How To Find New B2B Customers | The Topmost Essential Steps

If you want to know how to find new B2B customers, you’re in the right place. On the one hand, it’s worth mentioning that like everything in digital online marketing, what you’re looking to do has a name. As a marketer, you want to develop your customer acquisition strategy. On the other hand, finding new B2B clients can be more challenging than finding B2C clients for businesses.

More people are involved in the purchase decision, and as a result, B2B sales cycles are longer. In most cases, strategies for acquiring new B2B customers and clients differ greatly from those you see on social media or receive by email. Notwithstanding, B2B client acquisition can be a more difficult task than B2C. In most cases, B2B Sales and marketing cycles tend to be longer.

One reason is because more people are involved in making the decision. For your information, an average of six to ten people are involved in a B2B buying cycle. Unfortunately, unlike Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies, many marketers work in situations where access to B2B customers can be difficult. For instance, to help build customer relationships, they often need to convert leads.

In addition, they also need to create buyer personas for the target audience they want to attract. As such, they can use these to create content of interest to these personas at each stage of the buyer’s journey (i.e., Awareness, Evaluation, and Purchase). With that in mind, we’ll share the essential fool-proof methods, strategies, and steps to help you find new B2B customers effectively.

The Topmost Essential Steps To Find New B2B Customers

When finding new B2B customers, most companies share common marketing and sales challenges, including the difficulty of finding the right B2B customers and converting them into buyers. Another big challenge is that our increased use of social media and digital channels means that customers aren’t as dependent on talking to a supplier. Usually, they can obtain information and solutions to their problems and challenges on their own.

Conversely, most B2B customers already know what they want. They also like to investigate every available alternative to find a solution that’s right for them. On the contrary, it’s not so much your business that finds new clients, it is clients that will find you. Remember, potential B2B customers only make contact with a sales representative after carrying out their personalized research.

While business-to-consumer companies can reach out broadly to the people they serve, those of us who work in Business-to-Business (B2B) situations have a smaller population to reach out to. Often our B2B customers are choosers (buyers of our product) and are not our physical users. In many cases the buyer is a senior person, further reducing their accessibility.

Given these obstacles, many B2B product teams don’t build regular conversations (feedback loops) with the people they serve. This leads to riskier product decisions and an increase in failed features or rework of already deployed products. When working with these teams, we often hear this question all the time, “How do I find people to talk to when I work in a B2B company?”

Step #1: Know Ideal Customers And Be Best Friend

Are your customers happy customers? If so, well done! You already have the perfect starting point for finding new prospects. Now it’s time to get to know your customers a little better. If you already have lots of satisfied customers, try to work out what it is that makes them happy. The best way to do that is to get to know them better, right?

Activities to help you get closer to your customers:

Invite them to a customer get-together. This is a great opportunity to bring several customers together to discuss shared challenges, services or products.
Visit the customer at their office. Demonstrating genuine interest in your customer’s business is a good. way to build your trust capital with them.
Organise a webinar for a few selected customers. This is like holding a digital VIP event. You can, for example, address a common problem and then discuss different solutions. To ensure everyone gets a say, it’s important to ask open questions and be inclusive.

A satisfied customer is worth their weight in gold – but that’s not to say they’ll always be happy. If you don’t live up to the customer’s expectations they can easily part ways with you and go somewhere else. And one lost customer means you have to find more new ones. Best friends know each other inside out. You don’t need to ask for their opinion – you’re so in tune with each other, you “just know”.

It takes years of friendship to reach an understanding like this, but let’s simplify things a little to help you understand and define your ideal customer. To be successful with your prospecting you want to find the golden opportunities that represent clear business possibilities within the framework of your sales process. What do you know about that customer? And what don’t you know?

Step #2: Shift Your Mindset And Business Culture

In 2010 when every organization was hastily implementing some form of Agile software development there was a strong belief that, “If only we could get this Agile thing to work, we’d solve all of our problems.” Fast forward many years, there are millions of dollars in training, coaching, hiring and reorganization, new vocabularies, updated facilities, roles, and high expectations.

Eventually, many organizations still haven’t reached the pot of gold at the end of the agile rainbow. They’re frustrated. They did everything right. They implemented Agile. But the magic of agility, collaboration, faster time to market, and a continuous learning loop never appeared. What these companies eventually realized was that simply deploying an Agile Methodology isn’t enough.

