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Don’t Close the Sale, Educate the Client

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What does it take for you to bring in sales that convert prospects into clients? Perhaps you are a silver-tongued charmer who is capable of successfully “closing” a sale with almost any prospect? Or is the usual outcome of your sales process sort of hit or miss—not a disaster, but no one would wonder if you have a license to print money?

As you’ve done when unraveling other business obstacles, dissecting and analyzing how you sell, meaning that you’ll study the usual trajectory prospects follow when they include your service or product in their buyer journey—from the initial demonstration of the prospect’s interest to the outcome, when the prospect either becomes a client, or moves on to your competitor. Whatever you learn will indicate which of your intentions are not landing and may also direct you to the remedy. Begin with a review of sales basics.

  • Have you identified your ideal client and how to access them?
  • Do you know the usual pain points or goals that motivate prospects to consider your company?
  • Have you priced your offering appropriately?
  • How clear and convincing are you when articulating your unique sales proposition?
  • What’s your sales success rate when you must respond to an objection?
  • Are you able to detect buying signs that tell you when it’s time to ask for the sale (which could mean the prospect must contact the decision team and recommend a yes vote)?

If your analysis reveals that either your USP is vague and falls short of articulating the strengths of your offering, and maybe even leaves you vulnerable to objections that signal questions about its performance, you have a messaging problem. Attempting to defuse objections is not the cure for prospect hesitation; and bringing in a sale is no longer about dropping magic words that you hope will result in converting the prospect into your client. Enabling B2B sales in the post-pandemic ecosystem often requires that you educate prospects by presenting content marketing info that addresses their priorities and concerns and will, brick by brick, demonstrate that your solution is effective and reliable.

You must keep in mind, though, that the B2B sales process has become opaque; prospects developed an appetite for no-contact buying during the pandemic and the habit has become entrenched. Research from Gartner found that B2B buyers prefer a buyer journey that requires little to no contact with sales reps or other vendors (e.g., Freelancers); findings showed that 75% of buyers prefer to have little interaction with sellers. For that reason, B2B buying journeys and decisions are increasingly made without Freelancers or sales reps. If prospects must make contact to explore a question or two when evaluating from whom they might purchase, they hold tight to the self-serve, Do It Yourself mode. “I can handle this,” they say and you have little to no opportunity to influence, or even interact, with your prospect.

If interaction with the Freelancer or sales rep is unavoidable, a short list of “finalist” vendor candidates is typically contacted to schedule a product demonstration or learn the details of implementing and obtaining the service. But by the time you or any other vendor learns that a possible sale is in progress, the sale is already in BOFU, bottom of the sales funnel; too much has transpired to allow you to exert some control and influence over the sale. Any “sale closing spiel” is circumvented as you realize that you’ve stumbled into a decision that’s well underway—-without you. But Gartner research also revealed an upside, if you choose to see it that way—DIY online purchases are far more likely to result in buyer’s remorse.

Closing versus education 

Of course! Unless the prospect is re-ordering a service or product with which there’s been direct experience, it is unwise for prospects to assume they can successfully navigate the ins and outs of the purchase without guidance. They don’t know what they don’t know.

You designed your marketing/sales funnel to facilitate the initial stages of a buyer journey that’s conducted online and in DIY independent mode. Prospects whose level of interest brings them to MOFU and its gated content should feel comfortable to make email contact to identify themselves and request the info they’d like to view. The plan was for the Freelancer to thank the prospect for his/her interest, send the gated content and begin to discreetly monitor and guide the sales process. In so doing, Freelancers could also save any wayward prospects from themselves by being available to answer questions and make recommendations that encourage a successful experience with the product or service.

In fact, Gartner research indicates that those with sales responsibility should provide marketing content that captures the attention of prospects because the info communicates the value of your service or product and facilitates the decision process. The content must be relevant and aligned with the pain point that the prospect must resolve or goal that must be attained. That’s how a well-designed sales/marketing funnel should work.

More than ever, high-pressure sale “closing” tactics are not what typical B2B clients respond to today. The best way to bring in a sale in the current zeitgeist is to present a rational, evidence-backed case that reveals how and why your solution will effectively and efficiently resolve the prospect’s pain point or facilitate achievement of the goal. Rather than dwelling on product or service features and benefits, a strategy that was a given in 20th century selling, the best recipe now for Freelancers to obtain a degree of influence over the sale is to guide the prospect through a discovery process.

