The HubSpot Advantage: Elevate Your Game Against B2B Sales Challenges

Steering through the B2B sales challenges isn’t ever ‘by the book’. You need to define your unique proposition toward clients’ requirements and it will be always different for most clients you encounter.

65% of B2B sales reps say it’s difficult to generate responses from their lead nurturing initiatives. So, the ‘out of the ordinary’ is your everyday game as a business-to-business (B2B) model.

To address this, you require a thoughtful approach that encompasses various key elements to counter B2B challenges. Let’s begin exploring the complexities of B2B. Furthermore, we will be finding ways to fix these obstacles and ultimately prevent their magnitude in the future with this B2B sales guide.

8 Common B2B Sales Challenges You Encounter Everyday

Below discussed are the most common B2B Sales challenges that come to mind when you aim at achieving success with your products, services, and overall customer experience.

Identification of B2B Prospects

Who are your ideal buyers? Before targeted marketing campaigns, you need to decide your buyer’s persona. After this, list the use cases of your products and then work on these personas for B2B prospects to take the first step forward.

Long Sales Cycles

The majority of B2B deals involve custom solutions and thus differ in the nature of the conflict attended and the solution provided. Also, the process of fully understanding and satisfying the requirements of your buyer entails a lot of effort, resulting in long sales cycles.

Lead Generation & Qualification

In the B2B model, organic lead sources contribute to a large portion of lead generation and lead conversions. Nevertheless, you have to come up with a process to nurture cold leads to strike a balance between lead quantity and quality.

Limited Marketing Opportunities & Channels

B2B marketing challenges also revolve around when you talk about B2B sales. It’s due to the specialized nature of products or services, and a comparatively more targeted audience. Despite this, content marketing, email marketing, and social channels prove to be the best for B2B marketing challenges. Furthermore, webinars, trade shows, industry publications & listings also give you leads. But most of all, customer advocacy gets you the real leads.

Multiple Stakeholders

Decision-making in a business environment typically requires consensus from multiple stakeholders, leading to a more extended process. B2B purchases usually involve multiple decision-makers within an organization. Moreover, aligning the interests and needs of various stakeholders can be challenging, and it often requires a tailored approach for each decision-maker.

Complex Solutions

The solutions required to solve the challenges discussed by your clients vary all the time. Oftentimes, some slight customization is required with your existing products for the clients to align it well with their requirements.

Keeping Up with Deal Records

Maintaining the records that are associated with deals, contacts, companies and conversations with your clients can prove to be one of the very obvious B2B sales challenges. Definitely, you must opt for CRM data automation to get over this overburdening myriad of daily data collection and record-keeping.

Post-Sale Support and Service

Providing adequate post-sale support and service is critical in B2B relationships. Evidently, ensuring customer satisfaction and addressing issues promptly is a challenge that extends beyond the initial sale.

B2B Sales Stages Flowchart

The B2B sales stages usually involve research, planning, and execution. In brief, a B2B sales funnel is a clear and systematic overview of the journey a lead or prospect takes.

Here for the B2B Sales stages, we include key activities, decision points, and outcomes. Obviously, you would want to refer to your specific requirements when visualizing this roadmap for your expert B2B sales process for the reps to follow. In this case, I have simplified this B2B sales process as per the B2B model.

Drafting Sales Strategy

Profiling your ideal buyer is the first step towards setting up a sales goal. Firstly, it starts with screening your B2B prospects. For a flawless B2B sales process, follow the past sales procedures & the steps involved, gather conversion insight, and proportion them to your pitches & average leads, and you’ll have a clear set goal.

Stakeholders Viewpoint

Before you define your B2B sales funnel, count in the vision of every stakeholder, and do not undermine your potential as a team. Concurrently, assess real task deadlines involved in capturing, nurturing, and converting the clients. Many a time, you will encounter special requests to be entertained, and find inter-departmental tasks forth you as persistent B2B sales challenges. So, research well before you move to outline the sales process.

Outlining the Sales Process

Prospecting and creating a buyer persona are already your first of the steps. After this, learn about your leads and come up with a process to connect with them. Next, prepare a pitch for your products and services. Lastly, handle the objections & requests; and then close the deal and nurture your clients. You need to outline the steps involved in all B2B sales funnel, then plan, and assign resources accordingly.

Source: Snov

Analyze & Refine Sales Process

Regularly monitor and make changes in the defined process of overcoming B2B challenges. Furthermore, look at your sales process from the client’s perspective in order to guide them through the buyer’s journey – awareness, consideration, decision stage, and advocacy.

The B2B sales process is evidently a rollercoaster of tasks and teams involved. Thus, overcoming the complexities of B2B sales stages suggests a dedicated platform.

