Selling to Businesses (Business to Business)

Successfully marketing and selling to businesses requires a specialized set of skills and strategies. Because small and medium sized business owners and managers are generally incredibly busy and cost-conscious, a poorly tailored marketing message or ill informed sales pitch will quickly put them off.

“Because small and medium sized business owners and managers are generally incredibly busy and cost-conscious, a poorly tailored marketing message or ill informed sales pitch will quickly put them off.” 

Tips to Help

Selling to business is both art and science. Here are some tips

• Show How You Solve A Business Problem For Them. Once you have spent time learning about your client’s business, the next step is to think about the role your product or service can play in that business. This is the essence of building a value proposition around what you sell – seeing how your product or service can help the client achieve their business goals more quickly, cheaply or effectively than they could without it. This is easier said than done. Use research and your anecdotal experience to identify the issues and products or services that will tend to be relevant to clients.
• Create a Burning Platform. Many companies do what they do today simply because they did it yesterday. Most employees at a company have enough on their plate and are not necessarily looking to do more or make changes. It is your job to create a burning platform – something that changes their thinking from “too much to do” to “I have to fix this problem.”
• Understand Your Customer’s Business. Many businesses design training programs to ensure their staff are thoroughly conversant with their product or service range’s features and advantages. When selling B2B, however, this is just the beginning. You must have an understanding of your customer’s business and the business literacy and commercial awareness to engage in a dialogue with them.
• Solve Problems. Don’t be a sales person, be a consultant and resource. You never sell a product; you sell a solution to a problem. This means that your product itself is never the primary focal point. The focal point is what value your solution actually provides. What real world pain point do you make unpainful? For example, you don’t sell CRM software. You sell a way to never lose opportunities. Your aim is to become a valuable addition to the company, not just a vendor. You want to be the person they call when issues relating to your expertise unfold.
• Relationships Are Everything. You never actually sell anything to a business. You sell to people who work inside a business. The relationship you hold with your potential customer is what tips the scale, either in your favor or against. Assuming you offer a product of value, people buy from those they trust, have confidence in, and like.
• Know How Decisions Are Made. In order to close a deal, you need to understand how decisions are made. If you don’t understand the process, your sale will be delayed, or worse, you won’t have a sale to delay at all! You can have a single decision-maker (like the CEO of a small company), a single decision maker that requires approval (like the CEO who needs board approval) and multiple decision makers (Even though there may be one person who approves the final decision, this person relies heavily on the decisions made by a team, or in some cases, group consensus.)
• Influence Decision Makers. You have to make sure in your sales process that you first identify and then sell to decision makers. You can spend a lot of time proving yourself to people who are valuable, but don’t have the authority.
• Connect with The Person That Feels the Pleasure or Pain. Many individuals don’t make buying decisions because they don’t directly feel the impact. If a Mom thought that something could help her kids, would there be anything that would prevent her from taking action. There are many employees of a company who won’t make decisions, but if you get to the leader who wins or loses based on results, those decisions happen much more quickly.
• Participate in Industry Events. If you serve a particular industry, participating in industry functions such as associations and trade organizations is a great way to learn and meet people within the industry. Your aim is to become an active participant, become a regular contributor, and essentially become a fixture at industry events.
• Join a Committee. Take your participation with industry trade organizations a step beyond the semiannual events and get involved with their committees.Being a part of a committee that is well respected in your industry goes a long way in developing your credibility, contacts, and industry knowledge. It also shows that you’re not just there trying to make a buck, but that you’re there trying to further your customer’s industry and success.
• Partner with Non-Competing Vendors. The easiest place to find a warm introduction into a company is via those who already sell to that company. Seek out these relationships and share your solution with them. Vendors who are already inside a company have a keen perspective on the company’s needs.
• Map the Market. Business customers respond best to a sales pitch that is tailored as much a possible to their circumstances. To be worthwhile, a strategy must be built on a careful, well-researched segmentation of the market. A conventional approach breaks a market broken first by location, then business size, and finally by industry. Other lines markets can be divided along include age, income, political or cultural beliefs and buying behavior – in the technology space, for example, identifying early adopters can be important.
• Size Matters. A sales strategy that is not adapted to the size of the business you are targeting will be unlikely to be successful. This is true for a range of reasons, not the least of which being that small and medium sized businesses hate being treated as second-class citizens. The style of sales information the small and medium sized businesses tend to be most responsive too also differs. Technical information on performance may impress a specialist in a large business, but business owners – who are often forced to be a jack-of-all-trades – may respond better to testimonial information. The reason? Small and medium sized businesses tend to be risk averse. If they are going to invest in a product or service, reassurance that it has worked for other businesses will often go further than an impressive list of whiz-bang specs.
• Start with the People You Know. When selling to a business, start with the relationships you already have with people you know personally. If you’re new and have never sold anything to anyone, your goal is to find a warm referral to the organization you’re trying to get into.
• Contact Frequency. Customers want to be contacted just enough, not bombarded. Striking the right balance between contacting customers too much and too little requires understanding their stated and actual needs. The best contact calendars center around events that create value for customers, such as semiannual business reviews, which provide an opportunity to assess customer needs and ensure satisfaction. The key is to recognize that customers are also looking to lower their interaction costs, so any contact with them must be meaningful.
• Product/Service Knowledge. Sales reps should know their products or services intimately and how their offering compares with those of their competitors. Customers need information on exactly how a product or service will make a difference to their businesses. Companies can address a lack of product knowledge by centralizing content development to guarantee a uniform message and creation of compelling value propositions for customers.
• Hire Sales Reps. Hiring sales reps is a must. You’re able to capitalize on the relationships they’ve spent years developing and open up doors quicker than you can on your own. Be sure to differentiate between hunters and farmers.
  • Hunters. A hunter is someone who can find business. They’re the ones who shake hands and kiss babies. They’re already part of the good ole boy network. Finders are usually high priced and difficult to manage. Attention to detail isn’t always their strong point, so be sure you know how to support finders properly.
  • Farmers. A farmer, on the other hand, is someone who knows how to mine for business from existing customers and marketing campaigns. These are usually the people who make great internal sales people and account managers. They develop deep relationships through day-to-day interaction with customers. Unlike finders, miners are usually more technical and detailed oriented.

