and it’s an easy metric to test.

Forward’s digital sales room makes sales teams more flexible and efficient with multi-media embed. With all your sales material in one place, it’s easy to refine messaging and content through a single dashboard. Your team can collaborate in real-time and monitor existing content across platforms to ensure your message remains consistent. 

Win More Customers With Forward’s Digital Sales Room

Buyer engagement is the key to closing deals. It’s more challenging in a digital sales environment, but it doesn't have to be if you have the right strategies and tools. 

Understanding your buyer is a critical step in the process, and it involves having quality buyer engagement insights. In the B2B sales world, that means knowing each of the decision-makers involved in the process and what they engage with. You can then use that information to create tailored messaging across all platforms. 

Of course, things change regularly, so you need a setup that’s flexible and easily adaptable. Being able to switch up content to provide that customised experience can save a deal. It also means monitoring buyer engagement in real-time so you can react promptly.

Forward's digital sales room enhances these strategies to support sales teams with buyer communication. 

• Provides a unified space to consolidate sales materials and track progress to boost sales team efficiency.
• Offers personalised workspaces for every deal to wow your buyer and deliver that tailored experience they desire.
• Mutual action plans create a structured sales journey that’s easy to follow and features interactive elements to boost buyer engagement.
• Save time with customisable templates that fit various sales scenarios to appease all of your buyer’s decision makers.
• Live chat and comments make it easier to engage with your buyer on their time and answer the burning questions to move the sale along.
• Embrace real-time buyer engagement analytics to better understand your prospect’s intent.

Explore the benefits of Forward's digital sales room for engaging prospective buyers. Empower your sales team and try Forward for free today!