August 24, 2021
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The world has changed in the past year, and relying on traditional sales tactics is no longer enough to win new or repeat business. Today, closing B2B sales in the cannabis industry is dependent on two things – persistence and engagement. In a post-pandemic world, you need sales tools to help you find, prioritize, and communicate with prospects’ rapidly changing expectations and preferences.
No more is this more obvious than in how sales engagement and conversion optimization has changed in the past year. Research from McKinsey revealed that live chat and video have become the predominant channels for engaging and closing sales with B2B customers, and the researchers say there are no signs that things will go back to the way they were pre-pandemic.
For example, McKinsey’s research found that in the past year, 41% more sales representatives are using video and 23% more are using live chat for digital engagement with prospects. Why? Because that’s where consumers want to interact with sales people today. As a result, you need sales tools to engage and convert leads in digital environments or you’ll miss opportunities.
Following are five of the most important B2B sales tools you need to sell your products and/or services to cannabis license holders.
A robust CRM tool is essential to cannabis industry B2B sales success today. You can learn about 10 of the most important reasons why your business needs a CRM tool here. The top three reasons include:
Bottom-line, a CRM tool allows you to maintain a database of prospects, current customers, and former customers that you can use to engage, track, and convert more efficiently and successfully than ever.
To save you time, the Cannabiz Media License Database CRM tool comes pre-loaded with more than 70,000 cannabis and hemp leads who you can start selling to immediately!
You know what makes your CRM tool even more powerful? When it includes an integrated email marketing tool.
Email marketing is essential to B2B sales in the cannabis industry. Not only is it an affordable way to reach out to license holders, but it has also been proven to work. Research by Litmus found that for every $1 spent on email marketing, businesses get $42 in return, and research by Campaign Monitor found that for every $1 spent on email marketing, businesses receive $44 in return.
However, just any email marketing tool won’t do when it comes to B2B cannabis license holder sales engagement. You need an email marketing tool that allows you to effectively segment license holders by license type, activity, location, status, and much more. You can do all of it using the email marketing tool built into the Cannabiz Media License Database.
Did you know you can use live chat as part of your sales process? Since the COVID-19 pandemic sent everyone into lockdown, live chat has gained significant popularity as a sales engagement tool. Most people think of live chat strictly as a customer service tool, but it’s very powerful for sales as well. When consumers can instantly connect with a live salesperson to answer questions, they’re more likely to buy.
There are two popular types of live chat options for sales engagement – on your website and in your digital documents or estimating/proposal software. For example, your website can include a live chat option for consumers in early stages of the sales cycle to ask questions.
Later in the sales pipeline, you can embed a live chat in the digital documents you send to potential customers or the digital estimates and proposals you send. In this case, you’d receive a digital notification when the client is reading the documents you sent to them which gives you the opportunity to connect with them immediately, answer questions, and close the deal.
Social selling has grown to become a critical part of the sales process in recent years, and when you use a social media engagement tool, you won’t miss any key opportunities. You’ll also save a lot of time and build trust with prospects through your engagement that leads directly to sales.
For example, LinkedIn offers the LinkedIn Sales Navigator tool to help sales people find and connect with prospects. However, there is more to social selling than prospecting. It’s all about engagement!
That’s where a social media monitoring tool can streamline tasks and ensure important conversations don’t get lost. Hootsuite is just one example of a social media management tool that offers a social selling tool.
From within the Cannabiz Media License Database, you can instantly connect with individual license holder contacts across social media platforms by simply clicking the social media icon included in the contact’s record.
The more processes you can automate, the more you can maximize your sales engagement and conversions! There are a couple of general automation tools that can help you do it.
First is IFTTT, which is an acronym for If This, Then That. It’s a tool that allows you to create automated actions. For example, if a certain prospect publishes a tweet, you could set up an automaton that notifies you, so you can follow-up in a timely manner. The possibilities are endless!
Another great tool is Zapier, which allows you to create automations triggered by specific actions across a wide variety of tools. Each automation is referred to as a zap. For example, you can set up zaps so you’re automatically notified when someone submits a sales contact form on your website, to send new leads a personalized message, to share content across social media channels, to add tasks to your to do list, and much more.
The Cannabiz Media License Database comes with a variety of automation tools built into the platform, including tasks, deals, alerts, and more.
B2B sales tools have been proven to help sales people generate more leads, prioritize them, and close more deals. It’s all about engaging with the right people at the right time, and B2B sales tools let you do it more efficiently and successfully.
Schedule a demo to learn how you can use the Cannabiz Media License Database – complete with built-in tools for CRM, email marketing, social selling, and more – to take your sales process to the next level.
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