  • Diagnose the pain point and discover its origin
  • Document current, or previous, solutions that disappointed
  • Describe what doing business will look like when your solution resolves the pain point or enables the goal to be realized
  • Determine which solution appears to be most capable of producing the prospect’s desired results and outcomes

When a prospect contacts you for information about your solution, and you learn that a serious buyer journey that involves one of your solutions is in progress, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by stepping up and seizing what may be your only opportunity to signal that you understand prospect needs and discuss and send “how-to” content and performance data, which can include one or more of the resources listed below. Your thought leader credibility will yet again prove its usefulness when it supports the value-affirming sales interactions that are most effective with prospects now and are the best option to move the sale forward. Helping prospective buyers feel confident and in control of the purchase decision (e.g., by providing a choice of tailored recommendations based on their input and criteria) builds trust that can enhance the perception of your solution and give you the sale.

  • Case studies and success stories
  • Webinars and podcasts where you are a speaker
  • Blogs, e-books or other articles that you contribute to or author

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Image: © Prague Daily March 2, 2025 The weekly market in Prague’s Lesser Town.

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Brave New World of B2B Marketing: What Customers Expect Now

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The processes of marketing and sales in the B2B sector continues adjusting to local and global economic factors, as it responds to revolutionary technological advancements that are changing so much about how business is done. What might successful marketing campaigns and sales strategies look like as we approach 2027? What will define effective tactics? “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride” is the correct answer for the time being. Most of all, whatever lead generation marketing strategies and tactics that have done a respectable job bringing in customers will need a review and a reset as you come face2face with the growing adoption of artificial intelligence-powered business tools. Also rocking the boat is the availability of online information that’s fueling the Do It Yourself B2B buyer journey that’s seducing more of your prospects. Funnels and channels are receding into history.

Search moves from keywords to trustworthy references

Let’s begin with what’s on track to become the most impactful development in both business and personal sectors—the arrival, and acceptance, of artificial AI-powered everything. You’ve surely noticed that keyword searches may not only produce a list of website links? More often than not, you also see an AI-overview that gives addresses your query in AI-generated complete sentences. AI-driven traffic is growing 165 times faster than organic search. An important outcome of this change is that your website will now play a lesser role in your marketing strategy—or maybe none at all. Recall that just a year ago, it was a given that the foundation of your digital presence (and marketing) was the website. So it’s not about getting your site into the Top 10 search results anymore. Now, it’s Google AI-verified citations that make your organization look credible. Maybe you should consider it another spin on EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritative, trustworthy)?

Today, search means earning a referral as a trusted source; if AI can’t recommend you, there’s little chance you’ll be able to interact with a prospect yourself and attempt to make a pitch. If you do nothing else this year, devise a strategy to upgrade your marketing searchability so you can optimize your online presence for AI search engines and demonstrate that your organization is trustworthy and deserving of recommendation. Freelancers who hesitate to hire a marketing company (maybe until you get beyond tax time?) can perform some DIY work to make your entity become AI-search favorable.

  • Establish visibility on digital sources these systems already trust. Online public relations mentions have considerable influence on AI visibility, so get a PR campaign going and get your entity (and yourself) mentioned in industry publications. Additionally, establish a presence on experts’ forums and industry publications.
  • Prospects tend to use longer, more conversational queries when conducting AI-powered searches, say the SEO experts at BrightEdge, who found that queries of eight or more words trigger AI Overviews far more frequently. You can align your company with this customer behavior when you brainstorm a list of the most frequently asked questions you receive; make sure that you include complex or specific queries. Next, drop those FAQs and your responses into the appropriate tabs on your website and social media, written as concise, problem-solving sentences that are placed in the appropriate tabs in your website and social media platforms. Your objective is to create opportunities for your digital content (i.e., marketing messages)to be referenced in AI searches.
  • Remember that prospective buyers expect to find relevant information about your services and products on your social media platforms. Prospects expect that questions can be asked and answered and that expectation makes social media ideal sites for AI-friendly conversational queries that portray your company as trustworthy. Prospective buyers will also appreciate demos, comparisons, pricing and outcomes. Brand stories may become less important as prospective buyers turn to AI search for content that shows how your solution will solve problems. Freelancers would be wise to post content that answers typical buyer journey FAQs because if your social content looks like ads, it might be ignored.

