The B2B USA market size went down to $5.56 billion in 2020 due to the pandemic but is anticipated to touch $14.5 billion by 2024. A similar trend is expected for the global market as well.
However, B2B business challenges remain there. Starting from technologically advanced competitors to struggling with a marketing strategy and demanding customers to the longer buying process, all these reasons push you to adopt more mature and smarter ways to meet business goals.
The only way to combat those challenges is to improve your B2B workplace productivity, which itself is a challenge due to the loads of tasks the B2B business involves. As you read further you will learn about how to organize your tasks, save time, and be more productive at the workplace.
Here are the six smart ways to improve B2B workplace productivity:
1- Manage Your Projects Smartly
Handling multiple projects is a cumbersome task, especially when your business is B2B. You have to look after several sub-tasks, assign tasks to teams, schedule and attend meetings, share a progress report with the clients, generate bills, and more.
Hence, you must learn to manage your projects first, if you want to be productive. It will streamline your work and save you a lot of time that you would have wasted juggling between endless spreadsheets and paperwork.
The best way to do this is using project management software. These are suites of tools that help project managers plan, execute and control their projects across different phases of the project lifecycle. They help project managers collaborate with their teams and stakeholders.
Industry-standard project management tools such as Monday.com and ClickUp allow project managers to keep a record of projects and related notes, build the collaborative document, message internally, communicate with stakeholders, create and assign tasks, data and analytics reporting, plot milestones, manage the project portfolio, track budget, and schedule timeline.
The aim of these tools is to eliminate the need of bouncing between tabs or using multiple apps. The choice of the tool entirely depends on the type and size of your business, as well as individual business needs.
2- Automate Social Media Marketing Tasks
Social media marketing consumes a lot of time of the marketing team by keeping them engaged in finding trending hashtags, answering direct messages, scheduling posts in advance, curating content for publishing, triaging routine customer queries, and generating analytics reports.
With such a long list of tasks, the B2B marketing team hardly gets any time to focus on the crucial, high-impact creative, and strategic marketing plans that will actually guide the business towards its goals.
Social media automation tools are designed to make your marketing team more productive by handling all their social media management tasks. Using the tool, the team can auto-schedule various functionalities and save hours.
Some of the social media automation tools such as Hootsuite and CoSchedule go beyond auto-scheduling functionality and enable the user to monitor keywords, discover influencers, and automatically generate reports.
3- Track Your Project Time
The biggest challenge and concern of any project is on-time delivery. A project can meet the deadline only if project managers are aware of how far they are from the stipulated time.
For project managers, tracking different aspects of a project is not easy since it requires massive energy and skills like the ability to pay attention to details, and great time management.
One of the feasible solutions to tackle this challenge is using a project time tracker tool such as Deputy. It will give an actual idea of the position of the team in the assigned project and the amount of time each team member is spending on different segments of the project.
Besides, referring to the insights managers can reduce time spent rostering, allocate resources appropriately, monitor all processes in real-time, and initiate the project on time, preventing any delay. Also, the tools support third-party integrations to extend their capabilities.
4- Automate Email Marketing Tasks
Since B2B purchases are based on induction, email marketing is a viable strategy to capture leads. The clients want to be familiarized with the product or service you offer before they make their decision. Delivering brief or detailed product guides or other helpful content related to your industry will nourish your B2B leads.
But email marketing is not limited to this part only. The team has to keep looking for creative ideas to acquire leads and reply to the enormous client emails.
B2B marketing and sales departments seeking ways to expand their business must adopt advanced communication. Email marketing tools are a great way to save time, boost marketing productivity, capture new consumers, and determine leadership and campaign output.
The best email marketing automation tools such as Mailchimp and Moosend help you with creating a professional email newsletter, send in bulk emails that are customized and well-targeted, auto-reply to the emails, and monitor the performance of your email marketing campaigns.
5- Improve Team Communication
Whether you are in the office or working remotely, well-established communication is the key to successful project completion. Indeed, communication is necessary to save time, be productive, stay informed, and share data irrespective of your current location.
This is why there are professionally designed communication tools that are used in different B2B companies for seamless interactions. Most of these tools include video calling, audio calling, and chat, as well as collaboration features. You can conduct group meetings or opt for private calls/chats. Some tools are limited to chat, video calls, or audio calls only.
The basic advantage of these tools over free apps is the security they offer, which is often a huge concern for B2B companies.
Some of the top team communication tools recommended for B2B companies are Slack and Chanty.
6- Strengthen Network Security
Taking cybersecurity for granted can cost heavily both in terms of finance and reputation. Even the most established B2B organizations that suffer from cyber attacks lose assets, and network vulnerabilities. They face regulatory fines, legal actions, and the cost of remediation.
If you apply strict security measures, workplace productivity hampers. Similarly, if you only focus on productivity, then security is most likely to get affected. Therefore, a balance of two is necessary to improve productivity without compromising security.
For instance, your organization should opt for network vulnerability scanning and assessment to identify threats regularly, since they suggest the possible measures to be taken before any threats harm your systems and affect productivity.
Taking the help of a cybersecurity expert is best because they will suggest which tool is suitable for your business and how it will be configured.
Summary
Gradually, the global market is moving towards normalization, opening the massive scope of doing business and earning revenues. On the other side, the challenges in the B2B market have increased as ever before, due to evolving technology and innovative marketing ideas.
It is essentially important now to act and improve your workplace productivity to mark your position in the market. If you have started to grow and are already overloaded with different tasks, follow the above-given tips to ensure you never compromise on your business tasks.
