In the past 10+ years that i have worked with small business owners, more than half of the small businesses sold products or services to other companies or businesses, i.e. they were doing B2B sales.
B2B sales is a different beast altogether and one does not necessarily see flashy marketing or advertising campaigns here unlike in the consumer space. You will see a lot of boring corporate spiel without much glitz and glamour.
However, B2B sales are often what drives the backbone industries of the economy. A small business in the B2B space is also much more likely to have an intellectual property that is unique to it and has great value that it offers to its customers.
A B2B sales strategy is strong component of any small business sales strategy that a small business owners should know about.
Fundamentals of B2B sales strategies for small business owners
There are many fundamental differences in a B2B sales process when compared with a B2C or a consumer business sales process.
How is B2B sales different from B2C selling?
To summarise the key differences, its best to tabulate them for ease of context. The table below covers most of the basic differences. The nuances of sales strategies will be delved deeper within the rest of the article.
| Context | B2B sales | B2C Sales |
| Audience | B2B sales focusses on selling to other companies and businesses | B2C sales focusses on selling to individual consumers or families |
| Price and Frequency | B2B sales usually see high ticket deals, but the sales to one specific customer happens maybe once a year when contract is renewed | These are low ticket sales, that can happen several times a month |
| Use of the product | Its usually the company – or a group of employees in the company that uses the product in b2b sales | Typically its a consumer or a family that uses the product |
| Decision maker | Its a team of decision makes who take a buying decision in B2B sales, its never a single person deciding unless the customer is a single person company or a very small business | Its almost always individuals who decide to buy |
| Decision process | B2B sales is almost always a consultative discussion, where the salespeople have to demonstrate value multiple times in a single sales process. The discussions are often logical and have reasoning at every step. | Its effectively an emotional or impulsive purchase by the individual consumer |
How are decisions made in B2B sales?
This is perhaps what signifies the biggest difference in B2B sales, which is also often the cause of a large amounts of frustration for small businesses who sell to other larger companies and businesses.
In B2B sales, there are at least 7 steps before a deal is won. A small business owner will have to factor these steps and build a process to track how each potential lead is progressing. To do this, its essential for a small business to build a robust sales funnel.
As you can see from above, with each stage having a potentially different person you will be interacting with, the best way to get your proposal moving forward is to build a rapport with someone very high in the hierarchy of the potential customer.
You will need this person to champion your cause and push through the internal bureaucracy. I have bought tons of products and services from small businesses and in many instances, when the business owner was in direct contact with me, i was able to push through genuine cases that added value to our business.
Understand who makes these decisions and you have probably won half the battle to get a successful deal closure for your proposal.
What are the specific sales strategies that are needed in B2B sales when compared to B2C sales?
As you saw above, the B2B sales process is a lot more complex, starting with a request for a proposal from a business that is scouting for a product or services and all the way to negotiating and signing the contract.
To navigate this complex process, a small business that sells to other businesses need to have some specific advantages that will help them ease the process in each step. All of these strategies have specific advantages and if a small business ticks enough of the boxes to give them all the advantages they can get.
Partner with larger companies that have complementary products is one of the many underrated b2b sales strategies
If you are a small business that is offering a technical product or a professional service, it is always advantageous to sign a long term partnership with a larger company that offers a complementary product or service. It will help drive sales by piggy-backing on the infrastructure and relationships built by the larger entity.
I have a friend who runs an IT systems integration company, he has a team of certified developers who can integrate enterprise grade CRM, accounting, ERP, HR & Payroll and a host of other softwares. He has partnered with either brands directly or with authorised distributors and re-sellers of the software. He uses the partnership as a complementary offering to provide system integration services.
In such a model, its easy to drive sales as the partnering company usually does the heavy lifting and has a way with pushing through the corporate decision making process.
Establish 1-1 rapport with key decision makers in your potential customers
This strategy cannot be stressed enough. In B2B sales, a one-to-one relationship is crucial. Your sales team should be comfortable and competent enough to build these relationships over time. In B2B sales, if you don’t build relationships, forget about driving sales and growing your business.
There are many opportunities for your sales teams to try and establish 1-1 contact with key people in prospective customer companies. The below list has a few ways in which my friends company does this.