This won’t change how an organization works. Instead, they have to shift the mindset and the culture. OKRs are suffering a similar fate at the moment. So many companies are implementing or have already implemented OKRs and are now waiting to reap the benefits of the newly rediscovered goal-setting framework. But, like Agile and its derivatives, the magic doesn’t just come by.

Not by simply deploying a new set of goals. This should have been obvious to these companies as many of them were the same ones who invested heavily in Agile ways of working. Yet they still sought out a silver bullet for their organizational challenges. Remember, the strategies for acquiring B2B customers are very different from those you see on social media or receive by email.

Step #3: Learn From Your Competitors And Industry Peers

How do you refer to those that do the same things as you? You could call them competitors, but why not see them as industry peers? Get inspired by your industry peers to find companies and technologies that will allow you to pinpoint new potential customers. As long as you’re involved in basically the same type of business as these peers, there are hidden treasures to be found.

There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. You don’t have to be the world’s best salesperson who’s onboarding a steady stream of new customers who become the happiest customers that have ever walked the earth. No, that’s not what we’re suggesting. We’re just saying you need to be better than others who do roughly the same business as you do. Those ‘others’ are your industry peers!

Carefully observe what they are doing, try out things they do well and learn from their mistakes. Add your own personal touch to the strategies used by them, to ensure you stand out from others and are noticed by potential customers. “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer!” Inspiration will always come to you when you need it, as long as you keep an open mind.

Relationships are based on trust and confidence, which are the salesperson’s areas of expertise. What’s harder is the ability to segment thousands of customers and to decide who to contact. Unless you have access to a system, that is. Prospecting is much easier with a CRM System that allows you to be in control and streamline your sales process from the first sales call until the deal is done.

Step #4: Design An AMP-Ready And Optimized Website

Your website is one of the most important parts of your business — if not the most important of all. It not only gives you a presence online, but it also makes your business look more professional and increases your credibility. Now let’s look at the role it plays in finding new clients. If your website doesn’t rank well in search engines, your customer acquisition strategy isn’t going to be very successful.

The first thing your potential clients now turn to when they need to solve a problem is Google. If your target audience can’t find your company online, you’re going to miss out on a lot of business. Ideally, you want your website to work like a magnet to attract new clients. But for this to happen, you first need to know what your clients are looking for. Several tools can help you do this.

These will tell you what keywords your potential clients search for most in search engines like Google. Once you know what internet users are looking for, you can start attracting the B2B customers you want. A successful B2B customers and clients acquisition strategy should also include more long-term marketing strategies, like Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

However, organic search results require some time and effort to start delivering results and provide you with a sustainable competitive advantage. SEO is a cost-effective long-term strategy that will ultimately bring you regular new business. That’s because once your website ranks well in Google search results, it starts to pay for itself. It delivers a constant flow of new website leads.

Step #5: Increase Your Visibility On Search Engines

Increased visibility on Google should be a cornerstone of digital marketing for most businesses. The amazing thing about this is that you get the opportunity to expose your website effortlessly, and thereby promote your business, products, and services right when a potential customer might be looking for answers to questions you can provide them with.

Simply put, you can use two ways to boost your visibility on Google. One way is by developing a solid Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy, where you work with different approaches to improve your website’s position in search results pages. The second method is simply by advertising on Google when there are searches made for terms relevant to your brand, products, and services.

You can execute this by using Google’s advertising tool, known as Google Ads. At the same time, regular website blog posts can add to your business’s credibility and give potential clients more ways to interact with you. Engaging with followers and posting content regularly will build trust and authority in your niche over time. And that will help you to attract your target audience.

Step #6: Utilize A Working Content Marketing Strategy

As a rule of thumb, the main goal of content marketing is to educate your audience. This means providing leads with valuable resources. For example, blog posts, white papers, and webinars. By providing leads with real evidence of your industry expertise, you’ll help them to see the value of your solution. This will then increase their trust in your business and optimize conversion rates.

But this isn’t the only reason to use content marketing. It also helps your website to rank better in search engines like Google for keywords related to your sector. Online content is now essential to every online digital business. It will provide the cornerstone of many of your marketing campaigns by improving how your website ranks in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, or Yandex.

You should publish as much content as you can on your website as soon as possible. To be really successful, business marketing needs can be supported by a content strategy and a website. These should address the needs of the target B2B customers by highlighting content they can access, like videos and webinar replays. This will also encourage other leads to take part in future events.

