The Real Secrets to Skyrocketing Your B2B Conversion Rate

hushly blog

You know the B2B buying cycle is long but why aren’t your leads ever converting into customers?

If you’ve spent most of your time generating leads without worrying about quality or vetting, there’s a good chance that your B2B conversion rate is suffering.

If so, now is a valuable time to take a step back and re-evaluate your acquisition process.

How are visitors arriving on your site? Where are you collecting email addresses? Are they engaging with your content?

Put yourself in the mindset of your visitors and everything will start falling into place.

Your Leads Need a Mobile-Friendly Experience

Your target B2B audience isn’t a bunch of boomers and generation Xers. Like it or not, you need to meet the needs of millennials and Generation Z.

As of 2015, Think with Google reported that 46% of all buyers were between the ages of 18 and 34. For B2B marketers, this means creating a user-centric experience with plenty of personalization.

Your buyers go home and workout with their fitness devices, order food through UberEATS, and binge endless streams of customized content on Netflix. Their expectations for these hyper-personalized algorithms don’t change when they come into work the next day.

Think with Google also recently reported that B2Bs spend between two and three hours each day researching brands on their mobile devices. Mobile activity influences roughly 40% of B2B revenue every year.

If that wasn’t enough, by next year, 70% of all B2B searches will take place on mobile devices.

If you want to improve your B2B conversion rate, it’s critical to create a mobile-friendly experience from start to finish. In other words, everything needs to be optimized for mobile from your web pages and blog down to your lead magnets and emails.

Source: Think with Google

7 Secrets to Improving Your B2B Conversion Rate

Now you know that improving your visitors’ mobile experience is critical to boosting your B2B conversion rate – but how can you put this into practical action?

Here are a few tips to start bringing your B2B marketing strategy and website into 2020.

1. Get Rid of Forms

Forms are holding you back. No one opens a blog post, sees a form and thinks “Oh great, I can’t wait to give another website my information just to read an article.”

The truth is, there’s absolutely no way to optimize forms for mobile devices – no matter how much you tweak your layout, change the order, and update fields – because it’s still a form.

Forms are clunky and they get in the way of leads consuming your content. Instead, give your visitors a sample of your content and ask them to provide an email address if they’d like to read the rest.

Source: Hushly

2. Create an Adaptive Content Hub

An adaptive content hub with content bingeing features can satisfy your buyer’s expectation for a Netflix-like experience and ultimately boost your B2B conversion rate.

When you get rid of forms, people will spend more time reading your content and educating themselves about your company.

Use an adaptive content hub to put all of your content together in one place:

  • Ebooks
  • Podcasts
  • Tutorials
  • Case studies
  • White papers
  • Videos

3. Give Away Your Best Content

You spend so much time and money creating amazing in-depth content for your visitors – why are you hiding it behind a form?

Instead, include your best content in your adaptive content hub.

Research shows that 78% of buyers consume between three and five pieces of content before talking to a sales team. Putting your best content on display is important for demonstrating the value of your company and the services you can provide.

4. Let Leads Nurture Themselves

The idea of self-nurturing follows into the points above.

You want to offer your visitors an experience that allows them to educate themselves about your company, industry, and the services you provide.

When you incorporate self-nurturing landing pages into your website, your B2B conversion rate will jump because leads will be further along in the sales funnel before they even reach out to your team.

5. Incorporate AI

AI and algorithms are the only way to make these features work.

When a visitor arrives at your website, an algorithm will monitor the types of content they consume in the content hub and continue offering them similar content.

Yes, AI can sound scary but it’s essential today if you want to provide the type of experience that your visitors expect.

6. Create the Content Your Audience Wants to Read

According to LinkedIn research, B2Bs aren’t out there reading white papers – 49% of them consume video during the buying process while 65% say they find podcasts valuable for learning about a brand.

It’s up to you to do your research and find out what type of content they want from you. If your B2B conversion rate is low, it may be because you’re not creating the right kind of content.

7. Only Collect High-Quality Leads

At Hushly, we use human verification to make sure our clients only receive the highest quality leads.

Collecting email addresses from everyone who visits your website doesn’t just waste resources and send you down rabbit holes, it also throws off your data.

Accurate data is at the heart of every successful personalization campaign. Sadly, over 60% of businesses say their data is either not current or correct. Using correct data to drive your personalized campaigns like email or LinkedIn retargeting is sure to make your B2B conversion rate jump.

Ditch Forms and Watch Your Leads Grow

We promise – you won’t miss forms, and neither will your leads. Getting rid of forms in favor of self-nurturing landing pages won’t only reduce your bounce rate, but it will also skyrocket your lead conversions by at least 51%.

