Last updated on March 19th, 2024
In this definitive guide, we go over everything involved in a B2B sales process, including actionable tips and strategies.
B2B sales is a very complex, fast-growing, and competitive sector to be in. In fact, B2B sales is projected to hit $1.8 trillion by 2023 in eCommerce alone.
So, if closing big deals excites you, you’re in the right place.
Trust me, I know…
B2B sales is supposed to be hard.
But equipped with the right processes, strategies, and knowledge, B2B can be a piece of cake (or even exhilarating — if you’re like me).
So let’s get into exactly how you can improve your B2B sales to increase your business’ bottom line.
- What is B2B sales?
- The business sales process
- How B2B sales funnels work
- B2B vs. B2C sales
- Types of B2B sales
- B2B sales tips
- B2B sales strategies
- B2B sales software
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What Is B2B Sales?
B2B (or business to business) sales is the process of selling products or services to businesses, rather than a consumer. (Selling to consumers is called B2C Sales.)
This critical distinction between the target customers is vital in understanding B2B sales because selling to businesses is entirely different than selling to your average consumer in many ways.
It can also be much more profitable, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
For now, let’s talk about what the B2B sales process looks like.
The Business Sales Process — Understanding B2B Sales Funnels
In general, just like with B2C, the B2B sales process follows a path from the first impression to an eventual sale. This “path” is referred to as a funnel.
Defined sales funnels are critical for any business serious about B2B selling (or any selling, for that matter).
Let me give you a made-up scenario to explain why:
Meet John.
John runs his own small business, and while he’d enjoy scaling more, he’s doing pretty okay for himself.
Now, meet Rick; Rick owns a coaching business that helps small businesses to scale their revenue. (small businesses like the kind that John owns)
Rick’s challenge is that even though he knows he can help, he can’t approach John and get him to buy his coaching services right away. There’s no connection or trust between the two.
Before John buys, he’ll have to get through the sales funnel, or “customer journey,” of Rick’s B2B sales process.
This funnel includes (but isn’t limited to) nurturing and building trust with a lead, showing the value of the coaching services, and finally — closing the sale.
Every business has a unique sales process that its prospects go through. The most successful companies understand this process and revise it to optimize the rate of prospects that make it through to the sale.
How A B2B Sales Funnel Works
To better illustrate this, let’s cover the various stages of a B2B sales funnel:
Step #1: Lead Generation — Where The B2B Sales Process Begins
Before you can even attempt to sell to prospects, you’ve got to find the prospects in the first place.
Which is the first step of practically any funnel. Lead generation can be done through many different kinds of strategies — whether it’s direct or indirect marketing — or inbound or outbound lead generation.
The method (or methods) you choose will depend on your business and its industry.
Step #2: Qualifying B2B Leads
After you’ve got your leads, you’ll want to “filter” out your ideal customer base from the rest of them. You don’t want to waste resources trying to get unqualified leads through all the stages of the sales cycle.
You only want the prospects that show enough potential.
But how do you separate the qualified leads from the unqualified ones?
This again will be up to your business and its goal, but you should be able to weed out your unqualified B2B leads through the “discovery” phase.
One great way to do this is through a “scoring” system.
Using a CRM system with data integration allows you to score each prospect on various metrics, only moving someone down the funnel when you’re sure they’ve met your specific criteria.
Step #3: Nurturing Prospects
Once you’ve qualified your leads, you can now consider them legitimate prospects.
Now, it’s time to “nurture” them.
To put it simply, this is where you build trust and relationships and establish your authority in the space.
A great way to do this is through retargeting with email sequences or offering the prospect a free-barrier-to-entry offer that will provide instant value.
Step #4: Setting The Stage For A Proposal
Once there’s a relationship established and the prospect trusts you as an authority in your space, you’re ready to go for the proposal.
The amount of time it takes for a prospect to get from the first impression to the ready-to-buy stage depends on each company, but you can generally expect it to take anywhere from a couple of weeks to months. Enterprise-level companies often have deals that take years to fully close.
Step #5: Closing
The last step (and many salespersons’ favorite part) is closing — as well as what you should do post-sale.
After you sell to a client, the process isn’t over. If you want the most out of your efforts, it’s your job to continue a strong relationship with all prospects and customers.
Continuing an excellent relationship helps build your reputation, increase customer satisfaction, and encourage referrals.
Want to know how to hype-up your sales team to close more deals? Check out our favorite 15 ways to motivate a sales team.
