Your Guide to Using Product Recommendations to Improve B2B Sales

Predicting what B2B clients will buy from a brand is almost impossible unless you have only one specific product or service that you offer. This is one of the reasons why collecting data and analyzing trends is vital to keep that marketing ball rolling. By understanding what the customers are searching for, B2B companies can develop product recommendations that they can advertise to their target audience.

Product recommendations are defined as advertisements that target specific sets of audiences to cater to a certain need. These ads can appear on apps, webpages, or email and are usually based on data collected from sources such as browsing behavior, client attributes, and demographics. They also often provide a personalized shopping experience so customers can easily find items or services that have been advertised to them. Furthermore, it can improve your B2B sales.

That said, you need to remember that product recommendation strategies for B2B and B2C companies are different. To create practical suggestions for B2B products, companies have to collect online and offline data, attributes, and maximize their resources to determine what their customers are looking for.

What Are the Benefits of Implementing Product Recommendations for B2B?

Using product recommendations to boost your B2B sales undoubtedly has lots of advantages. Here are a couple of outcomes that you can expect when you implement this strategy.

Creates a Sense of Efficiency

Product recommendations work by optimizing the algorithm to know what customers are looking for. This practice allows employees to focus on other tasks instead of manually contacting clients one by one to offer their products and services. Cold calling is also a great strategy, and your sales team can still use this tactic to earn new leads.

Increased Personalization

Personalized marketing might be popular with eCommerce businesses, but B2B companies can also benefit from this. Learning about your audience’s searching methods, such as the most preferred time of the day that they are online, what channel/s they use, and what items they tend to put on their cart can help you improve your B2B sales funnel.

Think of product recommendations as something that indirectly tells your customers that you understand exactly what they are looking for and are ready to help them find it.

Helps Increase Revenue

Implementing product recommendations as a part of your marketing strategy can help you increase brand awareness, which can help you get new leads that can eventually turn into conversions. It also helps evaluate your sale’s margin by the products you sell, improve the lines per order, and help prevent your audience from abandoning their carts.

Where to Position Product Recommendations

The proper placement is essential when it comes to product recommendations. You’d want to make sure that your target audience sees relevant ads that they might be interested in clicking on. With that being said, here are a couple of places where you can put your recommendations:

• The cart. If you have add-ons that you can suggest to your customers before checking out, this is a great place to place them. Make sure that the products you are suggesting go hand-in-hand with what your customers are purchasing.
• Your Website’s Homepage. If you have a lot of people coming from direct traffic, then putting product recommendations on your homepage will eventually pay off. You want visitors to see what you have to offer. Not only that, but the algorithm can boost your chances of advancing these potential customers through the B2B sales funnel. Additionally, using a heatmap to figure out what visitors do on your website can help you personalize your suggestions even further.

• Categories. For B2B brands that offer different products and services, placing suggestions on the categories page is wise. Your customer might just be browsing your website, therefore showing them something that might be of interest could turn them into actual customers. Moreover, the AI will also track a specific customer’s browsing activity to see what they were clicking on.
• Product Page. There’s no better page to showcase your product recommendations than the product page itself. Your audience is already looking for products on your site, and it pays to offer other products that they might be interested in. This is also an excellent time to collect data and set your algorithm so you know what you should be recommending next.B2B business owners have to be aware of where their customers are in their buying journey so that they can provide recommendations effectively. Understanding the B2B sales funnel and collecting comprehensive data will help companies produce better product recommendations.

How to Use Product Recommendations for B2B Sales

Product recommendations can be a powerful B2B sales strategy if done right. Listed below are some helpful tips B2B business owners can use.

Build a Personalized Landing Page

Creating a personalized landing page can increase your chances of being discovered by your target market. Doing this will also help your customers find the products that they are looking for. Landing pages are designed to show shoppers more items that they might be interested in.

Here are a few tips to building a landing page that converts:

1. Come up with a simple, and catchy headline that will grab the readers’ attention.
2. Use subheadings to separate categories and content. This way, your web visitors can quickly scan through the page to find what they are looking for.
3. Add high-quality photos that support your text. Use original pictures that depict your products and services.
4. The product descriptions should be short straight to the point. Avoid making sentences too long, or the customer might lose interest in what you have to say.
5. Present solutions. Customers are often looking for ways to solve their problems. Thus, you should make it clear that you can help them out.
6. Add a call to action. Your landing page should encourage potential buyers to continue on with the purchase.
7. Include methods of contact. Your audience doesn’t want to search around for your contact details if they need them. Make sure your business phone number, email address, and social media pages are easy to find.

Run an A/B Test

Split or A/B testing is defined as trying out two different strategies to determine which one works best. It is often done simultaneously and shown to the same audiences to establish which of the two will come out with better numbers. The most crucial part about A/B testing is that it takes the guesswork out of the equation, making your marketing strategy more effective and efficient.

Here are a few steps to make sure your split test goes smoothly:

1. Make sure to conduct thorough research and collect data from your website. Doing this will help you plan out your split test.
2. Carefully observe and create a hypothesis based on the data that you’ve gathered. Use research tools to collect quantitative and qualitative data from your website.
3. Create multiple variations based on the hypothesis that you have created.
4. Decide what A/B testing method you’d want to use. Run the test and keep a close eye on the results.
5. Once you have the results, it’s time to implement the changes. Continuously monitor the outcome so you can be sure that you’ve chosen the right strategy.

Work on Upselling Related Items

If your brand offers different products and services, you can upsell some of those by using product recommendations. You have to make a good point in trying to upsell, though, and make it a point to show your customers that these items are better when bought together.

Moreover, you can also send product recommendation emails to your clients. Grow your email list by asking customers to sign up in exchange for a free trial. Personalize your email based on the data that you have collected to encourage your customers to click on it.

Conclusion

There are lots of other B2B sales tips that business owners can use. The important thing is trying out a new solution to boost your B2B sales. Additionally, loyal customers can even turn to advocates simply by referring your products and services to their friends and family. And when it comes to B2B companies, customer loyalty is worth its weight in gold.