Leveraging HubSpot for B2B Sales [Key Features]

The dedicated HubSpot Sales Hub suite is a celebrated sales tool, especially among CRM lovers. Although HubSpot isn’t bound to CRM, it has a variety of other elemental tools that contribute and make your B2B sales challenges go away.

Countering your B2B challenges with HubSpot sounds ideal as it brings everything to the arsenal. In fact, the CRM platform capacitates thorough sales management, comprehensive reporting capabilities, sales automation, CPQ (configure-price-quote), and complete lead management.

HubSpot sales hub encompasses a lot of other B2B sales essentials for sales emails, meeting scheduling, quote creation, ABM tools (account-based marketing), sales management playbooks, live chat, and nearly a thousand sales integrations.

Moreover, you get the all-new HubSpot to tackle most of your B2B sales challenges. The AI in Sales Hub now offers conversation intelligence which pulls out key details from calls with B2B prospects for you, while call tracking helps prioritize, place, and record calls.

Let’s take a closer look at the HubSpot Sales Hub and tools that help you steer through the B2B sales challenges.

Lead Generation Tools in HubSpot

Creating Targeted Campaigns

HubSpot’s robust marketing tools enable businesses to segment their audience seamlessly, delivering personalized messages through various channels.

With features like targeted landing pages, email marketing, social media management, and analytics, HubSpot empowers businesses to optimize special campaigns and automated marketing efforts for higher engagement and conversion rates.

Implementing Lead Scoring

HubSpot allows users to implement lead scoring based on predefined criteria, helping prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert. Focus on High-Potential Leads by identifying and prioritizing leads that exhibit behaviors indicative of strong interest or readiness to make a purchase. Enable your team to focus their efforts on leads with higher scores, improving the efficiency of their outreach.

Email Tracking & Sequences

You obtain real-time insights on email recipient engagement, allowing for timely and personalized follow-ups. With automated sequences, streamline your outreach with targeted email workflows, ensuring consistent communication that resonates, ultimately maximizing your chances of converting leads effectively.

Organized B2B Contacts & CRM Data

Managing Customer Relationships

HubSpot ensures a unified and efficient approach to managing customer relationships for sustained success. All you need is organized data when it comes to customer relationship management and HubSpot has got it. You can centralize customer interactions, streamline communication, and gain valuable insights. By leveraging HubSpot, you improve customer satisfaction and loyalty alongside creating a unified, efficient, and inbound sales approach.

Tracking Interactions & Communications

Mastering effective sales and customer relationships requires close monitoring and recording of all touchpoints between a business and its B2B prospects or customers. The HubSpot CRM is leading the way in harnessing the power of AI in CRM and it’s kind of buzz nowadays. The record-keeping and property management of deals, contacts & companies in HubSpot is remarkable. On top of this, you get an AI-powered conversation summary for your inbox, email threads, and even voice calls. So, it becomes a piece of cake.

HubSpot B2B Sales Automation

Streamlining Repetitive Tasks

Create automated workflows that trigger specific actions based on lead behavior or other criteria, streamlining the sales process. In HubSpot, you get to automate repetitive tasks such as follow-up emails, task assignments, lead generation, and lead nurturing, reducing manual workload. Ensure consistent and timely engagement with leads & customers throughout the sales journey.

Improving Efficiency in the Sales Process

To maximize productivity, close deals faster, and enhance overall business performance; you need to make your sales process much efficient and versatile at the same time. Scheduling meetings, sending internal notifications, lead scoring, and summarizing conversations. All this can easily be achieved simply by triggering a workflow and you can do it in HubSpot.

Automate Deal and Pipeline Management

HubSpot’s intuitive pipeline management tools enable users to visualize and manage deals through various stages of the sales process. HubSpot hands you a clear visual representation of the sales pipeline, helping teams understand the deal progression and identify potential bottlenecks. Moreover, through HubSpot Pipeline Management, you can plan and strategize sales activities based on the current status of deals within the pipeline.

Predictive Lead Scoring

The celebrated CRM ‘HubSpot’ leverages machine learning to provide predictive lead scoring, helping identify leads likely to convert based on historical data. Utilize predictive analytics in HubSpot to identify leads with a higher probability of conversion, improving the targeting of sales efforts. Leverage insights from predictive lead scoring to refine and optimize lead qualification criteria over time.

B2B Sales Analytics and Reporting

Monitoring Sales KPIs

Robust analytics and reporting tools provide detailed insights into sales performance, helping teams make data-driven decisions. Performance Monitoring is very crucial when it comes to B2B marketing and B2B sales challenges, you must track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rates, deal closures, and sales velocity for ongoing performance evaluation.