- They host their own developer conference event highlighting new industry trends where they invite CXOs, VPs and directors of prospective clients who lead the end user departments
- They travel extensively to events where key people from their potential customers are likely to attend
- They invite potential clients to their internal all-hands as key-note speakers
- The sales people visit their partners and jointly visit customer offices frequently
- They make use of LinkedIn a lot to identify the people who are key decision makers
- They track others who are making pitches to their prospective clients through social listening
Using these techniques to connect with key decision makers from your prospective customers is an essential practice that any small business owner needs to adopt in order to see an increase in sales
Having an effective sales pitch – B2B sales strategy 101
As obvious as it sounds, you’l be surprised at how many small businesses don’t have an effective sales pitch. An effective sales pitch is a presentation or a conversation a sales agent has with a potential customer, in which, the sales agent is able to articulate a value proposition of a solution that comprehensively solves the biggest problem for the customer .
What a sales pitch does to your business and salespeople is that it forces thinking into what is the essential value proposition of your business. The sales pitch also does the following for your business
- Enforces the discipline and standardisation of the pitch among salespeople
- Builds out scenarios and tactics that can be used within each scenario to emphasise value
- Provides useful tips to the sales agent to handle customer objections beforehand
- Makes your sales agent and your business put forward a professional image
Don’t be one of the many businesses that fall by the wayside by not investing time and effort to create a good sales pitch for your business.
Being a thought leader in your industry is a much better way of establishing your brand and credibility
An often ignored aspect of B2B sales is the marketing of your ideas and establishing your thought leadership in the in the industry. Establishing your thought leadership means that your business is considered to have the expertise in a specific aspect of your industry.
If your build your authority as a thought leader in the space, potential customers and other players in the industry recognise your intellectual ‘moat’. This also gives off an impression that the skill sets and capability of your team is of a higher order than the rest of the industry. This in turn attracts better talent to your business which feeds a virtuous cycle.
There are a few ways in which your business can build thought leadership through a few initiatives.
- Host a conference with industry leaders with a trending theme, invite a celebrated key note speaker
- Get a few research articles published by collaborating with a local university
- Do a paid media coverage on technical publications in your industry
- Consistently host webinars on best practices, educate aspiring candidates and students in industry best practices
- Write a detailed blog on your business website that comprehensively covers all aspects of your business – This will also act as an excellent organic lead funnel for your business.
- Conduct research and share findings via reports through platforms such as linkedIn and promote your research in 3rd party events and conferences
The open secret to building thought leadership is to share knowledge openly and freely
Driving B2B sales | A company needs to plan and be strategic in how they approach prospective customers
Approaching potential customers is an altogether different game in a B2B sales process. A small business that is selling to other companies can really up-level their sales process once the understand critical elements that go into how they research and build their understanding of potential customers.
How to research prospective customers in B2B sales?
Of the several hundred small businesses I have worked with in the past 10+ years, only a small handful employ a somewhat scientific approach to researching about their potential customers. Its basically less than 10% of all small businesses who are in B2B sales who do good research.
A small business that can effectively do this can stay ahead of the curve and grow in size disproportionately. There are some specific ways in which small businesses i know have taken their prospective customer research process.
- Use LinkedIn’s premium features to understand the people who work in your potential customer businesses, look for mutual contacts and learn more about the business from employees
- Visit a conference or an event hosted by your potential customer, meet folks and understand how they do business, their culture, the processes, the overall sentiment – are they aggressively investing, are they cautious, the overall mood.
- Look at hard data that is available in public domains like SEC’s EDGAR and other stage specific register of companies to understand the information that has been updated in the most recent filings
- Look for data such as revenue growth rates, employment rates, increased visibility on ads, marketing to give you an indication of investing in growth
- If you have the appetite for it, use data available from Dun & Bradstreet, it can get expensive per data point, but it will help you curate your target list of customers using hard data
Once you have gathered all of this data, you need to start building customer profiles, which is basically a detailed business profile about your customers along with what you have learnt about them.
Having these documented and available in a CRM for your sales teams to access, will help salespeople have great conversations with prospective customers and make the pitch a lot more effective.
Importance of having a solid demand generation strategy in B2B sales
Once detailed business profiles of your prospective customers have been defined and built, you need to focus on getting intent from folks in the identified companies. In my experience as a the head of sales operations, I have handled multiple demand generation initiatives.
What I have understood to work the best is a demand generation strategy that touches prospective customers through multiple channels. This means your business will need to increasingly use marketing tools that are available in platforms such as LinkedIn and tools and services for hosting webinars and virtual events.