Funnels are responsive, static buyer journeys are done

The marketing/sales funnel as we’ve known it is on a slippery slope to obsolescence in 2026. If your approach to leadgen hasn’t changed in two years or so, it’s probably out-of-date because it is almost certainly unresponsive to nuanced customer needs. One-size-fits-all leadgen can’t keep up with the In Real Time B2B buyer journey behavior and expectations. Hyper-responsive AI-driven leadgen marketing/sales funnels are able to adjust timing, marketing (or sales) channels and messaging that responds to the behavior of prospective buyers IRT. That responsiveness is valuable to you because a dropped lead is lost revenue. According to research by Mc Kinsey, adaptive AI-powered marketing/sales funnels reduce prospect drop-off and make a sale more likely.

The typical marketing/sales funnel is being outclassed as buyers increasingly turn to AI agents for product or service summaries and reviews, performance comparisons and rankingsof competing products or services and, ultimately, purchase recommendations. Adobe Analytics reports that traffic to retailer websites from generative AI sources increased by 1,200% in February 2025 vs. July 2024.

What Freelancers must do now is to stop thinking of buying “stages”—Top of Funnel, Middle of Funnel, Bottom of Funnel— and start recognizing and responding to buying signals. Redesign your marketing/sales funnel to respond to behavior that does not follow the (increasingly irrelevant) TOFU, MOFU, BOFU stages. AI-powered “zero-click” journeys can distill the discovery-to-decision process—and simultaneously effectively eliminate opportunities for brands to influence prospects, differentiate from competitors—or even appear in the list of possibilities during the buyer journey. A survey of more than 1,100 US consumers by Bain & Company found that 80% of them rely on these “zero-click” results for at least 40% of their searches. 

AI ready to become the buyer journey influencer

The involvement of AI agents such as Gemini Deep Research and Microsoft Copilot that “streamline” the B2B buyer journey present a real challenge to Freelancers and others who have marketing and sales responsibility. Freelancers who are reluctant to adapt their leadgen tactics to include an AI-friendly protocol might have already begun to lose those who might have been customers. What’s scary is that it’s unlikely you’ll know what’s happening to your leads. Remember, the obligatory visit to your website is often omitted when the buyer journey is guided by the brisk efficiency of an AI agent. There will be no browsing through our services and about us tabs; no marketing content downloads that deliver (hopefully) convincing info for prospects to read and assess. When contact with the core touch point that is your website is bypassed, marketers will be unable to reach out and send a personalized marketing email that could start a dialogue, build trust and result in a sale. Since the “fingerprint” obtained from contact with your website will not be available, you won’t know which interested prospects might have become customers.

In the Brave New World that’s brought to us by AI capabilities, if the digital presence of your brand is scarce on platforms other than your website, your company and its services or products may be rendered effectively invisible to AI-powered search. As AI assistants guide prospective buyers through a frictionless process that moves from questions to product or service comparisons to recommendations, relatively quickly and seamlessly. There will be no need to study an e-book or envision how a case study might apply to a prospect’s needs and goals, no need to listen to a webinar or podcast. Products and services that are AI-friendly will be made available for consideration; marketing content that the AI agent finds on a trusted platform will be shared with prospects and will form the basis of the buying recommendation. It is clear that how you promote and sell your products and services will be upended.

Yet all may not be lost, thanks to basic human behaviors. Researchers at Bain and Company anticipates B2B prospective customers will respond to the growing presence of AI with, you guessed it, acceptance or avoidance. Still, wise Freelance professionals will be in a stronger position by implementing even a low-cost, no-cost strategy designed to make their brand more visible to AI search and AI agents. So, ramp up your social media content to become more service or product oriented and create content that provides info that substantively assists the buyer journey. Sell prospects the way they want to be sold and express your content in an AI-friendly format, as per your analysis of FAQs. Recognizing PR opportunities whose purpose is to obtain for your brand heightened visibility and favorable mentions in respected publications and give yourself another way to position your brand as trustworthy and deserving of an AI agent recommendation. Bain and Company predictions are as follows:

1). Prospective customers will go directly to the brand website, because that’s what they’ve always done. In fact, who are slow to adopt generative AI may dominate B2B marketing and sales processes enabling traditional sales channels to retain the lion’s share of traffic. That said, the growing use of AI agents and the ubiquity of AI-powered search is likely to chip away at traditional methods.