Gaining Insights for Strategic Decision-Making

Use analytics to identify trends, assess the effectiveness of sales strategies, and make informed adjustments as needed. It’s quite easy to obtain B2B sales insights if you have access to platforms like HubSpot which offers you features like customizable reporting dashboards, complete sales performance analytics & sales forecasting tools.

Best Practices for HubSpot Implementation for B2B Sales

A flawless HubSpot implementation will solve the B2B challenges you encounter. If you do it yourself, make sure to begin with the ones mentioned below in this B2B sales guide:

Set Up Workflows

Leverage HubSpot’s automation capabilities to streamline repetitive tasks and optimize the sales process. Automate email sequences, follow-ups, and routine administrative tasks to improve efficiency and free up valuable time.

Goal Setting

Align HubSpot implementation with your B2B sales strategy and overall business goals. Clearly define how HubSpot will contribute to lead generation, conversion, and customer retention. Ensure everyone understands the strategic objectives.

Customize Pipelines

Unlock the full potential of your sales process by customizing pipelines to match the unique intricacies of your business. Moreover, modify stages to align with your specific sales cycle and operational needs. In addition to this, create custom stages, capture & organize relevant data at every stage

Optimize Lead-Scoring Models

Implement a robust lead scoring system in HubSpot. Define criteria that accurately reflect the engagement level and potential of leads in a B2B context. Regularly review and refine your lead scoring model based on the evolving needs of your business.

Aligning Marketing and Sales Teams

Foster collaboration between marketing and sales teams within HubSpot. Use shared dashboards and reporting features to align marketing efforts with sales objectives. This integration enhances lead handoff processes and overall synergy.

Training and Onboarding for Effective Utilization

Invest in thorough training sessions for your sales and marketing teams to ensure they understand HubSpot’s features and functionalities. Provide ongoing education to keep them updated on new releases and best practices.

Documentation and Knowledge Sharing

Create comprehensive documentation for your HubSpot implementation, including customizations, workflows, and best practices. Facilitate knowledge sharing among team members to ensure a smooth transition for new users and during staff changes.

Data Accuracy & Quality

Regularly audit and clean your data to ensure accuracy and consistency. Implement data validation processes to minimize errors and duplicates. Clean and reliable data is essential for effective lead nurturing and relationship management.

Segmentation and Targeting

Leverage the segmentation capabilities within HubSpot to categorize leads and customers based on relevant criteria. This allows for more personalized communication and targeted marketing efforts, increasing the likelihood of successful conversions.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Focus your marketing efforts on a specific set of high-value accounts. Without a doubt, Account-based marketing (ABM) is the answer. It is a targeted marketing strategy that tailors personalized marketing campaigns to engage specific accounts. By focusing on the nuances of each account, ABM aims to create a more tailored and impactful outreach, fostering stronger connections between businesses and their target accounts. This personalized approach can be very effective for B2B marketing challenges.

Tips to Prepare a B2B Sales Strategy with HubSpot

To prepare a strategy against the B2B Sales challenges, you require a combination of understanding your business goals, leveraging the capabilities of the HubSpot platform, and implementing best practices. Here are some tips to help you prepare a successful B2B sales strategy with HubSpot:

• Enhancing lead nurturing and conversion: Optimize the journey from prospect to customer for increased conversion rates.
• Personalization and targeted communication: Craft personalized and targeted messaging, enhance communication effectiveness, and build stronger connections.
• Customization and scalability for diverse B2B needs: Solidify your stance as a flexible B2B offerer and attend to the unique requirements of your clients, ensuring their scalability and adaptability to their diverse industry demands.
• Post-sales support and customer retention: Craft robust post-sales support systems, fostering customer satisfaction and loyalty for long-term business relationships.
• Ensuring a seamless customer experience: Use a CRM to ensure a seamless and positive experience at every touchpoint, from initial contact to post-purchase interactions.

CRM Integration for Better Sales

Integrating your CRM system with other tools can centralize data and streamline processes. Automated data entry, lead scoring, and reporting can save time and improve accuracy.

As discussed above, HubSpot stands firm as a quality option for all your CRM needs and is fully capable of knocking off those B2B sales challenges we talked about.

Over To You!

Take control, adapt, and thrive in the competitive landscape. Empower your team with a plan that speaks to your business’s unique requirements.

There is the right amount of knowledge required to properly leverage HubSpot as a B2B sales tool, and there are tons of free B2B sales guide for it. Now that you know of HubSpot’s capability, begin your research, implement the sales hub without a loose string, and let it propel your sales efforts towards the aim.

However, you would also require expert HubSpot implementation as a part of your strategy towards the challenges of B2B eCommerce. Go get it and begin the sales adventure that you have been anticipating over the years.