Feeling out of the loop with all the great business automation solutions out there? Does everyone else seem to be saving time and money with pre-built workflows and AI? Well, the good news is that software isn’t just for the big players or solely for B2C companies!
We’ve got the lowdown on the 5 best B2B software tools for small and medium businesses to thrive by streamlining operations, amplifying growth, and enhancing customer engagement. Get ready to discover software that’s a cut above the rest for all your B2B needs, no matter your size or industry!
B2B Software Acronyms Explained
Before we get stuck in though, let’s spell out some of the acronyms that get thrown around (a lot!) in this space.
B2B = Business to Business
B2B, or business-to-business, refers to transactions and interactions that occur between two or more businesses rather than between businesses and individual consumers.
B2C = Business to Consumer
B2C, or business-to-consumer, involves transactions and interactions where businesses sell products or services directly to individual consumers.
SMB = Small and Medium-sized Businesses
It refers to businesses that fall within a certain size range, typically with a limited number of employees or a moderate level of revenue.
SaaS = Software-as-a-Service
SaaS, or Software as a Service, is a cloud computing model where software applications are provided and accessed over the internet on a subscription basis, eliminating the need for users to install, maintain, and update the software locally.
CRM = Customer Relationship Management
Software that helps businesses manage interactions and relationships with customers and potential customers.
UI/UX = User Interface/User Experience
Pertains to the design and usability of the software from the perspective of the end user.
SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
A set of practices and strategies aimed at improving a website’s visibility and ranking on search engines like Google.
1. Amplify Growth with Referral Factory
For small businesses, standing out in a competitive market can be quite challenging especially when the cost of advertising is going up and the quality of leads is going down. One cost-effective way to generate high-quality leads is through referral marketing — where you ask your customers, partners, employees, affiliates, or fans to refer a friend to try your services. Now this may sound like a lot of work, which is why we’re recommending referral software! Referral Factory offers a comprehensive solution for referral program management that helps businesses grow by incentivizing customers to become brand advocates through a user-friendly interface. It also offers customizable campaigns, and seamlessly integrates with popular CRMs and payment gateways, meaning your referral tracking is super simple.
The best part is that B2B referrals work just as well as B2C when done right! Utilizing existing customers as sources of new ones has proven effective in this type of marketing strategy when executed properly.
“84% of B2B decision-makers start the buying process with a referral”
Salesforce Data
Through its various features such as UX customization options, along with easy referral tracking abilities powered by integration with leading CRM systems including HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Intercom, Monday.com, Pipedrive, and ServiceTitan as well as payment gateways like Stripe, businesses of all sizes can run fully automated referral programs and convert leads.
Harnessing Referral Marketing
Referral marketing, a technique used for promotion, encourages customers to endorse and recommend a company’s products or services. This approach relies on personal recommendations and word-of-mouth referrals to expand the customer base of a business. Implementing referral marketing strategies has shown to result in higher conversion rates (up by 70%), with these leads also tending to spend more on average.
To support this type of marketing strategy, Referral Factory offers various features that can be tailored according to specific needs without requiring any coding knowledge. It’s all plug-and-play! It’s easy to use and works with drag-and-drop builders so you can make your referral program look 100% on brand and professional.
This software is also equipped with referral program and email templates, making it effortless to design automated campaigns while providing comprehensive capabilities such as robust automation techniques.
Tracking and Analytics Simplified
An essential component of a successful marketing strategy is the inclusion of tracking and analytics. Referral Factory offers various metrics through its analytics tools that measure account, campaign, and user performance. These tools can monitor top-performing referrers, converted referrals, conversion rates, daily participation rates as well as how users are sharing their referral links.
Referral Factory also provides features to reward participants with multiple incentives available for selection. It also simplifies reward tracking while effectively managing the entire process from start to finish – all ultimately leading to the optimization of the sales funnel.
In summary, Referral Factory offers several key benefits to businesses, including the ability to lower customer acquisition cost, enhance customer advocacy, provide incentives for referrals, and facilitate overall business growth. These advantages make it a valuable tool for companies looking to boost their sales, even small businesses can benefit from referral marketing!
2. Streamlining Customer Relationships with HubSpot
A reliable CRM system is essential for successful business relationships with customers. HubSpot provides an all-in-one solution that includes all the resources your business needs to effectively connect marketing, sales, content management, and customer service. This makes it an ideal solution for managing customer relationships in B2B companies.
The Sales Hub within the platform offers advanced features such as meeting scheduling capabilities, and quote generation to streamline the sales process for businesses. Using one software platform for multiple products gives businesses a complete view of all contacts from start to finish with a company. This ultimately leads to improved lead management and increased effectiveness in closing deals.
HubSpot’s versatile suite of interconnected products works well for varying business needs, catering specifically towards efficient handling of customer interactions at every stage. In this way, it has proven itself as the go-to choice for streamlining processes related to growing one’s market base, fostering strong ties, and increasing deal closure potential, which highly benefits SMBs of all sizes and kinds.
