Gain insights into the preferences and behaviors shaping the future of business interactions

Table of contents
1. Traits of Modern B2B Buyers
2. Adapting to a Mobile-First Generation
3. Connecting with Today’s B2B Buyers

The B2B industry is currently going through a massive revamp, largely driven by the prevalence of millennial buyers with purchasing power. According to Forbes, 73% of people sitting in decision-making positions in various organizations are millennials. This departure is a seismic shift from the earlier millennia, when baby boomers and Gen Xers had control over B2B purchase decisions.

1. Traits of Modern B2B Buyers

The biggest customer group of today’s millennial generation B2B buyers, along with their Gen Z counterparts, heavily affects purchasing trends. Their unique traits dictate the mechanization of modern B2B deals. The buyers are digitally native and use the internet to a greater extent for shopping around for products, evaluating them, and finding out what others think about them. For instance, in a Google study, 81% of B2B purchasers began their buying journey on the web.

In addition, millennials value autonomy and information better than anything; thus, they prefer to explore more on their own before coming into contact with vendors’ representatives. This implies that online resources should be availed of in full, and self-service options should be provided as well.

2. Adapting to a Mobile-First Generation

The widespread use of smartphones has created a mobile-first culture among millennial B2B buyers. Firms need to fine-tune their digital resources, such as websites and communication platforms, for flawless mobile encounters. Neglecting this will have devastating consequences, as can be seen in the fact that 61% of users never come back to an incompatible mobile site.

Millennials are likely to choose brands that are socially responsible. Hence, B2B companies should emphasize their green manufacturing and exploit their ethical practices, not just as a way to contribute to the community but also to improve their brand image. As per Cone Communications’ research, 87% of millennials are likely to purchase products from companies committed to solving societal and environmental problems.

3. Connecting with Today’s B2B Buyers

To be successful in B2B communications, millennial decision-makers need to be connected with a holistic approach based on an exchange of values. This, therefore, means that they should be able to create customized content that addresses the specific problems that satisfy each audience’s unique needs. As an illustration, Adobe ensured the increase in its sales by using a data-driven strategy that personalized each of its content for each purchaser and attained an outcome with a 14% increase in conversion rates.

In addition, adopting cutting-edge technologies based on analytics and AI enables businesses to anticipate consumers’ preferences and tailor their services accordingly. IBM Watson, for instance, provides cognitive solutions that analyze big data sets so as to find insights actionable by businesses, hence making companies interact at higher levels with customers.

The key to success today is to understand the changing dynamics of millennial B2B buyers’ style of consumption, as it is becoming more pronounced in a stiff business environment that is getting more competitive by the day. By focusing business strategies on the digital, mobile, and social awareness tendencies of this demographic, businesses can create a foundation of meaningful relationships and thereby drive sustainable growth.

Discover SalesMarkBlog for Strategies That Propel Your Business Forward!

Table of contents

• Introduction
  1. The Evolution of AI Leads Scoring
  2. The Role of AI in Lead Scoring
     1. Data Collection
     2. Data Analysis
     3. Lead Scoring Model
     4. Predictive Analytic
  3. Traditional vs AI Lead Scoring
  4. How AI-powered Lead Scoring Sets Marketers Up for Success
     1. Identifying and Prioritizing Sales Leads
     2. Identify Upselling and Cross-selling Opportunities
     3. Better Segment and Target Your Leads
     4. Alignment of Marketing and Sales Team
• Wrapping Up

Introduction

In the B2B world of sales and marketing, identifying promising prospects might be an ongoing challenge, as not all leads efficiently create equal business leads. To curb this challenge, the B2B marketing and sales team can harness the power of AI-powered lead scoring.

For a better understanding, let us understand what AI-powered lead-scoring software is.

AI-powered lead scoring is a new concept that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms (MLA) based on historical data to make predictive analyses for B2B deals about potential conversions of prospects into customers.

In today’s exclusive blog, we will discuss the transformation of AI-led lead scoring and its potential to redefine B2B lead generation.

1. The Evolution of AI Leads Scoring

AI-powered lead scoring is cutting-edge software that helps B2B marketers prioritize leads and focus on those more likely to convert into customers just by analyzing customer interaction and conversion data. This software assigns score leads based on numerous factors, such as customer behavior, historical data, and the quality of the conversation.

Consider a scenario where a potential client inquires to your sales rep about your company’s product or service and the AI lead system can adeptly identify the client’s positive tone of communication, which indicates that they are genuinely interested in making a purchase. The assigned AI software analyzes the conversation and assigns a high score (70–100) to this lead, which indicates that this client is more likely to purchase the product or service that the company provides.

By leveraging the data collection from the CRM system, marketing campaigns, and other sources, the AI software can score leads based on your target audience or buyer persona.

Whether it is a B2B business or an e-commerce website, AI lead scoring can help refine strategies in marketing and customer relationship management (CRM).

2. The Role of AI in Lead Scoring

According to a global survey conducted by a private institute, it is estimated that companies that focus their efforts on correct leads have witnessed an increase of 9%–20% in marketing conversions. Furthermore, to improve lead scoring results, organizations must understand the specifics of their products and services, as this contributes to maximizing their KPIs and reducing downtime by 86%.

The role of AI in lead scoring is simply to eliminate the tedious tasks of data collection and analysis by automating the process so that the B2B sales and marketing team has more time to invest in creating strategies to convert prospects into customers.

For a better understanding, let’s see how AI transforms the lead-selection process:

1. Data Collection

AI software gathers a vast amount of data from various sources, including website interactions, email responses, social media engagement, and CRM systems. This data is essential for assessing lead behavior and intent.

