B2B Sales Ethics Innovate The Best 2024 Trends

New trends in the fast paced world of B2B seem to pop up daily along with B2B sales ethics principles and best practices.

While some of the B2B trends we're currently seeing aren't 100% new, there are new innovative ways to make them work better for you and your business. Figuring out the best way to innovate the trends in an ethical way will only help your business thrive and sustain itself in the long term despite an ever changing climate.  

Knowing the top sales trends in B2B sales is only the first step. Being able to interpret, understand, and implement them to best suit your business is the way you'll start seeing the results you want from the strategies while maintaining an ethical approach.

B2B Sales Trends and Ethics

You don't have to follow the trends precisely, but understanding the sales trends and tailoring them to your business is the best way to see your company grow, be successful, and stay competitive. Here's a quick look at some of the most prominent B2B sales trends and how B2B sales ethics best practices can apply to them.

 

Customer Focused Sales and B2B Sales Ethics

Ethical sales efforts should focus on customer needs instead of salesperson needs. Customer centric firms are 60% more profitable than those that are not.

Many sales efforts remain out of touch with customer needs; cold outreach copy that isn’t relevant or seems canned/automated, products that don’t match real needs and other issues that result from not making the customer and their needs the center of the sales process. B2B firms are catching on and recognizing the need to consider the customer and their motivations and problems as a part of their sales outreach process, collateral and messaging.

Personalization efforts are now getting down not just to industries, ICPs and specific positions/roles but also business lifecycle stages, revenue goals, team sizes, OKRs/company wide long term goals, specific pain points and other relevant objectives that can be addressed in sales messaging and outreach efforts.

B2B Sales Ethics and Social Media Influencer Collaboration

Social media is a hub for sales and marketing. While many people know you can utilize social media influencers for marketing, there are innovative ways that you can use influencers for B2B sales. Most companies don't see how influencers can be beneficial in B2B sales, but over 90% of marketers believe that B2B companies can leverage this sales tactic. 

However, there can be ethical gray areas when B2B buyers do not get adequate disclosure on influencer compensation or heavily biased information. 

Influencers can provide helpful, trustworthy information to your target audience. Collaborations with them that share objective, honest, and transparent content about your brand can be useful for driving revenue growth. Influencers should also disclose somewhere that they are compensated by your company when advertising your brand as an ethical standard.

With so many marketers in agreement about the benefits of social media influencer marketing, only about 25% of B2B companies are embracing this trend. With minimal B2B businesses using this trend, it leaves room for your business to advance far past your competition.

Implementing influencer marketing for your sales team isn't as simple as it might seem. Being able to narrow down the right influencers to market your product or service is vital for B2B sales. Conducting network analysis to see the relationship between an influencer's network and your target customers is how you get started.  

Choosing an influencer with a larger number of followers but who doesn't have a follower base for your niche isn't as beneficial as an influencer with a smaller number of followers but who is looking for products and services you're offering.

After network analysis, conducting topical analysis to ensure that the influencers are talking about the industry or topic your industry is in will help you make the right choice before reaching out to influencers for a campaign. If influencers are compensated they should disclose this in their endorsement of your brand.

Voice Search 

Accessibility is a vital component of B2B sales ethics and a good overall user experience, so innovating voice search can push your B2B business forward. People rely on voice searches every day. Not only does this make things more accessible for those with low motor skills, but even able-bodied people enjoy the convenience of voice search. 

Voice search is an innovative way for your business to increase your ranking on search engines and build better relationships with your target consumer. Implementing voice search requires some effort, but the benefits outweigh the work to implement the trend. 

As a B2B business, you already have a website and maybe even a mobile app. Reworking the website and app to be more discoverable and accessible through voice controls is going to allow your company to rise above your competition who haven't done so yet or done it well. 

Beyond allowing your website and app to be more accessible to B2B buyers, it also increases the user-friendliness of the sites. Updating your Google My Business listing to ensure all information is accurate will help with a smooth transition to voice search capabilities. This can often make your website and app run smoother, allowing for less frustration and more sales. 

Video Marketing

One of the biggest trends in B2B sales and sales in general is video marketing which can foster ethical sales practices by providing more detailed and engaging information to prospective B2B buyers while highlighting your unique selling points. 

B2B buyers appreciate seeing a visual that tells the story of whatever it is they're considering purchasing. It's easier for them to digest the information when they're not simply reading information on a pamphlet or in an email. 

Video marketing and sales isn't the only type of trend to use in B2B sales, but it's the ideal complementary tactic for many businesses. Depending on the services or products you're trying to sell to B2B buyers, your video marketing will look a little different.

The best video marketing deals with videos that showcase how your product or service works, the benefits, or a virtual tour of your platform. The main thing to know about video marketing is that it means nothing without perfect execution. 

Working with an outside sales team that understands what video marketing is and how to implement it well can save you a lot of time and headaches if you're not skilled with this type of sales. 

Overall, finding ways to use video marketing will help you tell a better story to B2B buyers in a creative yet easy-to-understand way. Even complex ideas can be easily translated into a video that will help increase your business's sales.

Generative AI and B2B Sales Ethics

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a top conversation in all industries lately. Instead of working against AI, it's best to find ways to work with it. The ethical usage of AI should involve producing content that is tailored to your audience’s needs, not just generated and published without a human touch, and also highlighting your brand and tone.

When you can innovate using the generative AI trend, you'll be able to work smarter, not harder, while still sticking with all your business and sales goals and ensuring a good overall user experience. In some cases, a 100% human touch is needed, however AI can help your sales enterprise scale and fulfill certain foundational needs.