Step #7: Build Relationships Through Networking

One of the best ways to generate B2B clients is to create online communities. These include groups of connected individuals who face similar business challenges and problems. These are known as social communities. For example, LinkedIn Groups are a good place to post comments (group conversations). A group built around value addition is a great place to find new potential clients.

When used correctly, social media can be an extremely powerful tool. It can help drive traffic to your website, and give your brand a personality. This will, in turn, strengthen your connection with your audience. One way to effectively use social media is to engage your customers by responding to their comments and questions. You should also use different strategies in your work plan.

Keep your social media calendar diverse and robust. Videos of your employees working, participating in team-building activities, or attending conferences can also be used to promote your business. You can create visuals to share statistics and industry knowledge with your social media followers. Ensure to keep your social media presence consistent by posting regularly.

Have someone available to answer questions or comments from followers. At the same time, you can use a social media scheduling tool to manage your social media accounts. These will let you automate the publishing of posts across all channels, optimize posting times, and provide you with analytics for how your posts perform.

Step #8: Leverage The Social Media Networks Power

Your potential clients are bound to be present on social media. Everyone has their favorite social network, even in B2B. For some, it will be Instagram, for others YouTube, while still others will prefer LinkedIn. So, your business needs to have a presence on social media. To find new B2B customers and increase conversion rate, one most significant social network is still LinkedIn.

Although it might have not crossed your mind before, LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for B2B lead generation and marketing. If you have never used LinkedIn before to find customers and make sales, it may seem like a time-consuming and daunting prospect; however, it’s quite the contrary. To generate LinkedIn B2B Sales leads, make sure to provide unique value propositions.

Also, focus on tailored experiences that suit the needs of your clients. Realistically, LinkedIn provides a unique opportunity to combine sales and marketing efforts into a digital experience for customers. You can, for example, enhance your brand by using events and influencers while connecting with sales through message funnels and building a network of sales specialists.

LinkedIn also offers several features that help sales professionals stay on top of their competition. You can, for example, see who has visited your profile, get insights into customer behavior, and track key metrics. In addition, some innovative LinkedIn automation tools can be used to optimize your lead generation and streamline sales processes.

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Step #9: Use Direct Messaging To Stand Out And Build Partnerships

Direct mail may still be an effective strategy for businesses, especially if you want to impress a particular lead. What better way to make yourself stand out than by sending personalized emails to your best prospects? Your competitors might be sending out impersonal emails to remarket their products or services, but you will leave a better impression by sending a brochure, postcard, gift, etc.

Also highlight what clients really appreciate about your business. To help identify your strengths, try talking to your sales team. As a marketer, work closely with the salespeople. They receive feedback from clients and also know what made them become a client. Listen to them and feedback from your clients to identify your strengths and highlight these on the landing page.

Business partnerships are free and enable both parties to increase their brand awareness. On that note, it’s worth mentioning that they are part of a referral traffic acquisition strategy. They can also be a great way to make early sales while your product and business reputation are still developing. But if a partnership is to be successful, they need to be relevant to your marketing strategy.

Start by asking yourself some questions to help identify other companies that could be potential partners.

Consider the following:

What products/companies in your sector have similar clients, but aren’t in direct competition with you?
Is there a company or an industry professional that would find your product or service particularly useful and be ready to promote it?
Could the clients of specific agencies, resellers, or distributors benefit from your product or service?
What can you offer them as a partner? Would your product or service generate more engagement from them? Is your contact list or client database valuable? Does your website or blog receive a lot of traffic?

These partnerships can take a number of different forms.

For example:

Guest blog posts: you can write blog posts for your partner’s blog and increase both visibility and readership
Software integrations: you can find ways to ensure that your products complement each other and can be used together
Cross-promotion: you can promote each other’s business to your own clients and contact list
Collaboration on bespoke projects: you can partner with another company to work on a bespoke project for a large client (this is a great way to network!)
Affiliate marketing: you can promote another company’s product or service on your website or with an email marketing campaign

Furthermore, many B2B businesses are now using “social selling” strategies. These rely more on proactive tracking, comments, and direct messaging of business contacts on social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter. To take advantage of these, you need to have a social media account for your business and an up-to-date profile page. Ensure you have a good strategy in your plan.

Step #10: Utilize The Seamless Phone Prospecting Method

By all means, phone prospecting, or cold calling, has been a part of business sales techniques for many years. Cold calling used to be the best way to reach out to potential clients, but it has fallen out of favor with many businesses. However, cold prospecting is not the only thing that’s fallen out of fashion. Many salespeople have stopped using this technique since the advent of the internet.

