B2B sales are one of the most important and complex aspects of any B2B business. This process can be difficult to navigate, but with the right knowledge and tools, it really can be a game-changer for your activity!

What are B2B Sales? What are the main benefits for your business? How is it working? What tools can help you?

In this guide, we will discuss the basics of B2B sales, including what it is, how to get started, and some tips for success. We will also explore some of the challenges that come with this type of selling and provide strategies for overcoming them.

So, if you are interested in learning more about B2B sales, keep reading!

What are B2B Sales?

Let’s start with the basics: B2B Sales is the process of selling products or services to other businesses.

The main difference between B2B sales and B2C is that in B2B selling, the buyer is another business rather than an individual consumer. This means that the purchasing decision is often made by a team of people, and the sale itself may require more customization, sales tactics, and/or complex negotiation than a typical B2C transaction.

Also, sales organization in B2B is usually more of a complex structure with longer decision-making processes, longer sales cycles, and the products or services being sold are often much more expensive than what is typically found in a consumer market.

There are many different types of products and services that can be sold through a B2B model, but some common examples include:

  • Industrial products;
  • Technology products and services;
  • Business consulting services;
  • Advertising and marketing services;
  • Financial Services.

At LaGrowthMachine, we’re exclusively working with B2B businesses and most of them are working in the sectors that we’ve listed above.

Our tool is perfectly designed for the needs of B2B Sales and help many sales team reduce the time and complexity of the whole sales process.

Get 3.5X more leads!

Do you want to improve the efficiency of your sales department? With La Growth Machine you can generate on average 3.5x more leads while saving an incredible amount of time on all your processes.

By signing up today, you’ll get a free 14-day trial to test our tool!

Try now for free!

What are the main channels to generate B2B Sales?

As said above, a B2B Sales process is very different from a B2C one. It involves some specific methods and sales techniques… including the channels you’re using!

To do so, to set up your sales strategy you can go through one of these channels:

  • Cold calling: although it’s not as famous as it was before, it can b a great way to reach new B2B prospects that you wouldn’t have otherwise had access to. It’s also relatively inexpensive and can be done relatively quickly. However, it can be quite difficult to get your B2B leads to buy something that they’ve never heard of you. It requires good sales reps for this.
  • Sales email: it’s one of the most common and effective methods to reach out to your potential customers. It’s less intrusive than a phone call, you can take more time to write a good email and you have more chances your prospect will read it.
  • LinkedIn Prospecting: LinkedIn is the most famous platform for B2B research. It is also the biggest database that exists for B2B. The social platform involves a lot of features and techniques that can help your sales team generate more leads.
  • Event Marketing: Attending or exhibiting at industry events for a sales rep is a great way to get in front of people and find new leads. This can be a very effective strategy, but it can also be quite expensive.

If you want to be successful in B2B selling, it’s important to use a mix of different channels to reach your target audience.

A sales routine from LaGrowthMachine

For example, you might use cold calling to generate initial interest, followed by email marketing and online advertising to nurture leads and drive them further down the sales funnel.

And guess what: that’s exactly what we’re doing at LaGrowthMachine!

What are the main benefits of B2B Sales?

As you’ll probably understand, B2B Sales are extremely important if you want to improve your B2B lead generation efforts.

To explain it better, it’s important to remind how the sales pipeline is working in B2B:

When talking about business-to-business, a lead is a potential customer that you’ll have to qualify before starting the B2B sales cycle.

Generally, the lead is first identified – and qualified – by the marketing team. At this stage, we’re calling them Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL).

Then, the sales team is going to go through the MQL lists trying to outreach them. The ones answering and interested in the product or service that you’re trying to sell are called Sales Qualified Leads (SQL).

Data from MQL to SQL in LaGrowthMachine

Finally, some of the SQLs are going to accept the deal: this is a B2 sales, leading them to get the status of clients!

