The Ultimate Guide to B2B Sales: Strategies, Tools, and Examples

Introduction

Traditionally, the B2B sales cycle was linear, with one person of authority making the purchase decision.

Today, though, budgets are tighter, the CFO holds the purse strings, and the buying committee has grown to include 11 people on average. About 14% of buyers also have more C-level decision-makers involved in their buying process. 

As a result, the B2B sales process is longer, less linear, and relies on a multi-touch sales funnel that leverages different channels to nurture leads.

B2B sales reps need to rely on more than cold calling to reach out and convince one person to buy from them. Instead, sales teams need to make it easy for prospects to justify the buying decision internally by:

• Reaching out to and building relationships with different stakeholders at target accounts

• Using case studies and data to showcase the value of investing in their product/service

• Showing how the product would benefit not just one team but across departments

Part 2. Leading challenges in B2B sales

Apart from the changing landscape of B2B selling, be aware of the following challenges:

1. Building solid relationships with prospects

Relationship-building is critical to getting prospects’ attention and standing out in a noisy, competitive market. 

However, a lack of comprehensive understanding of prospects’ preferences and pain points prevents sales teams from building relationships.

2. Qualifying leads

Data scattered across multiple sources makes it hard to consolidate customer information. You need more comprehensive data to identify leads who are genuinely interested in buying from you. 

Left unresolved, a poor or inaccurate qualification process means reps end up prioritizing wrong leads—not identifying, prioritizing, and nurturing high-potential leads effectively. This impacts their morale, prevents them from meeting their sales quota, and leads to teams missing their revenue target.

3. Longer sales cycles

As B2B selling evolves, sales professionals must convince different stakeholders in buying committees, including gatekeepers, influencers, decision-makers, and approvers.

 This takes understanding each stakeholder’s pain points and objectives and a personalized approach to reach out to and win them.

 All of this increases the length of the sales cycle as well, particularly for enterprise clients with long consideration and approval processes.

4. Need personalized outreach at scale

Simply identifying B2B companies that fit your ideal buyer persona falls short in today's competitive environment. Salespeople must go further, pinpointing the right decision-makers and tailoring their outreach with personalization.

Generic messaging gets lost in the flood of B2B outreach. Personalization allows you to stand out by genuinely understanding the prospect's pain points and priorities.

5. Building a high-performing sales team

B2B sales teams can no longer stick to traditional workflows and overused sales tactics. 

Scrolling through endless lists of leads is time-consuming. Tabular spreadsheet views slow down access to critical information, such as the stage a lead is in and the product they’re interested in. 

Naturally, this slows down sales processes like lead qualification, outreach, and nurturing.  

Teams need to centralize customer data, making it quickly and easily accessible. They also need to continuously test new strategies and iterate their outreach and relationship-building approaches. To focus on these action items, salespeople need to free up time from repetitive tasks–something that organizations can achieve through automation. 

6. Lack of collaboration between teams 

Sales is a team effort but a lack of collaboration means teams often lose deals due to siloed efforts, delays in decision-making, or just lack of context. 

For instance, sales might need more context on the leads handed to them by marketing teams, as data is fragmented across teams. This means that sales teams are clueless about the prospect’s journey so far, what interests them, and what problem they’re trying to solve. When marketing insights are readily accessible, sales can personalize their approach, addressing the prospect's known challenges and past interactions.

7. Not having the right CRM

Without a CRM, sales teams grapple with a lack of comprehensive lead data, team silos, and poor deal management. This impacts their productivity negatively—preventing them from meeting their revenue goals.  

In contrast, a robust CRM centralizes all lead information in one place, making the data accessible to all and speeding up sales processes. It also automates manual tasks like data entry, saving time and risk of errors. 

With an AI-powered CRM, sales leaders can get data-driven insights to help the sales team go after the right deals, optimize processes, remove bottlenecks, and make the right decisions.

Part 3: Strategies in B2B sales

What makes successful business-to-business sales strategies?

For starters, tailor your efforts to convince B2B buyers according to the way they make purchase decisions today. From there, focus on building a sturdy foundation of relationship building, personalization, and sales and marketing alignment. 

