Unsurprisingly, it was predicted that almost 50% of the marketers would be shifting their organizational goals towards sales and marketing alignment in 2023 for better B2B lead generation strategies. However, the question lies whether this was achieved? Or, how can this be achieved in the upcoming years and especially in 2024?
Industry leaders are of the opinion that high proficiency in sales could be attained from building a better sales channel or pipeline or by following some B2B lead gen tips.
What is sales pipeline? Sales pipeline is one of the key strategies/metrics being used by marketing leaders to monitor and check if every potential lead can actually be translated to a closed deal. It also is used by sales representatives to study steps to move leads to transactions, and ways to equate this with sales.
Listed are the reasons why sales pipeline would be an important sales strategy or investment for B2B lead generation:
- Sales pipelines enable companies to forecast their possible revenue.
- Allows leaders to score leads.
- Offers companies the benchmarks based on current trends that can be used for future estimations.
- Presents better opportunities to assign right leads to the sales people.
- Improves the sales team productivity.
How to build a resilient sales pipeline in 2024?
Considering the high vitality of sales pipeline for organizations, it would be imperative to note that building resilient sales pipelines in 2024 would call for an adaptive and strategic approach. This would majorly be driven by the evolving business landscape. Given below are some of the important tips that can help companies create a robust pipeline in sales:
- Using AI and advanced analytics
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and analytics can come in handy to gain insights into market trends, customer behavior, and sales performance. In fact, 66% of the sales professionals have confirmed that AI helps them understand consumers better and offer personalization accordingly. Furthermore, predictive analytics can help companies identify potential leads and prioritize them based on their probability to convert.
- Embracing social media selling
Consider the given fact- According to Oberlo Statistics, there are expected to be 5.17 billion social media users globally in 2024, depicting a 5.7% increase from 2023. This presents a great opportunity for companies to generate B2B leads through online ways. Not only this, online ways of sales promise to ensure a seamless and consistent customer experience opening new prospects.
- Proper investment in sales training and development
Equipping the sales and marketing team with necessary skills and technologies to adapt to changing market dynamics stand as an utmost need for the hour to improve market productivity. Statistics suggest that companies that invest in training are 57% more effective at sales than their rivals. Moreover, sales training yields a whopping 353% Return on Investment for the average company. Important to mention that progressive training keeps the team updated on the latest sales technologies and techniques.
- Automation in sales
In 2024, deploying automation tools for everyday tasks for simplifying sales activities would be a number one priority for marketing leaders. Speculations have it that sales automation is likely to play a vital role in improving customer engagement, driven by the use of AI-powered virtual assistants and chatbots.
- Implementing cybersecurity in sales
Needless to mention, sales and marketing teams are dependent on digital assets such as customer relationship management systems, websites, social media accounts, and email marketing platforms. This would mean that slightest of breaches in these can not only lead to financial losses but theft of confidential business information. In lieu of this, companies are now extending cybersecurity training to the sales people to educate them about use of strong passwords, encryption, multi-factor authentication, and more to mitigate the risk of unauthorized access and the chances of cyber-attacks. Having said that, proactively adapting these strategies would not only enable organizations to build a resilient sales pipeline to move ahead in the evolving market conditions, but also prompt them to stay ahead in the competition in 2024 and beyond.