In B2B sales, the stark reality is that only about 3% of your addressable market are active buyers with the budget, need, and urgency to address the problems you can help solve. In reality, this number might be closer to 1%.

This means that the remaining 97% of potential clients, while having all the characteristics to be your clients, may not need your solution "at that time." The challenge, therefore, is how to effectively engage with this 97% who are not immediately ready to buy because they’re just not that into you…yet.

The Problem with Focusing Only on 3%

Most outbound sales teams concentrate their efforts on finding and closing deals with the 3% of active buyers. This narrow focus often results in the vast majority of potential clients being ignored. Even well-oiled enterprise teams fall short in giving the necessary attention to the 97% who aren’t ready to pull the trigger just yet. This is particularly pronounced when selling high Average Contract Value (ACV) products and services or when replacing a competitor.

These prospects did not buy from you for one of four reasons, known as BANT qualification:

1. They did not have the Budget.

2. The person you were communicating with did not have the Authority to make a decision.

3. They did not have the Need.

4. The Timeline or urgency to solve the problem was missing.

Even if you are doing an average job with outbound, making sure you are engaging the right decision makers is usually not a problem. So let us keep Authority aside for now.

The challenge with Budget, Need, and Urgency is that these are usually driven by internal factors. It is very hard for you to influence any of these. Your job, instead, is to make sure that whenever the missing Budget, Need and/or Urgency organically changes, your solution should be at the top of their mind. And they should trust you more than anyone else to solve that specific problem.

You need to build trust and top of mind recall, so whenever the missing Budget, Need or Urgency organically change, they come to you.

Building Relationships at Scale

To address this issue, you need to focus on what we internally refer to as building relationships at scale. This involves creatively (and consistently) using emails, calls, events, ads, SMS and social to communicate your core value proposition to your prospective customers. To build trust and top of mind recall. So whenever the missing Budget, Need, or Urgency organically change, they come to you.

For some, it might take 3 months. For others, it might take 3 years. For many, they will never come to you. But if you set it up correctly, and build the right feedback loops, you should see positive ROI from month 3.

If you set it up correctly, and build the right feedback loops, you should see positive ROI from month 3.

Identifying and Engaging the Right Companies

The first step in building relationships at scale is to make the right people aware of who you are and the problems you can solve. This begins with marketing identifying the right accounts to target based on your ideal client profile. Once these accounts are identified, Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) step in to pinpoint the key individuals within these organizations.

Initial Awareness Communication

SDRs engage these individuals using a combination of email sequences, LinkedIn connections, and cold calls. To support these efforts, marketing often provides additional visibility through paid campaigns. This outbound playbook is standard practice today, so we won't delve too deeply into it here.

By effectively targeting and engaging the right companies and decision-makers, you can identify the 3% of active buyers and begin building awareness with the remaining 97%, setting the stage for future engagement.

Creating Thought Leadership Content

Identifying Your Core Message

Before diving into content creation, it’s essential to identify a single, clear statement that encapsulates the value you bring to your clients. This message should be reinforced in all your thought leadership content to ensure consistency and clarity.

For example, at Side Kick, our core message is: "Side Kick helps you scale qualified meetings without the need to scale humans." This succinctly communicates our value proposition and differentiates us from competitors.

The Outcome of Thought Leadership Content

The primary goal of thought leadership content is to achieve several key outcomes:

1. Build Trust and Credibility: By consistently providing valuable insights and expert opinions, you position your company as a reliable source of information. This builds trust and credibility with your audience, making them more likely to turn to you when they have a need.

2. Educate and Inform: Thought leadership content should educate your audience about industry trends, best practices, and innovative solutions. By helping them stay informed, you become an indispensable resource.

3. Engage and Retain Attention: High-quality content captures the attention of your audience and keeps them engaged. This ongoing engagement ensures that your brand remains top of mind, even when they are not immediately ready to buy.

4. Drive Awareness and Interest: Thought leadership content spreads awareness about your brand and solutions. It generates interest among potential clients, making them more likely to consider your offerings when the need arises.

5. Create Opportunities for Interaction: By inviting feedback, comments, and discussions, thought leadership content fosters interaction with your audience. This two-way communication helps build stronger relationships and provides valuable insights into your audience’s needs and preferences.

By focusing on these outcomes, your thought leadership content can effectively contribute to building relationships at scale, ensuring that your brand is trusted, remembered, and preferred by potential clients.

Content Distribution

Blog posts, white papers, case studies, webinars, ebooks, and videos are some of the types of thought leadership content available. There are plenty of resources online that delve deeper into creating such content effectively, and we encourage you to explore those resources for detailed guidance.