Develop a good strategy for them to work together, and you’ll have an amazing one-two combination.

• Recruit Rainmakers. The best rainmakers usually aren’t looking for a job at the moment, but those are precisely the ones you want. Hire a headhunter, and offer your prospect a better package selling a better product. Remember that top sales people already make a ton of money, so offering more money isn’t good enough. You’ll need to help support their growth. You need to identify their professional and personal goals and be the one to make it come to life. It could be anything from the need for ownership through stock options or equity buy-in to new responsibilities to a work-life balance.
• Acquire or Partner with Competitors. You must network with competitors as well. There are two things you’re looking for: a partnership or an acquisition. For example, let’s say you sell a stand-alone functional software system that services smaller volume customers better, while your competitor, who you’re friendly with, concentrates on mid-tier larger volume clients where integration is required. Bingo! This is a great opportunity to serve one another. In regard to acquisitions, the question is how do you acquire if you don’t have a large amount of cash or credit? Be creative. These opportunities don’t just pop out of the blue. They require that you build relationships with competitors. When the opportunity presents itself, such as when a competitor is struggling financially, they’ll reach out to you for help.
• Prepare a Response to Requests for Proposal. A request for proposal (RFP) is a document that an organization posts to solicit bids from potential vendors. It’s essentially an advertisement to come sell to them. You, as the vendor, will usually put together a formal package based on the issuer’s preferred format. Put together a standard RFP package, which you update quarterly, so when RFPs come up, you can easily reformat it to fit the entity’s requirements. The RFP process is meant to create structure and provide transparency to a vendor provider decision. Your relationships and industry contacts will be the ones to open doors and inform you when RFP opportunities arise.

As you can see, there are many different ways to approach B2B sales, but these techniques should give you some tools that you can deploy.