B2B vs. B2C Sales — Know The Difference
Now that we understand B2B sales more, it’s time we talk in-depth about the differences between B2B and B2C sales.
Understanding how these two differ is going to be a determining factor behind your success at selling to businesses — because it’s a whole different mindset than B2C.
1. B2B Sales Are High Ticket
With B2B products and services, one of the most common differences is the price tag.
Products targeted towards businesses are often much higher in price than those offered to consumers. And there’s a good reason for this.
When you sell to a business, it’s probably not for luxury, convenience, or purely the quality of life like you would if selling to consumers.
Sure, those things are valuable, but it’s much harder to assign that value to them since they’re so abstract, which means that most consumer goods don’t call for very high prices.
But you know what isn’t abstract?
Profit.
When a business buys a product or service, it’s almost always to increase its profit, indirectly or directly, which makes it all the easier to judge how much that product or service is worth.
And if your product or service can significantly increase revenue, you can charge a significant price.
Which leads us to the next difference:
2. The Buyer Intent Is Different
One of the most significant differentiators between B2B and B2C selling is who you’re selling to.
When you sell in a B2C setting, you’ll often have to convince buyers that they want your product or need it for some reason.
In a B2B setting, you may have to convince the buyer that they need your product, but they often know what they want. In fact, your job isn’t to convince them that they want your product at all.
Your goal is to convince them that your product is precisely what will get them to their goal and solve their problems.
In this way, B2B selling is often much more result-oriented than other types of selling.
3. One-to-Many Selling vs. One-on-One Selling
Another way these two forms of selling differ is that B2B selling often comes down to a one-on-one setting when it’s time to finally close.
It’s much harder for high-ticket items and services to get people to buy without steps like sales calls and one-on-one discovery sessions.
This makes the process quite different from many consumer products, which are usually sold through one-to-many sales methods.
4. Longer Sales Cycles
Business-to-consumer sales are usually based on emotions and quick, fleeting needs.
On the other hand, B2B customers are often looking for a concrete ROI or a logical solution to their pain points.
And because B2B sales are so rational, it takes longer to close the deal. Just cold-calling potential customers isn't enough for successful B2B sales in most circumstances.
5. Educated Buyers
Compared to B2C buyers, B2B buyers are less likely to make impulse purchases. Instead, B2B customers are extremely selective when it comes to buying products or services.
They're not only picky about who they buy from, but they also have their own criteria to get the best deal without the aid of salespeople.
6. Multiple Stakeholders
Since each decision influences the business' bottom line, purchase decisions need to go a long way for approval.
Typically, multiple stakeholders are involved in making a purchase decision. This gives your marketing and sales teams the opportunity to pitch not only one person but target multiple decision-makers.
A mutual "yes" from all stakeholders leads to a successful sale. Plus, the more valuable your deal, the higher the chances of converting your leads into customers.
3 Main Types Of B2B Sales Niches
While there are plenty of slight variations and various businesses out there, virtually every Business to Business company falls into three categories:
They either sell:
- Products
- Services
- Or Software
Let’s get into each one, how they differ, and some popular examples so you can get a more concrete understanding.
Selling Products To Businesses
Selling products is probably the most classic of the categories — B2B or not.
Products are often considered easier to market for a few reasons:
They’re tangible, and their value is much more immediately obvious.
With a product, you can demonstrate it practically immediately — and that’s if the potential buyer doesn’t already understand its value.
Take a printer manufacturer, for instance.
Everyone knows what a printer does and why they might need one. It’s not your job to introduce them to the idea of a printer, just your job to convince them that your printer is the one they should pick.
You can do this with competitive pricing, certain extra features, etc. — it’s really up to your creativity.
And another form of a product-based B2B operation is wholesale selling.
See, in a wholesaler’s case, it may be even easier to convince your buyer to work with you since their goal is to turn around and sell it for profit.
This means that selling in bulk can be much easier, as they have a fairly concrete idea of the value you’re bringing to the table.
An Example Of Product-Based B2B: Staples
A well-known example of a B2B company that sells products?
Staples.
Almost any business needs some sort of product to function, and filling that market demand can be one of the best ways to get reliable, consistent revenue.
While Staples does sell to consumers, one of the most significant revenue sources for their business revenue comes from another business that has an office.
Every office needs tons of products that Staples offers to operate: Stationary, desks, printers, the list goes on — which puts Staples in a perfect spot.