Have you received newsletter invitations on linkedIn if you have looked at research reports published by some Business house? Adopt that practice and send out cold-mails to your potential customers through relevant social media platforms and email marketing channels.
As I said, sharing knowledge is the best way to get high intent good quality leads for your b2b sales process.
In addition to these, some of the tips that small business owners can use to bolster their demand generation efforts are
- Referral programs to existing customers
- Membership programs to access privileged information
- Personalisation of marketing campaigns to address individuals
- Case-study marketing
- Sharing industry trends, news in a defined period
All of these efforts when done consistently builds awareness and helps potential customers associate your business as the one that helps solve for a specific problem they have.
Being strategic about using data in all sales and marketing outreach efforts in B2B sales
In today’s interconnected and digital world, almost everyone has access to mountains of data. There are vendors like D&B who sell data to a very granular level. What differentiates the successful businesses are in they way they use data to increase sales.
As a small business who is trying to increase sales to other businesses, you must have a data strategy that can give inputs to your sales and marketing teams to tweak their approaches.
Data being used for strategic marketing
As you collect information about your potential customers, you are likely to get data about all the products and solutions your prospective customers use. For example, you may find out that your prospective customer advertises on both facebook as well as instagram. Your product might be a complementary product that helps them amplify their efforts on these two channels.
Your marketing message should get personalised to that specific customer using the above information with the help of a case study or a narrative that can be built to suit the customer’s use case.
Marketing about your product in a personalised way is the key to driving b2b sales through social selling, an approach where relationships matter.
Data being used for strategic sales
If you figure out that your potential customer has been increasing investment in a specific area, that should trigger a sales pitch being written for that use case. For example, let us consider an example of a small business that provides catering services to a large corporate in the local area.
Word is out that the corporate has been increasing hiring recently. You also know that the company has been doing well in the past with respect to revenue growth. Your salespeople interaction with company has also informed you that the corporate’s employees are working harder and longer which means their business is booming.
The next logical step for the corporate is to expand into a new location. Your small business should anticipate this move and start making the pitch ready and start sending feelers to the business representatives for this.
You don’t want to be competing in the open market once the word is out.
Framework for driving B2B sales for a small business
I have developed a framework that has 4 key pillars that helps a small business develop their B2B sales approach. This is based on the learnings I have had from all the small business owners I have interacted with.
Be extremely sharp on your understanding of who your customer is before your sales pitch is ready
As I covered earlier, you need to have your target customer list ready before you make your sales pitch.
While making your target customer list, spend all your energy on researching what they really need. Speak to their employees, their customers and other partners in the ecosystem to understand nuances about their business.
Only such a deep understanding can help your business do an effective sales pitch that can work in the long run. In my experience, small businesses that have successfully increased B2B sales have spent their time doing their homework to prepare a very targeted list of potential customers that can go after.
Customise the product to suit the requirements of your prospective customers while marketing
Once your targeted customer list is ready, use all your insights to tailor a view of the product that has the context and can be relatable to the decision makers in your prospective customers.
Customisation of product and personalisation of communication are extremely critical in a b2b sales scenario to ensure that the key decision makers you want on your side have a friction less experience.
Reach out to the highest decision makers, people who actually have authority over budget and its utilisation
As i covered earlier, there are many steps involved in a b2b sales process, you will end up running around in circles if you follow the purchase process that has been set out by companies.
Look for the individual whose life is most impacted by the problems to which you have a solution. Check if that individual has the decision making power to sign the contract. Do whatever it takes to get a meeting with that individual
Don’t screw up that meeting.
Salespeople should strive hard to get in-person meetings either one to one or in one-to-many situations
In today’s scenario, there is a certain amount of inertia that has set in with respect to virtual meetings. Break that inertia. Take the effort to go to where your customer is. It need not be a scheduled meeting.
Run into them in person at 3rd party conferences, drop your card, collect theirs, ask them for a meeting later and follow it up with an email thanking them for their few minutes that they gave you.
Be specific in terms of what you want from them. Don’t leave them guessing.
Focus and put great energy on giving a great theatrical demo experience
Would you like to sit through a boring 60 mins dry walkthrough of a technical subject? Even if the subject is important to your business, it takes a lot of mental effort to absorb everything the presenter is giving out if the delivery is boring.
