There are hundreds of different sales tactics that you can use to find prospects, qualify leads, and make a sale.
But how do you decide which sales tactics make the most sense for your business?
To point you in the right direction, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best and most popular B2B sales tactics, from general practices to specific sales techniques, that you can use to close more of your deals.
Plus, you’ll learn seven old-school sales tactics that may not work for the modern seller.
What are sales tactics?
Sales tactics are the strategic methods and selling techniques that sales professionals employ to persuade prospects to become customers. These tactics cover the entire buyer’s journey from prospecting to closing. These sales tactics are not merely about pushing a product or service—they’re about creating meaningful connections and providing value.
Prospecting is the process of finding and reaching out to potential customers for your business. It’s typically an outbound marketing method that salespeople or sales development reps (SDRs) are tasked with.
Routine prospecting activities include cold calling, cold emailing, or following up with a lead that has gone cold. The end goal is to identify leads that can be moved to the next step of your sales funnel, and eventually, result in a sale.
1. Finding qualified leads
The first step of prospecting is to research and find a group of qualified people to reach out to. There are many ways to find potential buyers. You can:
The list goes on and on. Finding the right method that works for you will require a bit of trial and error. To get you started, here are a few helpful resources that cover researching and finding potential leads:
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A cold call is an example of a sales tactic that refers to an unsolicited call to a potential buyer to introduce them to your business and eventually move them toward a sale. This type of sales tactic usually has a low success rate, and it’s difficult for even the best salesperson to master.
At a glance, here’s why cold calling can be a difficult sales technique for selling:
Only 1% of cold calls ultimately lead to appointments (Source).
Around 90% of top-level B2B decision-makers do not respond to cold outreach (Source).
However, with the statistics as bleak as they are, B2B companies still frequently rely on cold calling to generate sales opportunities. If you want to step up your cold calling game, check out the following resources:
A cold email is an email sent to a potential buyer with no prior relationship with you or your company. The contact has never met you, nor have you been mentioned as a referral. You simply found their contact information and sent them an email out of the blue, hoping for a reply.
Similar to cold calling, cold emailing is a challenging sales technique aimed at getting a response or securing an appointment through unsolicited emails. However, with the right email scripts, strategy, and follow-up methods, you can improve your reply rates.
“We have to send a lot of cold emails as part of link building for SEO, or when we try to market our courses to people,” says Balazs Hajde, Content Manager at Authority Hacker. “We found that losing the salesy language and being casual goes a long way, both with marketing professionals and the average customer.
“So, for example, a common subject line we use is ‘Could you take a quick look at this?’ It’s friendly, something you’d get from a friend or a co-worker, so you instinctively open the message.
“We also like to be self-aware, so we write things like, ‘I know, I know, this is like, the 7,543rd email I’m sending you…’ Marketers appreciate the transparency, and everyone likes the friendly tone.”
The articles below will give you some more great tips for crafting the perfect cold email:
A “warm” call is a sales call that follows an initial form of contact or introduction. You may not have had a proper conversation with the potential buyer, yet they are familiar with you because of this initial introduction. (See also: warm email prospecting.)
Examples include sending them a white paper prior to the call, being mentioned as a referral from another client, commenting on some of their social media posts, or shaking their hand at a networking event.
The idea is that since the person is already aware of you, they will be more receptive and likely to speak with you about your business.
If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of warm calling and how to use the tactic effectively, we recommend checking out the following articles:
Mailing information and offers to potential buyers is still a great way to make initial contact with a new business. If you aren’t convinced that this sales tactic still works, here are a few interesting direct mail statistics to consider:
70% of Americans say that mail is more personal than the internet (Source).
79% of consumers will act on direct mail immediately, compared to only 45% who say they deal with email immediately (Source).
Targeted B2B direct mail has a response rate of 4.4%—nearly 37 times that of email (.12%) (Source).