Here, we will focus on distributing this content via Social Selling, Emails, and LinkedIn Ads.

Social Selling

Think of social selling as a game of football, where you have spectators and players.

Spectators: The Decision Makers

• Identify and Connect: The spectators are the decision makers you aim to sell to. Send them connection requests from your sales team’s personal LinkedIn profiles.

• Track Activity: Keep an eye on their LinkedIn posts and comments. Also, monitor job posts and senior hires in their business units to stay informed about key changes.

Players: The Thought Leaders

• Identify Influencers: Players are thought leaders in your industry. They can be based anywhere and are known for sharing cutting-edge, industry-specific content on LinkedIn.

• Track Content: Regularly track their LinkedIn posts and comments to stay updated on the latest trends and insights.

Playing the Game

• Engage with Thought Leaders: Start engaging with the players by posting comments and liking their posts. This shows your active participation in industry conversations.

• Create and Share Content: If possible, create and post original thought leadership content. This enhances your visibility and authority in the industry.

The Benefits of Social Selling

• Increased Visibility: All relevant decision makers who have been added in the previous steps will see your continuous engagement efforts. Each comment, like, and post by your team will be visible to them.

• Building Authority: Your team will consistently build relevance and authority in your domain by engaging with industry leaders and sharing valuable insights.

• Personalized Communication: Social selling provides opportunities for your sales team to personalize day-to-day communication over email and calls, leveraging insights from LinkedIn interactions.

Results of Effective Social Selling

• Faster Warm-Up: Decision makers become familiar with your brand and team more quickly, leading to faster trust-building.

• Increased Inbound Requests: Regular engagement increases the likelihood of inbound requests from potential clients.

• Higher Conversion Rates: The trust and authority built through social selling lead to higher conversion rates of leads to sales.

• Shorter Sales Cycles: By warming up decision makers earlier, the overall sales cycle becomes shorter.

• Easier Enterprise Client Acquisition: Social selling makes it easier to acquire large enterprise clients across various geographies.

• Revenue Impact: When done well, social selling positively impacts revenue numbers across the board.

Emails

Building high-quality email infrastructure is essential to ensure high delivery rates and effective engagement. Consistency is crucial, whether your schedule is once every 4 weeks or 14 weeks. Here are key points to keep in mind:

Assume that no one will take action on your CTA. Reinforce your core message through the subject, and the email body.

• High-Quality Infrastructure: Ensure you have a robust email infrastructure to maintain high delivery rates. This includes using dedicated IPs, maintaining a clean email list, and regularly monitoring bounce rates.

• Consistent Scheduling: Consistency is key, regardless of the frequency. Stick to a regular schedule to keep your audience engaged.

• Measuring Success: Focus on meaningful metrics such as clicks, time spent on site, and engagement rather than just open rates. Use these insights to refine future emails.

• Reinforce Core Message: Assume that no one will take action on your CTA. Reinforce your core message through the email body itself. In fact, assume that no one will open the email. Ensure that your core message is conveyed through the subject line and the first few words of the email body.

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads can be a powerful tool for nurturing prospects by communicating bite-sized pieces of your core message. Here’s how to make the most of LinkedIn Ads:

• Optimise for Impressions: Most B2B teams that are trying to build relationships at scale make the mistake of optimising their LinkedIn campaigns for clicks and lead generation. Instead, you should be optimising for impressings and trying to reinforce your core message through the ad copy itself.

• Cost-Effective Exposure: The average CPM (cost per thousand impressions) on LinkedIn is $30. Even if you assume it to be $100, you can still show 10 ads to each individual per month for $1. That amounts to $12 per prospect for 1 year to show them 120 ads. Imagine how hard and costly it is to achieve the same level of exposure through cold email or phone calls. LinkedIn Ads provide a scalable and cost-effective way to keep your message in front of your target audience.

• Avoid Ad Fatigue: Change your messaging often to avoid ad fatigue. Rotating your ad copy and images helps keep your audience engaged and prevents them from becoming desensitized to your message.

• Example Setup: Here are four screenshots of Side Kick LinkedIn Ad examples targeted at Marketing leaders in B2B and SaaS companies that have achieved product market fit and are in the growth stage or beyond. These ads communicate our core message in different ways via the ad copy itself to keep the audience engaged and informed:

By strategically distributing your thought leadership content through social selling, emails, and LinkedIn ads, you can effectively engage with your audience, build relationships at scale, and position your company as a trusted authority in your industry.

