1°) Why should you build strong B2B relationships?

The most important thing that building B2B relationships will bring you is: easy sales.

Every salesperson knows this: the best sales you make are the ones when you're not selling but when you're building relationships. Let me tell you a story.

I met Ana a year ago on Twitter, I mainly used Twitter for B2B sales. By engaging with Ana for weeks and months, she had the Breakcold brand in her mind.

When she became Head of Growth of a rising B2B SaaS startup, she immediately became a Breakcold customer. At the time, I didn't even know that she would have a sales role related someday, she was in the E-commerce business initially.

Example of I made a sales with Ana by building long-lasting relationships

And stories like this, I have many of them with much smaller sales cycles. I'm talking about a day, a week or a month, not years. My point is that building B2B relationships will be your biggest assets in B2B sales. It will also brings you:

• key partnerships

• sales pipeline acceleration

• super fans that will advocate for your service or product by mentioning it on social media or publishing posts about it

I'd say that no matter where your B2B contacts are in your sales pipeline stages (eg clients or warm prospects), you should be able to engage them.

But building B2B relationships is hard, I mean, it takes times right? You need to follow up via email, keep track of the social activity of your B2B contacts on social media manually and all that kind of stuff.

Well, there's actually a way to streamline the process that I've built for my company.

2°) What tools should you use to build and enhance trusted relationships with clients

Obviously I'm biased here because I run a Social Selling software dedicated to it but frankly, why do you think we built it? Because we were simply not satisfied by the current tools on the market.

They say CRMs (customer relationship management softwares) are here to build B2B relationships, but with the social media era with live in, it's not designed to make it work.

That's why you can use Breakcold to build and enhance trusted relationships not only with clients but also with prospects and partners.

Example of traditional sales pipeline stages - you need to build B2B relationships at each step

Imagine you wanted to bond with someone on LinkedIn in the past in a B2B sales mindset on LinkedIn for example, you had to:

• find the B2B contact on LinkedIn

• go to their LinkedIn profile

• click on activity

• click on posts

That was a nightmare and that's why no sales reps (eg SDR, BDR, AE etc) was doing it. It was simply just too time consuming.

This problem has been solved with Breakcold by allowing you to build B2B relationships natively in the CRM without leaving it and opening hundred tabs a day.

3°) My method to build B2B relationships

To build long lasting relationships virtually, especially through social media and manage effectively your B2B relationships, you need to adopt different strategies for every single part of the customer journey.

This method will help you grow sales 500%+ because of how it compounds over time. That's because it has exponential results, here's an extract of the ideal sales flywheel I designed for Breakcold to illustrate my point.

This is the ideal sales system if you want to make sales constantly and exponentially

How to build B2B relationships with prospects

To build B2B relationships with prospects, you need to:

• engage them via email, phone or social media

• start conversations

For each stage of the customer journey, different actions need to be taken.

Building B2B relationships with cold prospects

By definition, cold prospects don't know you so it's the hardest part of creating a B2B relationship. Your goal is to "break the ice", meaning to come up with something original enough to stand out from other people.

Prospects receive tons of cold emails, LinkedIn invites or LinkedIn messages every single day, how can you be different from the crowd? Do things that others don't.

People don't engage with cold prospects before reaching out, that's called Social Warming by the way. If you can engage someone before contacting them or sending a LinkedIn connection request, you'll have more chances to kickstart a B2B relationship.

Social warming = like, comment, contact

1/ Building a B2B relationship before reaching out cold prospects

So how to engage with cold prospects before taking another action?

• first, add you cold prospects to Breakcold and make sure you have at least their LinkedIn URL and ideally their Twitter one as well

• track them (it's called sales lead tracking)

• like and comment their social media posts for a few days

Example of how to track leads on LinkedIn and Twitter

All of this will allow you to create a B2B relationship from the start.

By engaging with their posts, especially by leaving comments they will engage back with you: that's when you should for example add them on LinkedIn so you can guarantee that your LinkedIn invite will be accepted.

Then your job is to contact the cold prospect.

2/ Reaching out to the cold prospect

To contact your B2B cold prospects, it's pretty much the same step as above, keep engaging with their social media posts. If you're lucky, they might reach out to you from themselves which proves that you were really good at creating a B2B relationship without being agressive in your sales approach.

To reach out someone to kickstart a B2B conversation with my method:

• like and comment a recent post

• send a LinkedIn message, Twitter message or cold email by using what you saw in their latests posts

• the first line should be personalized and a PS line is ideal

• ask questions, you need to some call to actions

Example of someone I reached out using LinkedIn

If you follow this simple process, you won't have problems like it happened in this below image:

Building B2B relationships with warm prospects

Once I have warm prospects, I usually put them in my warm sales pipeline stage. From there, I have a clear overview of where the prospects are in their customer journey.

Then I know that when they are in the warm prospect stage I need to always do one thing: stay top of mind.

The goal is to be like a living ad that will interact with the B2B prospects over and over again as attention is the key nowadays.

To be this living ad, I will make sure everyday to not miss any new posts from my warm prospects. The more they reply to my comments under their posts or to my warm emails, the more I build a B2B relationship and increase my chances to closing deals.

Example of building B2B relationships with warm prospects in a sales pipeline

How to build B2B relationships with customers

Ok, so what happened once you have existing clients, do you just leave the B2B relationship as it is? No, you keep it going!

Taking care of existing customers is the most important part of any business for retention purposes or repeat business as well as word of mouth.

The goal here is to check on them time to time with manual follow-ups. Like always, use their recent news on social media or their company ones to come up with a warm message.

On a daily basis, use your curated feed of existing clients to interact with their posts so you always stay top of mind. In the long term, all these little actions will bring massive ROI to your business.

You can also build B2B relationships by finding a job

The main difference here as you noticed is that we don't use traditional sales channel to communicate, we use modern ones such as social media. That's because it's much easier to build long lasting relationships there than via simple follow up emails.

4°) Other techniques to build B2B relationships

Beyond my method to build B2B relationships, there are other powerful techniques that I've noticed myself or that I've experienced.

Sending gifts to existing clients

Some time ago, I bought the Twitter course of Daboget Renouf called: How To Dominate Twitter. Few weeks after buying the course, I received a form asking my home address to receive a gift.

I filled the form and a few days later, I received in my letter box a super hand-crafter letter from Dagobert himself along with some goodies. The kind of bond you create with your customers by doing it is incredible.

Example of the letter received from my purchase on Dagobert's course

It's also a good form of publicity in the sense that if you're happy with this kind of original move, you'll share it on socials which will be bring even more people to the table.

Setting up a physical networking drink

If potential distributors of your solution or prospects are in the same location than you, just meet them in person. Taking a casual drink in a bar or café is often one of the best way to secure deals in the long term.

Once you've bond enough with the person virtually, ask them during a Zoom call to meet in person. In most cases, you'll get positive answers.

Networking drinks are the ultimate way to build B2B relationships