Selling Services To Businesses
Selling a service is a bit trickier because it’s much harder to show any tangible value from a service.
Take a sales coaching program as an example; you can’t see, touch, or feel high sales effectiveness, regardless of how valuable it is.
So how do you show them that your service actually works?
Well, this is where things like testimonials and past case studies really shine. It’s much easier to convince a prospect that your service has value when they can see past results rather than just taking your word for it.
Remember, for services:
It’s more important than ever to focus on trust, brand-building, and client relationships for services.
An Example of Service-Based B2B: Rankings.io
A perfect example of a B2B company that sells a service is Rankings.io, an SEO marketing agency that specializes in helping personal injury law firms. (Yes, law firms are businesses.)
SEO marketing is the service, and law firms are the business that Rankings sells to.
In order for Rankings to get where they are today, they had to build up case studies and become a well-established brand to gain industry-wide trust with clients.
Selling Software (Or SaaS) To Businesses
Software is kind of a mix between service and product — and depending on the particular software, it can certainly lean more towards one or another.
The reason SaaS is getting its own section is because it's an exploding industry that has grown so much (an industry worth $157 billion in 2020), it’d feel wrong to squeeze it in with services or products.
Software often has the same challenges as services, though, since a SaaS platform isn’t a tangible product, it can be hard to sell organizations on the idea.
Another challenge that comes with selling software is that the prospects will likely have to change up some of their processes to accommodate the software; even if those changes are worth it, they add another level of challenge to the sale.
Approaching software like selling a service when it comes to B2B sales is usually the best option — it’s very much oriented towards building relationships, brand authority, and trust.
One great way to get people on board with your software is through free demos; that way, they can “test run” your platform and see how well it fits for themselves.
An Example Of Software-Based B2B: Quickbooks
A great example of a service-based B2B business is Quickbooks.
Quickbooks helps many businesses, particularly smaller ones, track their finances through the platform.
The value?
Often, this improved finance-tracking often leads to more efficient usage of resources and saves these small business owners the time and energy involved in learning all the ins and outs of taxes.
Wholesale/Distribution Sales
The wholesaler offers crucial components for production or retail to other enterprises or wholesalers.
An Example Of Wholesale/Distribution B2B: JJ Foods
One of the best examples of wholesale B2B business. It's a wholesale food distributor selling key food supplies to restaurants and fast-food outlets, which then resell them to customers at a higher price.
5 B2B Sales Tips To Become A Better Salesperson
Now with all of that info-dumping out of the way, we should probably get to some actionable steps to help improve your B2B sales process.
So here are our top 5 tips to help you become a better salesperson.
#1: Buyers Might Be More Skeptical — Build Trust
With their business on the line, buyers are much more likely to be skeptical and careful about rash decisions, but that’s just the name of the game with B2B sales.
If you want to sell more, don’t go in gung-ho for the sale right away; that’s a surefire way to lose a potential customer early on.
You’ve got to build trust with prospects before you ever even think about selling to them.
Here are some ways to do just that:
- Testimonials
- Offer free value
- Build rapport and empathy with prospects
These next four tips will also help you build more trust with prospects.
#2: Buyers Are Educated — Know Your Industry
When dealing with business customers, your buyer likely knows their stuff — very well.
This is because you’ll either be dealing with a business owner or someone trained specifically to deal with making purchases for that business.
And as such, you’ve got to know your stuff too.
Remember, you’re supposed to be the expert on this solution, so if you can’t match (or surpass) the buyer’s knowledge, it’s not going to look great on your end.
#3: Be Patient & Know The Best Time To Sell — B2B Sales Takes Longer
One of the worst things you can do to your own sales cycle is rush the process.
Remember how we previously mentioned that B2B buyers are generally skeptical? Well, trying to get them to buy before they fully trust you will have the exact opposite effect than the one you’re looking for.
At the same time, make sure to encourage them to take action when the time is right.
While rushing the sales process will end in a failed sale, never attempting to sell in the first place isn’t going to get you anywhere either.
#4: It’s All About Increasing Your Partner’s Bottom Line — Show Relevant Case Studies
B2B buyers aren’t working purely off of gut feeling and instincts; they want to know that you can deliver the results you’re promising.
Which is why it’s so crucial that you have proof of your results. One of the best ways to do this is by creating relevant case studies.