AI is the future of B2B sales and marketing. Your sales team can use AI to help reshape sales content and strategies faster than they might be able to without the use of the technology. Generative AI can help businesses produce content quickly and without the need for industry expertise. 

Content you can create with generative AI includes email campaigns, blogs, social media posts, white papers, and more. While AI isn't a solution that will be perfect every time, using it as a building block to create the content needed for the sales team to succeed can allow you to focus on other business operations. 

If your B2B sales focus on customers who aren't in the country of the language you speak, generative AI can help your sales tactics reach a larger audience. Everyone knows that online translators aren't always socially accurate, and hiring translators can be a costly venture.

Generative AI is capable of reproducing sales content that sounds like a native speaker, so they're more likely to purchase from your business.

Advanced AI

Generative and advanced AI aren't the same thing, which is why we need to talk about them as separate B2B sales trends. Advanced AI helps you automate sales tasks and engage with customers in an easier way. This type of AI can help you gather a better understanding of your consumer and their behavior. However, if you gather data from  your customers, ethical practices should involve an adequate privacy policy and disclosures on how you will utilize any data that you gather. 

When you have a better understanding of your targeted consumer, you can tailor your sales strategies to better suit their needs. Using advanced AI can help your sales team better understand the "when" and "why" of your buyer's decision-making strategies. 

Understanding your customers is how you'll be able to personalize sales strategies to ensure that you're meeting or exceeding the needs of your customers. When customers see that you're taking the extra steps to address their pain points, you're more likely to see an increase in sales and customer retention. 

Advanced AI provides you and your sales team with insights about your customers that you wouldn't normally have. Or, you wouldn't be able to gather as easily as you could without this technology. 

Besides gathering a better understanding of your target customer base, it will save your business time and money. Advanced AI helps automate many tasks that your team is performing by hand, allowing them to focus on other tasks that require more attention.

Privacy and Security Measures

As a B2B company, you understand the importance of privacy and security for your customers, especially when it comes to cloud-based businesses. Security measures and privacy aren't new trends in sales, but there are always new ways to innovate this trend and improve on the measures you're already taking. 

Data breaches aren't an uncommon thing, but being able to prevent hackers and other breachers is vital to building trust with your customers and staying in business. Customers are increasing their awareness of how their data is used and are searching for transparency when using a company.

Customers want to know that the company they choose will keep their data and their customer's data safe. By implementing a robust security and privacy strategy, you can build trust and be more transparent with potential customers about how their data will be stored and utilized. B2B ethical sales practices should involve a modern and updated privacy policy that customers may even be required to opt into in some cases based on legal requirements. 

Always familiarize yourself with data regulations in your region and the region your customers are and use strong encryption to keep everything safe and sound. Once you revamp your security strategy, sales should increase. Remember, it's not enough to implement this innovation; you also need to run regular audits to catch any breachers early.

Leverage Data Analytics and Insights

Lastly, leveraging data analytics and insights is vital to a strong B2B sales strategy and a positive user experience, which are all essential to ethical B2B sales. This trend isn't new, but the technology we use to gather data insights is always improving. Simple insight gathering can come directly from customers. From asking them to do a survey to interviewing them, you can see more about what they like or dislike about the product or service. 

Google Analytics is just one of the platforms you can use to assess customer satisfaction, website clicks, and general engagement. A great way to innovate this trend is to look into predictive analytics. 

Predictive analytics will help you predict how your sales strategies will do based on trends. These insights can help you strengthen your strategy or completely change aspects that you believe will hurt you based on the predictive analysis. 

These analytics will help you move closer to a user-centric approach. Putting your customers first and working to better understand them will allow you to surpass your competitors and grow your business. When you have the data, you can use it to make more informed sales strategy decisions and build trust with your customer base.

Communicate Your Ethical and Sustainable Practices

Sustainability has been a top trend in industries such as energy, real estate, construction, transportation, consumer packaged goods, and others. More and more companies are looking for ways to implement sustainable practices, thanks to some B2B buyers preferring to support businesses with ethical and sustainable practices, along with consumers. 

Working on ways to incorporate ethical and sustainable practices into your B2B sales strategies is a great way to reach those B2B customers and also help the environment. It's a win-win. The main reason we're seeing sustainability as a trend in B2B is thanks to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG). 

How you can innovate this trend is to go beyond traditional large marketing campaigns. The sales team will want to add an emphasis on how the company is committed to sustainable and ethical business practices when appropriate. It's not enough to simply state this, though. The sales team needs to elaborate so buyers know exactly how they practice sustainability. 

Ways to innovate sustainable and ethical marketing is by addressing these aspects in various business operations and communicating them in your sales and marketing collateral. You can assess where to become more sustainable, from supply chain management to waste reduction and energy consumption. Reducing energy, carbon emissions, and waste with marketing campaigns is a great start. 

Not only are some B2B buyers looking for companies to embrace sustainable and ethical practices, but addressing these in sales and marketing campaigns allows for brand transparency. The more transparent your business is, the more trust you'll build with buyers. Ultimately, you'll be able to foster better relationships with customers and reach business goals.

Conclusion - Ethical B2B Sales and Innovation

As you explore various ways to innovate B2B sales trends, you'll find that it's something you'll need to stay on top of. Since trends are always changing, staying on top of the trends and finding new ways to improve upon them is what will drive your business forward. 

From implementing sustainable and ethical sales methods, utilizing video marketing, embracing AI, and more, you'll be able to reach your enterprise's sales and overall business goals.

Learn more about B2B sales trends, our B2B sales campaign services and what might work best for your unique firm by reaching out to Salesbox today.