Here are three B2B sales techniques:

1. Run personalized account-based campaigns

Account-based campaigns invest resources into engaging and converting specific businesses that align with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

 The success of these campaigns relies on sales and marketing collaboration to:

Identify accounts and people on those accounts to target

Create a customized campaign to reach out and nurture target accounts

For example, UserGems ran personalized LinkedIn ads as part of their account-based campaigns to get the attention of stakeholders at their target accounts.

The result? 31% higher win rates, 17% shorter sales cycle, and 25% bigger deal sizes. 

2. Multithread different members of the buying committee

Sales multithreading involves connecting with multiple people within a target account’s buying committee.

When you single-thread or connect with just one person at a target organization, you rely on one person to convince stakeholders to buy from you. You also risk losing the deal if your point of contact leaves the company.

In contrast, by multithreading, you: 

• Increase your odds of keeping an engaged account open

• Build a handful of internal champions for your product to help influence the buying decision 

Start by connecting with 1-2 people at a target account. Once you have their interest, ask them to connect you with more folks in their buying committee.

3. Target past or alumni customers

51% of B2B buyers say they refer to their past experience with a product/service to inform their purchase decision.

This makes proactively re-engaging past customers an effective B2B sales strategy to find warm paths into target accounts.

For instance, sales teams can reach out to alumni customers on social media to congratulate them on their new role with another company. Then, ask them if they want to try your tool at their new organization. 

Since these folks already know how valuable your product is in their workflow, they’ll likely be more open to trying it at their new organization as well.

Sales reps can also ask these past users to connect them with other stakeholders in the company to multi-thread their way into accounts.

4. Centralize data in a single source of truth 

A comprehensive 360° view of customer data in one place is key to cultivating meaningful relationships with prospects. 

Such consolidated access to data lets sales reps see essential lead data such as their:

Past conversations with other reps 

The product features they’re viewing on your website

The marketing content they’re interacting with across different channels

In turn, the data helps reps understand prospect’s preferences and interests, assisting them in personalizing their messaging and building relationships with them.  

360° customer data helps beyond the sales cycle by streamlining customer experience and brand loyalty. 

For instance, 67% of customers use multiple channels to complete a single transaction. By centralizing data, reps can access cross-channel interactions to inform their conversation with buyers — never asking them to repeat themselves.

5. Leverage AI

Strategically leveraging AI in your sales workflow enhances team productivity, helps you engage prospects better, and makes it easy to close more deals.  

For example, AI in your CRM software analyzes historical data and spares through customer information spread across different channels to give reps real-time recommendations to move deals through the sales pipeline. 

It also helps with lead scoring to help sales teams qualify leads faster. AI does this by analyzing past and behavioral data to determine how warm leads are. 

In short,  embrace AI as a complementary tool for sellers, not their substitute.

Part 4. Important KPIs to measure

1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer Acquisition Cost is the cost of winning a new customer—helping you determine your customer-acquiring initiatives’ return on investment (ROI).

 By knowing how well each initiative is doing, you can better allocate resources to customer acquisition campaigns and channels that drive the best results cost-effectively.

2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value measures the total revenue you can expect from a customer throughout their relationship with your company.

Tracking CLV lets you accurately forecast future revenue and business growth. It also gives you insights into how well your sales and marketing efforts are paying off so you can make strategic decisions for improving customer acquisition and retention.

3. Win rate

Win rate measures the deals the sales team closes out of the total number of qualified opportunities pursued over a period.

 Keeping tabs on this metric makes it easy to evaluate sales performance and forecast future sales revenue.

4. Sales cycle length

Sales cycle length is the time it takes to convert a lead—from their first touch to closing the deal. The metric is an effective measure of your sales team’s performance.

 By evaluating which parts of your sales cycle tend to be long, you can also optimize your processes for better results.

5. Churn

Churn is a measure of the customers who stop doing business with you over a certain period. For subscription-based services, it’s the rate at which users stop renewing their subscriptions.

 This metric gives you an overview of your business’s financial health — letting you predict stable revenue. It also shows you how satisfied customers are with your product.