In particular, many salespeople look at it as a time-consuming activity compared to digital marketing. But don’t abandon the idea of using phone prospecting. Unlike in B2C, phone prospecting can work great in B2B. Most leads want to talk to a person as one of the most important aspects of a client’s experience is being able to ask questions and receive answers in real-time.

We can guarantee that, working in an open space, you hear the phone ringing all day long. So, calling people on the telephone isn’t obsolete just yet. While cold calling doesn’t have a very good reputation in B2C, the same doesn’t really apply in B2B. That’s because it’s much easier to call businesses that know what they need.

There are a now huge number of tools that let businesses personalize each of their communications. But what most leads really want is to speak to a real person. Being able to speak to someone, ask them questions, and get answers in real-time is one of the best parts of a potential client’s buying experience.

Step #11: Use Business Industry Proxies To Fill The Marketing Gaps

The B2B sector is a highly competitive environment. To convert visitors into clients, you need to tell them the right story. Putting yourself in the shoes of leads who are short on time will help you to optimize your website’s user experience. Make it easy and quick for visitors to sign up or contact you. Create different landing pages to make sure they land on the page that is most relevant to them.

If your buyers are senior-level executives you may struggle to find exact matches for your target persona. In these cases, consider folks who may not hold the position currently but have held it in the past. Can you find someone who was once the CFO at a large media company? Perhaps they’re retired today or have moved on to a new position. Their experience in that role is still fresh.

Their technical approach is also pretty valuable. It can give you a sense of, not only, their perspective on your value proposition but also how to find others like themselves. Most marketers rely heavily on “proxies” for their customer insight. These are individuals who used to or currently work as professionals. They have the experience you need and, equally as important, the time to speak with you.

After all, the amount of access you have to these folks is vast. They’re not at work. Instead, they’re there to learn, socialize, and broaden their view on the industry. Whether it’s with an official sponsored booth or hallway “pullovers”, you can likely have a dozen daily conversations at each proxy. Build a quarterly stream of qualitative insight and a network of folks to follow up.

Step #12: Events And Conferences Are Another Concentration Area

Industry events are great places to meet the leads, clients, and partners that are all vital to your business. They can include things like business breakfasts, morning meetups, and afterwork events. These can be quite easy to organize if you have space in your offices. Otherwise, you might hire a meeting room at a café or a co-working space. Events are typically led by employees or an invited guest.

Speakers will normally address a topic of interest to your leads. This will be a problem or challenge faced by your leads and which your business’s product or service can provide a solution for. But you should remember that you aren’t there to sell your product or service. The event is organized to provide value to leads and helpful advice. You don’t have to avoid talking about your product.

You can also discuss your services altogether, but only do so sparingly. Leads aren’t at the event to listen to a sales pitch, but to get ideas and resources. If industry events are few and far between in your domain or your part of the world, host yours. To get the insight you need, hold a “tech breakfast” event. Offer a nice breakfast buffet, 2 keynote speakers, and a convenient location.

The event is also a great place to talk to leads directly and it will give you adequate information you need. Furthermore, the cost is relatively low so you can hold this event monthly. If finding one-off customers to speak with is tough, consider attending industry-based conferences. Conferences have a high concentration of like-minded professionals and qualified employed individuals.

Step #13: Use A Call Center As The Customer Feedback Front Line

In this case, there’s the call center. This is the first place your customers go when they have a problem. Your customer service reps hear it all. Talk to them first. Learn what they hear most often. Ask them to add one or two questions to their script to see if you can dig deeper into the root cause of the main issues they’re hearing about. Listen in on their calls (they’re used to it).

In the best of cases, your call center will allow you to take a few calls yourself. You can use these as an opportunity to learn more about your customers directly from them and to start to identify patterns in their behaviors that may improve your product decisions. This is a finite list of ways to find B2B customers to speak with and interview. There are dozens of other ways to do this.

Some questions to consider:

Is the population you’re targeting smaller than a B2C audience? Yes.
Are they harder to find and reach? Yes.
Does that make it impossible to gain qualitative customer insight in your B2B world? No.

It just means you have to get a bit more creative in how you approach these folks. In addition, it’s also a good idea to highlight client testimonials or important key figures. That’s because B2B buyers generally take more convincing before making a commitment. Reassuring them is ultimately what will let you turn them into clients.

