What Is B2B Omnichannel Sales? And Why It’s Important See How to Boost Revenue with Omnichannel Sales Online chat. Email. Video conferencing. In-person meetings. These are just a few ways B2B buyers interact with your organization. While having various communication channels can help prospects and customers reach you faster, it makes the jobs of sales reps and marketers a little more complex. How are they supposed to track interactions across disparate channels and remember where an account is in its buyer journey? You’d like to think the CRM is up to date, but how do you know for sure? Answering these questions is the goal of an omnichannel B2B sales practice — i.e., the strategy of using integrated channels to provide a smooth buying experience. In this article, you’ll find everything you need to know about omnichannel sales to start engaging with and understanding customers better, boosting retention, and ultimately increasing revenue. What is B2B omnichannel sales? Omnichannel sales is an integrated, multichannel approach to engaging prospects and existing customers. This strategy aims to provide accounts with a seamless buying experience by connecting the data from otherwise disparate outreach channels in one platform for a single source of truth. Some typical sales channels include: Video conferencing Phone calls Face-to-face meetings Online chat Email Self-service digital portals Social media outreach Direct mail During the COVID-19 pandemic, many B2B organizations moved sales meetings to online channels like video conferencing or email. While a lot of in-person interaction has returned, buyers now expect more options in communicating with a company and its sales teams — whether in physical, digital, or hybrid environments. This new need is where omnichannel sales comes into play. An omnichannel sales strategy allows buyers to communicate with companies through multiple avenues to give them flexibility in how they interact with your brand. Ideally, they shouldn’t notice as they flow through different channels; it should feel like a single, unified experience. Similarly, marketing teams use the phrase “omnichannel marketing” when referencing the different channels they use, i.e., social media, email, etc., to drive account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns in partnership with sales teams. In these initiatives, marketers tailor materials toward a specific segment of accounts to address unique prospects’ needs. Why is omnichannel sales important for B2B businesses? While a traditional sales strategy treats the various communication channels as siloes, an omnichannel approach integrates all sales channels’ data. For example, suppose a target account interacts with a chatbot on a company’s website. The bot gathers information and hands the prospect to the sales team. Without an omnichannel sales practice, a sales rep may not receive the key takeaways from the chat history, leading the account to repeat the information they initially provided to the bot and potentially get frustrated. An omnichannel approach is essential because it makes the buying process friction-free. By transferring context between channels, an omnichannel sales strategy bridges and integrates data to create a more unified customer experience. Furthermore, omnichannel sales ensures that reps and marketers can adequately use the contextual data generated in different channels to keep dialogue targeted and highly specific, increasing the probability of fast conversion. Components of a successful B2B omnichannel sales strategy At a high level, an omnichannel B2B sales strategy is valuable for providing a seamless customer experience. But there are also many different applications and ways to implement it. Here’s a look at the baseline components of any successful B2B omnichannel sales strategy: Channel conflict management A common way to lose a deal is to have various channels communicating different information to prospects. For example, an account may become confused or even angry if a sales representative provides pricing information during a video conference that conflicts with an email offer they received the day before. A successful omnichannel approach integrates, centralizes, and constantly reviews data for inconsistencies or duplicative efforts. Sales teams can do this through automation — i.e., an omnichannel sales platform — or through manual review. Doing so at scale often requires automation and orchestrating marketing activities to complement sales efforts. Marketing and sales alignment Similarly, marketing and sales teams must align on the message they communicate to prospects to ensure consistency and accuracy. If the sales team can’t support the message marketers send to prospective customers (or vice versa), the discrepancy can confuse accounts, lose deals, and make your organization look unprofessional. This component again comes down to proper centralization and collaboration of data. Marketing and sales teams should have shared CRM access to allow quick insight into an account’s buyer journey stage — enabling cross-team collaboration, conflict minimization, and determining the best outreach strategy. Personalization While some reps may think of message and content personalization as more applicable to consumer marketing, there are many ways to leverage it in a B2B omnichannel sales strategy. Using intent signals — or information that illustrates a site visitor’s interests — salespeople can qualify accounts and leads and reach out to them with personalized, relevant information. For example, having a website personalization strategy that segments customers by industry, journey stage, or use case relating to the solutions you offer enables your organization to cater to specific companies and their needs. After your site gathers visitors’ data based on their interactions, the sales team can use other channels like LinkedIn messaging or targeted email outreach to provide additional relevant information — helping to improve conversion. Not sure how to personalize your website? Download the B2B Marketer’s Guide to Website Personalization and Engagement and start boosting conversions. Download the eBook Data integration A 2022 study of 329 B2B marketing and sales professionals found that 86% believe not having a single data source hinders an organization’s understanding of the customer journey. Data integration, specifically through a B2B omnichannel sales platform, enables go-to-market (GTM) teams to bring all channel information into one system everyone can use to stay on the same page. Over time, data integration can also allow for more automated sales. For example, when an account engages with your ABM campaign in a way that indicates they’re comparing vendors, you can integrate this data with email automation, providing information on why your solution surpasses the competition. Additionally, you can retarget them through paid social and search ads to help move them through the funnel. Buyer journey mapping A buyer journey map is a visual representation of a prospect’s steps through your sales funnel. In omnichannel sales, this component also includes tracking the sales and marketing channels an account interacts with and at what stage in the buyer’s journey. Here’s an overview of a typical B2B account journey: Qualified: The account fits your ideal customer profile (ICP) but may not know your brand. Aware: The account is aware of your brand but is not entirely engaged. Engaged: The account engages with your brand but does not yet show buying intent. Marketing Qualified Account (MQA): The account shows signs of being in the market to buy. Opportunity: You’ve engaged their buying committee, and the account is close to the finish line. Customer: Hooray, the account is a customer! Post-sale: Identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, supporting retention. These steps will help when planning how to communicate with accounts and at what stage(s) of the buyer’s journey. If data shows that prospects are falling off at a disproportionate rate at the opportunity stage, GTM teams can examine the occurring activities, determine the issue, and find a resolution. The emerging hybrid role of B2B sales As B2B buyers have grown accustomed to virtual meetings over the past few years, an omnichannel sales approach is shaping into a hybrid one that involves in-person and virtual interactions. This evolution doesn’t mean that sales representatives can’t be exclusively in-person or virtual. Some industries may be slower, faster, or unable to transition to remote operations. But, for the most part, marketing and sales teams must be flexible and meet the customer where they are — through video conference, phone call, office, tradeshow, or anything in between. An omnichannel approach is critical in bridging the gap between these different environments. Reps should integrate notes from an in-person meeting into CRM to provide insight into additional marketing and sales efforts a company could take to increase efficiencies. Boost revenue with a B2B omnichannel sales strategy An omnichannel sales approach is essential to any B2B business in today’s environment. Marketing and sales teams must be able to handle a complex, hybrid, and multi-touch ecosystem without sacrificing personalization or context. However, doing so requires a platform that can integrate these disparate systems and provide a centralized repository for analyzing and planning the sales process. Demandbase provides all the tools necessary to help B2B organizations implement an omnichannel sales strategy, allowing them to go after opportunities earlier and progress them faster. Request a demo of ABX Cloud — the account-based experience cloud of Demandbase One, the solution reinventing ABM around the customer journey — to see how your business can use an omnichannel sales approach. Demandbase provides all the tools necessary to help B2B organizations implement an omnichannel sales strategy, allowing them to go after opportunities earlier and progress them faster. Request a demo of ABX Cloud — the account-based experience cloud of Demandbase One, the solution reinventing ABM around the customer journey — to see how your business can use an omnichannel sales approach. Discover ABX Cloud