2.) Customers whose buyer journey is AI-supported will span the spectrum from casual shopping assistance to completion of a major purchase guided by an AI agent. These behaviors might slow down the inevitability of AI influence on the buyer journey.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: © Dragoscondrea | Dreamstime.com

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Touch Point Touché

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Listen, even before the coronavirus shutdown crashed our Income Statements, Freelancers were always on the lookout for opportunities that look promising. Few among us could afford to leave money on the table. We’ve always understood hustle.

Savvy Freelancers are able to spot not only external, but also internal, opportunities. I’m talking about the most basic level of Inbound Marketing and the Customer Experience. Meaning, successful Freelancers will pose the question—once I have the prospect’s attention, or I’ve converted the prospect into a customer, then what? Every interaction that a prospect has with your company—-website, social media, newsletter, email, phone call, employee—represents a marketing or sales opportunity.

Those interactions are known as touch points. Individually and collectively, touch points are powerful. They impact the ROI of marketing campaigns and they shape the customer experience. They guide prospects through the marketing/ sales funnel, i.e., the buyer’s journey, or disable it.

Touch points must first be identified and then managed carefully and assessed periodically, to monitor their resonance. Touch points nourish, or undermine, your company brand in many ways, including perceived trust, dependability and competence. They have the power to encourage, or discourage, repeat business, referrals and good word of mouth, ingredients that add to the bottom line. Let’s discuss some common touch points.

Website

Lead generation is fed by numerous streams but let’s consider the most basic leadgen tool—-your website. Regardless of how many pages yours contains, most visitors start with the home page. Your home page feeds the top of your marketing funnel, the TOFU, the widest part that gets the most visits of every website. Most visitors will go no further and ghost the site.

Make your home page a leadgen magnet by making it useful and relevant and maybe even exciting with links to meaningful content and visible at eye-level Calls to Action. Depending on your business, consider inviting visitors to click and schedule a free 30 minute consultation, click to read your blog or newsletter, click to RSVP for your upcoming webinar, or click to hear the YouTube replay of your recent podcast. Add a chat bot programmed to quickly answer common questions and save visitors time. Engage and inform your website visitors and make them want more. Maximize the potential of your home page touch points.

Follow-up

If half of life is showing up, the other half is follow-up. It seems obvious, but many business owners and Freelancers fail to respond to inquiries about doing business. Many neglect to reply to phone or email messages. They lose business cards they should keep. They don’t send that private chat message to ask for the best time and follow-up method when they’ve met a potential prospect.

Unless you’ve been hospitalized and the anesthesia is still in effect, give a prospect or current customer a timely reply, ideally on the same day or within 24 hours. If you’ve been unwell, or if there’s been a family emergency, respond as soon as possible and offer profuse apologies. Use follow-up touch points to demonstrate your professionalism.

Invoicing and payment

Three years ago, I (finally) made time to search for a B2B services invoice that could serve as the starting point for a design I would customize and lucky for me, I found something. I’m pleased with my new invoice and feel that it communicates my business name and brand well. I consider my invoice to be a great send-off touch point at the close of a project.

How payments are made is another consideration. Going paperless is an option that certain of your customers may find preferable to writing and mailing a check. Some will pay faster. If payments can be made on your website or Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram account, make it known that the process offers impeccable security protocols. Again, make the touch point that is the payment process secure and easy.

Customer service

Identify the kind of support that customers need and/ or appreciate after they’ve purchased your product or service. It is imperative that you enable the results and experience that your customer expects.

Invite the always useful feedback derived from a short, well-written customer survey, which is an element of customer service. Show customers that you appreciate that they’ve done business with your company and that you care about their post-purchase experience.

Employees and helpers

Train customer-facing staff. Clearly describe your expectations regarding the level of service that will be provided (white glove) and your interpretation of a positive attitude. Devise (and refine along the way) problem resolution protocols and empower employees to approve small, relatively inexpensive fixes without your involvement, to resolve uncomplicated issues quickly and enhance customer satisfaction.

While it is unacceptable to expect anyone to tolerate disrespect, encourage those who represent the company on your behalf to go the extra mile and give the benefit of the doubt to customers. Model the behavior you expect in how you treat them.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Detail of The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo c. 1508-1512) ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel Vatican City (Rome) Italy