Equally important, some B2B customers might comment on something that you might have missed or have a different opinion about some industry news. See it as an opportunity to learn to speak the same language as your potential clients. With the help of your call center, you can use what you’ve heard from leads (e.g., about their needs, the problems they face, news) to create new content.

Step #14: Monitor Digital Online Forums And Community Groups

At Web Tech Experts, most of our clients find us in organic search results. On the one hand, we publish a lot of educational content on our blog to answer questions that our potential clients ask online. On the other hand, we identify these questions by regularly gathering marketing intelligence. This involves monitoring what is said in forums and discussion groups about subjects we have expertise in.

Ideally, each week we search for discussion groups relevant to our sector where members actively participate. This is where our target audience is present. We follow some of these groups on a regular basis, but others are always appearing, and they can be very useful. You can use these groups in two main ways. The first is to join the conversation and make yourself known to potential clients.

In particular, this includes offering your expertise. As always, the aim is to demonstrate your expertise and be of help to other members of the group. Just be careful not to promote your business too much. If someone accuses you of doing this, it can do more harm to your business’s reputation than good. Another way to take advantage of online activity is to browse various social hubs.

Consider Quora and Reddit forums related to your sector. You can use websites like these where your target audience asks questions to get ideas for new content. Then, you can write blog articles, white papers, and webinars that answer these questions. If a potential client is asking a specific question in an online forum, others are likely to share the same problem.

Step #15: Utilize The Best Tools To Find New B2B Customers

There are many different online platforms that connect a company that has a problem with a freelancer who can provide a solution. They basically work like classified ads, but for online B2B business services. Some examples of these platforms include Upwork, Fiverr, or Freelancer.com. If you’re a freelancer, there are several advantages to signing up;

Including:

simplification of work processes (e.g., sending a quote, receiving payment);
the speed at which projects are posted;
the ability to reach your target audience.

So, if you’re a freelancer, why not sign up to one or more of these platforms? That’s quite possibly where your potential clients are. When creating your digital online business profile, think about the first impression a client will have when they see it. This includes your profile picture, how you present yourself, client testimonials, and even the time you take to reply to messages.

Aim for a CRM system designed to close deals. For instance, as mentioned, Lime CRM is designed to make everyday life easier for salespeople and sales teams who wish to establish long-term relationships, maximise their sales numbers and increase their revenue. Get an overview of all your prospects and track where you are in the sales process with each potential customer.

Use customised dashboards to monitor your sales targets. Likewise, if you want to start generating leads fast, the best thing you can do is to start using a lead generation tool like Plezi One. Technically, Plezi One lets you easily create online forms (e.g., contact forms, request for quote, to request a demo, to download content) and use these to generate leads and potential clients.

It looks something like this:

One: Attract new visitors to your website
Two: Generate leads using online forms
Three: Increase your sales

In other words, Plezi One is the free toolbox you need to easily find new B2B customers. If you only remember one thing from this post, it’s this. You shouldn’t have to go looking for new clients. They are the ones who should be able to find you! For this to happen, the best thing you can do is to invest in inbound marketing. The new contacts you get as a result will be better qualified.

That’s because they’ve found you after doing their own research into a problem they face. And that’s the key to a good customer acquisition strategy. Remember, by offering additional resources to your target and potential B2B customers, they will also quite possibly be looking for similar solutions. All we are really doing is tracking the online behaviour of our target audience.

Final Thoughts:

If you’re looking for ways to refresh your online digital marketing efforts and capture the interest of potential B2B Customers, simply follow our tips. With a little strategy and dedication, you’ll soon be attracting brand-new B2B clients and expanding your business. Ensure you focus your efforts on acquiring and engaging with B2B customers, partners, and recognized industry experts.

As mentioned, LinkedIn currently has about 810 million users that marketers can easily/quickly utilize in their marketing strategies. Of those, about 310 million are active. Within this massive online database of professionals are many of your potential customers. The search functionality on LinkedIn is extremely powerful and can be targeted to a very narrow set of parameters.

As a result, you can fine-tune your marketing approach to yield exactly the user profile you serve and sell to. People are used to being approached coldly on LinkedIn. A few iterations on your InMail or contact request note will start to yield a steady flow of people to speak with. Try and be interested in hearing about the specific problems your customers are trying to solve.

Consider riding along with your sales team on their next call. Yes, sales teams are notoriously protective of their leads and existing clients. However, if you set expectations with the salespeople up front and agree on rules of engagement you’ll get a front-row seat to a series of customer conversations. Glean the challenges your customers face and how current solutions meet those needs.