If you haven’t tried using direct mail for your business yet, the following resources will help you build a successful direct mail campaign:
Referrals are an incredibly effective selling strategy to find qualified buyers. In fact, according to Nielsen, 92% of consumers trust referrals from people they know, and are four times more likely to buy when referred by a friend.
(via referralsaasquatch.com)
While some referrals will come naturally, there are a few ways you can entice your current customers to refer your business more readily. The following resources will get you started:
For an even deeper look at prospecting strategies, check out this sales prospecting guide from G2Crowd.
Lead Generation
What is lead generation?
You will find many different definitions when it comes to lead generation. However, lead gen essentially boils down to two activities:
Attracting qualified buyers to your business
Collecting their contact information (so that your sales team can follow up)
Lead generation is typically an inbound marketing strategy. In other words, you get qualified buyers to come to you versus prospecting, where you have to spend time finding and reaching out to prospects.
Building a successful lead generation process can take time, but once set up, leads should filter in consistently and reduce or eliminate the need for prospecting.
To build a successful lead generation process, you need a way to attract your target audience and another way to collect their contact information. We’ve outlined strategies for both:
7. Content marketing
Content marketing is an insanely popular marketing and sales strategy. In fact, many marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority.
Simply put, content marketing is the practice of offering something of value to potential website visitors, with the goal of introducing them to your brand or collecting their email addresses.
Content marketing is so popular because it works to attract people to your business or, more accurately, your website. Getting traffic is the first step to collecting leads.
There are many different types of content you can create, including:
Blog posts
Webinars
YouTube videos
Email newsletters
White papers
Ebooks
SlideShares
Pinterest graphics
The list goes on and on. The important thing is to find a type of content that works for you and attracts consistent, qualified traffic. From there, you can employ lead-capture tactics.
“One sales tactic that works very well for me is what I call the Free Giveaway Technique,” says Rishit Shah, Owner of TallySchool. “I sell a course on my website, which is paid. In order to sell the course, for the first seven days, I give my subscribers three free lessons each day via email. In total, I give them 21 free lessons over a period of seven days. After seven days, I ask them to sign up for the paid course.”
“Because of this technique, trust is built between me and the subscriber as I am offering free lessons every day, and they can also see the quality of the lessons that I am providing. Even if they don’t buy the course, I earn their trust and they send their friends to my website, which means new leads are generated for free.”
To discover the best types of content to create and come up with your own ideas, we recommend checking out the following articles:
A lead magnet is a sales technique where an incentive is offered to your website’s visitors in exchange for their email and any other contact information you’d like to collect. Typical lead magnet ideas include:
An eBook or whitepaper download
A coupon/discount
A checklist
A cheat sheet
A template
A lead magnet might also be referred to as a “signup incentive,” “signup offer,” “freemium,” or “content upgrade” (this is typically a lead magnet that is specific to one blog post).
For more lead magnet ideas, these resources have you covered:
A lead capture can be a pop-up form or landing page used to collect emails and other contact information from visitors on your website.
Using a lead capture is typically the third step of the lead generation process when using a combination of content and lead magnets:
Attract your target audience using content
Create a lead magnet to entice people to provide their contact info
Present the offer using a lead capture form or landing page
Once you have the visitor’s info, you can add them to a lead nurturing process and move them through your sales funnel. Or, your sales team can follow up with them directly. This will depend on your sales process and how you choose to connect with qualified leads.
The video below provides a deeper understanding of lead captures:
If you want to learn how to create an effective lead capture, check out the following resources:
Qualifying is an important part of the sales process. Without qualifying leads, you could spend countless hours reaching out to and following up with people who are not interested in your solution, don’t have the power to make a decision, or are simply not a good fit for your business.
Sales tactics are used to qualify this problem by identifying which leads actually have the potential to become customers and which ones aren’t worth pursuing.
There are several ways to qualify leads, both automatically and manually. We’ve outlined a few of the top methods below:
10. Build a sales pipeline
A sales pipeline is a visual representation of each stage of your sales process:
Most CRM platforms enable you to build a pipeline and visually see where each prospect is in relation to the stages you have set in your pipeline.