Why Building Relationships at Scale Works

Building relationships at scale is a strategic approach that ensures your brand remains relevant and trusted among potential clients, even when they are not immediately ready to buy. Here’s why this approach is effective:

1. Constant Visibility and Engagement

By maintaining regular communication through various channels, your brand stays visible to potential clients. This ongoing engagement helps you stay top of mind, so when the need arises, they remember and consider your solutions first.

2. Building Trust and Credibility

Consistently sharing valuable content and engaging with your audience establishes your brand as a trusted authority in your industry. Over time, this trust and credibility make potential clients more comfortable reaching out to you when they are ready to make a purchase.

3. Nurturing Leads Over Time

Not all prospects are ready to buy immediately. By nurturing leads over time, you ensure that when their budget, need, or urgency changes, they already have a positive relationship with your brand. This long-term nurturing increases the likelihood of conversion when the timing is right.

4. Scalability and Efficiency

Building relationships at scale allows you to engage with a large number of potential clients efficiently. Utilizing automated tools and strategic content distribution, you can maintain a high level of engagement without a proportional increase in resources.

5. Enhanced Brand Recall

Frequent and meaningful interactions reinforce your brand’s presence in the minds of potential clients. This enhanced brand recall ensures that your solutions are considered when they are evaluating options, giving you a competitive edge.

6. Improved Conversion Rates

By the time prospects are ready to buy, they have already engaged with your content and understand your value proposition. This pre-engagement leads to improved conversion rates, as prospects are more likely to choose a brand they are familiar with and trust.

7. Shorter Sales Cycles

With established relationships, the sales process becomes more streamlined. Prospects who are already familiar with your brand and solutions are easier to convert, leading to shorter sales cycles and quicker decision-making.

8. Cost-Effective Relationship Building

Engaging with prospects through scalable methods such as email campaigns, social selling, and LinkedIn Ads is cost-effective compared to traditional methods. This approach allows you to build and maintain relationships without incurring significant expenses.

By leveraging these principles, building relationships at scale ensures that your brand remains a preferred choice among potential clients, driving long-term success and growth.

How Side Kick Can Help

Side Kick acts as your marketing and sales copilot, leveraging automation and AI to drive more meetings and build relationships at scale. Here’s how we can support your efforts:

Social Selling

• LinkedIn Post Tracking: We help your sales team track every LinkedIn post from every prospect using AI to identify relevant posts.

• Slack/Teams Integration: Relevant posts, along with suggested comments, are pushed to a Slack or Teams channel, allowing your sales team to spend just 15 minutes a day on engagement.

• Building Trust and Authority: By engaging with decision makers, thought leaders and relevant industry posts, your team can build trust and authority with minimal effort.

Tracking Key Events and Triggers

• Comprehensive Monitoring: We track news, key events, senior hires, job posts, and department growth rates across every targetable account.

• Workflow Automation: Specific workflows are triggered based on tracked events, ensuring timely and relevant engagement.

• Human Intervention: When necessary, we notify specific team members to step in and take action, ensuring a personalized approach.

LinkedIn Ads

By leveraging LinkedIn investments, we help power outbound efforts and drive attributable meetings, ensuring your ad spend translates into actionable sales opportunities.

• Automated Ad Display: We automatically display ads via API and sync them with your nurturing emails for seamless engagement.

• Engagement Analysis: We track engagement rates from LinkedIn ads and website visits to automatically create an outbound-ready list each week for your SDRs.

• Partner Collaboration: While we do not create ad copies ourselves, we can work with one of our performance marketing partners to develop effective ad content if needed.

Nurturing Emails

• Content Creation: Our dedicated team focuses on creating high-quality content, including infographics, landing pages, and video sales letters.

• Email Infrastructure: We build a multi-domain, rotational inbox email infrastructure to ensure your messages reach the right people at the right time, maintaining high delivery rates and engagement.

• Consistent Engagement: We help maintain a consistent email schedule, whether it’s every 4 weeks or 14 weeks, to keep your audience engaged.

• Metrics Tracking: We measure success through meaningful metrics like clicks and time spent on site, refining future emails to maximize impact.

By integrating nurturing emails, LinkedIn ads, and social selling, you can effectively build relationships at scale. This approach ensures you remain top of mind, build trust and authority, and create a sense of reciprocity among your prospects. Building relationships at scale is crucial for B2B sales success. It's about engaging with the 97% who are not ready to buy immediately and ensuring you are the first choice when they are ready.

Click here to block time with Side Kick and start building relationships at scale today.