When you manage a company that sells exclusively to businesses, you face a whole set of issues that consumer retail businesses do not face. It is easy to find articles on the Internet that give advice and point out tools you can use to sell to consumers, but business-to-business sales organizations find it harder to get good advice.
B2B Sales Strategies
A business-to-business (or B2B) sales organization has to find creative ways to bring in revenue and sustain that revenue to keep the doors open. To maintain revenue, you must know your market, how to reach that market, and the tools available to increase sales. There are many challenges in selling B2B, but there is a solution for each problem, and there are tools you can use to grow your B2B business.
Focus Your Marketing
One of the most significant advantages a consumer retail business has over a B2B business is the broad expanse of a retail target market. A single retail demographic could cover hundreds of thousands of people, while a good B2B demographic may include only a few thousand companies.
When you define your B2B marketing plan, you must develop a focused target audience and a specific message for each audience. Retail organizations rarely use outside sales professionals because of the cost of having an external sales force and the apparent lack of need for outside salespeople in the retail world. But in the B2B world, your sales force will be the difference between your success and failure.
Use An Outside Salesforce
Retail organizations rarely use outside sales professionals because of the cost of having an external sales force and the apparent lack of need for outside salespeople in the retail world. But in the B2B world, your sales force will be the difference between your success and failure.
No matter what you sell, you need a personal presence before your customers close the deal. You may decide to only invest in an outside sales force for your larger clients, which makes sense if you sell a wide array of commodity products. But you can rest assured that your competition has an outside sales professional knocking on your clients’ doors and saying condescending things about your product and maybe even your company. The B2B sales organization with the best external sales force is the one that finds the most success.
Always Sell To People
The buyers and managers whom a B2B sales organization deals with want to be made to feel special. If you want financial success with your B2B sales organization, you cannot act like you are selling to a cold and lifeless corporate entity. You must sell to the individuals in that company and learn as much as you can about them to make them feel special.
A compelling sales and marketing tool you can purchase is client management software that has a mobile application to go with it. Your sales professionals can catalog every detail about every decision-maker at every customer location and use that information to bring in sales.
Become A Resource
When retail consumers buy a product that breaks down after 30 days, retail consumers have been conditioned to deal with the manufacturer for those issues. But when a product breaks down that your B2B sales organization sold to a customer, your customer will call you.
B2B customers’ habit of calling a sales organization when a product has an issue is actually an opportunity for your organization. By supporting your customers and being a resource for them, you are also strengthening the bonds with your customers and making it difficult for your competition to go in and take that business away.
Take Nothing For Granted
Even though retail consumers are the same people who purchase in B2B sales relationships, they still develop different buying habits when buying products and services for their companies. Retail consumers tend to buy the same product repeatedly because it works for them, and they see no need to buy the latest model. But their attitude completely changes when that same retail consumer gets behind their desk in a corporate purchasing department.
Corporate buyers and managers want the latest technology, and they want it before their competition gets it. If you sell widgets that customers use to package orders, then the customers with Widget Version 4 will want Widget Version 5 the minute it comes out, and they want to think that they have it before their competition does.
This issue of having a large audience interested in first-generation technology is one of the biggest things that separates B2B sales organizations from retail sales organizations. For every consumer who stands in line for a week to buy the latest smartphone, 100 consumers have no intention of trading in the phone they have had for the last few years.
As a B2B sales organization, you must market new products as soon as possible and prepare your customers for the upgrade the moment it comes out. You can increase sales by allowing some of your biggest customers to be beta testers for new products. In the corporate world, businesses love to be on the cutting edge of new technology.
If you sell to businesses, your marketing approach must be very different from that of a retail sales organization. Your marketing message has to be versatile, and your customer database has to be very comprehensive. Once you accept the differences between retail and B2B sales, you can acquire the tools and personnel you need to go out and expand your company’s bottom line.
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