6. Deal Velocity

Deal velocity measures how fast prospects move through your sales pipeline. A faster deal velocity indicates a streamlined sales process. On the other hand, a slower velocity indicates bottlenecks in the sale process.

7. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score measures customer loyalty by determining how likely customers are to recommend your business to others.

It gives you a snapshot of your overall customer experience. A higher NPS, for instance, shows higher customer satisfaction.

8. Net sales income

Net sales or net sales revenue is the total revenue a sales team generates after deducting expenses that go into generating sales.

It clearly measures the sales team’s performance by showing its ability to generate revenue efficiently.

9. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

Monthly Recurring Revenue is a SaaS-specific metric that shows the total predictable revenue generated by your tool from its monthly active subscriptions. 

Besides helping forecast revenue, MRR lets you identify trends in business growth and understand the impact customer churn has on revenue.

10. Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)

Annual Recurring Revenue is another metric used by SaaS businesses as a measure of the total revenue expected from their recurring subscriptions over a year.

Since ARR measures the revenue a company expects to make, it helps evaluate a business’s progress and predicts its future growth.

Part 5. B2B sales cycle

Now that you have a complete overview of the evolving B2B sales process, let’s take you through the 7-step sales lifecycle: 

1. Prospecting

The first step in the sales process is identifying and reaching out to potential B2B customers. To do so, be clear on your ideal buyer and their pain points and goals.

 Review previously won deals to identify behavioral, demographical, and firmographic patterns among customers and log your findings in a buyer persona document.

 Dive deeper: A complete guide to sales prospecting in 2024

2. Qualifying

After establishing contact with a lead, qualify them to determine customer-product fit. Salespeople do this by initiating a discovery call to understand if the product can solve the prospect’s challenges.

3. Product Demonstration

Once you’ve qualified the lead, the sales rep or account executive schedules a demo to walk the prospect through the product. These calls involve explaining product features relevant to the prospect’s use case.

4. Evaluation

Product evaluation revolves around the potential customer test-driving your product with a limited-time free trial account.

In this step, sales representatives/account executives should follow up with the prospect to answer their questions.

5. Objection handling/Negotiation

Buyers will likely have reservations related to the product you’re selling. This is where objection handling comes into the picture.

One good way to handle hesitations is to understand they often fall into one of these four categories: need, urgency, trust, and money. Based on the category, create and leverage proven templates to tackle these common objections.

6. Closing

Post successful negotiation comes to a close. It involves activities that take the deal to the finish line such as discussing terms of the partnership, signing final contracts, and implementation.

7. Nurturing

This last step in the B2B sales process is often overlooked. However, attending to customer questions post onboarding/purchase and checking in to ask if they need assistance gives you a competitive edge. It also contributes to decreasing churn.

Part 6. Best sales practices

1. Offer a short trial period

Free trials help B2B buyers test how easy-to-use your tool is. Trials have become an essential self-serve resource for them to inform their purchase decisions.

 Demand for free trials has grown from 67% in 2022 to 77% in 2023 — making it the most influential resource for buyers to make decisions.

So make sure you either offer a freemium model (with usage restrictions or limited free features) or a full trial for a limited time.

2. Tailor product demos to target accounts’ use case 

After free trials, product demos are the second most influential factor that B2B buyers look at when making their buying decisions.

Generic product demos won’t get you far in today’s competitive selling environment, though. Instead, focus on giving demos personalized to the prospect’s use case and business objectives. 

94% of buyers agree product demos tailored to their specific use case and goals are essential for helping them evaluate different products.

In your demo, highlight your product’s capabilities, ease of use, and how people can measure the ROI of their investment.

About 60% of buyers  also agree and strongly agree that they internally research tools before the initial sales call. This makes it essential to offer ungated, interactive product demos on your website as part of self-serve resources for interested buyers.

3. Take a relationship-first approach to selling 

Gone are the days of transactional selling.

As sales cycles become more extended and buyers have an increasing number of options to choose from, take a relationship-first approach to get prospects’ attention. 

Connect with prospects on social media, engage with their content, and start conversations.

