[Sales DX] Seven Online Sales Methods for B2B Companies, Illustrated

“DX” (digital transformation) is a term you hear everywhere these days.
Even in sales, where the image of pounding the pavement and doing the unglamorous work runs deep, the wave of digital transformation has finally arrived, and it has become essential to a company’s growth.

This article is for executives and heads of sales who have hit the limits of traditional B2B sales methods. It covers why sales DX is needed, the specific online sales methods that bring in new leads, and what makes them work.

1. What sales DX is

DX is the idea of using IT to transform existing methods into something better.
So what is “sales”?

In Europe and the United States, marketing, sales and customer success are usually organised and managed as clearly separate processes.

But In Japan, sales refers to a far broader process, from collecting business cards through to orders and improving customer satisfaction, in almost every case.

So sales DX aims to use IT to transform the whole process, from creating touchpoints with customers to maximising revenue.

2. Sales DX versus digitisation

The concept most often confused with DX is digitisation.

In business, digitisation means replacing part of an existing process with an IT tool.

Simple examples are moving from post to email, or from paper handouts to showing data on a tablet. The aim was only ever to cut costs and save effort.

Sales DX goes further than swapping out existing methods: it means using IT to change the sales process itself substantially and maximise revenue.

3. Why sales DX is needed

So why is sales DX needed now?
The biggest trigger has been the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic brought major change to Japanese business customs that had stayed the same for a long time.

The first is that states of emergency and the like made it impossible to hold trade shows, which had been the lifeline for B2B companies collecting new contact details, that is, generating leads.
Even where a show did go ahead, drawing the same numbers as before was difficult, and the supply of new leads dried up.

The second is that remote and home working spread widely to limit infection. With remote working normalised, staff disappeared from offices; field sales aside, the rate at which cold calls actually reached the right person fell sharply and companies could no longer book meetings.

Against that background, companies of every size, large and small, have hit the limits of their old methods and come to feel the need for sales DX.

Now that researching online is the norm, customer buying behaviour has also changed a great deal.

In most cases customers gather information online about features, prices, competing products and reviews before they ever speak to a salesperson.
According to research published by the Corporate Executive Board in the United States, 57% of the customer’s buying process is already over before they meet a salesperson.

In other words, communication with customers online is itself a major driver of revenue. That makes sales DX, which is also a rethink of the sales process, genuinely essential.

4. The advantages of sales DX

Sales DX is more than a response to new business norms; it brings real advantages to the companies that take it on.

①Higher productivity
With an ageing, shrinking population, hiring gets harder and keeping enough salespeople on the team inevitably becomes difficult.
To grow in that situation, a company has to raise productivity per person.
Sales DX built on IT, such as marketing automation, lets you narrow down the stages that need a person across the whole chain of lead generation, nurturing, inside sales and meetings, which in turn lifts productivity.

②Removing dependence on individuals and standardising sales
By its nature, sales depends heavily on individuals, and
“customer information exists only in the salesperson’s head”,
“what each salesperson asks varies wildly”,
“we have no idea who is proposing what or how, so nothing accumulates as know-how” —
many companies will recognise these problems.
Bringing in SFA (Sales Force Automation), CRM and sales enablement tools solves this by making customer information shareable internally, making activity visible, and allowing know-how to be captured and spread. The rise of online meetings, which others can join or record, helps as well.

5. Seven ways to win new B2B leads online

We start with lead generation, the point where sales activity begins.
Now that target customers have vanished from their offices, trade shows are not an option and dealing with customers online is a must, here are seven ways to win new leads without relying on trade shows or cold calling.

5.1 Online advertising

Search advertising puts an ad at the top of the results when someone searches a particular keyword, and
display advertising places a banner in a given slot on a site as people browse; both drive traffic to a landing page that makes the case for your service.
The main platforms are Google Ads, Yahoo! Ads and Criteo.

Online advertising works when you understand the status pyramid (see figure 4) and the method that matches each level before you run ads.
The status pyramid is a diagram showing how likely someone is to buy, based on their behaviour.
The higher up you go, the more likely they are to buy and the fewer of them there are.

At the top, people actively searching are looking for that information right now and are the most likely to buy, so
search advertising is in most cases an effective activity with a lot of upside.
To get the most out of search advertising, “ setting the keywords you run ads against and and reviewing the quality of the landing page that receives the traffic” are essential.
The articles below cover each of these.

[The bid strategy handbook] A thorough guide to bid strategies in Google search advertising

[Keep this one] Landing pages that deliver: the winning structure

Display advertising also allows fine-grained targeting.
As well as age group, area and time of day, you can target people who have visited your site, people looking at competitors, people interested in a particular category, or restrict ads to sites of a certain genre — many different angles are available.
The two worth running above all correspond to the second level of the pyramid, past searches and visits: remarketing, which shows ads to people who have already visited your site, and custom intent audiences, which target people who have searched particular keywords or browsed a competitor’s site.
The article below also covers how to set these up in detail.

What is display advertising? How it differs from search advertising, and how to maximise its effect, explained

5.2 SNS

Researching on social media is now completely normal; just as searching on Google has its own verb in Japanese, so does searching by hashtag on Twitter and Instagram.