Every company will have a different pipeline with any number of stages based on what needs to happen before a sale is made. However, a simple pipeline might look like:
There are four stages in the above example (Qualification>Meeting>Proposal>Closing). Sales or marketing team members can move leads from one stage to another when the buyer has met certain criteria (i.e., their company has sufficient annual revenue or number of employees) or the sales team has completed certain tasks (like scheduling a meeting).
A pipeline allows sales and marketing to easily keep track of the status of each potential deal. It also allows team members to qualify leads by setting criteria that each lead must meet before moving to the next stage.
Learn more about sales pipelines and how to build an effective one for your company:
Lead scoring is a technique used by sales and marketing teams to determine the value of a lead by assigning a score based on specific actions they take. A lead with a high score would be seen as “hot” or “warm,” whereas a lead with a low score would be seen as “cold”.
Lead scoring helps sales and marketing teams prioritize which leads are worth following up with and which ones are not ready to make a decision or may not be a good fit altogether.
Lead scores are calculated based on the actions a lead takes and the values you assign to those actions. For example:
Visiting your product page may result in 5 points
Downloading an eBook may result in 10 points
Scheduling a call or product demo may result in 20 points
Some actions can also deduct points (such as a lead unsubscribing from your email list). The point value assigned to each of these actions is completely custom. This means that your team will have to decide how many points each action is worth.
Many CRMs have the ability to automatically score leads. Some can even move leads from one stage to another in your sales pipeline based on their scores. This process of scoring leads cuts down on the manual work required to qualify potential buyers.
To learn more about lead scoring, visit the following resources:
The point of this call is to simply have a conversation and ask the potential buyers questions to find out if they’re a good fit for your business. It is not the time to make a sale.
Additionally, this call differs from a cold or warm call since this buyer should have already expressed an interest in your business (Ex: Filled out a form, sent you an email, visited your pricing page, etc.).
There are a number of frameworks for qualifying leads on a consulting call:
We won’t cover all of these frameworks in-depth, but if you follow the BANT framework, you want to ask questions that revolve around
Do you have a budget in mind you’re trying to stick to? (Budget)
Is there anyone else who needs to sign off on this decision? (Authority)
What challenges is your team facing at the moment? (Need)
When are you looking to make a decision by? (Timing)
“If your organization isn’t the best fit to help them address their needs, tell them and tell them early,” says Dirk Engel, Account Executive at BizLibrary. “Even better, point them in the right direction if you can. They will appreciate that you respected their time and were transparent. I’ve had multiple cases over the years when I’ve been honest and upfront with prospects that we weren’t the best fit, and two years later, they come to me because they’re now at a new company and remembered me.”
To learn more about the different sales frameworks you can employ and the questions to ask your potential buyers, we recommend the following:
Closing refers to everything a sales rep or sales team does to sign a deal or make a sale official, including collecting payment. While it’s important to allow the buyer time to evaluate your product or service, there are ways to create urgency to speed things along when a buyer is taking too long to make a decision, is on the fence about your solution, or anything else that would prevent them from choosing your company.
We’ve outlined a few specific closing strategies as well as general best practices to close a sale:
13. The time-limited close
The time-limited close is a sales technique where you try to make a sale by presenting a time-limited offer, like a discount or promotion. This tactic works well for potential buyers who say they need time to consider your solution.
This may also be referred to as the “urgency close” or “now or never close.”
Example of this sales tactic:
“I understand you need time to consider our solution carefully. However, we do have a 25% discount that expires tomorrow. Buying today would be a great deal and save your company $X.”
14. The assumptive close
The assumptive close assumes that the sale has been made. Rather than asking an open-ended question like “What solution would you like to go with?” you present a question specific to an exact solution and usually with a limited number of options.
Examples of this sales tactic:
“What day would you like to receive your shipment?”
“Would you like the product in blue or green?”
“Will 20 units be enough to start with?”
