Sales teams face a new challenge when it comes to reaching customers: finding the right way to connect.

This is especially true in the business-to-business (B2B) world. Until just a few years ago, sales efforts relied on person-to-person interactions. But the online transition came fast—and it was permanent. According to a recent report, 33 percent of B2B buyers now prefer to do business seller-free. By 2025, 80 percent of B2B transactions will occur through digital channels.

For sales teams, this transition can be difficult to navigate.

To manage the shift to remote sales during the pandemic, many B2B teams adopted a hybrid approach, connecting with clients and prospects through a mix of marketing channels—email, text, mobiles apps, in-person communications, and more. According to an industry study of 2,500 B2B organizations, more than 90 percent of enterprise companies plan to continue reaching customers this way for a simple reason: it works. Customers “want the right mix of in-person interactions, remote contact via phones or video, and e-commerce self-service across the purchasing journey,” the report states. “Because of its omnichannel nature, it enables broader and deeper real-time customer engagement.”

The new challenge? Streamlining the process.

In the rush to keep up with buyers moving online, many companies had seemingly unlimited budgets to scale their sales teams, test new tools, and use SaaS platforms to manage data and identify customers. Now, however, funding is tight because of economic uncertainty, and sales teams are forced to adopt a new byword to tackle an ever more complex world: simplify.

“Having the right data and tools, as opposed to a lot of tools, is key,” says James Casola, vice president of sales and marketing solutions for Dun & Bradstreet. “Simplifying the sales process with an end-to-end, data-driven solution that can serve multiple markets is the direction companies are headed.” 

The Great Simplification
For a few years, investment in sales departments appeared to have no end in sight.

During COVID-19, many companies seemed to transition to digital B2B sales overnight, expanding teams, tech stacks, and tools to connect with customers in new ways. “I call this the great complication,” Casola says. “Companies tried anything they could to remain competitive in a fast-moving environment.”

Investment in sales tech generated a lot of value. Digital sales and clients’ buying journeys produced vast amounts of data, and companies enriched their knowledge of customers. 

Yet all that data presented a new problem to solve: organizing and deploying it effectively. 

“Many companies became overwhelmed,” says Casola. “Now they’re focusing on finding the right tools to maximize the data they already have in house.” Often, businesses aren’t making full use of their data. A cybersecurity company, for instance, approached Dun & Bradstreet because it assumed that the largest share of its customers was with Fortune 500 companies—their most expansive and lucrative accounts. Yet when Dun & Bradstreet analyzed the company’s customer data and ran it against its own proprietary database, a surprising discovery was made. Twenty percent of the company’s clients were in education, while another 25 percent came from businesses with 150 employees or less.

“If that company had targeted businesses that weren't its primary customer types, that would have been an absolute failure,” Casola says. 

Narrowing a customer type can be achieved efficiently and quickly with the right data. Casola, for instance, had four clients that insisted on doing businesses with companies using a specific CRM software. Vetting that information against its data, Dun & Bradstreet shrank the target market by 80 percent, then applied additional metrics to arrive at an exact buyer type that offered a better chance of a sale. “At that point, we lock arms with the CMO and apply our assets to a much smaller target and drive traffic,” he says.

The key to winnowing the target market efficiently was to pair the company’s first-party data with third-party data that created deeper, richer sets of information—then it presented everything in a single, easy-to-use platform. At that point, the company could come up with a game plan for contacting the right person at the right time with the right message. 

“In today’s environment, leadership teams don’t want their salespeople going wide anymore,” Casola says. “You have to be targeted.”

Simplifying the Customer Experience, Too
Increasingly, speed and convenience for customers is paramount.

Take for instance a company offering an online summary of its product. If a prospective customer wants to access that to learn more, but has to enter a lot of data to do so, the sale could be derailed. “Nobody wants the great inquisition,” Casola says. 

The trick is to find the right balance between convenience and getting enough information to create amore robust set of robust first-party data. Dun & Bradstreet offers a solution that pre-populates the online forms, making it easy to quickly click through to the desired content. Then, with that basic information, Dun & Bradstreet can compare a potential buyer’s profile with its own data sets to fill in additional details. Since many purchases are made by buying groups, not individuals, that comprehensive picture helps sales teams create a hybrid strategy that effectively reaches all the desired groups of customers. 

“You might have 5,000 customers who’ve visited your site, but all you have is their company name, address, one contact, and an email address,” Casola says. “You need to know where the buyers are coming from, their industry, and how big they are. That’s where we come in. We can fill in the holes with about 2,700 data elements and scores, and this information helps you find the businesses that are more likely to be your desired customers.”

It’s also important for sales and marketing teams to have a complete, coordinated view of the data they’re looking at. If, say, a prospective customer has read a summary, has already spoken with someone in the company, and is then contacted by a salesperson unaware of that history, the result may be frustration. 

“Inbound traffic is no longer one-size-fits-all,” Casola says. “Prospective customers should be able to talk with someone who can address their specific needs quickly, without additional screening. The future is about integration and simplification.” 

Make B2B Feel More Like B2C
Given all the focus on data, it can be easy to forget a basic truth: sales is still about people connecting with people.

As B2B buyers increasingly do their purchasing online—and as data becomes more important to thriving in this environment—it becomes important to target them as individuals. In this way, the B2B and B2C worlds are merging, with many of the same tactics useful for both, whether customers are buying for themselves or for their company.

“One of the biggest transitions in data is the ability to stitch together business and personal information,” Casola says. “There’s no reason why your personal interests can’t bleed over into your business interests and vice versa, and the sophistication of what can be done here is just exploding.”

For years, for instance, a leading bank in the United States kept the data of its business and retail customers separate. But by comparing its data sets with those of a third party like Dun & Bradstreet—and discovering where B2B and B2C customers overlap—the bank was better able to market to both. 

In the end, the true power of data is the ability to enhance relationships. What does that look like after all the back-end research about a customer has been done? Sometimes all it takes is a simple text to stand out.

“We’ve made a huge investment in cell phones numbers, because that’s where people want to interact,” Casola says. “For every text you get per day in B2B, you might get 20 emails.”

Overall, the power of the hybrid approach—one built on proper data—is the ability to reach customers in the way they prefer. “Again, the future is the great simplification,” Casola says, “using data to make our lives—and sales—easier.”

This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Dun & Bradstreet.