Social media works for B2B lead generation too, and it is a channel you have to use to get your service in front of your targets.

“Social media” covers a lot of ground — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, LINE and more — but the most effective for B2B lead generation is Facebook advertising

Many Facebook users are business people in their thirties and above, and plenty use Messenger as a work communication tool, which makes Facebook a very good fit for advertising a B2B service.

Facebook advertising also has impressively precise targeting, using registered details to target by job title or by interest.

The article below covers setting up Facebook ads and improving how you run them.

A manual for improving Facebook ad performance (the basics)

5.3 Contact form outreach

Contact form outreach means writing a message into the enquiry form on a company’s own corporate site.

Depending on the size of the company, enquiries from the website are often read directly by the owner or a board member, so this is an effective way to get your information in front of a decision maker and win an enquiry.

There are tools that handle everything from building the list of recipients to sending in bulk.

The knack of getting a response from contact form outreach comes down to the accuracy of your recipient list and designing a benefit that catches their interest.

The first speaks for itself, but what does designing a benefit that catches their interest actually mean?

In short, rather than the pushy approach of simply describing your own service, what the target company receives should be useful information at no risk to them.

For example,
“We provide ON-Sale, a sales DX service for B2B companies.
If you are interested, could we arrange a meeting?”

Instead of pushy wording like that,

“On [date] we are holding a seminar on winning new B2B leads.
It presents a case study of a company that took on sales DX and built a system generating more than 50 new leads a month within a year. Do join us if that interests you.”

Writing your outreach with that kind of useful, risk-free information in mind is what gets results.

5.4 SEO (content marketing)

SEO works well not only for the active levels of the status pyramid but also as a way to reach people whose needs are still latent.

Let us think it through with concrete keywords.
In the marketing funnel, search keywords fall into four stages (figure 5).

Awareness: they recognise the problem but do not know the solution
Interest: they want to know how to solve it
Comparison: they are weighing up several similar services
Purchase: they are about to buy a particular product

Awareness keywords sit at the top of this funnel, a long way from a purchase, so they are unlikely to convert. With search advertising, where you pay per click, they mean more wasted clicks and higher costs, so they are not worth bidding on.
That said, awareness keywords do carry very high search volumes.
To build awareness of your service among more of your targets, SEO and content marketing is the effective approach.
Reaching your targets at the early stage, when they first feel the problem and the need, also improves your chances of making their evoked set, the shortlist of options they consider when buying.

5.5 Webinars

Selling through seminars is nothing new, but webinars are what companies rushed into with the pandemic.
Salespeople are not the only ones left stuck by the loss of trade shows.
The buyers looking for products and solutions are short of information too.
A webinar lets you build awareness of your service and make the case for which problems you solve and how, and it has become an essential method in B2B sales.

For selling through webinars,

　1.. can you read your targets’ problems and interests and set an appealing theme? (attendance)
　2. can you raise attendees’ engagement with your service? (content)

These two are what matter.

On attendance, what matters is not sheer numbers but whether the people you gather are genuinely your targets.
For our own sales DX service, ON-Sale, the decision makers are owners and business heads, so the theme has to speak to the problems they feel.
Concretely, a seminar on strategies that lift company performance and revenue, or on case studies from companies that have achieved real results, brings in more qualified leads than one solving execution-level problems such as how to set up ads.

The content has to be substantial enough not to disappoint them, too.
A seminar that is nothing but a description of your own service, or one so abstract that it offers no concrete next action, disappoints the people who turned up and works against you. When you plan a seminar, always build it around solving a problem.
The first step towards a webinar that performs is to define your target clearly, which means setting a persona.
Start by pinning down the problems your service solves and working out exactly who has them.

5.6 Online trade shows

An online trade show is, as the name says, a trade show held online.

With conventional shows impossible during the pandemic, organisers switched to online events.

Most work like this: instead of a booth you create a company page inside the platform, and you capture leads from the people who visit it or download your material.

A physical event required meeting people and exchanging business cards; online, without any card exchange, you get a list of the people who visited and a record of what they did on the page as data.

Many online events also charge less to exhibit, so finding and joining one that matches your service will bring in new leads.

(Well-known online trade shows)
・IT Trend EXPO
・DMM Online Trade Show, and others

5.7 Sales matching platforms

Platforms that match companies wanting to push their service with companies that have a problem are also on the rise. Services for sharing your own network with contacts at other companies, for introducing advisers, for matching manufacturers with agencies, for creating meetings at owner level — the pandemic has produced all sorts of services that help win new meetings.

Consider finding and using a platform that suits your service.

【Well-known services】
・VisasQ
・Chira-CEO
・Sales Hub
・HikakuBiz, and others

6. In closing

We hope that was useful.
This article has covered what sales DX is, why it is needed, the specific online sales methods for winning new leads, and what makes them work.

Digitally transforming a sales organisation has many advantages: higher productivity, more revenue, less dependence on individuals and a wider market.

Changing from established methods does, of course, meet resistance. Alongside specialists in sales DX, you need to be clear about the purpose, form an internal team to drive it, and push the change through.
Getting sales DX right lifts revenue and profit through new customers, and improves employee engagement through better ways of working.