If you can show buyers that you’ve delivered great results to similar prospects in the past, it’ll make a world of difference in their decision-making process.
#5: Use A CRM System
Including a CRM into your sales systems can serve to transform your sales process completely.
With various ways to streamline the way you handle data, automate parts of your marketing process, and more — it’s one of the best ways to increase your sales productivity and effectiveness.
7 B2B Sales Strategies To Close More Deals
And lastly, let’s look at 7 B2B sales strategies you can use to close more deals and increase your own bottom line.
#1: Create A No-Brainer Initial Offer
Want to close more deals?
Convince the buyer that they’d be losing money by not working with you.
If they can be sure that your product or service will raise their bottom line, why wouldn’t they work with you?
In other words, when the time to sell finally comes, make your offer a no-brainer choice.
#2: Create A Value Ladder
A value ladder follows the same general idea as the sales funnel does.
Virtually none of your customers will go straight from learning about your company to purchasing your final offer right away — B2B or not.
To build the essential trust to get any prospect to the end of the journey, you’ll need to create a series of offers that mirrors your sales cycle.
To give an example, let’s say you’re a coach.
When someone first learns about you at the beginning of their customer journey, you could offer a free ebook for an email signup.
Next, you could offer a sale on some of your lower-tier classes.
And you’d follow this path until they’ve finally reached your final (or “bullseye”), high-ticket offer.
Do note, though; the value ladder isn’t all about making a series of sales — It’s about consistently providing value to your prospects while gradually building-up trust.
The more you can show them that you’re offering something with legitimate value, the more they’ll trust that your main product or service is worthwhile.
#3: Don’t Focus On Selling. Focus On Relationships With Prospects & Clients Instead.
Ever wonder why people are so skeptical of the “shady car salesman” type?
It’s not because they’re trying to sell a product; we encounter people trying to sell us on something every single day. It’s because those types are only focused on selling.
When you’re too focused on the sale, and not enough on your prospect’s success, it shines through clearly — even more so when dealing with trained professionals.
So with that in mind, remember:
Your customer’s success is your success, so make your goal to build that relationship and work on getting them to reach their goals.
#4: Sell Solutions & Solve Problems
An important thing to keep in mind is that prospects don’t care what you’re selling.
Let me explain.
See, any potential customer of yours has a problem that needs to be solved, and if a pebble were the solution to that problem, they’d buy it in a heartbeat.
Potential buyers don’t care what you’re selling. They care about finding a solution to their problem.
Make it your goal to show them how your product is the solution, and you’ll see your sales increase by magnitudes.
#5: Account-Based Selling
When selling to larger companies in a B2B setting, the traditional one-salesperson-per-customer approach can often be inefficient, ineffective, and outdated.
That’s where account-based selling can save the day.
To keep the explanation from turning into another full article, we’ll keep it somewhat short:
Account-based selling involves assigning whole teams in various departments to work with multiple shareholders in a target company towards their goal.
While it may not be the ideal strategy for every B2B transaction, it’s certainly a strategy that can do wonders in creating a hyper-focused, highly-profitable strategy for your customers.
#6: Capture Traffic Across All Channels for Your Sales Funnel (Website, Social Media, ETC.)
If you want to maximize revenue, it’s in your best interest to take advantage of all opportunities available.
And that means bringing in leads from any channels available.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a focus, though. You’ll likely be able to pinpoint a few standouts when it comes to effectiveness, but that doesn’t mean you should abandon the rest.
#7: Have Your Marketing Squared Away To Attract The Right Leads
A great way to waste resources and cash is by moving “dead end” leads down the sales funnel.
You know, the leads who were never going to work with you in the first place?
This is why highly-targeted marketing strategies are so critical; more leads don’t necessarily mean more revenue if you aren’t targeting the right people.
Take the time to look where you might be letting unqualified leads get through the cracks, and then work to close those cracks.
Using A B2B Sales Software
And with all of that advice in your toolkit, you’re a few steps closer to increasing the profitability of your B2B sales process.
Want to know another way you can increase profitability and efficiency?
Streamlining and automating your sales process with a CRM system like VipeCloud. VipeCloud allows you to transform your sales in multiple aspects, from how you store your data, to the way you track your qualified leads.
And you could try it for your own business today, for free.
Start your free trial today to see first-hand how VipeCloud can improve your sales processes.
This post is fantastic. I love how you match each sales process step to a statistical probability. Great work!!!
Thank you for sharing the informative article.