2. Data Analysis

With the assistance of machine learning algorithms (MLA), analyzing this data identifies patterns and trends, as it can detect which read behaviors are associated with successful conversions.

3. Lead Scoring Model

With the help of AI software, you can create a lead-scoring model that assigns scores to each lead based on customer demographics, behavior, and other data points, removing human bias as they look into intricate patterns while analyzing the data. The traditional lead scoring model was usually human bias, as sales reps were more inclined toward leads that they generated, which tends to be inconsistent in purchasing your product or services in the long run.

4. Predictive Analytics

The predictive analysis takes the help of machine learning, which gives a better insight into your sales and marketing teams. Through predictive analytics, which is generally based on historical data and customer behavior, you gain in-depth knowledge about your clients and how to target them so that they turn into qualified leads, which ultimately saves you time and increases your revenue.

3. Traditional vs. AI Lead Scoring

Since traditional lead scoring depends on the marketer’s opinions, it may be laborious and only sometimes correct. Furthermore, this type of lead scoring depends heavily on analysis, intuition, and chance to determine which leads have the highest chance of becoming customers.

Contrarily, AI lead scoring does a lot of the legwork and gathers information from several sources. It determines the characteristics of your ideal client and what signals a potential consumer is likely to buy from you.

For a better understanding, distinctions between AI lead scoring and conventional lead scoring are shown in this more thorough table:

4. How AI-powered Lead Scoring Sets Marketers Up for Success

According to a survey by Salesforce, AI revealed that 98% of them think it improves lead generation because an AI-enabled CRM platform has a wider reach for collecting data compared to standard CRM. The CRM platform offers data to train AI models, making lead generation more accessible when markets do not have enough internal data.

For a better understanding, let’s elaborate on how AI lead scoring helps improve sales capabilities:

1. Identifying and Prioritizing Sales Leads

B2B businesses need to work closely on quality leads for better sales conversion; however, they also need to find quality leads. AI-based lead scoring can help markets and sales teams identify quality leads that are more likely to be converted. The AI lead scoring software can help you filter quality leads out of the bulk lead data, compare non-worthy and worthy deals, and make instant decisions about whether the lead is considerable or not.

2. Identify Upselling and Cross-selling Opportunities

AI-generated lead scoring software helps in acquiring new customer bases and even enhances sales capabilities through cross-selling and upselling opportunities. With the help of CRM platforms with AI-based lead scoring capabilities, you can ensure that the engagement with your existing customers reboots again, which gives the sales team a probability that customers are willing to further connect with you, which improves your sales capabilities in the long run.

3. Better Segment and Target Your Leads

Based on AI lead scores, you can segment your leads into various engagement segments, ensuring seamless targeting and follow-up. In this way, the sales team can be aware of the lead status in every particular bracket. AI lead scoring software automatically generates a score for each of the leads to help understand different sales strategies. Furthermore, they can plan and implement effective and customized strategies to ensure better and faster conversion.

4. Alignment of Marketing and Sales Team

To ensure that the right lead is in the sales pipeline, both the marketing and sales teams should work together and use AI-powered lead-scoring software to analyze the lead’s data to attract them to the right deals. As the whole process of lead scoring is automated, the sales teams get time to focus on the right leads instead of wasting time on leads who are less likely to be converted into customers.

All the above strategies add a new dimension and intelligence to the marketing functions. The implementation of these AI-powered lead-scoring strategies leads to high-scoring leads, which offers valuable insights into the behaviors and attributes that contribute to a successful conversion.

Wrapping Up

We are in an era where demand generation, B2B marketing, and sales teams have to use AI in lead management and conversion processes to streamline these daily operations and also upgrade personalization and efficiency. As these B2B businesses embrace AI, the potential for better customer engagement and increases in sales conversions grows massively.
Marketing industrialists believe that the future of sales and marketing relies on the intelligent application of AI-powered strategies and staying ahead of the digital landscape.

Visit Our SalesMarkBlog Section to Uncover the Sales Strategies That Ignite Your Sales Journey!

Benefits of Cold Calling in B2B Sales

In today’s world, where emails and social platforms are on a ride, one needs to make the best effort to reach out to your prospects. Cold calling may be dead today, but it still acts as a primary tool to build your list of prospects and help you land more deals.

A well-articulated cold call paired with a crafted email can be leveraged to build a brand. When a highly effective email can be easily ignored, using cold calls can help bridge the gap in attention.

The added benefit of cold calling post-Covid-19 is that many businesses have transitioned to contactless sales and have adopted phone and video conferencing exclusively. So cold calling has become more effective more so than ever. Thus, due to this, many B2B sales professionals are planning to leverage colder outreach triggering buyers’ decision-making mindset.

Other benefits of cold calling reaching net-new customers, perfecting your sales pitch and making a personal connection with a potential customer.

Overview of Cold Calling in today’s world

Let’s admit it! In the age of scrolling where information is available at a click, cold calling can be a daunting task. Today, introducing your offers and services to people not who are not aware of your business is a massive challenge.

Besides, many customers mistake B2B cold calling for spam or “robocalls” from automated dialers, with callers ending up with no prospectus. However, cold calling is a legal business development practice and is not considered spam, provided with some rule adherence.

While the debate on whether cold calling is worthwhile or not is still on among sales professionals, cold calling still has value and remains one of the most cost-effective methods for B2B businesses to reach new customers. These calls may not lead to an actual sale on the first go, but it serves as an opportunity to familiarise a potential prospect with your brand and product.

Visit Our SalesMarkBlog Section to Uncover the Sales Strategies That Ignite Your Sales Journey!