Therefore, B2B Sales – and all kinds of account-based sales – can lead you to many advantages:

  • Improve the quality of your leads: B2B Sales are a great way to understand the whole process and improve the quality AND quantity of your leads. By focusing on businesses that are a good match for your products or services, you can reduce the number of unqualified leads and get better results from your marketing efforts.
  • Generate more revenue: B2B Sales can help you close more deals and generate more revenue for your business. By understanding the needs of other businesses and tailoring your products or services to meet those needs, you can increase your chances of making a sale.
  • Gives you a better budget to improve processes and management: B2B Sales can also give you a better understanding of your customer acquisition costs (CAC). This, in turn, can help you allocate your marketing and sales budget more effectively and improve your overall sales process, by investing in a tool like LaGrowthMachine for example.

How to improve your B2B sales process?

Now that we’ve seen the importance of B2B Sales and are reminded of how the process is working, let’s see how you can improve it to get even better results.

At LaGrowthMachine, we’ve built our very own process and placed it at the heart of our software. This sales methodology is going through 4 main steps.

Step 1: Have a look at your current process

The first thing to do is to take a step back and analyze your current process to understand its failures and improvements that need to be made.

To do so, you need to start with your clients and see what they did before becoming one.

Great news: you can do that also by programming an automated sequence on LaGrowthMachine! You’ll deal with much more data in much less time!

Here’s a checklist you should keep in mind when managing your selling process in B2B:

  • Who are your target buyers?
  • What were the channels they used?
  • How did they find you?
  • What made them decide to buy from you and not from a competitor?
  • What is your sales pitch?
  • Do you manage to get the decision-makers?
  • How do you handle the buying process?
  • Are you aligning sales and market research effectively?
  • Are you closing deals?
  • What’s your current sales organization?
  • How do you manage your sales conversations?
  • What’s your value proposition and do you provide potential solutions?

In B2B, there’s a much stronger relationship between the seller and the client. Therefore, you can conduct customer surveys or interviews to gather information. Otherwise, you’ll need to have a look at your sales data.

This is also the right moment to list your resources: budget, human resources, sales tools, etc…

Step 2: Understand the pain points of your sales process

Once you have a good understanding of your sales process, it’s time to identify the pain points.

What are the stages that take too much time? Where do you lose most of your leads?

To answer these questions, you need to look at your data again and see where things are going wrong.

For example, if you’re losing a lot of leads at the SQL stage, it means that there’s probably something wrong with your outreach methods or that your leads are not qualified enough.

You can easily see which stage of the sales automation process is failing in LaGrowthMachine

On the other hand, if you’re losing a lot of deals at the closing stage, it means that maybe your prices are too high, that your offer is not so competitive, or that you’re not able to close the deal fast enough!

Step 3: Implement your changes

Finally, it’s time to implement the changes that will help you improve your process.

This is where you need to be creative and think outside the box!

To take the example we used above, if you’re losing a lot of leads at the SQL stage, maybe you could consider changing your outreach methods or qualifying your leads better by:

  • adding more people to your sales teams;
  • investing in software to automate your sales software like LaGrowthMachine that will save you a lot of time;
  • modifying your sales ton of voice or methods.

Get 3.5X more leads!

Do you want to improve the efficiency of your sales department? With La Growth Machine you can generate on average 3.5x more leads while saving an incredible amount of time on all your processes.

By signing up today, you’ll get a free 14-day trial to test our tool!

Try now for free!

Step 4: Get feedback and make improvements

It’s important to get feedback both from your sales team and your clients to see what’s working and what’s not so that you can make the necessary improvements.

It’s also important to keep track of your KPIs to see if there has been any improvement since you made the changes. For example, you could track KPIs such as:

  • Number of leads generated;
  • Conversion rate;
  • Conversion time;
  • etc…

If something fails somehow, don’t hesitate to go back to steps 2 and 3 and try something else!

As you probably noticed, B2B Sales is a process that requires time, investment, and a lot of hard work. But it’s definitely worth it because it can help you close more deals and generate more revenue for your business!

That is why, even if it seems obvious or time-consuming, you should try to remember these 4 steps if you want to improve your B2B sales and get all its benefits.