What’s Unique About B2B Conversion Rate Optimization?

With a couple of years of conversion rate optimization for both B2B and e-commerce companies under our belt, there is quite a bit of difference but even marketing agencies don’t realize that everything a CRO audit would tell an e-commerce company to do doesn’t come close to what you need to do in B2B to get the game-changer results that clients desire.

In this article, we’ll talk about some of the misconceptions about B2B CRO and what lenses you need to wear in order to develop customer vision.

A Brief History of Sales Funnel Professor’s B2B CRO Practice

A happy little accident, Founder Eddie Davis was negotiating the buyout of an Atlanta-based B2B company that had serious sales and marketing challenges when he stepped down as COO of a fintech competitor of QuickBooks after a 7-year stint.

Over that time, he hired and managed countless sales and marketing professionals as well as agencies and chose the company’s software stack, first using SalesForce and later migrating to HubSpot as the nervous system.

To say he heard and read every pitch under the sun would be an understatement. While he was working on that buyout, he decided to offer a number of entrepreneurial friends his services on a project basis and the results were remarkable.

The reports ended up being 50-70 pages of recommendations, often topping 100 discrete “fixes.”

CEO’s with multiple marketing degrees suddenly “got it” in a way that had eluded them for years. He was a CRO expert that was going significantly deeper than anyone offering the service elsewhere.

But what was more remarkable were the results of implementing the changes. In year one, companies that had never had touch-1 inbound deal flow suddenly did. A SaaS company 5x’d revenue in 6 months. Another got 19 deals opened in a month that happened to be its first month as a commercial enterprise.

In year 2, we’ve had the pleasure of providing CRO audits to even more B2B companies and watched incredible results. A franchisor that was struggling to sell franchises built a 30M funnel in less than six months using our recommendations.

Throughout this time, we’ve expanded the chapters in our conversion rate optimization audits to more clearly articulate all the ways in which a B2B company can win.

And while many people come to us seeking to purchase a conversion rate optimization audit, what we provide is more comprehensive.

We call it a sales funnel audit because we provide end-to-end guidance, whereas traditional CRO is focused just on the middle of funnel.

Why Are Our B2B Conversion Rate Optimization Audits End-to-End?

In simplest terms, because our clients hire us to make them more money, and we struggle to get excited about incremental gains.

CRO in the traditional sense is much more like ecommerce optimization where you’re working on the geometry, labels, etc. to try to squeeze out a few more sales on a product that can be purchased in any number of ways from any number of vendors.

With B2B, every client has the opportunity to decommoditize themselves, so why wouldn’t we help them do that if their end game is to get more strangers to purchase?

To do that, we need to be sure we’re getting the right people into the funnel in the first place with excitement and intrigue about what they’ll find in the middle of the funnel. We also don’t want to try to optimize someone’s middle of funnel and have them not get blowout economic results because they aren’t actually bringing the right people into their funnel in the first place.

So our CRO/sales funnel audits include a specified top of funnel: PPC, SEO, ABM, etc.

Did we mention we want our clients to get blowout results? So what if were to make huge improvements to top and middle of funnel but leave them without the guidance to turn a severely underperforming bottom of funnel into a closing machine? That’s why we include bottom of funnel guidance as well.

While e-commerce typically ends in a shopping cart to checkout experience, B2B deals close in a number of ways including demos and contracts, free trials, gateway drugs, PLG and more. So we roleplay your buyer and document what could be improved at the end of the funnel as well.

Brand & Messaging in B2B Conversion Rate Optimization

With e-commerce, if you sell t-shirts, there are lots of other t-shirts. You may even have competitors selling the exact same design.

With B2B, it’s pretty rare that two companies sell exactly the same product or service. They may share features and value props, but the delivery and experience are almost always different.

But many B2B companies actually ignore their points of differentiation. It’s not uncommon for B2B services to use drab, dated websites that aren’t even really about their company…they just vaguely describe the space in which they operate.

If we were to just say “freshen up your colors and use more action-oriented calls to action,” that would help these companies incrementally, but what they really want is a phase shift and that requires digging down to the bedrock and then coming back up to the surface.

We actually include a full Storybrand positioning statement as part of our conversion rate optimization for B2B companies. It’s specific to the audience and value prop they choose.

With that in hand, we then rewrite their critical pages: home, about, contact, landing page for that product/service, etc.

The goal is to help them be the iconic option in their space, where they’ll ace memorability and credibility just via how carefully crafted the brand and messaging are.

Add other credibility elements like trophy logos and testimonials, and you’ve got a powerful combination.

Emotion Quotient & My Tribe Vibe: The Newest Additions to Our B2B CRO Lenses

If you spend enough time on Linkedin, you’ll realize that the most vocal “influencers” there are not so hot on inbound marketing.

Kind of makes sense, right? You wouldn’t be posting constantly if you were already drowning in inbound deals, but LinkedIn done right can be a nice extra funnel for some companies and when only ABM is possible because the product is so new, you should strongly consider LinkedIn.

But if you listen to LinkedIn, you’ll find almost all of the CRO recommendations are logic-based:

• Speak to ROI so the CFO doesn’t veto it
• Surface objections and overcome them
• Talk about how and how long it takes to get the value

That’s all good stuff but you can nail those and still have company that no one cares about it.

Even in our early days, we included a lot of guidance on brand and story within other CRO audit chapters, but we wanted to better help companies understand what it takes to get to iconic status.

So we added two chapters:

Emotion Quotient

This lens is just about feeling something. Many B2B companies use marketing that elicits “meh” and you don’t want that. You’ll watch people leave your site and can assume no memory was formed.

Feared-based selling is powerful.

Excitement is another great emotional response.

How about delight? There are lots of ways to go the extra mile to get the emotion quotient up once you get your positioning statement together.

My Tribe Vibe

Some people get married because they love their partner so much. Others get married because they know their partner loves them so much.

Thankfully B2B purchases aren’t as hard to exit as marriages, but they are high stakes and much more emotional decisions than you’ll find they’re portrayed on LinkedIn.

You can lower the perceived risk and raise the trust quotient significantly if you show visitors that they’ve found “their people.”

Time to Get a Better Understanding of Your B2B CRO Opportunities for Improvement?

Our CRO audits are 50-70 pages of documented recommendations.

We can’t cover what often amounts to more than 100 discreet recommendations plus a full Storybrand and rewrites of your critical pages on an introductory call.

But we’re having to share our thoughts with you and give you a basic understanding of might be possible if you were to raise your scores across the board.

If you’d like to book one, grab a free pay-it-forward call.