March 30, 2022Cash Flow
Companies in the business-to-business space have historically been slower to embrace new technologies than companies in other sectors. Embracing new B2B technology can give you a competitive edge and improve almost every aspect of your business.
Benefits of Using B2B Technology
By implementing B2B technology into your business, you may see a number of advantages.
1. Allows for Easier Lead Generation and Faster Sales Process
One of the primary functions of the sales team is to create new business by generating leads.
Traditional lead generation methods can be time-consuming and expensive. Technology makes it possible for sales representatives to access thousands of high-quality prospects with names and contact information with minimal effort.
This technology also helps sales reps close deals faster. The faster your team closes sales, the sooner it can move on to contacting new leads.
2. Facilitates More Efficient Problem Solving
One of the keys to a successful sales process is identifying and fixing problem areas efficiently. B2B technology provides real-time, accurate, granular data that allows your team to identify problems and make fixes on the fly.
It also provides your team with status reports that make it possible to track how well changes are working and make additional adjustments as necessary.
3. Provides Flexibility
Companies change over time. If your technology isn’t able to change with you, it becomes obsolete.
Modern technology can be scaled up or down to suit changes in the size of your company or sales team and evolves based on your company’s changing needs.
The best tools are designed to integrate with your customer relationship management system to provide a seamless experience.
4. Improves Search Engine Optimization
SEO is one of the most important parts of any B2B marketing strategy.
The better your SEO is, the better your chances of making the first page when potential customers are searching for relevant keywords.
B2B technology can optimize your SEO by assisting you with keyword research.
Keyword research involves identifying the keywords that the people most likely to purchase your products or services are searching for. Identifying the optimal keywords and ranking high for these keywords is the key to driving visitors to your website.
5. Helps With Content Creation
Choosing the correct keywords is important, but simply stuffing your content with keywords isn’t enough to get your pages to rank well.
You also need high-quality content. Blogging platforms and content management systems have long been in use in the B2B world. However, new technology provides additional functionality.
Technology can help you create your website, design your infographics, create videos, record podcasts, write blogs and produce webinars.
For example, the falling price of augmented and virtual reality platforms has made more interactive content possible. Content marketing not only helps you rank better but may cost as much as 62% less than traditional marketing.
6. Improves Marketing Tracking and Measurement
One of the most challenging and time-consuming parts of marketing is tracking and measuring how well marketing campaigns perform.
Analytics tools make it possible to track and measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns in real-time.
This helps your marketing team make better decisions about how to best utilize your website, online ads, email marketing campaigns and social media to drive business.
7. Increases Productivity
Using B2B technology to perform time-consuming or labor-intensive tasks frees up your staff to apply its time and talents to tasks that can’t be easily automated.
For example, most B2B sellers offer credit terms to customers. The process of processing credit applications, accepting payments, and collecting late payments from customers who don’t pay on time can consume a substantial amount of time and resources.
It can also negatively impact your cash flow. Automating this process frees up your staff to engage in activities that generate revenue and improve cash flow by reducing late payments.
8. Fosters Better Analytics and Forecasting
Before companies started adopting technology solutions, teams of business analysts relied on tools, such as Excel spreadsheets, to analyze and forecast sales data.
The spreadsheets often became large and difficult to manage, and human error reduced the accuracy and usefulness of the results.
Technology built on artificial intelligence is capable of analyzing large amounts of data faster than any human can.
Using this technology reduces errors and produces results in shorter times. Sales managers can access forecasts and analyses that are nearly instantaneous. This helps team leaders make better decisions.
9. Improves Planning and Collaboration
Technology solutions help marketers create detailed marketing plans before launching campaigns.
This results in better targeting and more focused marketing. Additionally, these tools include features that make collaboration between marketing teams much easier.
This is particularly important as remote work becomes more common and teams may need to communicate with co-workers around the world.
10. Boosts Engagement
Creating great content that no one sees isn’t very useful. This is why content promotion is so important.
B2B technology, such as social media management platforms, enables marketers to improve engagement on social media platforms and manage digital advertising campaigns more effectively.
Not only does getting people to share your content on social media help spread your content and generate new leads, but it also helps you acquire earned links that boost your SEO.
11. Builds Better Brand Awareness
B2B e-commerce platforms help your business establish an online presence.
E-commerce platforms make it easier to create exactly the shopping experience you want your customers to have. This helps you build your brand locally, nationally and internationally.
12. Increases Sales
Artificial intelligence technology makes it possible to create sophisticated, automated upsell and cross-sell recommendation programs.
These programs increase sales by identifying products that customers are likely to be interested in purchasing, resulting in customers buying additional products.
These systems also make it easier for returning customers to reorder products based on previous purchases.
How Pencil’s B2B Technology Can Help Your Business
Pencil offers a B2B technology solution that helps you make better credit decisions, reduce late payments, invoice customers and collect payments.
It is designed to seamlessly integrate with your existing inventory, accounting, credit and e-commerce platforms so that you won’t need to waste time manually transferring data.
If you want to automate and organise your contacts and trade credit customers, book a demo with us and we can show you how it can work for your business.