Take time and plan out the structure of the delivery of the demo of your product. Make sure that the demo resembles the customer’s context as closely as possible so that really meaningful questions about various scenarios can be addressed.
The demo of your product should include multiple formats of multimedia such as videos, music, actual performance etc. If your product is a software product or software service, make sure that you configure it so that resembles the customer’s use case.
Top get the best results, ask your best salespeople to deliver the demo.
Position yourself bigger than what you are, but promise only what you can deliver
This is a ninja technique one of my mentors told me about. While has experience in building and scaling more than 15 businesses over his lifetime, there was a technique that helped him open doors in the early days.
He had great educational credentials and good corporate experience prior to starting off. So his business card read “Vice president, Sales” instead of CEO. The message this implied was that if a person with these credentials was working for someone else, the company ‘must’ be good.
This is just one way of showing that you are bigger than you actually are.
The only caveat is that, while this ninja technique can be good for marketing, when it comes to actually delivering products or services to your customers, promise only what you can actually deliver. Sometimes its ok to take a long shot, but make sure that you devote enough time and effort to deliver the promise.
Sales Strategies that always work in B2B sales
There are some strategies that always give favourable results to small business owners when employed in B2B sales processes. These often require the small business to adopt the right mindset and processes to follow through.
Adopt a solution selling approach rather than pure sales
Solution selling or consultative selling is when you try and give your customer the best solution that can solve their problem instead of pushing your product for sales. This approach is less pushy and often looks to build a beneficial relationship for the customer.
Personalised marketing is crucial to increase sales
Tweak all your marketing communication to suit the context, the problems and culture of your potential customer. As I said earlier, less than 10% of the businesses do this and it you give you a great edge over the others.
B2B Sales strategy with partnerships always helps increase sales
Partnering with companies in the same space, who provide complementary products or services is a great way to get introduced to new customers and to sell bolt-on offerings without having to do the heavy lifting of going through all the purchasing processes.
Partnering also reduces many overheads such as marketing costs, direct cost of sales to scout and identify new customers as well as overheads such as maintaining a larger customer success team.
Learn the art of follow up to increase sales
As you know by now, the sales process for b2b sales involves multiple decision makers and decision points. This will necessarily require your salespeople to follow up regularly with the potential customer.
Make sure that follow-up -fatigue does not set in and that your team members do not give up on the potential client. You may be just one phone call away from converting that custiomer.
Also, remember to add value to your potential customer in every follow up call or email through new information, new capabilities or new findings that you may have in your industry.
B2B Sales strategy Example: SaaS Industry
Lets take a look at an example of a B2B sales strategy from the SaaS industry.
Background and Objective: Soft Software Inc. is a SaaS company specialising in project management software for mid-sized tech companies. They aim to increase their overall revenue by 15% in the next year. They want this growth to be primarily be driven by acquiring new customers while existing customers will drive the baseline revenue.
Target Audience: Mid-sized tech companies, especially those experiencing rapid growth or have undertaken digital transformation initiatives.
Key Strategies that Soft Software can implement
- Account-Based Marketing (ABM) to target high-value prospects with personalised marketing
- Content Marketing and Thought Leadership – Produce whitepapers and case studies
- Solution Selling and Training – Train the sales team to understand customer challenges deeply and present Soft software as a tailored solution.
- Partnerships and Alliances – Form strategic partnerships with companies offering complementary services
- Feedback Loop – Implement a system to collect, analyse and implement improvements from customer feedback
Metrics and KPIs: Monitor new account acquisitions, revenue growth in existing accounts, engagement with content marketing, conversion rates from campaigns, and customer satisfaction and retention rates.
Execution and Review: Execute the strategy over the year, with monthly reviews to assess progress and make necessary adjustments.
While the above example may be applicable to the SaS industry, the basic principles and tenets are applicable across industries. B2B selling requires the business to double down on its intellectual property and market its thought leadership rather than marketing the brand.
The strategies that small businesses should consider while trying to do b2b sales have been highlighted above. To reiterate some of the most important tactics and tips that small business owners must implement
- Look at the highest decision maker in the potential customer
- Build a relationship
- Do deep research on your customer
- Sell a solution to your customer’s problem
- Market your thought leadership to be known as an expert in your field
A successful small business that manages to pull through these will end up increasing their sales over time and continue to build a moat around their business.