4. Research prospects’ pain points and jobs-to-be-done 

The more you learn about your target personas, the better you can understand their day-to-day goals and struggles. These nuanced details, in turn, assist in:

• Creating valuable content that helps readers solve their points and drive qualified leads

• Tailoring your outreach messages so they align with your target account’s goals

 Keep in mind: alongside researching your ideal buyer, dig into your different personas’ jobs to be done (JTBD). 

For example, a CRM can help two personas: sales managers and sales reps. Both have different objectives and daily struggles.

Sales managers, for instance, focus on improving team productivity and driving more revenue per quarter. On the other hand, sales reps are concerned about meeting their monthly/quarterly quota.

 By knowing these jobs-to-be-done, you can improve your messaging and content so they resonate better with prospects.

To start gathering these details:

• Analyze deals and accounts you’ve previously closed to spot patterns in their decision-makers, jobs-to-be-done, and goals

• Map different personas’ roles with their goals and challenges

• Identify how you can leverage their pain points to sell your product

• Document your findings and walk your team through how to use the information throughout the sales cycle

5. Focus on benefits instead of features to sell

A benefits-led sales model helps you communicate how your product can solve target customers’ needs.

It prioritizes value—connecting your product with prospects’ desired outcomes, all of which answer the ‘what’s in it for us’ question buyers have in mind.

In contrast, feature-led selling focuses too much on selling your product instead of prospects’ specific goals and use cases. This prevents you from connecting with buyers and dilutes your product positioning, adding friction to prospects’ decision-making process.

6. Dedicate resources to sales, onboarding, and customer success (post-sales)

Lastly, create dedicated teams focused on assisting and nurturing prospects throughout the buyer’s journey, including post-sales.

This improves buyer experience, moves prospects faster through the sales cycle (pre-sales), and assists customers with appropriate tool adoption (post-sales) to reduce churn.

Part 7. Essential tools for B2B sales

1. AI-powered Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software

A Customer Relationship Management platform centralizes important lead data in one place, making it more actionable and facilitating collaboration across teams.

It also helps build a warm sales pipeline by assisting with activities like lead qualification and assignment. 

For example, a robust CRM tool scores leads based on their interaction with your content across different channels. This makes it easy for you to identify warm leads to go after instead of wasting resources on leads that’ll likely never convert or aren’t ready to convert yet.  

CRM software also automates tedious processes, reducing manual work. For instance, you can automate data entry and lead allocation to relevant reps—boosting team productivity.

Moreover, showing all open deals in a central dashboard assists sales leaders in forecasting revenue and saving likely-to-close deals from sinking.

Dig deeper: What is CRM?

2. Video conferencing tool

A video conferencing tool facilitates live video-based meetings with one or more people. Use it to host discovery calls and present product demos.

3. Email address finders

As their name suggests, these sales tools find your target prospect’s email address by scraping the publicly available information on the web in real-time.

 In doing so, a reliable email address finder saves sales teams time in manually searching for contact emails during the prospecting stage of the sales cycle.

4. Professional social media platforms

These give you valuable data and tools to identify and reach out to warm accounts aligned with your ICP. It offers insights like target accounts’ recent hires and department headcount that let you: 

• Determine decision-makers in their buying committee

• Identify the warmest path into target accounts

It also gives you real-time alerts on customers changing jobs so you can engage alumni users.

5. Email signature tool

An email signature tool adds your name, job title, contact details, and useful links, such as your social media links, at the end of an email.

 These email signatures look professional in your outreach emails and make it easy for prospects to learn more about you.

6. Customer support tool

A customer support tool makes it easy to centralize, track, and assign customer queries and complaints. Doing so helps support teams quickly and efficiently respond to queries, improving customer satisfaction.

7. Configure, Price, Quote

Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) tools quickly generate personalized quotes.  As a result, the software reduces the time-consuming work that goes into creating and getting quotes approved.

Naturally, this improves sales team productivity and prospect experience as leads get custom quotes without long waits.

8. Sales enablement tools

Sales enablement software manages and tracks sales training resources that teams need throughout the B2B sales cycle.

Since the tool serves as a central, easy-to-access library for sales collateral, it saves reps’ time in finding relevant resources while facilitating learning.