Automating Lead and Contact Management
In the world of modern business, automation plays a crucial role in contact management. HubSpot offers various features that enable businesses to automate their contact management effectively. These include automatic updates for contact records, syncing contacts, and tasks such as reporting and analytics. By utilizing these features, companies can personalize customer experiences, ensure accurate data collection, and enhance automation capabilities across different marketing channels.
Businesses like Handled (a home moving company) and PRECISION have successfully automated sales, marketing, and customer service processes with the help of HubSpot. As a result of implementing this system into their operations, a noticeable improvement has been seen in overall outcomes while reducing the need for additional market research services. Hubspot facilitates efficient contact management through its advanced features, making it an essential tool for any business looking to streamline its communication efforts.
Customized Pipelines To Keep Your Sales Team Happy
The unique feature of HubSpot is its ability to create personalized sales pipelines that cater to the specific needs and processes of a business. Through these pipelines, businesses can visualize their entire sales journey, streamline different operations within the company, and even incorporate customized objects from HubSpot.
This aspect plays an essential role in optimizing the overall sales process for any organization’s dedicated sales team by providing various benefits such as effective tracking of deals, prioritizing tasks with real-time data insights, improving forecast accuracy, and aiding in efficient closing of deals.
Marketing Automation Software
HubSpot’s marketing automation software stands as a beacon for SMBs navigating the intricate realm of B2B lead generation. With its intuitive design, HubSpot makes it easy to automate repetitive tasks and nurture leads with personalized content and engagement strategies. Plus, by aligning sales and marketing efforts, HubSpot helps SMBs create seamless customer journeys, from the first point of contact to the final sale. Its automatic lead scoring ensures that sales teams focus on leads with the highest conversion potential. For SMBs looking to drive growth and establish a strong foothold in the B2B space, HubSpot’s marketing automation software is an indispensable ally, streamlining processes and empowering businesses to maximize their lead generation and conversion rates.
In summary, HubSpot is your go-to tool for customer relationship management through its advanced features such as automated contact organization and customizable sales pipelines. This enhances the effectiveness of tracking and managing leads more efficiently.
3. Simplified Payments via Stripe
Effective payment processing is crucial for the success of all businesses, no matter their size or whether they’re B2C or B2B. Stripe provides a wide array of comprehensive solutions that cater to different types of payments and businesses, with ready-made payment pages and the ability to collect recurring payments. This makes it a valuable addition to any B2B software stack.
Utilizing Stripe offers several advantages for businesses including:
Improving authorization rates and offering local payment methods.
Optimizing checkout conversion processes.
Supporting recurrent business models and minimizing customer turnover rate.
Automating financial tasks within the company.
Providing convenience through its robust security measures.
Seamless Integration
Stripe stands out as a leader in the realm of payment processing due to its ability to seamlessly integrate with a diverse array of platforms. Its compatibility extends to Terminal, providing businesses with a comprehensive solution for in-person transactions. Moreover, Stripe facilitates streamlined integration with Connect, empowering businesses to effortlessly manage and pay out to third parties. The versatility of Stripe is further evident in its support for various Stripe Apps, enhancing functionality and customization options for businesses. Additionally, Stripe seamlessly integrates with referral marketing software such as Referral Factory, enabling businesses to implement and manage referral programs effortlessly. This adaptability extends to an array of e-commerce platforms, making Stripe an ideal choice for online businesses seeking a reliable and flexible payment processing solution. The comprehensive integration capabilities of Stripe contribute significantly to its effectiveness, as businesses can leverage its services across a wide spectrum of applications and platforms, ultimately ensuring a smooth and efficient payment processing experience.
Advanced Security Measures
In today’s digital age, maintaining strong security is of utmost importance. Stripe places great emphasis on protecting customer relationships and employs various measures to achieve this.
One way they do so is by using TLS and HTTPS encryption protocols during transaction processing to ensure the integrity of data. Their compliance with PCI DSS involves utilizing a hosted payment field that allows for direct entry of payment card details onto their validated servers.
To Safeguard sensitive customer information, Stripe takes several precautions including leveraging it for verification purposes as well as implementing industry-standard encryption algorithms both during transmission and storage. They have an extensive range of solutions in place aimed at preventing fraud and mitigating potential data breaches.
These approaches are all integral elements within Stripe’s secure infrastructure designed specifically for payments made by customers. It is through these efforts that the company ensures protection against any threats or unauthorized access to vital customer data. Requiring strict adherence from its staff members also reinforces its commitment to providing reliable services while prioritizing the safety of user information.
In summary, Stripe is a crucial financial management tool for B2B businesses, especially B2B SaaS companies.
4. Building Trust with G2 Reviews
G2 Reviews supports businesses in establishing trust and credibility by aggregating legitimate customer feedback and leveraging social proof. The platform assists companies in formulating a review collection strategy, encouraging sellers to obtain authentic reviews, and utilizing a team for moderation to evaluate user-generated content.
