What Is B2B Sales? | Examples, Strategy, & Tips
B2B sales covers almost every industry and type of business. B2B SaaS alone is a multi-billion dollar market. However, a few business-to-business selling principles hold true across industries. This guide will walk you through the sales strategies to set your team up for success.
What Is B2B Sales?
Short for business-to-business sales, this method of selling describes a transaction between one business and another. These transactions of sales and products can happen online or in person, but it takes the work of more than one stakeholder. You can expect these deals to have long sales cycles and high dollar values.
B2B Sales Examples
There are several different types of sales models including, supply sales, wholesale and distribution, and software and service sales.
1. Supply Sales
This type of sales is when a business sells consumables to support another business. Some of the most common types of supply sales for businesses include equipment, office supplies, and employee workwear, like PPC and uniforms.
While the process in supply sales is similar to B2C sales, the main difference is in quantity and purchase authorization. Purchase authorization means that a decision-maker within an organization needs to approve which type of office product and how much of it to buy.
2. Wholesale & Distribution Sales
When it comes to wholesale and distribution, B2B sales focus on key retail and manufacturing components, like raw materials. Whether it’s food products sold to restaurants or mechanical parts to maintain machines involved in manufacturing, the final product is sold at a higher price to consumers.
3. Software & Service Sales
Instead of selling a physical product, these B2B companies sell SaaS or other intangible products. Some common examples of software and service products include tax software like Quickbooks, lead routing software like Freshsales, and storage hosting services like Google Cloud.
B2B Sales Strategy
Building a strong sales strategy is difficult, not because there’s a shortage of tactics and methodologies. The true issue is that there are too many sales enablement options. Do you create videos and research whitepapers? Do you focus on PPC ads and email marketing?
I’ll talk about a few of the most buyer-centric sales strategies designed for modern times here to help you choose which direction to pursue.
1. Get to Know Your Customers
Using buyer personas, sending out surveys, and tracking consumer behavior are all ways to get to know your customers better. Collect data to do the research about customer wants and needs, as well as the typical buying process. While there is some variation in the customer journey, you can expect something similar to this:
- A customer experiences a pain point
- They look for an answer, usually online
- They’ll contact their network for ideas
- They research solutions, read reviews, ans sign up for trials
- They finally sign up for a product demo or talk to a sales rep
This process should tell you something very important: that it’s not just the customer who is important to you, but their network and online habits are as well. Learning more about these will show you where to find your best leads, help you develop stories to entice them, and teach you how to build stronger relationships.
2. Create Value for Your Customers
All B2B salespeople need to create a way for customers to more easily understand the value your organization provides. The most straightforward way to do this is showing them exactly what problem your product solves. Identify their issue and offer a specific solution. Another way to create value within a customer relationship is offering incentives, like loyalty perks and other benefits.
3. Close the Deal
You’re helping a customer make a big decision — financially as well as functionally. From the initial cold calling to the follow-up meetings, you have a ton of opportunities at various touchpoints to offer useful resources, share personal stories, and build a stronger bond that eventually encourages their purchasing decisions.
So how do your sales reps close deals? Is it their winning personality, a standardized playbook, or another sales technique that ensures trust? In some industries, pricing is more important than anything else, so closing the deal is all about bartering. In other industries, customer service is most important, so extra personal attention is essential.
B2B Sales Tips
The above sales and marketing strategies can definitely help improve your team’s sales performance, but I have a few more tips that can enhance your sales funnel even further. Take a look at these recommendations to streamline your B2B sales cycle.
1. Subscribe to a Prospect’s Content
Instruct your sales professionals to follow a B2B buyer’s social media feed and public networking profiles. Are they hosting a webinar? Active on LinkedIn? Get in touch with them wherever you can. In addition to putting you on their radar, this also helps you better understand their priorities and gain valuable insights to help you create more personalized outreach.
2. Approach the Real Decision-Makers
Not every B2B customer you meet will be in charge of decision-making. Shorten longer sales cycles by getting in touch with the people above the purchasing managers instead of developing relationships with buyers who are lower on the totem pole.
Deliver your value proposition straight to the people with the authority to actually take action and sell only to stakeholders who have the authority and budget to actually make buying decisions.
3. Sell Business Outcomes
Potential customers aren’t really interested in your specific product or service. They just want to see the results you can deliver. While your sales representatives might have been able to pitch just features and benefits in the past, today, B2B marketing is about tangible outcomes. Use case studies and real-world examples to make the reason they need YOUR product clear.
Solutions For B2B Sales Reps
A lot goes into sales these days, whether it’s business-to-consumer or business-to-business. Your B2B sales teams and marketing teams have a lot more work to do — even in a digital world. However, B2B sales software can provide automation solutions for many manual sales tasks, including lead generation, real-time metrics tracking, and outbound messaging.
You can learn more about the benefits of B2B sales software here, and stay up-to-date on everything going on in the B2B world when you sign up for the RevOps newsletter.