15. The custom close
The custom close works well if you’ve established a relationship with the potential buyer and understand their needs and wants. The idea is to propose a solution that will fully meet their needs, yet still ask if the buyer requires any additional features.
This may also be referred to as “suggestion close” since you are suggesting a solution specific to their needs.
Example of this sales tactic:
First, you cover the features the buyer needs and ask if there’s anything else:
“So, you want X, Y, and Z. Do you need any additional features?”
If you understand the buyer’s needs well and have covered all the features they’re looking for, they will reply with “no,” at which point you can follow up with:
“Great, then our [name of product or solution] is a perfect fit. It comes with [explain benefits] for $X. All I need is your signature.”
For more closing techniques, check out the following resources:
And finally, here are some significant sales closing statistics from GetAccept that can help you close more deals.
16. The sales pitch
Sometimes, making a sale isn’t as simple as closing a deal over the phone or via email. Sometimes, you actually need to “pitch” or present your proposed solution in a meeting.
If that’s the case, these articles will steer you in the right direction and help you to create the perfect sales pitch or presentation:
Another essential sales tactic is to continue to follow up with potential buyers. These people have busy schedules and may have missed your initial few calls or emails.
“The average person can get a few hundred emails a day. That makes it pretty tough to respond to all of them, and things naturally fall to the bottom of the list. If you don’t get a response, it doesn’t mean that someone is ignoring you—it just may mean that he or she is too busy.” (Elliott Bell, Director of Marketing, The Muse)
Additionally, it’s a good practice to check in from time to time to ask if there’s anything else you can do or if the buyer has any questions or concerns you can address.
To help craft the perfect follow-up process, check out the following:
Upselling is a sales technique for selling in which a seller attempts to convince their buyer to purchase a more expensive version of the product they’re interested in, while cross-selling involves selling a customer complementary items to enhance the original purchase.
Think of a customer coming into a bicycle shop: Upselling would mean convincing them to buy a higher-end bike than the one they were looking at, while cross-selling would be selling them a helmet and bike pump to go with their new bike.
“More often than not, upselling comes from having a friendly conversation with someone that goes beyond what they initially say their needs are,” says Ryan Miller, CPRW, Client Success Manager at Employment BOOST. “There’s a great chance that a person could use an additional service from you, but they might not even know it or may not even know you offer it.”
“You should try to figure out the why of what they’re looking for to get more information before agreeing to provide your solution. Too often, we are transactional and trying to get the quick sale and close it, but asking broader questions could lead to more opportunities for greater revenue and relationships.”
If you’re looking for a deeper dive on upselling and cross-selling, these resources will help:
Our Sell to Win Playbook provides tons of expert advice on what it takes to turn prospects into sales. Get an insider look by downloading the playbook for free!
Here are a few sales tactics that apply throughout the sales process and after the deal closes as well.
19. Active listening
A key technique to keep in mind throughout the sales process, especially when it comes to relationship building, is active listening.
This technique involves giving prospects your undivided attention and emphasizes understanding their needs, emotions, and motivations. As you talk with prospects, paraphrase what you hear to ensure you’re getting the right message and ask clarifying and open-ended questions.
Active listening helps you understand your prospects’ needs, allowing you to pitch them the right solutions in a way that addresses their actual concerns.
To learn more about how to develop this skill and use it in sales, explore the following resources:
While facts and figures are important in sales, weaving storytelling into sales tactics helps create emotional impact and show prospects how your product can improve their life or business.
A well-crafted sales story will include relatable characters, compelling tension, and clear resolutions. You can either make your prospect the main character of the story or share a story of an existing customer that your prospect can relate to.
Ultimately, your sales stories should show how your product or service can help your prospects overcome the challenges they’re facing in their daily lives.
To learn more about the art of storytelling as it relates to sales, check out these guides:
Objections are a normal part of the sales process. No matter how compelling your product or pitch is, people will have concerns and hesitations. That’s why handling objections is such a key sales skill.
When an objection comes up, start by ensuring you understand the prospect’s concern through active listening and clarifying questions. Acknowledge the objection’s validity and empathize.
