Personalisation is a huge part of the relationship-driven B2B driven industry – and promotions are no different. Businesses have to be able to promote effectively in order to engage and retain customers.
No two B2B customers are the same, which means you need custom catalogues and pricing for every customer. But many platforms today lack the flexible tools needed to run personalised promotions.
The lack of personal touch when running promotions is one of the reasons B2B sellers are hesitant to go online and choose to do things manually.
The Problem with Running B2B Promotions Manually
In a competitive market, the importance of promotions in helping businesses capture more sales cannot be underestimated. Many businesses understand this and will drop prices or run promotions more frequently when sales are slow.
The problem is, B2B sellers too often end up manually handling dozens of different promotions at the same time. This is true even for sellers that have built a presence on online platforms. Businesses digitise to achieve more with less effort while maintaining their core values. However, the one-size-fits-all approach on online platforms is working against B2B sellers.
Most online platforms like marketplaces only allow you to list a standardised product catalogue with the same prices for every customer. All of your customers will see the same thing, including the promotion you set. Without the personalisation element, sellers have a difficult time incentivising their customers to buy online.
The inability to customise catalogues, prices and promotions online is one of the main reasons B2B sellers still operate offline and serve customers individually. But running promotions manually eats into your margins as you can only tend to so many customers at a time. When you add different sales channels into the mix, things can get complicated.
Create Custom Promotions with the Right Solution
To get the most out of promotions, you have to be able to set them up quickly then seamlessly manage all your sales in one platform. The fastest and most impactful way to remedy this is by investing in the right digital solution to facilitate promotions.
With a platform like Dropee Direct, you can group your customers according to any criteria you want, whether by industry, location or your own custom tier.
Then, you can set custom settings for each customer group to determine how they interact with your products and prices. Essentially, each customer will get custom catalogues that are only visible to them with prices and promotions – discounts or free shipping – tailored to their needs. This way, you ensure that every customer will receive the right offers as long as they meet the criteria like order value, purchase frequency and even location.
Now that you know what you need to run promotions seamlessly, here are the best practices to keep in mind.
Best Practices When Setting Up Promotions
Late Payments? Try this Promotion
Late payments are one of the biggest cash flow disruptors, but you can incentivise your customers to pay you early with a promotion. For example, if the payment term for your invoices is 60 days, you can offer a small discount to customers that pay within 30 days. This way, you strengthen your cash flow while providing your customers a financial advantage.
Excess Inventory? Here’s What to Do
If your business deals with perishable items or seasonal products, you’d know that the closer your product gets to the expiry date, the more you will lose. To protect your margins, it’s crucial to sell off products with limited shelf life before you have to resort to steep discounts just to clear up some inventory. When planning your promotions, consider discounts to help move these perishable stocks in time.
Sales Take Too Long? Speed Things Up this Way
To close sales faster, offering time-sensitive discounts can help speed things up. For example, you could offer your customer a 10% discount on their order if they buy within the quarter. This short-term and limited offer creates urgency in your buyers.
However, this tactic should not be done too often as your customers will come to expect discounts every time and will be hesitant to buy.
Want to Retain Customers? Here’s How
Referral discounts are a great way to expand into new markets while building customer loyalty. B2B is all about relationships and buyers prefer to buy from someone they trust, or through recommendations With this in mind, you can create a referral promotion whereby both the referrer and the referee are given discounts for every successful lead. This promotion tactic encourages loyalty and motivates your customers to keep bringing in more referrals.
Additionally, you can also offer loyalty discounts to repeat customers as an incentive for future purchases. A good example is the offer of 10% off software subscription fees if they pay annually.
Can’t Drive Sales Volume? Try this
One way to achieve greater sales volume is to encourage your customers to purchase in bulk. This is where promotions come in to entice your customers with better prices if they meet the required order value. A minimum order quantity is not the only way to go about this, you could also offer bundle deals – where your customers can get complimentary products at a discount.
Optimise Sales with the Right Promotional Tools and Strategies
Promotions are instrumental in B2B to help businesses generate more sales and build customer loyalty. But trying to manage hundreds of promotions for customers with different needs manually is not a scalable solution and leads to missed opportunities.
With the right solution, you can define promotions for different customer groups and immediately launch them to customer touchpoints so your clients get the right promotions at the right time. By integrating your promotion system with an online order management system, you can consolidate all your data in one place and accurately analyse your promotions for better results.
Want to see how Dropee Direct can help you digitalise seamlessly? Get in touch with us here for a free demo.
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