The Best B2B Sales Strategies for Tanking Opportunities in 2022

It’s the beginning of the new year, and as always, experts and companies are publishing their trends and strategies for setting more meetings and closing more deals in 2022.

But hey, maybe that’s not for you.

If you think more opportunities and more deals sound horrible and it’s not really on your priority list, then follow the advice below 👇.

We have three tips for frontline sellers and two for sales managers who want to know what exactly to do to avoid hitting quotas.

Three Ways for Frontline Sellers to Trash Every Opportunity

You read that right. For sellers looking to avoid setting meetings and connecting with buyers, we have three surefire tricks to make sure you meet that goal.

1. Buyer Personas are for Meeting Setters

If you don’t want to find the right prospects to sell to, don’t invest time in Buyer Personas. Buyer personas are a direct line to connecting with your ICP, but you’re not trying to get there.

Think about it like this: your resolution this year is to connect with as few people as possible. Being able to tap into your buyer’s priorities is only going to help you identify more leads, so steer clear.

The best way to do that is to go into every outbound opportunity without answering these five questions:

• • Who are my typical customers?
  • Do we know the goals for each ICP on the buying committee? 
  • What are the challenges my buyers face?
  • Do we offer a product or service that can help those buyers succeed?
  • What are the common objections our buyers bring up?

These will only bring you closer to aligning your product with the kind of buyers you’re trying to avoid. 

Without personas to help you meet new buyers, you’ll be free to go with the classic “spray and pray” email blasts and cold calls. Maybe go through your inbox and see if there are any offers to buy lists from shady providers. Bingo. Snag one of those and start hitting the send all.

Here’s one more tip to help you steer clear of making the right connections – do not use LinkedIn Sales Navigator. LSN is only going to give you an insanely clear vision of who your buyers are, what they do, what their interests are, and a tidal wave of other pertinent information. Which you probably don’t want.

Related Content: Four Ways to Set More Meetings Like A Top Performer

2. Love the Archive? Don’t Personalize Your Emails 

Is being a regular in your prospect’s archive part of your 2022 goals? Then keep everything automated and generalized.

The archive and trash folder are massive fans of generic, unenthusiastic, spammy messaging. They love it. 

Start with the subject line — make it something like, 

• • “What’s the deal with {insert pain point}?” or “{First Name}, there’s a {Generic Solution} with your name on it. 
  • 10 minutes to chat this week about fixing {Company Name} ’s {Generic Problem}?” 
  • Or my personal favorite, “Quick question.”

If they’re short, make them cringy. If they’re long, make them annoyingly long. The idea is to make your buyers dismiss your emails immediately.

And if the buyer somehow opens your email — whether it’s out of an unlikely interest or the more likely derision — it has to be just as bad. Do not make any attempt at personalizing the body text or showing any semblance of prior research. Ignore all of the following questions:

• • How does the company make money? 
  • How does the person you’re talking to affect the company?
  • What does their day-to-day look like?
  • How would your solution make an impact on their life and company revenue?

Again, ignore all of these. Talk solely about your product or service and not about them. You will be pushed to their archive so quickly it’ll be like they never even opened your email. 

3. Multi-Channel Selling Will Only Book More Meetings

If you aren’t trying to book more meetings, definitely don’t make your messaging or strategy stand out. That means sticking to the same old channels and resources indefinitely.

As we said earlier, don’t use LinkedIn or Sales Navigator for any type of unique outbound. If you already have an account, don’t worry, we can help you optimize for the worst.

1. 1. Stick to InMail. Even if they’re one of your connections, go into Sales Navigator and send them a message through there. Like with email, make it hard to read in substance and style. 
   2. Text-Only Always. Once you run out of InMail messages, which will happen after so many (depending on your subscription plan), bombard them with text-only messages and hard pitches in each one. Do not use video, and do not use voice messages. Most importantly, please don’t send them any resources that could add value to the conversation. 

LinkedIn and Sales Navigator aren’t the only culprits. Any sort of technology, platform, or subscription service that catches the eye of prospects will be a trigger for booking a meeting.

Direct sending tools like Sendoso or Sales engagement platforms like Outreach will only create opportunities for you. Any type of tool that will increase your efficiency and improve engagement from potential buyers is sure to only push you in the right direction. 

Two Tips for Sales Managers Who Love Churn

Sales managers play a pivotal role in throwing the sales team’s success down the garbage disposal. For frontline leaders with failure on the agenda, we have some excellent tactics to make sure not a single salesperson or customer makes it through the first quarter.

1. Stick to Activity KPIs for Unrivaled Turnover

Introspection and team analysis are the qualities for KPIs that build strong sales teams, so if you’re a manager looking to quickly burn the team out, here’s what you need to do. 

You are going to want to stick to the run-of-the-mill, activity-based KPIs. 

Pick between 15 to 20 of them, and then drill into every seller to drive them home. Literally, drive them home away from their job because they will be so burnt within a few months that it’ll give new meaning to a salesperson’s average tenure.

It can be easy to get caught up in the kind of KPIs that deliver real results and create a healthy work environment. The best of them are listed below. If you’re trying to hang on to record-setting customer churn and sales team turnover, take these off the docket.

1. 1. Average Sales Cycle (as a team and by rep)
   2. Average Conversion Percent (by stage and by rep)
   3. Tracking Attributed Closed-Lost Reasons
   4. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
   5. Product Performance
   6. Meaningful Conversations

Related Content: How to Hire Salespeople and Build an Impactful Sales Org

2. Incentivize Customer Qualification for Optimized Churn

One of the main reasons customers churn is that sellers and customer success teams are incentivized to do solely what’s “best for the revenue stream.” That’s the exact approach we will advise you to take if you hate long-term customers.

Most B2B buyers (80% of them) have changed to new suppliers in the past year or say they plan to do so within the next year. We can help you secure your membership in that 80%.

Ensure that every rep has tunnel vision for their part of the sale. Highlight the importance of being selfishly focused on their piece of the customer lifecycle. Continue to design incentives that move customers through the same process, rake in commission, and make the process incredibly cumbersome for both seller and buyer.

The result is rapid churn from your customers, rapid churn from SDRs, and a crippling sales process. Easy as that.

If you want your sellers to remain in their siloed headspace and ignore customer applicability, product usage/fit, and renewal probability, we can assure you you’ll have churn for years to come.

We hope you found some excellent tanking strategies in this post. Here’s one more:

Updating your B2B sales strategies and outbound playbook is the best way to stay ahead and keep your team performing. So don’t do that. Keep doing what you’ve been doing in 2022, and absolutely do not read our latest edition of the Modern Outbound Playbook.

Related Content: Modern Outbound Playbook & The Modern Outbound Tech Stack