Not only does this enhance the reputation of businesses, but it also provides valuable insights into customer preferences and areas where improvement is needed. G2 Reviews allows businesses to utilize social validation as a tool by incorporating unbiased opinions from industry experts and other customers that help build trust with potential buyers which can ultimately attract more customers.
Capturing Authentic Feedback
Authentic feedback plays a crucial role in helping businesses understand the needs of their customers and improving their products or services. The G2 Reviews platform offers a reliable way for companies to gather genuine reviews from users through user-generated content and an effective review collection strategy.
To ensure the authenticity of published reviews, G2 Reviews requires reviewers to use a business email address when logging in. They also label verified software reviews with the tag “Verified Current User” alongside an approved screenshot that shows the reviewer logged into their account.
G2 Reviews has been successfully utilized by various businesses such as Vecteezy, BoomTown, and Winning by Design for collecting honest feedback from consumers.
Leveraging Social Proof
G2 Reviews plays a significant role in influencing consumer behavior and B2B decision-making through the use of social proof. This is achieved by showcasing positive reviews and endorsements from satisfied clients, as well as forming partnerships with reputable brands. Establishing trust with potential customers is crucial for any business, which G2 Reviews helps to achieve by providing credibility and transparency.
The success stories of Hospitable and Slack demonstrate how businesses can effectively utilize social proof through G2 Reviews. By utilizing this platform, these companies have been able to establish themselves as trustworthy entities in the eyes of potential customers.
5. Optimize Visibility with Ahrefs SEO
In today’s digital age, the success of a business largely depends on its online visibility. That is why companies turn to search engine optimization (SEO) for assistance. Ahrefs, an all-encompassing SEO toolkit, offers various components such as competitor analysis, website auditing, and optimization services, keyword research tools, and content ideas generation features. With these powerful instruments at hand, businesses can gain a competitive advantage in the virtual world.
Ahrefs has become a top choice among SEO professionals due to its exceptional characteristics including Domain Rating – highly recognized as one of the most significant metrics used in this field, reliable link data that surpasses those offered by competitors, and finally, the AhrefsBot which holds first place among web crawlers for having extensive capabilities when it comes to browsing websites.
By providing SMBs access not only to standard features but also allowing them room towards more advanced options – makes the Ahres Business Intelligence tool a must-have resource aiding establishment growth through enhanced presence over digital platforms.
In-depth Keyword Analysis
The Keyword Explorer tool from Ahrefs is an essential aspect of SEO, providing a range of valuable insights to uncover untapped opportunities. With features such as generating thousands of keyword ideas and evaluating their difficulty and traffic potential, it caters to various search engines like Google, Bing, YouTube, and Amazon.
By utilizing Ahrefs for keyword analysis, you can enhance website content and improve on-page SEO. Additionally, the Content Gap feature allows you to identify keywords that your competitors rank for but are missing from your own strategy. Aside from offering comprehensive data for multiple countries and search engines, this tool provides accurate suggestions tailored to different platforms.
Competitive Edge with Backlink Tracking
Backlink tracking is a crucial element of SEO that helps businesses keep track of their competitors’ backlinks and discover new opportunities for building links. To monitor competitor backlinks using Ahrefs, the steps to follow include identifying your rivals, inputting their website URLs into Ahrefs, and analyzing their backlink profiles.
It is recommended for companies to regularly check on their competitors’ backlink profiles through Ahrefs at least once every month to stay updated.
Bonus: B2B Tool Integrations
If you’re not already jumping for joy over how much time these tools are going to save you in their individual capacity, wait until you hear this: they connect! Most B2B apps these days have native integrations to other tools or if they don’t you can often hook them up via connecting software like Zapier! Here are some ways that you can get these tools working together to automate daily tasks:
Referral Factory and HubSpot
Since Referral Factory is in the business of getting you hot new leads and Hubspot is all about managing your leads, it makes a whole lot of sense that these two tools work together! With Referral Factory’s HubSpot referral integration, you can instantly add newly referred leads as CRM contacts and even track them through your sales funnel to watch if they convert. And if they do, Referral Factory can automatically reward the person who referred them. You can also create referral links for all your HubSpot contacts!
G2 and HubSpot Marketing Hub
The integration between G2 and HubSpot offers a powerful solution for B2B businesses seeking efficient task automation. By seamlessly connecting G2’s platform, which provides user reviews and insights on software and services, with HubSpot’s comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation tools, businesses can automate numerous tasks across their sales and marketing processes. This integration allows for the streamlined transfer of valuable customer data from G2 to HubSpot, enabling businesses to better understand their audience, target their marketing efforts effectively, and make data-driven decisions. The automation capabilities enhance overall efficiency, saving time and resources while improving the quality of customer interactions and ultimately contributing to the success of B2B strategies.
Conclusion
In the current digital landscape, small and medium-sized businesses heavily rely on B2B software tools to improve their operations and drive growth. These 5 essential B2B software tools are bound to improve your bottom line and make your business a whole lot more productive at the same time.
