What is Multi-Channel Selling?

Confining your B2B sales strategy to a single channel can be detrimental to your sales growth - not only because you’re limiting your brand exposure, but also because you may not be reaching the right leads. 

As the name suggests, multi-channel selling is a sales strategy in which your team utilises a variety of channels to promote products, engage with customers, and build a brand image through communications.

Multi-channel sales vs. single-channel sales

Multi-channel selling involves broadening your outreach to prospects across a number of sales channels such as email, social media, and online marketplaces, rather than only building a presence on one. Businesses usually employ multi-channel sales in their B2B sales strategy in order to increase their brand awareness and ensure their sales and marketing efforts are reaching the right leads to improve conversion rates.

Benefits of Multi-Channel Sales

Transitioning from a single-channel to multi-channel B2B sales strategy offers several benefits:

1. Reach more customers

Stretching your sales strategy across multiple channels will naturally increase the number of businesses you reach, because not all leads congregate on a single channel. Building a presence on a diverse assortment of channels from LinkedIn to email newsletters will help you build a brand that’s widely recognised and associated with a strong image. 

2. Improve customer experience

When your brand is accessible from a number of channels, your customers’ buying experience becomes straightforward. If a lead views a post on LinkedIn with a direct link to your trade portal, they can quickly and effortlessly click through to the product they’re interested in purchasing and make a self-serviced order, or they can navigate to your ‘Contact Us’ page and get in touch with your Sales team. Increasing your touchpoints gives buyers a consistent and streamlined experience.

3. Increase conversion rates

Expanding your B2B sales strategy to more than one channel means you have a higher likelihood of reaching the leads that are really interested in your products. Not only will increasing your brand visibility help you share product promotion with ideal customers, these leads will also have an easy portal to your website to make a quick order.

4. Boost engagement

By widening your outreach to customers and leads, you can personalise the sales content you send out based on the platform you promote on. For example, if a customer has subscribed to your emailing list, it’s likely that they’re expecting to receive customised communications, special offers, and exclusive content, whereas content posted to social media is usually top-of-funnel and less tailored.

Best Practices

Generating optimal traffic to your business with multi-channel selling can be a trial-and-error process that takes time to fine-tune. However, there are some key tips to follow to accelerate the process:

1. Identify your target audience

To discern where your customers browse online, or physically, you need to have a clear understanding of who your target audience is. 

Knowing what industry you’re targeting might seem simple, but there are a number of other questions you need to ask yourself:

• What department should you sell into?
• How large are the organisations you currently supply for?
• Does your existing customer base have a majority B2B or B2C business model?
• Where are your current customers based geographically?

There are several B2B sales strategies you can employ to answer these questions:

• Create an ICP: An ideal customer profile (ICP) helps you determine not only what companies you need to target to maximise conversion rates, but also which departments within these companies are your best fit. 
• Analyse your customer journey: Developing a customer journey map will unearth touchpoints that you didn’t consider before, giving you newfound access to the customers you aren’t currently reaching.
• Use CRM to store customer data: A Customer Relationship Management software adds structure to your data and can be connected to your B2B eCommerce site to extract customer information.

2. Choose the right channels

Now that you’ve conducted sufficient research on your target audience, the sales channels that will generate the most traffic should become clearer. 

Promoting your brand on every sales channel you can brainstorm is an immense challenge, so tapering your outreach to the most successful channels will be a better use of your time. According to a LinkedIn State of Sales report, more than three-quarters of top performers say they “always” perform research before reaching out to prospects. 

To identify where you should focus your efforts online and build a strong brand image, you can keep track of the source of inbound traffic to your trade portal using online platforms like Google Analytics. Source attribution allows you to identify which channels are currently bringing in the most conversions, and which channels need to be refined to optimise sales success.  

3. Standardise your brand image

Consistency and gradual expansion is key when it comes to multi-channel sales. There’s little use in promoting your products via multiple sales channels when your brand image is weak and unrecognisable. While your content should differ slightly to appeal to specific audiences on different channels, you need to ensure that you’re delivering a unified buying experience across every channel to guarantee a high satisfaction rate.

4. Use automation to track your progress

While you may not get your B2B multi-channel sales strategy right the first time, closely monitoring your success on different channels will help you reach your ultimate objectives. Consistently reviewing your performance using a reporting tool will allow you to make improvements to your outreach strategies and make small but impactful adjustments to your sales channels. 

Many CRM systems offer built-in reporting tools that can be configured to show you the metrics you need. Using CRM reporting, you can monitor KPIs (key performance indicators), use existing data to guide your B2B sales approach and identify which sales channels have the highest success rate based on your own criteria.

Prospect CRM extracts valuable data from your back-office systems, revealing key customer insights and making your Sales team stock-aware. Start building your multi-channel sales strategy with Prospect CRM from day one of your 14-day free trial!