Then, provide evidence that addresses the issue or present alternatives that may better meet the prospect’s needs. Once you feel you’ve reached a resolution, check that the prospect is on the same page and ask if they have other questions or concerns.
It’s also helpful to keep track of common objections your sales team encounters so that you’re prepared to deal with them.
With the right approach, you can turn objections into increased engagement and interest from your prospects.
22. Leverage automation and artificial intelligence (AI)
Sales teams today have access to a wide range of tools that use automation and AI to increase efficiency and productivity.
CRM platforms can automatically send follow-ups, move leads through your pipeline, and report on performance. Many CRMs also provide AI-powered insights into your relationships and conversations.
Of course, you should use AI and automation as a complement to personal interaction and relationship-building, not a replacement. If you ignore these tools entirely, though, you’ll likely fall behind competitors and miss out on potential sales.
To learn more about how automation and AI are impacting the sales field, take a look at these resources:
Even after you’ve made a sale, the selling process doesn’t stop there. It’s important to not only establish trust and build a solid relationship with the buyer before they make a decision, but also after they’ve decided to go with your company.
You want to make sure the buyer is happy with your company, they feel like they’ve made the right decision, and they feel important.
To help build long-lasting relationships with your customers, we recommend the following resources for continuing the sales process long after you’ve made an initial sale:
Now that we’ve covered some of the timeless sales tactics, let’s explore the tactics that haven’t aged as gracefully.
These techniques for selling may have worked for the old-school sellers, but for the modern buyer, they’re out of touch and, at worst, just plain rude.
Here are seven tactics to leave behind as a modern salesperson:
Seeking the sale at all costs: Selling at all costs—without thinking of the customers’ needs—will lead to dissatisfaction down the line and a poor reputation. Focus on selling with integrity.
Pitching products instead of solutions: You’re not selling a product to your prospect – you’re selling a solution to their problem. Seek to understand your target audience and their pain points to craft the ideal pitch, and you’re more likely to boost your closing rate.
Overselling products and services: Be honest about the value your product and/or services represent – overplaying features and benefits or overselling in general can backfire when expectations are not lived up to.
Turning up the pressure: Aggressive persuasion and manipulation tactics no longer cut it in the 21st century, especially since modern consumers have multiple options available to them and won’t tolerate a sales bully.
Bombarding leads with sales messages: While it’s important to stay top-of-mind, multiple emails and calls over a short period of time will likely turn prospects off.
Rushing prospects through the sales process: The need for speed won’t win you the lead. Realize that buyers make purchases at their unique pace and focus on providing the best sales experience you can.
Pretending that sales is a solo sport: Encouraging unhealthy, “every-man-for-himself”-type competition between sales reps can lower morale and productivity. Try to keep the rivalries friendly and motivating.
And the most important sales tactic of all…
“It’s not much of a quick and dirty tip, but the most valuable sales tactic for us is honesty,” says Ian Clark, Head of Americas at Frank Recruitment Group. “We always look at long-term goals rather than immediate results, which means placing an emphasis on building trust in order to develop relationships with clients and candidates. It sounds like an overly simple way to achieve this, but the easiest advice is to avoid lying. That’s not just when it comes to the big objections. It’s the little things, too.
“If there’s a gap in your knowledge, go away and get an answer rather than making it up. You never know when a customer is genuinely unsure or simply testing you to gauge how trustworthy you are. If you don’t know your product, get to know it, and don’t be afraid to tell a customer when you have a knowledge gap. That vulnerability can be a great way to engender trust and should be looked at as an opportunity rather than a weakness.
“If we can’t help, or the situation isn’t right, we will hold our hands up and be honest. We might take a small hit now, but it means showcasing our knowledge and expertise as well as having confidence in the quality of our product in the long run. Even if you have to tell someone that we might not be right for them at the moment, the next time you touch base, you’re likely to have a warm lead. There’s nothing more satisfying than picking up the phone to someone who believes in you. It makes the job far easier and enjoyable.”
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