If you are looking for how to increase B2B sales in your wholesale business then this article will take you through 5 proven ways you can dominate in 2018.
Increasing wholesale sales is something that you can benefit greatly from throughout your whole business. A jump in wholesale sales:
- Puts your product in front of new audiences that you might not have reached before
- Increases product volume meaning lower buy costs for you on the backend
- Lets you build and strengthen your relationship with your biggest purchasers
How To Increase B2B Sales
Dollar for dollar, working on the WooCommerce wholesale side of your business and trying to increase your sales there as much as possible is the most powerful place to invest your marketing money.
So how exactly do you go about increasing your B2B sales to wholesale customers?
Rather than skirt around the edges, I want to get really specific and show you 5 proven tactics to attract and build your B2B sales.
Tactic #1: Increase Your Reachout Efforts To Fill Your Pipeline
The first step in any B2B sales campaign is to figure out how to attract customers. And not just any customers, you want highly targeted customers that are going to do the volume you desire.
In our article about wholesale marketing strategy, we covered a number of strategies for getting more wholesale customers:
- Cold calling
- Cold mailing (direct mail campaigns)
- Email outreach
- Sending samples (always pre-qualify who you’re sending them to!)
- Identify potential wholesale customers in your current customer list
- Tradeshows & industry meetups
- Profile existing B2B customers and find more like them
- Industry directories
- Create an amazing recruitment page so people can self-identify as wholesale
So here’s your challenge: Plan your next 30 days.
What can you do to increase your efforts over the next 30 days? What have you tried and had success with in the past? Double down on it and invest more resources into filling your pipeline.
Tactic #2: Work Closer With Your Top 20%
If you know anything about the 80/20 rule then you’ll buy into the thought process that roughly 20% of your wholesale customers will be producing 80% of the revenue in your business.
So let’s take advantage of that.
I want you to segregate and work more closely with the top 20% of wholesale customers.
Here are a handful of ideas you can use to spice up the relationship with these proven producers:
- Send free samples of products they haven’t purchased yet
- Schedule a visit and work 1-on-1 on their marketing of your products
- Can you lower the price to give them the incentive to buy more? This is where pricing tiers come in.
- Can you lower or remove their minimum requirements
- Can you grant them free shipping
- Find some way to celebrate the anniversary date of them signing up with you
- Make ordering painless
- Make contact a regular habit
- Surprise them
- Look for joint-promotion opportunities
Tactic #3: Go Top Down
If you’re working with a couple of stores in a network of stores and you want to extend your reach, it can really help to approach the head office directly.
This can help multi-store customers enhance their buying power and it will help you get management buy-in.
Management buy-in is important for securing larger deals and cementing yourself as a mainstay of your customer’s product line.
Sometimes finding who to talk to can be a pain but here’s a quick hack you can use: LinkedIn.
If you can’t get the details you need from the individual store owners, then you can use LinkedIn as a tool for locating the exact person you should be speaking to.
Simply go to the LinkedIn homepage and search for the company group by name and you can click on the People tab in the search results:
If you’re not sure what the group company is called they often list it in the footer on the retail store’s website. You can then plug that company name into LinkedIn and find the connections you need.
It’s really important when using the top-down strategy to build your relationship with the key decision makers. These are the people that you need to win to your cause.
If you’re having trouble getting your product into the stores or there is some resistance there, then I recommend asking them to run a trial of putting your product in just a couple of stores and measuring the results. When you demonstrate performance, then it’s much easier for them to say yes. It makes them look like the hero in their company.
Tactic #4: Wholesale Specific Coupon Deals
Coupon deals are a mainstay of retailing and it’s a fantastic way to get customers over the line and feel special.
But did you know you can use coupons for wholesale deals as well?
We built a plugin specifically for this purpose called Advanced Coupons for WooCommerce and one of the key features is being able to restrict the user roles that have access to that coupon.
Coupons are and will always be a fantastic motivator to get people over the line but you might be wondering what you can you use them for with B2B customers?
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Seasonal campaigns
- Free shipping campaigns
- Conditional campaigns (like BOGO – buy one, get one)
- Freebies and giveaways for hitting certain quantities
- Once off deals for special customers
The only limit to the kinds of deals you can run with a coupon is your imagination.
Tactic #5: Follow Up Consistently
The last tactic to close this article is a simple one. It’s just about following up consistently.
I get it – we all get busy! Following up is one of those regular boring tasks and it’s very easy to put it into the “I’ll do it later” basket.
But consistency is what builds your funnel and ultimately, your business.
One way to get over this is to systematize your processes.
Systemization is all about writing down exactly what and how you do each task in your business. In this case, it’s your “follow up process”.
It might look something like this:
Follow Up Process
- Every Thursday morning, open up the Trello board labeled “Follow Up”
- Go to Google Drive and copy the email template titled “checking how you are”
- Email the customer and make sure it is marked with the from address “admin@yourcompany”
- Archive the card on the Follow Up Trello board and create a new follow-up reminder in the future follows ups list
- Mark the customer’s name in the warehouse system to ensure they get a free sample on their next order
When you systematize the follow-up process like this, it means that it gets done exactly the same way each time. It’s consistent and predictable.
Make use of tools like Google Calendar which can be shared with your workers, Trello boards which are like shareable task lists, and group storage solutions like Google Drive and Dropbox. Doing this prepares you for the future and makes it easy for other people to run these processes for you.
Consistency is key.
