Clients are the lifeblood of any business, but they can also be one of the most difficult groups to manage. As a B2B company, you need to do everything possible to keep your clients happy and ensure they remain loyal. At the same time, it’s easy for you or your employees to make mistakes that lead customers away from your brand.
Here are some common mistakes B2B companies make that can lead to the loss of important clientele.
Lack of Strategic Account Planning
Strategic account planning is a critical part of any B2B business model. It’s not enough to simply have a list of accounts and try to sell to them all at the same time.
A good strategic account plan will help you prioritize your sales efforts and target customers with the highest potential for success. This means that it should be based on in-depth research about each customer, including how they buy, what kind of products or services they need, who their decision makers are, and what their goals are for working with you.
Once you’ve identified your top accounts and prioritized them, it’s time for action. The next step is figuring out what tactics work best for engaging these customers so that you can earn their trust as well as maximize sales opportunities in each relationship over time.
Most top B2B businesses conduct their account planning in Salesforce for maximum effectiveness. Salesforce makes it easier to define your most-valued customers. At the same time, it also ensures effective sales revenue and income measurement, which you can then use to analyze how well you’re doing with respect to your target revenue and income set for each client.
Inefficient Customer Support
Inefficient customer support is one of the most common mistakes that can lead to losing clients. When you have dedicated client management, you have a better chance of attracting more clients and maintaining their loyalty. Dedicated customer support will help you solve issues faster and increase client satisfaction.
Unfortunately, many B2B businesses fail to provide efficient customer support because they don’t have dedicated client managers. Instead, they rely on outsourcing or using an off-the-shelf help desk solution where agents are only trained in technical aspects of the product rather than its business value.
The lack of technological infrastructure also contributes to this problem. When there’s no way for customers to access live chats online and ask questions via phone calls or emails, they leave.
Efficient customer support teams are vital when it comes to retaining your clientele. In some cases, you might have to set aside dedicated support teams for some of your most-valued clients.
Poor Technological Infrastructure
Technology is a critical element of the B2B sales process, especially when you are dealing with complex issues and large solutions. Poor technological infrastructure can result in the loss of clients. It might also result in a high number of abandoned calls and emails from potential clients who have been put off by your technological inadequacies.
The solution is simple. Ensure that you have a solid IT infrastructure in place before engaging in business development activities. This will ensure that you can provide excellent customer service and keep your customers happy with your services or products. You can even consider outsourcing some parts of this process if it proves too costly for your budget.
Failure to Address Major Client Issues
There are several common mistakes that B2B businesses make when it comes to client management, and these mistakes lead to lost business. One major mistake is failing to address major client issues and concerns. This is a major problem because if you don’t address the issues your clients have with your product or service, they will likely take their business elsewhere.
Clients want their issues to be addressed and solved as early as possible. Failure to do so shows that you aren’t dedicated enough. That’s more than enough reason for them to leave you and look elsewhere for a B2B company that’s more efficient in dealing with such cases.
Failure to Market Properly
Failure to market or advertise your business will lead to the loss of potential clientele. Unless these businesses are aware of your existence and what you’re capable of, they have no reason to do business with you.
When promoting your B2B company or services, you must make use of all marketing tools available. It’s also important that you fully harness the power of social media marketing.
In the last year, worldwide social media ad spending jumped by 19%. In most cases, these spendings are dominated by retail, e-commerce, telecom, and software businesses. However, B2B companies are playing their part here as well.
When it comes to platform-wise ad spending, Instagram dominates the market. TikTok follows in the second position. For B2B companies, while Instagram and TikTok are good options, their focus should be more on LinkedIn. That’s because the majority of entrepreneurs are on LinkedIn, making it a more suitable advertising platform for your B2B company.
LinkedIn has over 850 million members on its platform. On top of that, there are over 58 million company and business profiles listed. This presents a huge opportunity for B2B companies like yours to promote your products and services here.
It is important to remember that B2B relationships are long-lasting and require a great deal of time, effort, and investment. Thus, you must do whatever possible to avoid these mistakes and ensure a long and healthy relationship with your clientele.