When people aren’t bombarded with clunky forms, they’ll spend more time consuming your awesome content and educating themselves about how you can help them. When they’ve decided you’re a good fit, they’ll sign up.

See what it’s like to build a database of high-quality leads. Learn more about optimizing your lead magnets for conversions.

For Solid B2B Relationships, You Need to Focus on What Matters Most

It happens all the time.

I’m on a call with a customer. We’re spending all of our time talking about something that I feel is unimportant. By the end of the call, we never get to the substantive work required to impact results that lead to ROI.

I’ve always struggled with building the patience to take the time to explain to people what seems obvious to me.

However, I’ve also learned over time how important it is to do just that for building strong long-term B2B relationships.

Everyone is Unique. Don’t Fight It – Roll with It to Build B2B Relationships

Everyone has different priorities and communication styles. If you don’t acknowledge and respect that, along with different personal styles, you will never establish a foundation for long-lasting partnerships built on trust and mutual respect.

In today’s landscape with constant changes and increasing competition as well as smart and agile companies vying for their piece of the pie, acting quickly and focusing on what’s most important is critical for building B2B relationships in your company and outside.

Focus on What’s Best for the Company’s Health

All employees must focus their time and energy on the actions that will yield the best results for the business as quickly as possible.

It’s crucial for each employee to realize the unique challenges of their CEOs and Executive Leadership. It’s up to you to get your company to grow and profit in the shortest amount of time possible.

It doesn’t matter if you are in in a startup company or a big enterprise that’s been around since the beginning of time.

During every meeting, in each project, while completing each task, sending each email – you should always evaluate the situation based on the value that it can bring to the overall health of the company.

The most valuable employees will remind their colleagues of the importance of doing the same as they build B2B relationships.

Contract negotiations, for example, is one of the most critical areas for all key stakeholders to come together as early as possible. They need to understand each other’s perspectives and concerns immediately so they can agree on resolutions efficiently and put plans into action.

Sometimes, a week’s delay in reaching an agreement on a deal can cost a company hundreds to millions of dollars. With these B2B relationships, literally millions of dollars are at stake.

Everyone involved in those negotiations must understand the business impact for a delay.

Stop Thinking of Your Work as a Means to an End

It’s no longer about “how many hours” did you work today. Instead, it’s more about “what have you accomplished that will result in a good business outcome and positive growth?”

Ironically, the work you must do to justify the time you spent growing the business is exactly the work keeping you from growing it even more. Nevertheless, this work is still critical to your long-term success as you forge B2B relationships

Never assume that people “know what you’re doing.” After all, they are busy “doing their own thing” in their own world, too.

Sorting out attribution challenges between sales and marketing technology solutions like MAP (marketing automation platform) and CRM (customer relationship management) tools as well as the time you spend creating reports and presentations are necessary to securing sponsorship from people you are dependent on for success.

While you may reach a solution faster alone, you will get farther and grow higher as a team.

That’s what it’s all about.

Executive understanding and sponsorship are vital to securing the resources you and your business require to succeed. It’s always a challenge to strike a balance between doing the work and telling the right people about the work you’re doing.

5 Examples to Build Solid B2B Relationships and Grow Your Team

I’ve always felt like the best ways to learn and grow B2B relationships from articles like this is to read and absorb specific examples.

Here are a few practical examples based on my experiences during the last six months leading the Hushly Customer Success team.

1. Put the Argument on Hold and Meet Halfway

Don’t argue over terms of an agreement negotiated before your time. Focus on what you can do NOW to “meet in the middle” by the time it comes time to re-evaluate that partnership.

2. Table the Meeting Until You Have the Resources and People You Need

Don’t spend an hour talking about things you can’t fix because you don’t have the right people in the room.

Wrap the meeting early and figure out how to get the people you need in the next meeting.

Identify the people on both sides who will be responsible for bringing those people together as quickly as possible.

3. Get Specific and Realistic with Goals

Rather than spending time hammering on about “what people are doing,” get a clear and specific agenda you’ve defined in advance. Decide what you’ll accomplish by the end of that meeting.

4. Don’t Waste Time Debating. Put the Numbers Together

Don’t spend time debating a particular point based on what people think. Instead, agree on a test plan and the metrics which will prove the point either way then put it into action.

5. Sleep on It and Come Back with Fresh Thoughts

Instead of spending time getting increasingly more upset because you don’t believe your “point of view” is being heard or understood, agree to end the conversation and write out points of view. The following day, come back together for a calm, clear, friendly conversation.

We’re Only Human, After All

At the end of the day, we are human beings.

It’s good to be passionate about our points of view. We are all different – not wrong – simply different. The best possible outcomes will only happen when we can simply agree on common priorities and discover the best way to get there together as quickly as possible.